It’s not easy being a startup when the team is split into two locations separated by an ocean—a hardware engineering base in California and a software engineering base in London. Despite this divide, employees at Lunar Energy, a clean energy startup that develops solar energy solutions to power homes, work cohesively—which is very much by design.
“A lot of companies look at statistics to fill employees, and you have recruiters that try to fill positions as quickly as possible,” says Ed Franklin, head of people at Lunar Energy, which was founded in 2020. “But [we] take our time with the people we hire.”
And once they’re onboard, those employees’ opinions are highly valued. Lunar Energy’s CEO Kunal Girotra regularly solicits employee feedback through Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions. He holds monthly meetings with senior executives to understand employee sentiment. The company even maintains an anonymous web-based feedback forum to gather employee intel.
“This is unusual in a startup,” says Franklin, who contends that while CEOs often focus on the product or funding, theirs prioritizes the company’s people and work culture. “He’s not defensive about things that are constructive.”
Consider that until recently, several of the company’s engineering teams tasked with developing different products were siloed even though they were all working toward the same project: the company’s Lunar System, an all-in-one energy system that enables homes to make, store and use clean energy through a combination of solar panels and electric batteries. But when employee feedback indicated that a lack of collaboration across the teams was hindering them from meeting their goals and deadlines, Girotra brought the engineering teams together under a new director, and promoted other employees to lead each project within the larger group.“It’s easy for a CEO to say, ‘we want this product to launch in 6 months,’” says Franklin. But at Lunar Energy, employees have a say in how and when that happens, “and it’s helped us hit milestones.” It has also helped Lunar Energy earn the No. 4 spot on our sixth-annual list of America’s Best Startup Employers.
To create this list, Forbes partnered with market research firm Statista to identify and assess 3,000 privately-held companies headquartered in the United States. To qualify for consideration, each company was required to employ more than 50 people, to have been founded between 2015 and 2022, and to be an independent business (not a spinoff of a larger corporation). Companies were evaluated on reputation, employee satisfaction, and growth, on the basis of millions of data points, to determine each company’s score. The 500 startups with the highest total scores made our final list. (For more on the methodology, see below.)
Several companies that fared well last year rose substantially on this year’s ranking, including: Cribl (No. 1, up from No. 6 last year), a data management company that serves the IT and security sector; Wiz (No. 8, up from No. 18), a fast-growing cloud security company; and Hightouch (No. 3, up from No. 9), a customer data and AI platform.
At No. 11 (up from No. 15), Mill, a startup with a mission to reduce food waste, makes its product—a sleek food composter—the center of most company interactions. Mill devices, stuffed with items such as rotting eggs and garlic, are placed in shared company spaces, such as conference rooms, to field-test product designs and understand consumer pain points. Though maybe not a company for sensitive smellers, this method does help with employee bonding. “We really bring everyone in the company along for that journey,” says Emma Bright, Mill’s head of product design and engineering. She adds that such an in-your-nose experience drives employees to address customer concerns about odors, while not taking themselves too seriously—and “is fundamental to solving problems quickly.”
The company, founded in 2020, also hosts seasonally-themed, food-focused events and potlucks, and organizes a yearly retreat called Camp Mill—a several-day outing in a natural setting designed to reorient the team around the company’s climate-focused goal. Those retreats are not spent staring at laptop screens planning for the next quarter, but sharing skills and experiences—along with yoga and painting. Mill is far from the only startup putting its product front and center with employees.
At Whatnot (No. 6, up from No. 8) the staff uses the company’s product on a daily basis, all part of an effort to build “a lot of connection to our product, community and excitement about the future,” says Whatnot’s chief people officer Tess Singha. Whatnot, a livestream commerce platform founded in 2019, now boasts a valuation of about $5 billion.The company recently rolled out an in-person onboarding program that provides new employees with a complete introduction to Whatnot. The orientation includes learning about the company’s founding story and plans for the future, and watching a seller go live on the commerce platform for the first time. The aim, Singha says, is to connect the dots from employee to the seller experience.
“We often host seller interviews during our weekly town hall meetings so every employee can learn about the seller’s journey on Whatnot, from how they use our product, [to] what inspires them and their aspirations for growing their business,” says Singha. The company also invests in the wellbeing of its employees by offering a weeklong, company-wide break in both the summer and the winter, generous parental leave and an allowance for employees to buy on the Whatnot platform—all on top of Whatnot’s competitive cash and equity compensation.
Sharing space atop this year’s rankings were some of the buzziest companies of the year—Generative AI platforms—which collectively received $56 billion dollars in venture capital in 2024, nearly double the amount of VC funds raised by GenAI companies in 2023.
Case in point: Anthropic, which landed at No. 7, is the maker of Claude, an AI-assistant similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. (OpenAI, arguably the most well-known of the AI startups, also made the list at No. 13.) Elevating Anthropic to that position were robust paid leave programs and family-forming benefits, relocation support, competitive salary and equity packages, a monthly wellness stipend and extensive mental health resources, including therapy and coaching sessions, says Hannah Pritchett, Anthropic’s head of people.
Less tangible but just as vital to employee happiness, says Pritchett, is a company culture where technical and ethical conversations happen in the same room. “We hire from academia, startups, Big Tech, policy—and what unites us is a shared mission: building AI systems that are not just powerful, but fundamentally safe and aligned with human values.”
And Anthropic employees don’t take this mission lightly. “Everyone carries both the excitement of pioneering new technological territory and the responsibility of doing so with extraordinary care,” says Pritchett. It’s certainly a sentiment shared by many of the worthy companies on this year’s list.
For the full list of America’s Best Startup Employers, click here.
Methodology
To create America’s Best Startup Employers 2025, Forbes partnered with market research firm Statista to identify and assess 3,000 privately-held companies headquartered in the United States. To qualify for consideration, the startups were required to have more than 50 employees, to have been founded between 2015 and 2022, and to be an independent company as opposed to a spinoff of a larger corporation.
Each company was evaluated in three primary areas: company reputation, employee satisfaction and growth. To assess employer reputation, Statista culled articles, blogs and social media posts about each employer and identified such phrases such as “corporate culture,” “employee engagement” and “company strategy.” Text analysis was used to categorize each finding as positive, negative or neutral. To evaluate employee satisfaction, Statista likewise researched online reviews, blog comments and company policies on such issues as compensation packages, healthcare and leave benefits, remote work and diversity-promoting initiatives. Growth was assessed by examining the organizations’ head counts, job openings and website traffic growth rate over a two-year period.
Ultimately, millions of such data points were used to determine each company’s score, and the 500 startups with the highest scores made our final ranking of America’s Best Startup Employers 2025.
As with all Forbes lists, companies pay no fee to participate or be selected. To read more about how we make these lists, click here. For questions about this list, please email listdesk [at] forbes.com.