This is the entire team at Savvy Wealth, “an AI-native registered investment advisor (RIA) for independent financial advisors” that is the No. 1 financial services firm on this year’s Inc. 5000 list and the highest-ranked firm overall in the nation’s highest-ranked city by number of Inc. 5000 firms: New York.
Images courtesy of Savvy Wealth
The metro area and the city proper lead all challengers when it comes to total Inc. 5000 headquarters. Sheridan, Wyoming, and Greater Provo top our per-capita chart.
Last week’s first installment of Site Selection’s annual location analysis of the latest Inc. 5000 list found California leading the way by a long shot when it comes to total Inc. 5000 company headquarters locations. Delaware outguns Virginia and Utah in the per-capita category.
This week we look at the nation’s top metro areas and municipalities for Inc. 5000 firms. First, the top metros:
Top U.S. Metro Areas by Number of 2026 Inc. 5000 Company Headquarters
| Metro Area | Total 2026 Inc. 5000 Firms |
|---|---|
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 388 |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 274 |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 243 |
| Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, FL | 226 |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 221 |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 215 |
| Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA | 206 |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 150 |
| Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, TX | 138 |
| Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD | 126 |
Metro New York repeats its No. 1 performance last year, but with an additional 16 firms to its credit. Los Angeles welcomed 21 more firms to its roster to jump from third place last year to No. 2, displacing the nation’s capital, where the number of firms dropped precipitously from 302 to 243. Meanwhile, Chicagoland saw its number drop by 28, while Greater Miami saw its count rise by 23 companies, enabling the region to jump from No. 7 to No. 4 — the biggest leap among the top 10 regions.
Money-Making Municipalities
As far as cities go, here are the top 10 by municipality, which align somewhat with the metro areas above save for the exceptions of No. 8 Houston and No. 10 San Diego:
Top U.S. Cities by Number of 2026 Inc. 5000 Company Headquarters
| City | State | No. of Inc. 5000 Firms |
|---|---|---|
| New York | New York | 192 |
| Austin | Texas | 124 |
| Chicago | Illinois | 110 |
| Atlanta | Georgia | 106 |
| San Francisco | California | 77 |
| Miami | Florida | 76 |
| Dallas | Texas | 76 |
| Houston | Texas | 71 |
| Los Angeles | California | 60 |
| San Diego | California | 52 |
Rival states-that-would-be-nations-if-we-let-them Texas and California account for six of the top 10. The cities in the top 10 showing the most growth in fast-growing firms are Miami (13 more than last year), Houston (11), New York (8) and Atlanta (7).
As in past years, the city-level numbers show which municipalities outside a metro area’s center city are rivaling if not surpassing that namesake city. Among them, No. 14 Scottsdale (41 firms) outdistances Phoenix by 11 Inc. 5000 companies. The Los Angeles-area community of Irvine, California, tallies 40 firms. Boca Raton (Miami metro) has 27 Inc. 5000 firms to its credit. Alpharetta, Georgia, part of metro Atlanta, boasts 26 to tie with Indianapolis, Indiana. And the borough of Brooklyn, New York, hosts 25 Inc. 5000 companies in a tie with Raleigh, North Carolina, an St. Louis, Missouri.
Three Inc. 5000 firms based in New York City make the top 25 in the nation: Financial services firm Savvy Wealth at No. 11, software company Beehiiv at No. 19 and business and corporate services company Kale at No. 23.
Savvy Wealth calls itself “an AI-native registered investment advisor (RIA) for independent financial advisors.” Just after its naming to the Inc. 5000 list (as the fastest-growing financial services firm in the nation), a successful close of a $100 million Series C funding round led by Halo Fund (the growth-stage venture firm co-founded by Qualtrics founder and Utah Jazz owner Ryan Smith and Accel general partner Ryan Sweeney) means the company has now received over $200 million in funding.
“Wealth management is a $14 trillion market, and the technology underneath it hasn’t meaningfully changed in decades,” said Smith in a release announcing that latest funding round. “Robinhood modernized retail brokerage for a whole generation, and Savvy is doing that for financial advice by building a wealth management firm from the ground up with AI at its core. What makes this work is that advice is a deeply human business, and the best use of AI here isn’t to replace the advisor, it’s to make them dramatically better at serving each client personally.”
