We Predicted These Companies Would Break Out in 2025. Here’s How They Did |
From Spindrift to CoreWeave to Databricks, here’s what happened to the companies we thought would have a banner year.
BY JENNIFER CONRAD, SENIOR WRITER @JENNIFERCONRAD
Photo illustration: Inc. Art; Getty Images
In January, Inc. named its 16 companies to watch in 2025. At the time, President Donald Trump was entering office, and we thought his administration would shake up industries from healthcare to nutrition (very true!). We also predicted 2025 would be the year VCs would loosen their purse strings (less true, except for big AI deals). As 2025 comes to an end, we’ve taken a look at how our prognostications held up.
Then: At the beginning of the year, FarmboxRx CEO Ashley Tyrner-Dolce said, her phone was “ringing off the hook with VCs looking to invest,” as healthy food startups got a boost from the MAHA movement.
Now: In June, FarmboxRx, which with Medicare plans and private insurance companies to provide boxes of healthy produce as a member benefit, was acquired by Pyx Health for an undisclosed sum. Tyrner-Dolce told Inc. that within about 10 minutes of meeting Pyx co-founder and CEO Cindy Jordan and COO Christina Rice, she knew Pyx was “the home for Farmbox.” Tyrner-Dolce left the company after helping with the transition and is now an angel investor.
Then: Wonder acquired Grubhub and Blue Apron in 2024 and started 2025 with close to $2 billion in funding.
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Now: The Marc Lore food hall concept continued its spending spree in 2025. In March, it picked up Tastemade, a media company that makes cooking videos and other food-related content, reportedly for about $90 million. Then in November, it bought Sweetgreen-owned kitchen-robot maker Spyce for $100 million in cash and $86.4 million in Wonder stock. Wonder also raised another $600 million this year, and founder and CEO Marc Lore said he hopes to take the company public in 2028.
Then: In January, Spindrift was rumored to be in advanced talks for Gryphon Investors to take a majority stake in the company.
Now: The deal was officially announced soon after. At the same time, the company named Dave Burwick, a former CEO of Peet’s Coffee and Boston Beer, as its new CEO. In his first year, Burwick introduced a line of sodas made with real fruit and killed off the company’s Spiked hard seltzer line.
Then: Professor and artificial intelligence pioneer Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs started the year with $230 million in funding for her spatial intelligence startup.
Now: In November, World Labs introduced its first publicly available product, Marble, a generative AI model that can create 3D worlds from an image or text prompt. “This is a brand-new category of model that’s generating 3D worlds, and this is something that’s going to get better........