Georgia: Top Companies & Startups

Georgia is home to 18 Fortune 500 headquarters. Nearly 70% of every credit and debit card transaction in America routes through a company based here. A pantyhose company built with $5,000 in savings turned its founder into the youngest self-made female billionaire in the country. Georgia builds differently.

The state has produced soft drink empires, airlines, insurance giants, wire manufacturers, and fintech unicorns, often from people who had no business plan beyond solving a problem in front of them. Here's what's been quietly assembled over the last 150 years…

In 1987, Georgia lawmakers stripped the state's caps on credit card interest rates and annual fees. Banks and processors noticed. Nearly four decades later, Atlanta processes close to 70% of all U.S. debit, credit, and gift card transactions, and more than half of America's fintech companies sit inside the metro area. Locals call the GA-400 corridor "Transaction Alley."

NCR built the cash register and then the ATM here. Global Payments and InComm turned payment processing into a Fortune 500 business. Pindrop, spun out of Georgia Tech IP in 2011 by Vijay Balasubramaniyan, Mustaque Ahamad, and Paul Judge, raised $122 million building voice fraud detection that flagged 86 million phone scam calls a month. Kabbage, an Atlanta small-business lender, sold to American Express for roughly $850 million in 2020.

Transend proves Transaction Alley is still producing new players. Matt Lekawa, Ankit Patel, and Jason Jones spent more than twenty years building lending products inside BB&T, Capital One, GreenSky, and BHG Financial before leaving to fix the part of payments nobody wanted to touch: business-to-business. Most companies still pay their suppliers with paper checks or wait days for ACH to settle, and nearly half of U.S. invoices get paid late. Transend lets suppliers offer their own branded financing at the point of sale. The supplier gets paid up front, the buyer gets terms of up to 60 months, and a bank partner funds the loan. The team built it to a $10 million run rate on just $900,000 raised from funds like Redbud VC. In a metro that already routes most of the country's card swipes, they went after the transactions still running on paper.

John Pemberton was a war veteran and pharmacist in Columbus, Georgia, chasing a morphine addiction cure when he mixed the first batch of Coca-Cola in 1886. It's now the most recognized brand on earth, still headquartered in Atlanta.

Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank got fired from a home improvement chain in 1978. They started Home Depot in Atlanta out of spite as much as ambition. It's now the largest home improvement retailer in the world. Truett Cathy opened a small diner in Hapeville called the Dwarf Grill and invented a pressure-fried chicken sandwich; it became Chick-fil-A, the highest revenue-per-restaurant fast food chain in America, still closed every Sunday.

Delta traces back to the world's first aerial crop-dusting company, founded in Macon in 1925 to fight the boll weevil. It's now the largest airline in the world by revenue, headquartered a few miles from where Home Depot started. UPS moved its headquarters to Atlanta in 1991 and now delivers more packages daily than any company on the planet.

Then there's the list most people don't associate with Georgia at all: Aflac, built in Columbus in 1955 around supplemental insurance and a duck nobody expected to work. Equifax, one of three companies that decides your credit score. Southern Company, one of the largest energy utilities in America. Genuine Parts, the company behind every NAPA Auto Parts store in the country. Invesco, a global asset manager with $1.8 trillion under management. Intercontinental Exchange, founded in Atlanta by Jeffrey Sprecher in 2000, now owns the New York Stock Exchange. Cox Enterprises, still owned by the same family that bought a Dayton newspaper in 1898, now pulls in $21 billion a year and nobody outside Atlanta can name what it actually does.

Eighteen Fortune 500 companies call Georgia home and most of America interacts with several of them before breakfast.

Roy Richards Sr. started a wire and cable company in Carrollton in 1950 because he wanted to run electricity to his grandmother's house. Southwire is now one of the largest wire and cable manufacturers on earth, still family-owned, still headquartered in the same county.

The Winchester family has run Quikrete out of Atlanta since 1940. Forbes ranks it the 17th most valuable private family business in America and puts the family's net worth at $18 billion, built almost entirely on bags of dry concrete mix sold at every hardware store in the country.

Carl Bolch Sr. started RaceTrac in St. Louis in 1934 and the family moved it to Atlanta in 1976, where it's grown to roughly 667 gas stations under family leadership four generations deep. Holder Construction, founded in Atlanta in 1960, now builds projects across eight U.S. cities and rarely makes headlines outside the industry it dominates.

What’s unique about Georgia's economy is that it runs less on logos everyone recognizes and more on companies that quietly own a category.

Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius built Mailchimp out of Atlanta without ever raising a dollar of venture capital. In 2021, Intuit bought it for $12 billion, one of the largest bootstrapped exits in tech history.

Tope Awotona emigrated from Nigeria, failed at five different startups, and mortgaged his own condo to keep building a sixth. That sixth company was Calendly, now valued north of $3 billion. Sara Blakely moved to Atlanta at 27 with $5,000 in savings and no investors, cut the feet off a pair of pantyhose, and built Spanx into a company Blackstone valued at $1.2 billion when it bought a majority stake in 2021. She became the youngest self-made female billionaire in America without ever pitching a VC.

Kabir Barday started OneTrust out of Atlanta and built it into the category-defining privacy compliance platform, valued at $5.1 billion in 2020. Rob Frohwein and Kathryn Petralia built Kabbage into a small-business lending platform that sold to American Express for roughly $850 million. Tim Sheehan built Greenlight, a debit card for kids, into a $2.3 billion company backed by a16z and J.P. Morgan. SalesLoft, a sales engagement platform, took a growth investment from Vista Equity Partners at a $2.3 billion valuation in 2022.

None of these founders started in California. All of them ended up worth billions.

Georgia's company roster reads like it was written by two different states. One built Coca-Cola, Delta, and Home Depot over a century of stubborn, unglamorous execution. The other built Mailchimp, Calendly, and Spanx in the last twenty years without waiting for anyone's permission or capital. Both belong to the same place, and both are still hiring.

Whether you're building the next Mailchimp or looking to join a company that already owns its category, Roots connects you with the founders, talent, and investors who make that happen.

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