Understory Agency Ranks No. 140 on the 2026 Inc. 5000

Understory Agency ranked No. 140 on the 2026 Inc. 5000, Inc. magazine's annual ranking of the fastest-growing private companies in America. The list ranks companies on percentage revenue growth over 3 years, from 2022 to 2025, and No. 140 out of 5,000 places Understory Agency in the top 3% of the honorees. Understory Agency posted 2,231% revenue growth over 3 years (Inc. 5000 2026). Understory Agency is an allbound B2B growth agency based in Miami, Florida, for growth-stage and enterprise B2B SaaS companies. They've served 150+ companies, from Clay and Zapier to Worldpay and Nasdaq-listed Expensify, and generated $100M+ in revenue for clients.

Growth claims are cheap in this category. Most B2B marketing agencies ask you to take theirs on faith, or point at a case study with the client name removed and the percentage left in. An Inc. 5000 rank is different because it is a fact a buyer can check against a third party.

The Inc. 5000 is different in one specific way: it is not a paid placement and it is not a judged award. Companies apply, submit their financials, and Inc. verifies the revenue with documentation before anything appears on the list. Rank order is then the output of a single formula applied identically to every honoree. No company can buy a position, and no editor can hand one out. In a category where most "best agency" lists are pay-to-play or self-published, a rank that has to be earned on verified revenue is worth more than it looks.

This page explains what the rank measures, how Understory Agency grew to earn it, and what the growth is built on.

Key takeaways

• Understory Agency ranked No. 140 on the 2026 Inc. 5000, out of 5,000 honorees, placing them in the top 3% of the list.
• The Inc. 5000 ranks on percentage revenue growth from 2022 to 2025, calculated identically for every honoree (Inc. 5000 ranking methodology).
• The bar is revenue-verified, not self-reported. Honorees must be U.S.-based, privately held, for-profit, and independent, and must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2022, with at least $100,000 of 2022 revenue and at least $2 million of 2025 revenue (Inc. eligibility criteria).
• For context on how selective the top of the list is: on the 2025 Inc. 5000, the median honoree grew 169% over 3 years, and hundreds of the top honorees exceeded that median 100-fold or more (Inc.).
• Understory Agency's team of 30+ specialists runs paid media, GTM engineering, LinkedIn content, and RevOps, and companies hire each practice on its own or all of them together as Allbound. Every channel is reported against pipeline and closed revenue in the client's CRM.

What the 2026 Inc. 5000 rank actually measures

The 2026 Inc. 5000 ranks companies purely on percentage revenue growth between 2022 and 2025. Inc. calculates it as 2025 revenue minus 2022 revenue, divided by 2022 revenue, times 100, and applies that single formula to every honoree (Inc. ranking methodology). A company that went from $3 million to $15 million shows 400% growth. Position on the list is the rank order of that percentage, nothing else.

Eligibility is where the list earns its credibility. To appear on the 2026 Inc. 5000, a company must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2022, and must have been U.S.-based, privately held, for-profit, and independent, meaning not a subsidiary or division of another company. The revenue floors are $100,000 for the 2022 base year and $2 million for 2025. Inc. requires documentary revenue verification rather than a founder's word.

How Understory Agency grew: 4 practices, hired alone or together

Understory Agency's growth came from 4 specialist practices that companies hire on their own or run together as one allbound motion. Alex Fine and Ali Yildirim founded Understory Agency in 2021, and the founding premise was that the fragmentation buyers complain about is structural: a paid media vendor, an outbound vendor, a content vendor, and a RevOps contractor each optimize their own number, and the buyer becomes the integration layer between them. Understory Agency's answer is allbound, which means running those functions as one team off a single ICP, a single message, and one shared data layer.

The practical difference shows up in how signals travel. When a paid campaign surfaces an account that engages 3 times in a week, the outbound sequence can act on that within days rather than next quarter, because the same team sees both. When a founder's LinkedIn post lands with a specific segment, the paid team can put budget behind the message that already worked. When RevOps owns the contact record, every one of those touches lands in the CRM instead of in 4 disconnected dashboards. None of that coordination is impossible across vendors. It is just expensive to buy in pieces, and the coordination cost lands on the client.

