NO.7/ SHOPIFY How the e-commerce platform behind Kylie Cosmetics, All-birds, and Bombas is powering the Ama-zon resistance.

When Kylie Jenner sold a controlling stake

in her four-year-old makeup startup to French beauty conglomerate Coty in November for $600 million at a $1.2 billion valuation, the 22-year-old CEO emerged a billionaire. The sale of Kylie Cosmetics was an extraordinary achievement for the reality star turned entrepreneur, one that’s even more notable for the fact that her company has just 12 full- and part-time employees. To build a hyperefficient online brand, it helps to have the Kardashianjenner influencer juggernaut in your corner, of course. But perhaps just as important is Shopify, the Canadian e-commerce logistics startup that powers everything from Jenner’s website to the payment systems used in all of her pop-up shops.

Kylie Cosmetics’ rise is exceptional, but far from unique: Shopify works with some of the most successful direct-to-consumer startups, including Allbirds, Bombas, Brooklinen, Outdoor Voices, and Rothy’s (No. 33). It also powers stores from legacy companies, including Budweiser, The New York Times, and Nestlé. Shopify signed its millionth merchant in 2019—it has sellers in 175 countries—and generated nearly $1.6 billion in annual revenue, up from $1.1 billion in 2018. (The company makes money from monthly subscriptions, as well as additional fees for premium features.) Deloitte estimates that between 2016 and 2018, companies on Shopify enabled $183 billion in transactions and created full-time jobs for 1.4 million people. In the four days from Black Friday through Cyber Monday last year alone, Shopify merchants sold more than $2.9 billion worth of goods to 25.5 million people, up from $1.8 billion the year before.

Tobias Lütke, cofounder and CEO, who began building Shopify in 2004 to make it easy for entrepreneurs to design e-commerce sites without hiring professional developers, still has a long way to go to catch up to Amazon, which controls half of all e-commerce sales