Making The Wall Street Journal's list of top 50 venture capital-backed start-ups appears to be a good indicator of future health - at least for another year. In a follow-up article to yesterday's, the WSJ reported today that, "most of the companies on the 2011 list have remained unscathed, if not prosperous."
Today's WSJ article noted that six of the companies have since held initial public offerings and two others have filed papers to go public; four were acquired, and the other 38 are still privately backed, including last year's top-ranking Castlight Health Inc., a medical-software firm. Castlight Health was not represented on this year's list at all.
One of the highest profile IPOs was from No. 20 in last year's listing, Fusion-io Inc., which uses flash memory for data hardware and software. The company, which made the list two years in a row, held its IPO in June 2011 and its stock has since risen about 71% since, the WSJ reported.
Last year's 50th ranking company, Aprius Inc., had been successful in raising $31 million in funding before going out of business. The company's main product was a device designed to bring down the cost of flash-drive storage for servers.
More than 5,900 companies were considered for the ranking. To be eligible they had to be based in the U.S., have received equity financing within the past three years and be valued at less than $1 billion.
The data was compiled by VentureSources, which, like The Wall Street Journal, is owned by News Corp.
Join the Conversation