Funded Startups

Paul Julius Reuter founded the agency on carrier pigeons between Aachen and Brussels in 1850, and when Thomson Corporation bought Reuters for 17 billion dollars in 2008 not a single direct descendant held a journalism job to attend the announcement

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A serene image of two pigeons soaring in the blue sky, showcasing the freedom of flight.

Reuters is not a newspaper, has never owned a printing press, and began life as a flock of homing pigeons. In 1850 the birds carried closing stock prices across the roughly 76-mile gap between Aachen and Brussels, the point where the German and French-Belgian telegraph lines stopped short of each other. Paul Julius Reuter set … Read more

Chad Hurley registered the YouTube domain on 14 February 2005 as a video-dating play called Tune In Hook Up, and the pivot to general uploads came after the team offered 20 dollars to any woman who would post a profile clip and got no takers

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Resource Hubs: Explore curated lists of newly funded startups, browse weekly funding rounds, and find verified decision-maker contacts for cold outreach campaigns. YouTube exists because three former PayPal engineers — Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim — could not convince a single woman to upload a video of herself to their dating site in … Read more

Yvon Chouinard’s first business plan was a single sentence written in 1957 — make a piton that doesn’t break on the third placement — and that one constraint is what eventually produced a company doing 1.5 billion in annual revenue

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Detailed shot of hands using a carabiner while rock climbing indoors, conveying action and focus.

Explore more founder-origin features and newly-funded-startup intelligence in the Growth List Resource Hubs, where the editorial team tracks how today’s category leaders started — and who’s funding the next ones. Yvon Chouinard was a teenager in the late 1950s when he bought a coal-fired forge, a 138-pound anvil, and some tongs and hammers from a … Read more

John Paulson personally cleared nearly 4 billion dollars in 2007 shorting subprime mortgages his team had spent eighteen months modeling, then dumped his entire Sino-Forest stake four years later within two weeks of a short-seller’s fraud report, booking a loss reported at roughly 720 million dollars

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Flat lay showing coins, calculator, and charts on a red background for financial analysis and business concepts.

John Paulson walked into the offices of Goldman Sachs and asked the bank to manufacture something the cash market could not supply on its own: bespoke exposure to the riskiest tranches of subprime mortgage bonds, packaged into synthetic securities he could then bet against at scale. He bought credit default swaps referencing those bonds across … Read more

When Barclays told Paulson and Geithner at 8 a.m. Sunday that the UK regulator would not clear its Lehman guarantee, Bank of America and Merrill had already agreed to a $29-a-share rescue of their own

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Resource Hubs: For more on the institutional histories that shaped modern finance, browse the Growth List startup archive, our recently funded companies database, and our United States startup funding lists. At 8 a.m. on Sunday, September 14, 2008, Barclays told Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner, and SEC chairman Christopher Cox that the UK Financial Services Authority … Read more

When Dick Rowe supposedly told Brian Epstein in early 1962 that guitar groups were on the way out, nobody wrote the line down — it first appeared in print two years later, in Epstein’s own memoir, and Rowe spent the rest of his life denying he ever said it

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Resource Hubs: Newly Funded Startups · Growth List Blog · B2B Lead Lists Brian Poole and the Tremeloes got the Decca contract. The Beatles did not. That is the only part of the famous audition story that survives unchanged when you actually go looking for the documents. The rest of it — the smirking executive, … Read more

In 2013, Canada pulled its penny from circulation when production cost hit 1.6 cents per coin, but the US Mint kept pressing one-cent pieces for another twelve years at costs that climbed past 3.69 cents, absorbing losses no private manufacturer would tolerate for a single quarter

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Spilled jar of pennies creating a pattern of coins representing savings and finance.

Resource Hubs: Growth List tracks newly funded startups, decision-maker contacts, and verified outreach data sourced from Crunchbase. Browse our funded startups database and weekly lead lists for sales, recruiting, and partnership teams. On the afternoon of Wednesday, November 12, 2025, at the United States Mint in Philadelphia, US Treasurer Brandon Beach stepped up to a … Read more

In 1975, a young Kodak engineer named Steve Sasson wired a Super-8 lens to a cassette recorder and waited 23 seconds for a single black-and-white image to crawl onto tape, and the executives who watched, whose film business ran on 70 percent margins, could not see why anyone would want it

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Black and white photo of vintage cameras on display with descriptive signs.

In December 1975, in a research lab in Rochester, New York, a young Kodak engineer named Steve Sasson aimed a device the size of a toaster at a lab technician and flipped a switch. Capturing the image took about fifty milliseconds. Then he waited. Twenty-three seconds later, the data finished crawling onto a cassette tape. … Read more

The Mars family controls one of America’s largest private companies and almost never gives an interview or appears at a public event, a tradition of invisibility Forrest Mars Sr. enforced for the rest of his life after one 1966 magazine profile enraged him

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Resource Hubs: For more on founder-driven companies and the families behind them, see Growth List’s coverage of the largest private companies in America, multigenerational family businesses, and recently funded startups backed by founder capital rather than venture money. In 1966, Forrest Mars Sr. agreed to a single sit-down interview with Candy Industry & Confectioner’s Journal. … Read more

Coca-Cola’s formula could leak tomorrow and the company would lose almost nothing in enterprise value, because the 1885 trademark precedent set in an Atlanta courtroom is what every cent of the brand’s 90-billion-dollar valuation actually rests on

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Close-up of 'Startup' written on a glass panel in an office setting.

Asa Candler walked into a Fulton County, Georgia courthouse in 1888 and within five years he had spent roughly $2,300 buying out every remaining claim to the formula a morphine-addicted pharmacist named John Pemberton had cooked up in a brass kettle in his Atlanta backyard. Candler didn’t care much about the syrup. He cared about … Read more

Cornelius Vanderbilt died in 1877 holding 105 million dollars, more than the US Treasury, and by the time 120 of his descendants gathered for a 1973 family reunion, they were told that not one Vanderbilt at the table was a millionaire

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Explore the haunting beauty of an abandoned mansion interior with decaying walls and vintage charm.

Resource Hubs: For more on founder origin stories and the mechanics of how fortunes are built (and unbuilt), see Growth List’s running coverage of capitalism’s strangest case studies. Most people assume the Vanderbilt family lost its fortune in some single catastrophic event — a market crash, a fraud, a famous heir who gambled it away … Read more

Bell Labs in Murray Hill ran on a rule Mervin Kelly built into the architecture — every researcher had to keep their office door open, and the hallway became the company’s real innovation engine

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Close-up of 'Startup' written on a glass panel in an office setting.

Mervin Kelly, an executive who ran Bell Labs during the post-war era, made researchers walk to lunch. The dining room sat at the far end of a long corridor in Murray Hill, New Jersey, and the route was deliberate. A solid-state physicist heading for coffee would pass a metallurgist, a vacuum-tube engineer, a topologist working … Read more