Companies based in San Francisco

Instagram is an American photo and short-form video sharing social networking service owned by Meta Platforms. It allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters, be organized by hashtags, and be associated with a location via geographical tagging. Posts can be shared publicly or with preapproved followers. Users can browse other users' content by tags and locations, view trending content, like photos, and follow other users to add their content to a personal feed. A Meta-operated image-centric social media platform, it is available on iOS, Android, Windows, and the web. Users can

thumb|246x246px|Uber taxi

former American web traffic analysis company

Pinterest is an American social media service for publishing and discovery of information in the form of digital pinboards. This includes recipes, home, style, motivation, and inspiration on the Internet using image sharing. Pinterest, Inc. was founded by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp, and is headquartered in San Francisco.

American multinational financial services corporation

Lucasfilm Ltd. LLC is an American film and television production company founded by filmmaker George Lucas on December 10, 1971 in San Rafael, California, and later moved to San Francisco in 2005. It is best known for creating and producing the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, as well as its leadership in developing special effects, sound, and computer animation for films. Since 2012, Lucasfilm has been a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Studios, who also owns former Lucasfilm subsidiary Pixar.

Airbnb, Inc. ( , an abbreviation of its original name, "Airbed and Breakfast") is an American company operating an online marketplace for short-and-long-term homestays, experiences and services in various countries and regions. It acts as a broker and charges a commission from each booking. Airbnb was founded in 2008 by Brian Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk, and Joe Gebbia.

IGN is an American video gaming and entertainment media website operated by IGN Entertainment Inc., a subsidiary of Ziff Davis, Inc. The company's headquarters is located in San Francisco's SoMa district and is headed by its former editor-in-chief, Peer Schneider. The IGN website was the brainchild of media entrepreneur Chris Anderson and launched on September 29, 1996. IGN features articles on games, films, anime, television, comics, technology, and other media. Originally a network of desktop websites, IGN is also distributed on mobile platforms, console programs available on the Xbox and Pl

Anthropic PBC is an American artificial intelligence (AI) company headquartered in San Francisco. It has developed a family of large language models (LLMs) named Claude. Anthropic operates as a public benefit corporation, which researches and develops AI to "study their safety properties at the technological frontier" and use this research to deploy safe models for the public.

Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by the American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and client software. Dropbox was founded in 2007 by MIT students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi as a startup company, with initial funding from seed accelerator Y Combinator.

American multinational banking and financial services company

Goodreads is an American social cataloging website operated by Goodreads, Inc., a subsidiary of Amazon. Users can search its database of books, annotations, quotes, and reviews and expand the database by registering books to generate library catalogs and reading lists. They can also create their own groups of book suggestions, surveys, polls, blogs, and discussions. The website's offices are located in San Francisco.

Perplexity AI, Inc., or simply Perplexity, is an American privately held software company offering a web search engine that processes user queries and synthesizes responses. Perplexity products use large language models and incorporate real-time web search capabilities, providing responses based on current Internet content, citing sources used. Its real-time search engine is called Sonar and is based on Meta's Llama model. A free public version is available, while a paid Pro subscription offers access to more advanced language models and additional features.

Sephora SA is a French multinational retailer of personal care and beauty products, offering nearly 340 brands alongside its own private label, Sephora Collection. Its product range includes cosmetics, skincare, fragrances, nail polish, beauty tools, body care products, and hair care items.

Autodesk, Inc. is an American multinational software corporation that provides software products and services for the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media, education, and entertainment industries. Autodesk is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and has offices worldwide. Its U.S. offices are located in the states of California, Oregon, Colorado, Texas, Michigan, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Its Canadian offices are located in the provinces of Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, and British Columbia.

American multinational clothing and accessories retailer

Cloudflare, Inc. is an American technology company headquartered in San Francisco, California, that provides a range of internet services, including content delivery network (CDN) services, cloud cybersecurity, DDoS mitigation, and ICANN-accredited domain registration. The company's services act primarily as a reverse proxy between website visitors and a customer's hosting provider, improving performance and protecting against malicious traffic.

Macromedia, Inc. was an American graphics, multimedia, and web development software company headquartered in San Francisco, California, that made products such as Flash and Dreamweaver. It was purchased by its rival Adobe Systems on December 3, 2005.

American video game producer and publisher

American audio-based social networking service

Salesforce, Inc., is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, artificial intelligence, agentic AI, and application development.

Dolby Laboratories, Inc. (Dolby Labs or simply Dolby) is an American technology corporation specializing in audio noise reduction, audio encoding/compression, spatial audio, and high-dynamic-range television (HDR) imaging. Dolby licenses its technologies to consumer electronics manufacturers.

Patreon (, ) is an American monetization platform operated by Patreon, Inc., that provides business tools for content creators to run a subscription service and sell digital products globally. It helps artists and other creators earn a recurring income by providing rewards and perks to its subscribers. Patreon charges a commission of 8 to 12 percent of creators' monthly income, in addition to payment processing fees.

