Several advancements in society have been largely driven through the collaborative efforts of individuals and corporate entities. In the business sphere, companies rely on other companies for several products, services, or other capabilities that enable them to effectively serve their target market.

There are several businesses in existence today, each one with its unique business model and target market. For B2B businesses, their target market is other businesses that require the products or services they offer.

For instance, a wholesale club such as Costco depends on many product manufacturers for the products sold at its warehouses. In turn, campus stores and other small store owners depend on Costco to get the goods that they sell to consumers in their stores.

The above is one of many examples of how the business-to-business (B2B) model functions. Although in the example above, Costco functions both as a B2B and a B2C because it serves both small retailers and consumers, there are several businesses in existence such as Hubspot that serve only other businesses.

The existence of B2B facilitates partnerships between businesses within the same industries and extends to include partnerships with businesses in other industries that provide services that enable the smooth functioning of other industries.

Examples of B2B businesses include Adobe, Cisco, and General Electric amongst many others which we shall discuss here.

See also: Business Valuation Methods and Examples

For example, a product manufacturer such as Coca-Cola that sells its beverage concentrates and syrups to bottling companies can be viewed as a B2B. This is because it does business with other business entities as its clients and not with individuals.

Several companies in existence today such as Boeing and J.P Morgan are good examples of B2B businesses. Other companies such as Starbucks and Lululemon operate both as a B2B as well as a B2C (business to consumer) because they serve both corporate entities and individuals.

Business-to-business entities serve as key facilitators of global trade, collaboration, and advancement in various industries and across continents.

B2B transactions often involve more complex negotiation processes when compared to B2C, they also involve larger order quantities and bulk purchases.

See also: Chick Fil A Positioning and Business Strategy

Types of B2B Companies

1. Service-based
2. Product-based
3. Software-based

Service-based B2B businesses

This type of B2B company provides services to other companies. It may range from traditional services such as cleaning, accounting, marketing, and maintenance, or modern services such as data security, cloud computing, content creation, and graphic designing.

For example, a company such as Amazon provides various cloud computing options and e-commerce platforms for many business organizations.

Product-based B2B companies

Product-based B2B businesses sell physical or digital products to other businesses. This often includes product manufacturers and wholesalers who sell their products to other businesses.

The product sold comprises various items including office equipment, machinery, raw materials, finished goods, etc.

Common examples of B2B companies in this category include IndiaMart and General Electric

Software-based B2B businesses

The digital revolution has advanced the availability of various software to ease a lot of processes for businesses. The software is generally developed by software companies and tailored to solve specific pain points for businesses such as invoicing, accounting inventory tracking, database management, customer support, etc.

See also: Chain of Command in Business Management

Additional B2B company examples include Accenture, IBM, Amazon, SalesForce, and UpWork.

See also: Navigating Economic Downturns: Strategies for Businesses to Survive and Thrive

Examples of B2B businesses

1. Accenture
2. Adobe
3. Airtable
4. Alibaba
5. Amazon
6. BlackLine
7. Boeing
8. Buffer
9. Cisco
10. ComplYant
11. Curbell Plastics
12. Drata
13. FedEx
14. Firerock
15. Fusion Risk Management
16. General Electric
17. Hootsuite
18. HubSpot
19. IBM
20. Intel
21. Livestorm
22. Mailchimp
23. Morgan Sports
24. Upwork

Accenture

Accenture is one of the examples of a B2B company, a leading global professional services company. Through the services it provides, the brand serves the world’s leading businesses, governments, and other organizations by helping them build their digital core, optimize their operations, accelerate revenue growth, and create tangible value on a large scale and within the shortest possible time.

The company began in the early 1950s as the business and technology consulting division of the accounting firm, Arthur Andersen. At that time, it was known as Andersen Consulting but it was renamed Accenture in January 2001. The name change was necessitated due to the increasing tension between the consulting division and the accounting firm.

By 1998, Accenture issued a claim for breach of contract against Andersen Worldwide Société Coopérative (AWSC) and Arthur Andersen. After arbitration with the International Chamber of Commerce was concluded in August 2000, it led to the breaking of all contractual ties between Accenture and Andersen Worldwide Société Coopérative and Arthur Andersen.

