Ask HN: What are some less known but powerful/important companies?

It depends what you haven't heard of. I've certainly heard of Qualcomm and I don't even live in the same time zone.

There's companies like Mindgeek which own about 80% of the porn on the internet.

Nestlé, Pepsi Co, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Danone, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Mars, Associated British Foods, and Mondelez own nearly all the major food brands in the world.

Agriculture is also huge - many of the billionaires in my country are related to agriculture, or agricultural products like latex gloves and condoms.

Chinese tech companies tend to be underrated because many of them are private. Huawei makes similar revenue to Google and probably writes more code, but you don't see people fantasizing about working there. There's also ZTE, Tencent.

It depends on what you mean by less known/powerful

A lot of companies that the general public doesn't tend to hear about are either outside of CPG/outside of your geography/outside of industries you hear about in the news or just private companies or holding companies. Some have really high revenues or # of employees.

A couple of companies I was surprised by revenues:

- Cargill/Koch both have $100B+ revenues

- Exor (Italy/Netherlands) $143B+

G4S is the world's third-largest private employer; they run private prisons.

Many private equity firms are the real owners of a lot of brands you probably heard of i.e. JAB holdings owns Peet’s coffee, Panera, Pret, Krispy Kreme, Krueger, etc etc

MarkMonitor, who provide big-enterprise domain name registration and brand protection. You'll find a significant number of big corporations have their domain name registered with them.

think tanks.