Sometimes, it’s only when one person achieves something incredible that others find achievement within reach.
For most of sporting history, sprinting 100 meters in under 10 seconds was the realm of superheroes. Clark Kent, yes; humans, not so much. But when American athlete Jim Hines ran a race in 9.95 seconds in 1968, his astonishing feat was just the beginning. More and more runners broke the 10-second barrier until today’s most successful athletes like Usain Bolt see this once-impossible ceiling as “barely an obstacle”.
Back in 2012, when General Atlantic first moved into Turkey’s tech scene with its $44M Series B investment in online food delivery company Yemeksepeti, it sent a signal that Turkey’s startups could compete globally. And last year, General Atlantic returned to Turkey, leading a $500M Series E round for Insider, a Turkish unicorn with global ambitions. With each new success, the bar gets higher.
Insider and Yemeksepeti are part of the 2025 Endeavor Outliers class. Each year, Endeavor chooses a cohort of companies that, by a variety of measures, are the top performers of our community. They’re redefining what success looks like in emerging markets.
While Endeavor has been actively supporting founders in emerging and underserved markets for nearly three decades, our first publicly recognized Outliers class was published in 2020.
Those early pioneers — founders of companies like Rappi, Colombia’s first unicorn; Kavak, Mexico’s first unicorn; and Careem, which Uber acquired for $3.2B in the largest tech exit in the Middle East — paved the way for the next generation of entrepreneurs. They broke the mental barriers that held entire markets back.
As a result, the 2025 Outliers cohort is raising the bar for what’s possible in emerging markets. The 2025 Outliers cohort has a median revenue four times higher than the 2020 cohort. There are three times more companies making over $100M in revenue, nearly six times the number of companies valued at more than $1B, and six times as many publicly listed companies.
2025’s Outliers at a Glance
(Last 3Y)
(2024)
valued at $1B*
companies
(Last 3Y)
All these incredible companies were chosen across three criteria:
Scaling up
($25–100M in Revenue)
Scaled up & growing
($100M+)
Multipliers
($500M+ Exit)
The criteria for qualifying evolve, as Nasim Novin, who leads our Outliers program, explains. “Every year, we see our Outliers raise the bar — not just for their own companies, but for entire markets,” she says.
The top-performing countries represented in this cohort are Brazil, Indonesia, Spain, and Mexico. While Silicon Valley or large emerging markets like China and India tend to get most global attention, Endeavor looks elsewhere — and every year, we see new players from these “elsewhere markets” driving change. In 2025, we have two new countries represented for the first time; edtech company Headway became the first Ukrainian Outlier while Indie Campers set a new bar for Portugal.
After launching Endeavor offices in both countries in 2023 and 2024, we’ve begun selecting and supporting the founders behind these outlier companies, on their pathways to become role models for their ecosystems.
Fintech makes up 26% of the Outliers class, significantly higher than the 19% share in our overall portfolio, highlighting its outsized presence and strong performance. Financial technological innovation shows no sign of slowing down. Almost half of investments from Endeavor Catalyst, our rules-based investment fund, goes to fintech companies. Two of those, Brazilian QITech and Nigeria-based Moniepoint, are our newest unicorns, transforming financial systems in their home countries.
Neon, a Brazilian neobank, is another star Outlier, which became a unicorn in February 2022 and has since doubled in size every year. They have had an outsized impact on the Brazilian fintech ecosystem to match. Founder Pedro Conrade has also become a familiar stalwart in Endeavor’s Brazilian network and beyond. He leads mentorship sessions on scaling and managing C-level executives, as well as on growth strategy and market expansion, advising Brazilian fintech Trinus on their recent $7M Series B extension and South African fintech companies Ozow and TymeBank. He frequently serves as a panelist in Endeavor’s International Selection Panels, evaluating and providing feedback to high-impact entrepreneurs and shaping the next generation of Endeavor Entrepreneurs.
The five-year boom
We’ve been tracking our top 10% of companies for five years now, which offers the chance to see the growth from 2020 to 2025. And just as Jim Hines showed back in 1968, one company’s achievement breaks the barrier for the companies that follow it.
That’s why 2025 Outliers are consistently performing higher and achieving more than the 2020 Outliers. Earlier companies pave the way for their successors: so let’s take a look at the pathways they’ve forged.
Over the past five years, top-performing companies haven’t just grown — they’ve soared. Their median annual revenue has nearly tripled, jumping from $36M to $100M, while still maintaining strong momentum, with a median CAGR of 65.7% in 2025 (down from 87.3% in 2020, but very impressive at this scale). This growth is reflected in the number of companies crossing the $100M revenue mark — 87 in 2025, a fourfold jump from just 22 in 2020.