Accenture offers a wide range of information-related services to the businesses that it serves. The services include:

• Application services
• Artificial intelligence
• Automation
• Business process outsourcing
• Business strategy
• Change management
• Cloud
• Customer experience
• Data and analytics
• Digital commerce
• Digital engineering and manufacturing
• Enterprise platforms
• Finance consulting
• Infrastructure
• Marketing
• Mergers and acquisitions (M&A)
• Metaverse
• Operating models
• Security
• Supply chain management
• Sustainability
• Technology consulting
• Technology innovation
• Zero-based transformation

This wide range of services has enabled Accenture to become one of the top businesses in the services industry leading the brand to be named fifth in Time’s 2023 World’s Best Companies.

The company serves over 300 businesses in a wide range of industries including communications, media and technology, health and public service, financial services, products, and resources. These businesses are scattered across more than 120 countries.

Accenture’s services have been used by several businesses and government departments including Google, Apple, Databricks, the United States Department of Defense, Microsoft, and Dell.

Based on its 2023 annual report, Accenture employs over 733,000 individuals working in over 49 countries including South Africa, the United Kingdom, Ireland, India, Philippines, and the United States. The brand also reported a revenue of $64.1 billion in the same year.

Adobe

Adobe Inc. is a multinational computer software company that was established in December 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke. The company was known as Adobe Systems Incorporated until October 2018 when it was renamed Adobe Inc.

The establishment of Adobe was a key contributor that spurred the desktop publishing revolution as a result of the creation of PostScript. Additional groundbreaking products of the brand include the Portable Document Format (PDF), illustrator, Photoshop, Acrobat, and Premiere Pro.

Adobe is a B2B company that specializes in the creation of software for the creation and publication of several types of content including illustrations, graphics, motion pictures, animation, photography, print, and multimedia.

At inception, Adobe functioned strictly as a B2B company offering specialized printing software which included algorithms describing the letter forms of many languages.

The company has since expanded its services as well as its consumer base by providing its services to individual subscribers. Adobe’s services are broadly classified into 3 categories which include:

• Digital media
• Digital experience
• Publishing and advertising

According to the brand:

From small businesses to the world’s largest enterprises, our customers use our integrated Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, and Experience Cloud solutions to unleash their creativity, accelerate document productivity, and power their digital businesses

Adobe reported revenue of $19.409 billion for the fiscal year that ended, in November 2023. It employs more than 23,000 individuals and has been recognized as one of the best companies to work for by Fortune.

Airtable

Airtable is another example of a B2B business, it is a cloud-based platform founded in 2012 by Andrew Ofstad, Emmett Nicholas, and Howie Liu.

It has 6 offices scattered across the United Kingdom and the United States. The company employs over 600 individuals and has been recognized among CNBC’s 2023 Disruptor 50.

The company provides a platform that enables businesses to more easily store, analyze, and make comparisons between groups of data. Teams can also create apps on top of shared data by using the platform’s inbuilt templates.

This can be done irrespective of an individual’s technical skills or knowledge of programming; therefore, it enables companies to make meaning out of available data and build apps that meet their unique needs thereby powering their most critical workflows.

Due to the ease and effectiveness of the platform, a lot of companies use the platform to ease the management of projects and activities such as tracking their hiring process, marketing campaigns, service or product development, product inventories, and employee directories amongst many others.

This has granted Airtable recognition as one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies in 2023. Over 450,000 companies use the Aitable platform to ease collaboration and other team processes.

Some of the companies that use Airtable include DropBox, LinkedIn, West Elm, GitHub, Shopify, Autodesk, Equnox, and Intuit.

Alibaba

Alibaba.com is one of the components of Alibaba Group Holding Limited, it offers a platform through which small and medium-sized companies can scale their business by enabling them access to the global market through digital trade.

