Shorties Roundup: Inc. 5000 Regionals listed these fast-growing DMV tech companies

Our human brains love a good list as a way to contextualize our world, or our local tech economy.

Inc. magazine knows this well, and this week dropped the regional version of its Inc. 5000 rankings of fastest-growing private companies. For the D.C. metro area, which includes D.C., Baltimore and Northern Virginia, we recognize a handful of tech companies high on the 250-entry list.

Notably, FiscalNote came in at #9, reporting 739% growth from 2017 to 2019. Early this year, the Penn Quarter-based political software and intelligence firm acquired FactSquared, the parent company of Factba.se, an AI-enabled transcription tool that makes Trump’s words across speeches and tweets searchable in real-time. That acquisition came just a few weeks after it raised $160 million in growth capital and debt financing.

Bethesda, Maryland’s Homesnap ranked at #42, with 228% growth over two years. The real estate tech company was acquired by CoStar Group for a reported $250 million at the end of 2020.

And Columbia, Maryland-based Leap, which makes an app to manage in-home improvement sales, is ranked at #21, with 433% growth over two years.

“From the beginning, Leap was designed to challenge the outdated contractor sales model,” Leap CEO Patrick Fingles said in a statement. “We created a new standard that helps contractors quickly and easily increase business using the digital approach that homeowners expect. This recognition affirms our market-wide adoption and ability to scale to meet growing demand.”

See the full list

Now, for the news shorties from this and last week, as shared in Technical.ly DC’s daily newsletter and found elsewhere in the past few days:

Company updates

• Gaithersburg, Maryland-based Viela Bio’s acquisition by Horizon Therapeutics has officially closed. The deal is reportedly worth more than $3 billion.
• Cybersecurity company Lookout, which has an office in Reston, Virginia, has acquired San Jose-based cloud-native security company CipherCloud. Lookout CEO Jim Dolce wrote in a blog post that the combo “will create the industry’s first company capable of providing an integrated endpoint-to-cloud security solution.”
• Healthcare AI company Zasti will invest $5.9 million to establish its U.S. HQ and operations in Loudoun County, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam announced last week. The move is expected to bring 60 jobs to the area.
• LifeFuels founder and CEO Jonathon Perrelli announced that he’s shutting down the venture-backed startup. The company put its smart nutrition water bottle on the market in fall 2019.

Funding news

• MPower Financing raised even more VC funding: The Downtown D.C.-based fintech company added $5 million to its recent $25 million round.
• WorkChew has raised $2.5 million in seed funding. The three-year-old, D.C.-based startup connects remote workers with coworking space in the form of local hotels and restaurants.
• CMT Solutions Inc. has raised $10 million of a Series A round. The Falls Church, Virginia company makes a HIPAA compliance portal for physicians’ offices.
• VLP Therapeutics Inc. has raised $16 million of a Series A round. The Gaithersburg, Maryland-based biotech company will use this funding the advance its cancer treatment vaccine.

Social impact moves

• Gaithersburg, Maryland’s Novavax reported that a late-stage trial found its COVID-19 vaccine 96% effective against the virus.
• Local musician and entrepreneur Alfred Duncan launched Black Men Ventures — inspired by Black Girl Ventures — to fund Black male founders’ companies.
• SEED SPOT is taking applications for its summer 2021 program. Early deadline is March 31, while the hard deadline is April 14. The social impact accelerator is launching its spring program with these 11 startups: The Wave, AsisVisa, Ancestories XR, Working Fields, HappyPlate, Holistic Urgent Care, People Objective, Disruptia, T|W Tote, ShareMyJourney and Avisely.
• Howard University School of Business is launching the HPS Center for Financial Excellence to prepare students for careers in private investment and investment banking. The center is supported by a $10 million donation from HPS Investment Partners and The Kapnick Foundation.
• Northern Virginia Community College, George Mason University, Virginia Tech and University of Maryland are among 38 institutions to launch the Taskforce on Higher Education and Opportunity. The group is “driven to act by the challenges of the pandemic, income inequality, the changing nature of work, and unemployment among recent college graduates being nearly double the 2008 recession.”

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