Most of these companies fly under the radar because they don't need media telling investors how good of an investment they are. That just invites competition.

I used to work at a company like that. Our competitor was all over tech crunch, etc but we were completely unknown to the tech community. We still beat them because we were focused on our audience which had nothing to do with the tech world.

I believe that the biggest exit ever, remains Microsoft. It is said to have produced more than 10,000 millionaires in 1986 dollars in addition to the handful of billionaires. Now technically, since it took $1,000,000 VC funding in 1981 [1], it doesn't meet your criteria. On the other hand, because it was a profitable company with a high pre-money valuation, the founders + Ballmer kept control. Because the valuation was high and the investment small, the VC had little effect on how the money was distributed.

I say this because, never taking VC is not a great long term business goal. Accepting outside investment is a business decision and one that in Microsoft's case probably helped all their employees and certainly did not hurt them.

[1]: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/microsoft

not an exit yet, but the MailChimp founders still own 100% of a 525M+ business.

And they send a lot of email, give back to their community (Atlanta, GA), and sponsor a lot of independent art and media (podcasts).

https://www.inc.com/magazine/201802/mailchimp-company-of-the...

Not a software play, but RxBar recently sold for $600M with no VC.

https://www.inc.com/robbie-abed/this-chicago-startup-sold-it...

Pardot (B2B Marketing Automation SaaS) was afaik entirely bootstrapped and sold to ExactTarget (now SalesForce) for ~100M. https://www.saastr.com/a-real-life-saas-case-study-eloqua-ma...

There's probably a bias here around bootstrapped founders exiting at lower valuations because the take home of 100% of 10M is easier to get than 5% of 200M.

I made up the numbers here but I think many founders are happy to get that first or second base hit of change your life but not quite FU money safety net vs VC money forcing the bipolar choice between home run or strike out.

ViralNova was just one dude with a couple freelance writers and sold for $$$.[1]

That was in 2014. In 2018 it is way more difficult to bootstrap an online content company (Would love to be proven wrong with an example though).

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/zealot-media-buys-scott-delon...

Also, not $100M+, but ShipStation sold to Stamps.com for $75 Million in 2014.

If you don't count tech companies, plenty of non tech conglomerates, restaurants, even things like cosmetics and trading make it big on just their savings and bank loans.

It wasn’t an exit, but GitHub didn’t raise money until they got a $100MM investment at a $650MM pre-money valuation.

Any recent examples in the $100 Million plus arena?

Does a floatation count? WiseTechGlobal in Australia floated for 1bn last year, market cap gone up 3x since. Completely bootstrapped AFAIK.