The company was started in June 1999 through the combined effort of Jack Ma and 17 other individuals including Jin Jianhang, Joseph Tsail, Lucy Peng, Cathy Zhang, James Sheng, Eddie Wu, Lou Wensheng, Simon Xie, Jin Yuanying, Zhou Yuehong, and Shi Yufeng.

Alibaba is one of the top e-commerce business-to-business platforms globally. The brand’s mission is to make it easy to do business anywhere. Based on this, the company offers a secure platform where product manufacturers can directly sell to wholesalers or suppliers.

The brand aims to ease global trade between companies and across countries and continents. It states that:

Our founders started our company to champion small businesses, in the belief that the Internet would level the playing field by enabling small enterprises to leverage innovation and technology to grow and compete more effectively in domestic and global economies. We believe that concentrating on customer needs and solving their problems – whether those customers are consumers, merchants or enterprises – ultimately will lead to the best outcome for our
business. In the digital era, we are staying true to our mission by helping our customers and business partners harness the power of digital technology. We have developed a large ecosystem powered by technology infrastructure that enables participants to create and share value on our platforms. Our decisions are guided by how they serve our mission over the long term, not by the pursuit of short-term gains

Alibaba

The company has continually set the pace for other B2B e-commerce companies by connecting businesses in over 200 countries across the globe.

As of this year 2023, the platforms enable businesses to access hundreds of millions of products in over 40 different categories such as industrial machinery, metals and alloys, fabric and textile raw materials, medical devices and supplies, renewable energy, and electronic components.

Alibaba has a workforce of over 235,000 individuals, working in several countries including the United States, Vietnam, Turkey, the United Kingdom, South Korea, China, and Italy.

Amazon

Amazon ranked second in Fortune’s 2023 World Most Admired Companies, this goes to show the extent of brand recognition the brand enjoys all over the world. Although Amazon is largely known for its B2C platform, it also has a curated B2B platform which is the Amazon Business.

This B2B platform which was initially referred to as Amazon Supply was launched in 2015 to provide businesses with access to certain products such as office, breakroom, janitorial, and restaurant supplies.

Aside from products, businesses also get access to internet-based services such as cloud computing, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence through Amazon Web Services.

A considerable number of businesses use Amazon business to ease their business supplies purchases due to the wide range of available products and the discounted pricing. Some of these businesses include ExxonMobil, Vacasa, Sugar Mountain, and New Balance.

For the year 2023, Amazon Business recorded sales of $35 million. The platform is available to companies in the United States, Spain, Germany, Italy, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, and India.

Amazon also ranked No. 4 on Kantar BrandZ’s Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands in 2023.

BlackLine

Another example of a B2B business is BlackLine. From time immemorial, accounting has been one of the top challenges faced by businesses, the use of manual accounting processes is often time-consuming and requires having bulky records that are often difficult to trace and track.

Blackline has created several cloud-based financial operations management platforms that ease various accounting processes including accounts receivable automation, financial close management, and intercompany financial management.

The company was founded in 2001 by Therese Tucker and has become a go-to platform for more than 4,300 small, mid, and large companies operating in diverse industries. Some of the brand’s customers include Coca-Cola, eBay, Zendesk, British Gas, Western Union, SiriusXM, and Stackpath.

Blackline helps companies to deploy modern accounting techniques that aid the unification of their accounting processes and data, automating repetitive work, and driving accountability through visibility. Thus, a lot of companies trust Blackline to help them achieve a seamless and easier accounting process.

Currently, in 2023, the brand has over a thousand employees working in about 12 countries including Australia, Japan, the United States, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and Germany.

Due to the brand’s robust diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, volunteerism, charitable donations, and fundraising, as well as its workplace culture such as support for remote and in-office employees, and demonstrable support for environmental sustainability, Blackline was among the companies awarded the 2023 Tech Cares award by TrustRadius, a leading B2B software peer review platform.

Boeing

Boeing is an additional B2B company example. The company functions in the aviation industry and owes its existence to four men; William E. Boeing, James Smith McDonnell, Donald W. Douglas Sr., and James H. Kindelberger who were influential in the brand’s deep foundations, diversity in operation, and surging growth over the years.