Across the board, there’s been incredible performance metrics. Turkish mobile games startup Spyke Games has seen 18x growth in the past three years—par for the course for a company that had a record-breaking seed round of $55M and has $1B in revenue to date.
In Pakistan, fintech Abhi has grown eight times over the past three years, while delivery platform Toters, based in Lebanon, faced down war and uncertainty to more than double its size in the past year.
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Since 2020, the number of companies valued at over $1 billion has increased nearly sixfold, rising from 13 to 76 in 2025. This rapid expansion has been fueled by the increasing flow of international capital into markets beyond the U.S., India, and China. Late-stage investors have played a crucial role, helping scale-ups in elsewhere markets accelerate growth, achieve unicorn status, and, in turn, attract even more investment into their ecosystems.
Those founders are now paying it forward–reinvesting their success to empower the next generation. At the 2023 Endeavor Gala, South African digital bank Tyme Group’s co-founders, Tjaart van der Walt and Coen Jonker, met David Vélez, founder of Latin America’s largest fintech, Nubank. What began as a conversation turned into mentorship, which ultimately led to investment –Nubank led Tyme Group’s $250M Series D round, officially cementing Tyme’s unicorn status. This is the power of top-performing companies: they’re not just scaling, they’re changing the entrepreneurial landscape globally.
Along the way, they’re reshaping the global VC landscape by becoming the first investments that international VCs make in these markets. Hala (with investment from TPG in Saudi Arabia), Property Finder (General Atlantic in the UAE), and Carry1st (from Andreessen Horowitz in Africa) are not quite unicorns yet — but they are well on their way.
As the saying goes, every overnight success takes about ten years—and the 2025 Outliers cohort is proof. This year, the average age of Outliers companies has risen to nine years, up from six in 2020, underscoring the maturation of high-growth ventures in Endeavor’s markets. Take Brazilian fintech giant Pismo: founded in 2016, it spent years operating under the radar before its $1 billion acquisition by Visa in 2024.
And Pismo is far from the only one—several companies in this year’s cohort have been building for even longer. Founded in 2013, Bending Spoons spent its first six years bootstrapping on its way to becoming a unicorn valued at $2.2B in 2024. And Cubic Telecom, created by Irish entrepreneur Barry Napier in 2008, only hit the global media after it sold a majority stake to Softbank in 2023, one of the largest tech transactions in Ireland’s history, representing 80% of all dollars invested into the country’s tech startups that year.
49 Outliers are consistent high performers
Some familiar faces appear in both the 2020 and 2025 classes. A core group of 49 companies has qualified as Outliers for six consecutive years, making up over 20% of this year’s cohort. Among them are standout names like Mexican online consumer lender Kueski, Nice One, Kueski, and Bending Spoons.
Few companies sustain top-tier performance year after year, but Kueski has done just that. The Mexican online consumer lender has been among the top 10% of Outliers for six years running — proof that scaling responsibly is just as critical as growing fast. Co-founder and CEO Adalberto Flores Ochoa has built one of the most admired leadership teams in the region, known for high retention and a strong company culture.
Nice One is redefining e-commerce in Saudi Arabia. Founded by Omar and Abdulrahman Al-Olayan, the beauty retailer has built a logistics engine that enables same-day delivery in Riyadh and nationwide fulfillment in under 48 hours. In its latest financial year, Nice One reported $250 million in revenue and over $20 million in net profit — more than double the previous year. This momentum culminated in its January 2025 IPO on the Saudi Stock Exchange, marking a major milestone in its journey.
When Bending Spoons, another recurring Outlier for the past six years, acquired apps like Evernote, WeTransfer, and Meetup, it didn’t just expand its portfolio. It reversed the usual script of global acquisitions — where well-known giants acquire smaller players from emerging markets. This time, it was an Italian holding company buying household names, proving that ambitious moves can come from unexpected places.
Cloud kitchens surged and stumbled after the pandemic, but Kitopi never slowed down. Co-founder and CEO Mohamad Ballout has led the company far beyond its original model, transforming it into the world’s leading multi-brand restaurant. While many in the space struggled, Kitopi scaled aggressively — executing 18 acquisitions and growing to over 200 locations across five markets. By constantly evolving its playbook, Kitopi has proven that adaptability is the real key to sustainable growth.
“What sets Outliers apart isn’t just their business growth—it’s their commitment to growing as leaders and building a community,” says Nasim.
If there’s anything 2025 Outliers prove, it’s that they’re hitting goals which five years ago seemed unimaginable. What will happen next? For those on the ground and for us at Endeavor, it’s clear that if you want to be part of the action, you need to get involved — yesterday.
For founders, the ceiling of what’s possible is rising; pretty soon, we’ll have fond memories of barriers which once seemed insurmountable and are now simply growing pains. For investors, the takeaway is urgent. If you don’t want to be missing out in 2030, it’s time to look elsewhere now.