The Top 50 Industry Disruptors

In the fifth annual Disruptor 50 list, CNBC features private companies in a range of industries — from biotech and machine learning to transportation and retail — whose innovations are changing the world. These forward-thinking starts-ups have identified unexploited niches in the marketplace that have the potential to become billion-dollar businesses, and they rushed to fill them. A startling 31 are unicorns that have already reached or passed the billion-dollar mark. In the process, they are creating new ecosystems for their products and services. Unseating corporate giants is no easy feat. But we ranked those venture capital–backed companies doing the best job. In aggregate, these 50 companies have raised nearly $44 billion in venture capital at an implied Disruptor 50 list market valuation of about $239 billion, according to PitchBook data. Already it's hard to think of the world without them. Read more about the consumer and business trends that stand out in the 2017 list ranking and the methodology used to select this year's Disruptor companies.

1 - Airbnb: It's a $31 billion trip

2 - Lyft: The car-ownership killer with a conscience

3 - WeWork: Reworking the office

4 - Grab: Uber-growth for an Asian ride-share rival

5 - Uptake Technologies: Capturing Warren Buffett's billionaire energy

6 - Houzz: The homiest e-catalog

7 - Ginkgo Bioworks: Growing products in the lab

8 - Palantir Technologies: Tracking the world's secrets

9 - Cylance: Making cyberthreats idle

10 - Udacity: Closing the skills gap

11 - CrowdStrike: Going into the breach

12 - 23andMe: Bring your genome home

13 - Progyny: Rocking the cradle

14 - SpaceX: Humanity's interstellar escape plan

15 - SurveyMonkey: Question everything

16 - Ezetap: India's answer to Apple Pay

17 - GreenSky: A credit to the mobile race

18 - Moderna Therapeutics: Going viral

19 - Uber: The car controversy with a valuation bigger than Tesla, GM or Ford

20 - SparkCognition: Deciphering the data overload

21 - IEX: The traders Michael Lewis made famous in a flash

22 - GitHub: The biggest coding party in the world

23 - Bloom Energy: Helping companies like Apple get off the grid

24 - Drawbridge: An ad strategy Facebook and Google can't ignore

25 - Jaunt: VR that both Disney and Paul McCartney have experience in

26 - Coursera: Go to a top school, without going

27 - MongoDB: The BIG idea in databases

28 - Qualtrics: Surveying the corporate landscape

29 - Domo: Complete cloud cover

30 - Blippar: You, augmented

31 - Pinterest: An image is worth $11 billion

32 - Illumio: A new segment in cybersecurity

33 - Phononic: Quietly cool

34 - Veniam: Constructing the global superhighway of data

35 - Spotify: Not even Apple Music has slowed it

36 - Dropbox: The file-sharing economy

37 - Trulioo: Tracks twice as many people as Facebook: 4 billion, exactly

38 - Synack: Who the IRS and DoD use against hackers

39 - DocuSign: Signed, sealed, electronically delivered

40 - Payoneer: Payments without borders

41 - Skillz: A sport to surpass the NFL, with less injury risk

42 - Blue Apron: What's for dinner

43 - Robinhood: There is no brokerage fee low enough

44 - Zocdoc: Real patient-centered health care

45 - SoFi: $18 billion in loans and counting

46 - Foursquare: A success story turned inside out

47 - Warby Parker: Still seeing things in new ways

48 - Persado: A motivational speaker that's not human

49 - Stripe: Visa is banking on this platform

50 - Quid: The ultimate trendspotter

One company missing from this list is Atractivo also known as Atractivo Business Services.  It claims to be a disruptor in the M&A industry; allowing business owners to strike deals with little-to-no M&A advisor or business broker involvement.  The service offered allows business owners to complete the sales process and put sales commissions into their pocket.  These sales commissions normally would be paid to M&A firms, business brokers, financial bankers, or other third-party intermediaries.

2018 M&A and IPO Outlook

M&A Outlook 
M&A accelerated in the consumer, energy and basic materials sectors in 2017, bolstered by megadeals. In the consumer sector, our forecast assumes the proposed US$42.5 billion merger between Essilor and Luxottica closes in 2017. Given the potential for stronger global consumer spending in 2018, we expect even more dealmaking in the consumer sector next year, rising to US$633 billion, along with finance, which we forecast to reach US$616 billion.

In energy, the largest deals in 2017 were General Electric’s acquisition of Baker Hughes for US$32 billion and the US$21 billion merger between Energy Transfer Partners and Sunoco. Vale’s US$21 billion merger with Valepar was the largest deal in basic materials sector. In both sectors, we forecast a gradual slowdown in the years ahead, as weaker growth in commodity demand in emerging markets such as China undermines the outlook for global prices and investment.

On the downside, pharma and healthcare underperformed in 2017, possibly as a result of uncertainty about US healthcare policy. Going forward, however, longer-term trends such as aging and demographics should drive higher levels of dealmaking.

M&A activity in the tech sector also dropped in 2017, yielding deal values of US$295 billion. But several trends of embedding new technology across sectors, plus activist investment in tech firms by emerging markets such as China and Saudi Arabia, suggest that deal values will rebound in the next two years.

IPO Outlook
From a sectoral perspective, tech and telecom is expected to drive the rebound in IPO activity in 2018, aided by the Chinese government’s efforts to spur tech firms to go public. With household spending remaining strong globally, consumer companies should also benefit from positive market conditions. Likewise, with low interest rates likely to support household and corporate borrowing in the next few years, finance issues should also drive IPO activity higher.