Missouri's Top Companies

Missouri doesn't get talked about in the same breath as Texas or California, but it should.

The state is home to two of the largest privately held companies in the entire country. Nine Missouri companies made the 2026 Fortune 500, led by Centene at No. 19 with nearly $195 billion in revenue. It was the eighth straight year Centene held the top Missouri spot. And the state is quietly producing founders who go on to build some of the most recognizable companies in tech.

Enterprise Mobility was founded in St. Louis in 1957 by Jack Taylor. It started with a fleet of seven cars. Today it does $39 billion in annual revenue across more than 9,500 branches in over 90 countries, with a fleet north of 2.4 million vehicles and more than 90,000 team members. Forbes ranks it among the ten largest private companies in America. In nearly seven decades it has had only four CEOs. Most people know it as a rental car counter. Few know the scale behind it.

Edward Jones does $16 billion in revenue, ranks No. 249 on the 2026 Fortune 500, and is still headquartered in the St. Louis area. More than 20,000 financial advisors serve 9 million clients and roughly $2.2 trillion in client assets. The firm has never gone public. It is owned by its partners, more than 33,000 of them as of late 2025. Its first limited partnership offering came in 1974, when the founder's son sold stakes to 21 associates for about $500,000.

World Wide Technology, out of Maryland Heights, does $20 billion in IT and software services with more than 12,000 employees. David Steward and Jim Kavanaugh founded it in 1990, and it is the largest Black-owned business in the United States. Graybar Electric in Clayton does $11.6 billion and sits at No. 342 on the Fortune 500. Bass Pro Shops, through its parent Great American Outdoors Group, does $8 billion out of Springfield.

Then there's the construction cluster. JE Dunn, Burns & McDonnell, and McCarthy Holdings are all multi-billion dollar firms headquartered in Kansas City or St. Louis, all still privately held, all quietly running some of the largest infrastructure and engineering projects in the country.

Add Lockton Companies (the largest privately owned insurance brokerage in the world, out of Kansas City), Hallmark (founded in Kansas City in 1910), and Schnuck Markets, and you have a private-company bench that rivals anything in the country.

Missouri's public company presence is deeper than the private list suggests. Reinsurance Group of America ranks No. 193 on the Fortune 500 and Emerson ranks No. 245. Ameren returned to the list at No. 466, and it is the state's largest electric utility, serving about 1.3 million customers across roughly 500 Missouri communities.

O'Reilly Automotive is the Springfield success story. It opened on December 2, 1957 with one store and 13 employees. It now runs more than 6,400 stores, employs over 93,000 people, and did nearly $18 billion in sales in 2025. That was its 33rd consecutive year of comparable store sales growth.

Post Holdings and Ameren both clear $6 to $8 billion in revenue out of St. Louis. Stifel Financial, Olin, Evergy, Leggett & Platt, H&R Block, Energizer Holdings, UMB Financial, and Caleres round out a list that spans finance, chemicals, utilities, and consumer goods. UMB alone has been operating out of Kansas City since 1913.

Missouri is a state with real corporate weight.

Some of the most interesting companies in Missouri aren't on any Fortune list, and that's exactly the point.

Independent Stave Company, based in Lebanon, is the largest barrel maker in the world. Founded in 1912 and still owned by the Boswell family, it ships to customers in 40 countries. When Prohibition hit in 1919, it kept the lights on by making barrels for fruit and salted meat. Diamond Pet Foods manufactures pet food at massive scale out of Missouri and barely shows up in a Google search. Farmer Companies and WW Wood Products? Same story. They’re a part of Missouri's economy that never makes a list, but they’re doing well.

The venture side is smaller but still substantial. EquipmentShare, out of Columbia, started as a winning pitch at Columbia Startup Weekend in 2014 and got into Y Combinator's Winter 2015 batch. It went public on the Nasdaq in January 2026 (ticker EQPT). It priced at $24.50 a share, raised $747 million, and hit a market value near $8.2 billion on its first day of trading. It now operates 430 locations across 45 states.

Paytient is another Columbia company. Founded in 2018 by Mizzou alum Brian Whorley, it has raised more than $100 million and serves over 23 million members through nearly 7,000 employers, insurers, and providers. TierPoint runs cloud infrastructure out of St. Louis. Nerdy, Balto, and Storage Mart round out a group of companies that raised real capital without leaving the state.

Capacity, a St. Louis AI company was founded in 2017 by David Karandish and Chris Sims. They build support automation software for contact centers and announced more than $92 million in new investment in 2025.

Jack Dorsey built Twitter and Square after growing up in St. Louis. So did Sam Altman, who graduated from John Burroughs School in Ladue before Stanford and now runs OpenAI. His brother Jack, raised in the same St. Louis suburb, co-founded Lattice and is now a general partner at Benchmark.

Missouri-rooted founders and executives have also gone on to build or lead Opendoor, Illumio, Masterclass, OpenDNS, and Kinder Morgan. HOK, the architecture giant, was actually founded in St. Louis and stayed.

The talent was always there. No one questioned whether Missouri could produce builders. It's whether Missouri can keep them, or connect them back once they've built something worth connecting to.

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