The Fastest-Growing Industries in America: What 15 Million Companies Reveal About Where Founders Are Building in 2026

Social Networking Platforms: up 434%. Blockchain Services: up 305%. Business Intelligence Platforms: up 303%.

Those aren't projections. They're founding rates, measured by comparing how many companies were created in 2023 through 2025 versus 2018 through 2020, across 15.4 million company profiles in the Data Surfer database.^[1]

Most "fastest-growing industries" lists cite Bureau of Labor Statistics employment forecasts or revenue estimates. This one is different. We counted how many new companies actually appeared in each industry over two equal three-year windows, then ranked the 1,922 industries by percentage change. The result is a ground-level view of where founders are placing their bets right now.

Every year, publications rank industries by projected job growth or revenue estimates. These are useful numbers, but they measure different things than what founders, investors, and sales teams actually need.

Employment projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics tell you where large existing companies plan to hire. Revenue rankings from the Inc. 5000 tell you which already-successful companies are scaling fastest. Neither tells you where new companies are forming.

Founding rate does.

When thousands of new companies appear in an industry within a two-year window, it signals something specific: founders see enough opportunity to quit their jobs, raise capital, or bootstrap a product in that space. That's a leading indicator. Employment numbers are lagging ones.

Our approach has advantages and limitations. The advantage: it captures the full universe of new entrants, not just the ones that survived long enough to make a list. The limitation: the dataset skews toward knowledge-economy industries. Construction companies are underrepresented relative to SaaS startups.

How we built the cohorts. We divided the dataset into two three-year windows of equal length. The "recent" cohort includes companies with a founding year of 2023, 2024, or 2025. The "older" cohort includes 2018, 2019, and 2020. Then we calculated the percentage change between them.

To prevent statistical noise, we excluded any industry with fewer than 500 companies in either cohort. This removed ultra-niche categories where a handful of new entrants could swing the percentage wildly. The 50 industries that survived this filter represent the most meaningful growth signals in the dataset.

Here are the top 20 industries ranked by founding-rate growth, comparing companies created in 2023-2025 versus 2018-2020.

Now let's look at the top 10 in detail.

The top 20 list isn't random. Three macro trends explain most of what we're seeing.

The Surprises

Pet Services at +177%. This one catches people off guard. But 1,823 new pet services companies in three years reflects a real structural shift in consumer spending. Americans spent $158 billion on pets in 2024, and the industry is professionalizing.^[2]

Insurance Agencies and Brokerages at +160%. The insurance industry is fragmenting. Independent agents and brokerages are multiplying as technology lowers the barrier to entry. You don't need a corner office and a team of underwriters anymore. You need a license, a CRM, and a niche.

Services for Renewable Energy at +150%. The growth here is in the service layer (installation, maintenance, consulting, project development), not in manufacturing, which is consolidating. The Inflation Reduction Act turbocharged this category. With 5,783 new companies in three years, renewable energy services is now larger than many of the "hotter" categories on the list.

National averages hide the real story. Where companies are being founded varies dramatically by industry.

* Registration addresses, not founder operational hubs

Cross-Industry Patterns

New York leads in media-adjacent categories. Social Networking Platforms, Business Content, and Internet News all have New York as their top city. When a category involves content creation, distribution, or audience building, New York's talent pool gives it an edge.

San Francisco leads in pure infrastructure. Data Infrastructure and Analytics is where SF dominates most clearly. When the product is deeply technical and the buyers are other technology companies, the Bay Area network effect still works.

Austin is consistently third or fourth. Across every industry in the geographic dataset, Austin shows up in the top five. It's no longer a niche alternative. It's a primary hub.

Miami punches above its weight in finance-adjacent tech. Blockchain Services and Business Intelligence Platforms both show Miami in the top five. The city's timezone (aligned with Latin American markets), favorable tax environment, and growing fintech community are pulling companies in.

Growth rate alone doesn't tell the whole story. An industry growing at 200% from a base of 500 companies is a different opportunity than one growing at 50% from a base of 60,000.

The takeaway: a 300% growth rate in a 2,000-company industry means 1,500 new entrants. A 50% growth rate in a 96,000-company industry means 32,000 new entrants. The "slower" market is adding 20 times more companies.

The best opportunities often sit in the upper-left quadrant: high growth, moderate volume. Think Education (35,413 companies, +183%), IT System Custom Software Development (6,631 companies, +159%), or Services for Renewable Energy (5,783 companies, +150%). Large enough to sustain a business. Growing fast enough to create urgency.

Not every industry is growing. Some are contracting sharply.

Three patterns stand out.

Manufacturing is consolidating, not growing. Motor Vehicle Manufacturing (-75%), Machinery Manufacturing (-68%), Industrial Machinery (-67%), Appliances and Electronics Manufacturing (-64%), Chemical Manufacturing (-60%), and Computers and Electronics Manufacturing (-60%) all show steep declines. Fewer new companies are entering these spaces because the capital requirements are rising and the incumbents are entrenching.

Advertising Services collapsed, but Marketing Services surged. Advertising Services dropped 71%, from 67,311 to 19,486 companies. Meanwhile, Marketing Services (rank 19 on the growth list) jumped 153%, from 24,403 to 61,679. This is almost certainly a reclassification effect. Companies that would have called themselves "advertising agencies" five years ago now call themselves "marketing services" companies. The work is similar. The label shifted.

E-Learning's drop is pandemic normalization. E-Learning Providers fell 66%, from 14,218 to 4,891 companies. But the older cohort (2018-2020) includes the pandemic boom year of 2020, when thousands of e-learning companies launched to meet sudden demand. The 2023-2025 numbers represent a return to baseline, not a collapse in demand. Education as a broader category still grew 183%.

Oil and Gas at -59% reflects both the energy transition and the economics of shale drilling. Fewer small operators are entering a market where the survivors have already secured the best acreage.

This data points in different directions depending on what you're building, where you're working, or what you're selling.

This research is based on 15,360,004 company profiles aggregated from multiple public sources and enriched through the Data Surfer platform.^[1]

Limitations

For researchers and analysts who want the complete picture, here is the full ranking of the 50 industries that met our minimum threshold of 500 companies in each cohort.

The total founding-rate growth across all 50 qualifying industries was 1,223,855 new companies in the 2023-2025 cohort. Even the 50th-ranked industry (Residential Building Construction) still grew 42%. Every industry that made it past the 500-company threshold in both cohorts is growing. The question isn't whether industries are growing. It's how fast, and from what base.

For a closer look at the largest employers in the United States, including many of the companies that anchor these industries, see our companion research.

This data is updated regularly as new company profiles are added to the Data Surfer platform. The underlying dataset grows by thousands of companies each week, and future editions of this analysis will incorporate those additions.

Published April 2026 by Data Surfer Research. For questions about this data or to request custom industry analysis, contact research@data-surfer.com.