The company serves several companies in the aviation and outer space industries through its manufacturing and servicing of commercial airplanes, space systems, and defense products.

The brand’s core values are integrity, safety, and quality; this has enabled Boeing to become one of the industry leaders paving the pathway for innovation. According to Boeing:

The company continues to expand its product line and services to meet emerging customer needs. Its broad range of capabilities includes creating new, more efficient members of its commercial airplane family; designing, building and integrating military platforms and defense systems; creating advanced technology solutions; and arranging innovative financing and service options for customers.

Boeing

Boeing has existed since 1916 and currently employs more than 156,000 individuals. The company is divided into four business segments:

• Commercial airplanes which handle the manufacturing of commercial airplanes, business jets, and freighters.
• Defense, space, and security which is driven by the brand’s vision to connect, protect, explore, and inspire the world through aerospace innovation; it provides solutions for the design, production, modification, service, and support of commercial derivatives, military rotorcraft, satellites, human space exploration, and autonomous systems.
• Boeing Global Services provides innovative, comprehensive, and cost-competitive service solutions for commercial, defense, and space customers. The service is available to both commercial and government organizations and for all plane types irrespective of their original manufacturer.
• Boeing Capital Corporation serves as the division’s financier and a provider of financing solutions for its clients all over the world.

Some of Boeing’s top clients include Emirates Airline, Air India, the U.S. military, Etihad Airways, SpiceJet, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Qatar Airways, and Blue Dart.

Additional clients include Saudi Arabian Airlines, Gulf Air, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Royal Jordanian, Vistara, Oman Air, Egyptair, and the Department of Homeland Security.

Buffer

As more companies turn to the use of social media to reach their customers, the need for a tool that helps ease the process of posting on multiple social media sites at once has become increasingly necessary. This B2B example solves this issue by functioning in 4 major ways viz:

• Assisting businesses to share click-worthy content by informing them about what and when to publish to make the content outstanding.
• Aiding companies build their following by suggesting appropriate hashtags for each channel when sharing content
• Reduce workload and save time by automating the publishing of posts and reports on engagements
• Easily collaborate with gaming team members based on Buffer’s permissions levels and approval flows.

The Buffer software started as a Startup Sprint project in November 2010, designed by a group of European experts including Joel Gascoigne and Leo Widrich in San Francisco.

It initially only functioned for X (formerly Twitter) but now includes other social networks such as Mastodon, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, and Pinterest.

Buffer manages these social sites both on the web and on mobile aiding businesses to schedule posts, engage with their communities, and analyze results. The company is an official marketing partner of Meta, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

The brand is fully remote, comprising a team of over 80 employees working remotely from over 80 countries including the United Kingdom, Nigeria, France, South Africa, the United States, Poland, Canada, Ghana, Kenya, and Spain.

Buffer Inc. reports an annual recurring revenue of over $17 million and a monthly recurring revenue of over $1 million. They also record 140,852 monthly active users and an average revenue per user of $26.71.

Through the brand’s five-fold tools of publishing, analytics, engagement, start page, and AI assistant, businesses are equipped with the right tools to organically build their audience while monitoring what works and generally improving their social media presence.

Some brands that use Buffer include Fortune, DressUp, Huckberry, HappySocks, Business Insider, Burrow, The Sill, and Food52.

Cisco

Another example of a B2B company is Cisco Systems Inc. The company which is more commonly known as Cisco was started by two computer scientists, Sandy Lerner and Leonard Bosack in December 1984.

Before establishing the company, they had pioneered the concept of a local area network (LAN) being used to connect distant computers over a multiprotocol router system at Stanford University where they worked. This feat was made possible based on existing technology developed in the University in the 1970s.

Thus, when Cisco was established, it served as a B2B business providing dedicated network nodes that enabled multiple network protocol connectivity for companies.

Through the acquisition of other technology companies such as Crescendo Communications, Stratacom, and Kalpana, Cisco became an even stronger technology company providing Ethernet switching and other communications-related services to its customers.

Over the years, the brand has grown to become one of the biggest digital communications technology conglomerates in the world. The brand has a workforce of over 84,000 individuals, providing services and products to more than 42,000 companies in over 98 countries.

