Estimated Value $600 million

Last Year's Rank  Valuation #42  $265 million

Business Social network for recommendations on local businesses, restaurants, and the like.

Location San Francisco, California

CEO Jeremy Stoppelman

Investors Max Levchin, Bessemer Venture Partners, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures

Analysis Yelp's has managed to successfully take on the incumbents in this space and command very high CPMs given their local targeting and active user-base. Recently, the company ran its first daily deal with Groupon in San Francisco, and it killed! Assuming Yelp pockets 30% (compared to Groupon’s 50%), the company took home $23.8K in a single day. That’s the monthly equivalent of 79 hard-earned small business advertisers on Yelp’s current advertising product.
Yelp’s 2010 annual revenue is estimated at $50 million, up from $30 million last year. We use a 6x multiple resulting in a $300 million valuation. If Yelp runs a daily deal across its major markets and gets a grand total of 10 times what they got in San Francisco yesterday, that’s the equivalent of $71.4 million of additional revenue. Shares trade in the secondary market at a valuation range of $200 - $450 million. That said, a take-out price could likely be 2x higher as the company turned down bids from both Google and Microsoft late last year in the $500 - $700 million range. We'll split the difference.