A carpenter who got tired of paper blueprints built the software the construction industry now runs on - and priced it so nobody has to pay per seat.
Uptodown is one of the world's largest independent, multi-platform app stores, founded in 2002 in Malaga, Spain. It distributes Android APKs (and historically Windows software) directly to users as an alternative to Google Play, offering older app versions, region-free access, and editorially curated listings. Bootstrapped and profitable on web advertising rather than venture capital, it serves well over a hundred million monthly users and hundreds of millions of downloads while championing software sovereignty and user choice.
Xero is a cloud-based accounting software company founded in Wellington, New Zealand in 2006. It serves more than 4.4 million subscribers - mostly small businesses and the accountants and bookkeepers who advise them - across New Zealand, Australia, the UK, the US and beyond. Xero connects bank feeds, invoicing, payroll, expense tracking and a marketplace of thousands of third-party apps into a single real-time platform, and reported NZ$2.1 billion in revenue in FY25.