Thanks to technology, nowadays a company needn't boast lots of employees or a large office space to make a lot of money. In fact, a whole host of firms, new and sometimes old, have relatively tiny staff numbers yet are now worth more than some major multinationals. Click or scroll through to take a look at the billion-dollar businesses that have surprisingly few employees.

Wayfair is an online platform for furniture and homewares which was founded in 2002. The Boston-based furniture giant also owns other brands Joss & Main, AllModern, Perigold, and Birch Lane, selling more than 14 million products across its sites. With a market cap of $9 billion (£6.9bn) at the time of writing and just 12,124 employees, this global company makes a lot of cash despite its relatively small size.

This old school payments company dates back to 1851. Western Union pioneered the wiring of cash among individuals, and person-to-person money transfers remain its core business. At the last count, the Colorado-based company had 12,000 employees worldwide and a market cap of $11.7 billion (£9bn).

Founded by Jack Dorsey (pictured), Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass back in 2006, Twitter has risen to become a global phenomenon. Despite the fact it has 330 million monthly active users and has a market cap of $25.7 billion (£19.8bn), the company has just 4,300 employees worldwide.

Read more about Jack Dorsey and CEOs who receive tiny salaries

If you’ve signed a document online recently, chances are you’ve used DocuSign. The e-signature company says its mission is “transforming the foundation of doing business: the agreement”. With a market cap of $14.5 billion (£11bn) to its 2,255 employees, this billion-dollar company is surprisingly small.

New York-based tech company Compass is revolutionising the real estate industry in the US with its smart technology and go-to app, which provides real-time property info. Founded in 2012, the firm has just 2,200 core staff, though it does hire agents. The sector-disrupting company was recently valued at $6.4 billion (£4.9bn) after a round of funding in July.

Internet payment company Stripe was founded in 2011 in San Francisco by fresh-faced Irish siblings John and Patrick Collison. Since then, investors have been throwing money at the company, which handles tens of billions of dollars in online transactions a year. Following its most recent funding round, the company has been valued at $35 billion (£27bn).

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Cloud computing companies including San Francisco's Slack Technologies are at the top of many an angel investors' wish list. These firms are expanding at speed as more computer users turn to the cloud. Slack, which has a relatively modest 1,664 staff, is growing fast and has a market cap of $12.8 billion (£9.9bn).

Find out about the man behind Slack, and how he went from commune to CEO

The company that owns WordPress, Tumblr and WooCommerce, Automattic has a market cap of around $3 billion (£2.3bn) despite the fact it has just 1,167 employees. In its mission statement, the company says, “our common goal is to democratize publishing so that anyone with a story can tell it, regardless of income, gender, politics, language, or where they live in the world”.

A Spanish startup founded in 2015, Glovo is an on-demand food delivery service which may come to rival the likes of Uber Eats and Deliveroo. The company was valued at €1 billion ($1.1bn/£8.4bn) after its funding round in December. The startup says it employs just over 1,000 people globally, although it’s on the lookout for an extra 300 people to join its tech team according to its website.

Buzzy tech company Tanium specialises in remote cybersecurity, a market that is mushrooming right now. Founded in 2007 by father-son team David and Orion Hindawi, the firm based in Emeryville, California has been valued at a hefty $6.5 billion (£5bn). With just over 1,000 employees, the company ranked in 10th place on Fortune’s 2019 list of the “100 Best Medium Workplaces”.

The Robinhood app, which allows users to invest in the stock market commission-free, has proved to be a phenomenal success, particularly among millennials. The Palo Alto, California-based company behind the app only came into being in 2013. Despite having just 908 employees according to its 2019 company profile, the firm was valued at $7.6 billion (£5.9bn) after its July funding round.

An electric scooter startup based in Santa Monica, California, Bird is coming to rival the likes of Bolt, Lime and JUMP (owned by Uber) in the e-scooting world and operates in more than 100 cities across several countries. Currently worth $2.5 billion (£2bn), Bird recently raised $275 million (£212m) at a valuation in October. In January, Bird acquired fellow e-scooter operator Circ for an undisclosed amount, raising a further $75 million (£58m) funding in the process.

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An online car marketplace with a current market cap of $3.9 billion (£3bn), CarGurus was set up in 2006 by Langley Steinert, the co-founder of TripAdvisor. It gives users information around car pricing, dealer reputation and vehicle history to allow them to buy reliable used cars for a good price. Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts with just 732 employees according to Bloomberg, the company is making big money with a small workforce.

UK challenger bank Monzo is the new kid on the block when it comes to managing money, but the five-year-old company already has a market cap of $2.5 billion (£2bn). The mobile app bank that gives you instant spending notifications and easy budgeting options first launched in the UK, and has 3.6 million customers using its app-based services worldwide; it is about to launch in the US. However, the UK's fastest-growing bank has just 713 employees, according to its 2019 financial report.

Ironically, a Google search for the number of employees at Quora will lead you straight to Quora itself, where users of the question-and-answer platform have debated the matter. Although the company has not disclosed figures on the number of employees, most estimates put it at between 700 and 800. Which isn’t many considering the company is worth $2 billion (£1.5bn).

When Instagram was snapped up in 2012 by Facebook for $1 billion (£752m), the photo and video-sharing social networking site had just 13 staff, which included co-founder and former CEO Kevin Systrom (pictured), who left the company in September 2018. Around 700 employees work at Instagram's offices in San Francisco as of 2018, the most recent year for which figures are available, which is nothing compared to the app’s number of active monthly users, at more than 1 billion. Though Instagram is now part of Facebook, analysts estimate it is worth more than $100 billion (£75.2bn).

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Free credit score checker and money management platform Credit Karma, which relies on targeted advertising to make its cash, has pulled in millions of users since its launch in 2006. The San Francisco-based enterprise, which employs 700 staff, is valued at $4 billion (£3bn) after its latest round of funding.

The Swiss company behind Ethereum, the world's second biggest most popular platform after Bitcoin, saw the value of its creation soar by 13,000% in 2017. While its value has shrunk since the height of the bitcoin bubble, the firm, which is thought to have just 305 core employees, still had a market cap of $14.14 billion (£10.9bn) in the fourth quarter of 2019.

This Berlin-based cryptocurrency company has only been around since 2016, but its creators have already secured backing from Volkswagen AG and other major league investors. The firm is in the process of setting up offices in several cities worldwide, but right now it has around 100 employees. Despite that, it had a market cap of $11.6 billion (£8.9bn) after its round of funding in June. 

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