Taking Population into Account
Using our self-imposed filter of a minimum of three Inc. 5000 firms to qualify, here are the top 10 metro areas on a per-capita basis:
Top U.S. Metro Areas by Number of 2026 Inc. 5000 Company Headquarters Per Capita
| Metro Area | Population | Inc. 5000 Firms | Firms Per 1M Residents |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sheridan, WY | 32,519 | 3 | 92.3077 |
| Provo-Orem-Lehi, UT | 732,197 | 44 | 60.0929 |
| Oxford, MS | 70,853 | 4 | 56.4175 |
| Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, TX | 2,473,275 | 138 | 55.7959 |
| Dover, DE | 189,789 | 9 | 47.4183 |
| Boulder, CO | 326,831 | 14 | 42.8397 |
| Burlington-South Burlington, VT | 227,942 | 9 | 39.491 |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 6,304,975 | 243 | 38.5408 |
| Huntsville, AL | 527,254 | 20 | 37.9291 |
| Heber, UT | 79,903 | 3 | 37.5469 |
Sheridan topped this category last year as well. While two of the metro area’s three firms — Joy Technologies and Dorado Nutrition — come in at No. 4,075 and No. 4,966, respectively, on the Inc. 5000 list, the region’s highest-ranking Inc. 5000 firm is The Dr. Z Functional Medicine Academy, at No. 150 nationally with a growth rate of 2,093%.
The education and clinical technology platform is named for Dr. Brandy Zachary, DC, IFMCP, a chiropractic physician and developer of LabDX, a functional medicine lab interpretation and care-planning platform built to “help practitioners make structured decisions about which labs to order, how to interpret results and how to build coherent care plans.” Her story reads like an overwrought movie script, as her own struggle to treat her immunodeficiency led her forward. An excerpt:
“Seven specialists. Eight prescriptions. Nearly a million dollars a year in medical care. Her brain was electrocuted 20 times for what turned out to be an infection. Not a single specialist found the answer. The gaslighting was, as she has described it publicly, profound.
So she found the answer herself. PubMed. Midnight. A 450-square-foot converted garage on a miniature pony rescue ranch — in bunk beds, with her daughter, in her forties. She traveled to Princeton, Stanford, Harvard, and UCSF as a patient fighting for her own diagnosis, not as a practitioner with credentials to wave around. What she eventually uncovered was a primary immunodeficiency affecting fewer than 12,000 Americans.
She was placed on Social Security disability. $927 a month. Single mother. No child support. No alimony. No co-parent. A decade-long predatory divorce with eleven attorneys on the other side and two traumatic brain injuries somewhere in the middle.”
TDZ-FMA’s business headquarters is in Sheridan, Wyoming but the team spans 10+ countries. When the company exits, Zachary has committed to distributing 20% to her staff. Meanwhile, earlier this year, she won four American Business Awards Stevies, including Gold for Best Female Entrepreneur — the inaugural award in that category in the program’s 24-year history — plus three Silvers.
New to this year’s per-capita top 10 when compared to last year’s are No. 5 Dover, Delaware, with nine firms; No. 9 Huntsville, Alabama, with 20 firms; and No. 10 Heber, Utah, with three firms. All of Dover’s nine companies are within the top 1,000, led by No. 359 Card Depot and No. 442 SNH Life Sciences and Technologies.
What does Card Depot do? Provide discount gift cards from over 400 major brands. “We buy gift cards in bulk from brands and other companies with large supplies of gift cards,” the company explains. “Because brands get almost a free loan from selling a gift card, they’re happy to sell them in large quantities at a slight discount. We buy them in bulk, negotiate a great deal and pass the savings onto you. (Sort of like Costco or your favorite discount retailer.)”
Between 2022 and 2025, Card Depot grew by 966%. “Landing in the top 400 out 5,000 puts Card Depot among the fastest-growing consumer businesses in the country this year,” the company said on learning of the Inc. 5000 news. “There was no growth hack behind this. Card Depot grew by doing unglamorous things relentlessly, in a category where trust is everything.”
The same might be said of economic development in the metros and cities laying the groundwork for Inc. 5000 firms to thrive.