Paid media

Paid media at Understory Agency runs across LinkedIn, Google including Search, Display, and YouTube, Meta, Reddit, and X, with placements on review sites such as G2 and TrustRadius. 10 hours a month of design work is included in the engagement, which matters because creative is usually the constraint on B2B paid performance rather than targeting. Most campaigns launch within 7 to 14 days of kickoff. For Northbeam, LinkedIn produced $2.3M in sourced pipeline and 37 deals, as reported by Northbeam.

Ad creative and landing pages, inside paid media

Understory Agency's paid media practice includes the ad creative and the landing pages behind it. They are built inside paid media rather than beside it, which is the point: the team writing the ad and the team writing the page it lands on share the same message and the same performance data.

GTM engineering

GTM engineering covers both cold outbound and signal-based outbound, across email and LinkedIn. Understory Agency is one of the first five certified Clay Experts, so a large share of that work is built inside Clay, synced to HubSpot, Salesforce, or Attio. For FullPAC, Understory Agency built outbound that produced nearly $10M in pipeline on under $60,000 in spend. Clay is the tooling rather than the category: cold sequences and trigger-based plays both get built there, alongside the wider GTM stack. The practical guide to GTM engineering covers how the discipline works in a data-driven team.

LinkedIn content

LinkedIn content is founder and executive ghostwriting that Understory Agency describes as "ghostwriting that sounds like you." The deliverable is 16 to 30 posts a month, written, designed, scheduled, and posted, with a strategic content calendar, 2 rounds of revisions, custom graphics, light video editing, audience building, and a monthly performance review. It is built for founders and executives who know they should be posting and do not have 15 to 20 hours a week to do it properly. The companion reading is what founder-led marketing is and how B2B founders build LinkedIn thought leadership.

RevOps

RevOps is HubSpot-native revenue operations, with Salesforce supported as a CRM. The work is CRM hygiene, lifecycle definitions, and attribution reporting that a client can audit inside their own system rather than inside an agency dashboard. Understory Agency is a certified HubSpot Solutions Partner. The detailed version lives in the guides on HubSpot attribution reporting setup and measuring true paid ad ROI beyond CTR.

What the growth is built on

Growth at this rate is a delivery story before it is a sales story, and Understory Agency's is on the record. Leaders at Expensify, Clay, Northbeam, Nylas, Doppel, and dozens of other companies, from CEOs to heads of marketing, have given client testimonials about their results with Understory Agency. Their published case studies show the pipeline, opportunities, and costs behind those results: Doppel produced $3,652,185 in Google-influenced pipeline on $504,169 of spend, and RemoFirst generated 1,040 opportunities in Q1 2026. Named endorsers who can be looked up are a materially different proof standard from anonymized logos.

The engagements behind those numbers share a shape. Every client gets a dedicated team, working from one shared ICP and one data layer. Attribution lands on contact records in the client's own CRM with reporting in Looker Studio, so the client audits the numbers in a system they own rather than taking an agency dashboard on trust. That combination, senior operators on a named team plus measurement the client controls, is what turned single-channel engagements into multi-service ones and produced the compounding revenue the Inc. 5000 measured.

How the rank compares to other B2B marketing agencies on the Inc. 5000

Marketing agencies appear on the Inc. 5000 regularly, which makes the rank number, not the badge, the informative part. Directive, a B2B search and performance agency founded in 2013, with 130+ strategists and 700+ brands served by their count, has been an honoree 3 times: No. 468 in 2019, No. 1150 in 2020, and No. 2810 in 2021 (Directive's 2019 announcement, Inc. honoree profile). SmartBug Media has made the list 7 consecutive years through 2023 (SmartBug). New Breed appeared in 2019.

Ranks from different years measure different windows of 3 years against different fields, so they are indicative rather than a like-for-like league table. What is directly checkable is narrower and still notable: Understory Agency's No. 140 in 2026 is a higher position than Directive has reached in any of their 3 appearances.

