The Rise of Super Scale Companies: Redefining Growth in the 2020s
Today’s fastest-growing firms leverage technology, AI, and platform models to achieve exponential revenue growth, transforming industries from healthcare to fintech and logistics at unprecedented speed and scale.
The last decade has witnessed an unprecedented surge in business growth, driven by the exponential rise in the availability of digital technology and an accompanying expansion in private market funding of innovation and entrepreneur-led businesses.
The outcome has fundamentally redefined what it means to scale in the modern economy.
Where companies would previously follow a fairly predictable growth trajectory, digital and tech-centred ‘superscalers’ are able to 2x, 5x, 10x or more their revenue growth in three years.
Exploring the fastest growing businesses from Deloitte’s 2024 Fast 500 rankings, we take a look at what these companies are doing and how they’re achieving up to 10x revenue growth (without dramatically increasing resources) at a pace and scale that seemed unimaginable until recently.
It’s not just their use of technology either.
These "super scale" growth companies represent a new category of business that transcends traditional growth patterns.
Unlike gradual expansion models of earlier decades, today's fastest-growing companies understand how to leverage advanced technologies, platform business models, and artificial intelligence to achieve growth rates measured in thousands of percentage points rather than modest double digits.
We hope this edition serves as some useful guidance for new firms starting their own growth journey. Get in touch for more perspectives on what the research tells us and interact with the data in our Superscalers in 2025 infographic here
Top 10 Superscalers - Deloitte Fast 500 2024
Common Attributes of Super Scalers
1. Technology-First Architecture
All top performers are fundamentally technology companies, even when operating in traditional sectors like healthcare or real estate. They've built their core operations around scalable digital platforms rather than ‘retrofitting’ technology onto existing business models. This architectural choice enables them to serve exponentially more customers without proportional increases in operational costs.
2. AI Integration as a Competitive Moat
Artificial intelligence has emerged as the defining differentiator for super scale companies. From Cowbell's AI-powered underwriting to Deel's AI-enhanced global compliance, these companies use machine learning not as a feature but as the foundation of their competitive advantage. AI enables them to automate complex decision-making, personalise services at scale, and continuously optimise operations without human intervention.
3. Platform and Marketplace Business Models
The majority of these companies operate platform or marketplace models that create network effects. As more users join the platform, its value increases for all participants, creating a self-reinforcing growth cycle. Lessen's vendor network, Zero Hash's financial infrastructure, and Autosled's transport marketplace all exemplify this approach.
4. Strategic Capital Deployment
These companies demonstrate exceptional ability to attract and deploy large funding rounds strategically. Rather than simply scaling existing operations, they use capital to build new capabilities, enter new markets, and strengthen their technological advantages. The funding serves as an accelerator for already-proven business models rather than a lifeline for unproven concepts.
5. Addressing Critical Pain Points
Each company targets significant, often systemic problems in large markets. TG Therapeutics addresses unmet medical needs, Vytalize Health tackles healthcare delivery inefficiencies, and Deel solves complex global employment challenges. Their explosive growth reflects the market's desperate need for these solutions.
6. Inherent Scalability Design
Unlike traditional businesses that face increasing marginal costs as they grow, these companies achieve decreasing unit costs through scale. Their technology platforms, once built, can serve millions of users at essentially the same operational cost as serving thousands.
The New Nature of Growth: 2020s v Earlier Decades
Speed and Scale Compression
The 2020s represent a fundamental shift as data latency shortens and AI algorithms improve, enabling new technologies to flourish including autonomous vehicles, conversational AI, and augmented reality. Where previous decades saw companies take 10-20 years or more to reach billion-dollar valuations, today's super scalers have been able to achieve similar milestones in 3-5 years.
From Linear to Exponential Growth
Modern scaling occurs when revenue increases without substantial increases in resources, contrasting with traditional growth where costs rise proportionally with expansion. The 2020s emphasise profitability and economic fundamentals, unlike the 2010s which operated in a low interest rate environment where traditional economic laws seemed suspended.
Technology as Growth Enabler v Cost Centre
In earlier decades, technology was primarily viewed as a cost centre or operational necessity. Today's super scale companies treat technology as their primary growth engine. The shift from viewing IT as overhead to leveraging it as a competitive multiplier represents a fundamental change in business strategy.
Global-First Mentality
Unlike companies from previous decades that expanded internationally after dominating domestic markets, today's super scale companies often launch with global ambitions from day one. Deel's international payroll platform and Zero Hash's cross-border settlement infrastructure exemplify this global-first approach.
Capital Efficiency Revolution
These companies achieve dramatically higher capital efficiency than their predecessors. Where traditional companies required massive capital investments in physical infrastructure, manufacturing, or inventory, super scale companies achieve greater market impact with significantly less capital investment by leveraging cloud computing, APIs, and platform economics.
Understanding Industry Transformation
Accelerating Healthcare Digitisation
Four of the top ten companies operate in life sciences, reflecting healthcare's rapid digital transformation. Companies like Vytalize Health and Talkiatry are rebuilding healthcare delivery from the ground up using technology, achieving growth rates impossible in traditional healthcare models.
Re-imagining Financial Services
The fintech firms in the list (Zero Hash and Cowbell) aren't just digital versions of traditional financial services—they're creating entirely new categories. Zero Hash enables tokenised finance infrastructure, while Cowbell uses AI to make cyber insurance accessible to small businesses for the first time.
Real Estate and Logistics Modernisation
Traditional industries like real estate (Lessen) and transportation (Autosled) are being transformed by companies that bring modern software development practices to historically analogue sectors. These companies achieve super scale growth by digitising entire industry workflows rather than just individual processes.
Implications for the Future
The emergence of super scale growth companies signals several fundamental shifts in the business landscape:
Winner-Take-All Dynamics: Platform effects and network benefits create scenarios where market leaders capture disproportionate value, making early scaling advantages crucial for long-term success.
Technology as Strategy: Companies can no longer treat technology as support infrastructure. In the super scale era, technological sophistication directly determines competitive position and growth potential.
Global Competition from Day One: Markets are increasingly global from inception, requiring companies to build for international scale from their earliest product decisions.
Capital as Accelerant: While substantial funding remains important, success increasingly depends on already having achieved product-market fit and demonstrated scalability before major capital deployment.
Conclusion: The Dawn of Super Scale Business
The companies profiled represent more than statistical outliers—they embody a new category of business that leverages 21st-century technologies to achieve growth patterns previously thought impossible. Their success stems not from incremental improvements to existing models, but from fundamental reimagination of how business value is created and delivered.
With average growth rates of 1,981% and median growth rates of 460%, these companies have compressed traditional business development timelines by an order of magnitude. They demonstrate that in the right conditions—combining technological leverage, platform business models, AI integration, and strategic capital deployment—companies can achieve in three years what previously required decades.
The super scale phenomenon is not a temporary market anomaly but represents the new baseline for ambitious technology companies. As AI continues to mature, global connectivity deepens, and platform effects become better understood, the growth rates achieved by today's leaders will likely become the minimum threshold for tomorrow's market entrants.
For entrepreneurs, investors, and business leaders, the message is clear: the companies that will define the next decade are being built today, and they're being built differently than ever before. The age of super scale growth has arrived, and it's transforming not just individual companies, but the entire nature of business competition and value creation.
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Simon Hardie is an author and founder of findexable - the digital analytics and insight platform. He co-hosts the Born to Disrupt podcast with Mingzulu and Disrupts