American visual effects and animation studio

American technology company

Figma is a collaborative web application for interface design, with additional offline features enabled by desktop applications for macOS and Windows. The feature set of Figma focuses on user interface and user experience design, with an emphasis on real-time collaboration, utilizing a variety of vector graphics editor and prototyping tools. The Figma mobile app for Android and iOS allows viewing and interacting with Figma prototypes in real-time on mobile and tablet devices.

American software company

digital storefront company selling video games and e-books

meal delivery service

former mobile app development company, now development team inside of Scopely

American startup accelerator

Strava is an American internet service for tracking physical exercise which incorporates social networking features. It started out tracking mostly outdoor cycling and running activities using Global Positioning System (GPS) data, but now incorporates several dozen other exercise types, including indoor activities. Strava uses a freemium model with some features only available in the paid subscription plan. The service was founded in 2009 by Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath and is based in San Francisco, California.

Bebo ( ) was an American social networking website that originally operated from 2005 until its bankruptcy in 2013. The site relaunched several times after its bankruptcy with a number of short-lived offerings, including instant messaging and video streaming, until its acquisition by Amazon in July 2019 when it was shut down. It was announced in January 2021 that it would be returning as a new social-media site the month after. By May 2022, it had once again been shut down, without having left beta-testing.

software company most known for creating the Unity game engine

Yelp Inc. is an American company that develops the Yelp.com website and the Yelp mobile app, which publishes crowd-sourced reviews about businesses. It also operates Yelp Guest Manager, a table reservation service. It is headquartered in San Francisco.

American pornographic company

Lyft, Inc. is an American company offering ride-hailing services, motorized scooters, and bicycle-sharing systems in the United States and Canada, and, via its Free Now mobile app, Europe. Lyft is the second-largest ridesharing company in the United States after Uber. It has 25 million active riders and coordinates 9 million rides per day.

Udemy ( ) is a US-based education technology company. Founded as a massive open online course (MOOC) provider in 2010 by Eren Bali, Gagan Biyani, and Oktay Caglar; the company is based in San Francisco, California, with offices in the United States, Australia, India, Ireland, Mexico and Turkey. Its education platform allows both the creation and sharing of online courses. By early 2025, Udemy claimed to have millions of individual users. Courses are typically video-based and on-demand.

San Francisco, California-based independent record label, focused on punk rock

American clothing and accessories retailer

Substack is an American online platform that provides publishing, payment, analytics, and design infrastructure to support subscription-based content, including newsletters, podcasts, and video. It allows writers to send digital content directly to subscribers. Founded in 2017, Substack is headquartered in San Francisco. The company has faced criticism over the years for their content moderation policies as well as security breaches which involve user data.

enterprise social networking service

Disqus () is an American blog comment hosting service for websites and online communities that use a networked platform. The company's platform includes various features, such as social integration, social networking, user profiles, spam and moderation tools, analytics, email notifications, and mobile commenting. It was founded in 2007 by Daniel Ha and Jason Yan as a Y Combinator startup.

OpenDNS is an American company providing Domain Name System (DNS) resolution services—with features such as phishing protection, optional content filtering, and DNS lookup in its DNS servers—and a cloud computing security product suite, Umbrella, designed to protect enterprise customers from malware, botnets, phishing, and targeted online attacks. The OpenDNS Global Network processes an estimated 100 billion DNS queries daily from 85 million users through 25 data centers worldwide.

Salon is an American politically progressive and liberal news and opinion website created in 1995. It publishes articles on U.S. politics, culture, and current events.

American video game developer

DoorDash, Inc. is an American company operating online food ordering and food delivery. It trades under the symbol DASH. With a 56% market share, DoorDash is the largest food delivery platform in the United States. It also has a 60% market share in the convenience delivery category. As of December 31, 2020, the platform was used by 450,000 merchants, 20 million consumers, and had over one million delivery couriers.

American clothing and accessories retailer

thumb|Splunk at AWS Summit

Kink.com is an independent San Francisco–based bondage internet pornography company that runs a group of websites devoted to BDSM and related fetishes. Kink.com, along with Kink Studios, LLC, Hogtied.com and Behindkink.com are DBAs for Cybernet Entertainment LLC, the parent company that operates the studio.

standards and trade organization

cryptocurrency exchange

American independent record label

Public transport agency in San Francisco, California, USA

Heroku is a cloud platform as a service (PaaS) supporting several programming languages. As one of the first cloud platforms, Heroku has been in development since June 2007, when it supported only the Ruby programming language, but now also supports Java, Node.js, Scala, Clojure, Python, PHP, and Go. For this reason, Heroku is said to be a polyglot platform as it has features for a developer to build, run and scale applications in a similar manner across most of these languages. Heroku was acquired by Salesforce in 2010 for $212 million.

American video game developer

United States Class I railroad (1865–1996)

American independent record label

American company