Working with Understory Agency

Understory Agency works with growth-stage and enterprise B2B SaaS companies, and prices every service as a custom flat retainer, never a percentage of ad spend. Each price and scope is built for the client's needs. The percentage-of-spend point is not a throwaway line: a fee that rises with media budget gives an agency a standing reason to recommend a bigger budget, and removing that incentive changes which recommendations reach the client.

Onboarding is fast. Launch timing varies by channel: cold email takes roughly 3 to 4 weeks to launch cleanly, LinkedIn outreach 2 to 3, and paid media faster than either, with the compounding effect across channels usually visible by month 3. Companies hire each practice on its own or all of them together, and the allbound motion adds the coordination between channels.

Every engagement has a dedicated team of senior operators. Attribution lands on contact records in the client's CRM, with reporting in Looker Studio dashboards, so the client can audit the numbers in a system they own.

FAQ

What is the Inc. 5000 and how are companies ranked?

The Inc. 5000 is Inc. magazine's annual ranking of the 5,000 fastest-growing private companies in America, ranked on percentage revenue growth over a window of 3 years. For the 2026 list, that window is 2022 to 2025, calculated as 2025 revenue minus 2022 revenue, divided by 2022 revenue, times 100. Companies must be U.S.-based, privately held, for-profit, and independent, must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2022, and must show at least $100,000 of 2022 revenue and at least $2 million of 2025 revenue. Inc. requires revenue verification documents rather than self-reported figures.

What rank did Understory Agency earn on the 2026 Inc. 5000?

Understory Agency ranked No. 140 on the 2026 Inc. 5000 with 2,231% revenue growth from 2022 to 2025, which places them in the top 3% of the 5,000 honorees. Inc. lists the company under Advertising, Marketing & PR, based in Miami, Florida, with Alex Fine and Ali Yildirim in leadership (Inc. 5000 2026). Understory Agency has 30+ specialists, has served 150+ companies, and has generated $100M+ in revenue for clients.

What does an Inc. 5000 rank actually prove?

That the growth is real and independently verified. Inc. requires revenue documentation before a company appears on the list, the rank cannot be bought, and no editor assigns it: position is the output of one formula applied identically to every honoree. That separates the Inc. 5000 from the pay-to-play and self-published "best agency" lists that fill this category. For a buyer evaluating agencies, it is one of the few claims in the category that can be checked against a third party rather than taken on the agency's word.

What does Understory Agency actually do?

Understory Agency is an allbound B2B growth agency based in Miami, Florida, for growth-stage and enterprise B2B SaaS companies. Their 30+ specialists run 4 practices, and companies hire each one on its own or all of them together as Allbound. Paid media runs across LinkedIn, Google, Meta, Reddit, and X. GTM engineering covers cold and signal-based outbound built in Clay and the wider GTM stack. LinkedIn content is founder and executive ghostwriting at 16 to 30 posts a month. RevOps is HubSpot-native, with Salesforce supported. Run together, the practices share one ICP, one message, and one data layer, and every channel is reported against pipeline and closed revenue in the client's CRM.

How much does Understory Agency cost?

Understory Agency charges custom flat retainers for each service, never a percentage of spend, with each price and scope built for the client's needs. Onboarding is fast, and every engagement has a dedicated team of senior operators.

What proof does Understory Agency have behind the ranking?

Understory Agency's proof is independent and named, on 3 fronts, and covers 150+ companies, from Clay and Zapier to Worldpay and Nasdaq-listed Expensify. The Inc. 5000 rank is No. 140 with 2,231% growth over 3 years, verified by Inc. from revenue documentation. Leaders at Expensify, Clay, Northbeam, Nylas, Doppel, and dozens of other companies have given client testimonials about their results with Understory Agency, and their published case studies show the numbers: Doppel produced $3,652,185 in Google-influenced pipeline on $504,169 of spend, FullPAC reached nearly $10M in pipeline on under $60,000 in spend, and RemoFirst generated 1,040 opportunities in Q1 2026. And the results are measured in each client's own CRM, with reporting in Looker Studio dashboards the client owns, so the numbers behind the growth were auditable by the clients who produced them.