St. Louis: The Companies That Never Left
St. Louis doesn't feel like a comeback story, because it never really left. Most Midwest cities that produced a corporate giant eventually watched it get bought, gutted, or relocated to a coast. St. Louis has watched that happen too, but kept building anyway.
St. Louis doesn't feel like a comeback story, because it never really left.
Most Midwest cities that produced a corporate giant eventually watched it get bought, gutted, or relocated to a coast. St. Louis has watched that happen too, but kept building anyway.
Anheuser-Busch, Monsanto, and Express Scripts all sold for a combined $180 billion-plus in acquisitions that would have hollowed out a lesser ecosystem.
Instead, those scientists and operators didn't scatter. They started companies, and a city best known for beer and biotech giants quietly became one of the more interesting ag-tech and enterprise software hubs in the country.
Anheuser-Busch has run its brewing empire out of St. Louis since 1852. Before InBev's $52 billion acquisition in 2008, it was the largest American-owned brewer in the world and one of the most recognizable corporate names to ever come out of Missouri.
Enterprise Rent-A-Car started in St. Louis in 1957 with a nine-car fleet and grew into the largest car rental company on the planet, still privately held by the Taylor family, still headquartered in Clayton.
Edward Jones has run its brokerage business out of the same metro since 1922 and now manages trillions of dollars in client assets through a network of tens of thousands of financial advisors.
Express Scripts built one of the country's largest pharmacy benefit managers out of St. Louis before Cigna acquired it for $67 billion in 2018. World Wide Technology, a St. Louis-based IT provider, has grown into one of the largest privately held companies in America, doing over $20 billion in annual revenue.
Monsanto ran its agricultural biotech empire out of St. Louis for over a century before Bayer's $63 billion acquisition in 2018, and that acquisition alone displaced thousands of scientists and researchers who understood plant genetics and agricultural data better than almost anyone else in the country.
Those displaced researchers are a big part of why St. Louis has become a serious ag-tech and biotech hub instead of just a former Monsanto town. BioSTL was built specifically to catch that talent and turn it into new companies, and it has helped anchor the Cortex Innovation District, a 200-acre innovation district built on a former industrial rail corridor near Washington University and Saint Louis University.
Cultivation Capital and SixThirty Ventures both write early checks into that same biotech and ag-tech pipeline, alongside enterprise software and logistics founders who benefit from World Wide Technology and Express Scripts having already trained a generation of operators.
St. Louis carries a rare mix for a Midwest city: legacy industrial and consumer giants that never left, a research base strong enough to catch falling talent from a Monsanto-sized acquisition, and enough capital infrastructure to keep that talent building locally instead of scattering to the coasts.
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