Some of the businesses that the company serves include WeWork, Adventist Health, Vodafone, 99Bridges, Yamazaki Mazak Corporation, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, TechVets, and Swisscom

Some of the services and products the company currently provides include telecommunications equipment, networking hardware and software, domain security, and team collaboration networks.

Cisco also provides energy management, videoconferencing, and the Internet of Things (IoT). In the 2023 fiscal year, the company reported a revenue of $57 billion.

The company has gained several awards over the years. Some of the awards won by Cisco in 2023 include No. 1 in Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For, No. 1 in PEOPLE Companies that Care, and Corporate Knight’s 100 Most Sustainable Global Companies.

ComplYant

When it comes to the issue of filing and paying taxes, a lot of small businesses and entrepreneurs find it challenging to keep up with the deadlines or even accurately calculate their taxes.

ComplYant was founded in August 2019 by Shiloh Johnson to empower small businesses and entrepreneurs by providing them with the right tools to tackle all tax-related matters. The founder has a Master’s degree in taxation and over 20 years of tax and corporate experience.

The ComplYant app works as a digital tax assistant that provides an easy and accurate way to follow tax deadlines, carry out tax budgeting, and manage all business tax types.

This B2B business example operates completely remotely with over 50 staff working to assist small companies and entrepreneurs meet with tax-related matters and become compliant.

Curbell plastics

This B2B company was started by 2 brothers, Leonard and Edmond Leone in Buffalo, New York’s industrial district in 1942. The company began as a small machine shop and started using plastics in fabrication based on a request from a local aircraft company.

As the company’s expertise grew and with the end of the Second World War, the US chemical industry began introducing numerous plastic-made new materials into the marketplace and asked the brand to become a distributor of these products.

At inception, the company was known as Curbell Machine Shop but was later renamed Curbell, Inc. to reflect its broader mission and expansion into other fields aside from fabrication.

The company continued experimenting with plastic due to its durability, lightweight, and limitless potential. Soon after, the brand’s products were in use beyond New York and it led to the creation of a separate entity that was focused on the production of materials from plastic. This new entity was named Curbell Plastics Inc.

Curbell Plastics currently produces plastic films, tooling materials, sealants, sheets, fabricated parts, adhesives, tubes, rods, and prototyping materials used by several industries including:

• Aerospace
• Anti-terrorism glass and security glazing
• Food and beverage processing
• Glass lamination
• Heavy equipment
• Life sciences and medical equipment
• Lighting and light management
• Machine shops and plastic fabricators
• Machinery and equipment
• Marine remotely operated vehicles (ROVS)
• Military and defense
• Oil and gas
• Orthotics and prosthetics
• Packaging and conveying equipment
• Point-of-purchase displays
• Printing and graphics
• Randomes
• Scientific instrumentation
• Semiconductor and electronics
• Sign manufacturing
• Spacecraft
• Transportation
• Underground pipe and conduit supports
• Valves, regulators, and seals

The company can work with these diverse industries due to its use of advanced plastic materials which have become increasingly useful in reducing product costs while improving product quality and reducing cost in many different industries.

For example, some plastic polymers which have bright eye-catching colors are useful in the production of point-of-purchase displays while those with the ability to diffuse light generated by LED lamps are useful in lighting.

Curbell’s network of 24 service and distribution centers provides a wide reach to supply plastic materials to machine shops, entrepreneurs, Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and other customers throughout the United States, ensuring that they receive the materials they require at the right time. Curbell Plastics is therefore a good example of a B2B company.

Drata

Drata is one of the examples of a B2B business that operates in the software as a service (SaaS) industry. It was founded by Adam Markowitz, Daniel Marashlian, and Troy Markowitz in 2020.

The brand provides various tools that replace manual efforts when preparing for audits and maintaining compliance. This in turn reduces the expenditure of the companies that use Drata and the time taken to prepare for audits.

Additionally, Drata aids businesses in maintaining compliance by automating the processes involved in streamlining compliance for an individual company’s frameworks and other industry-related security compliance requirements such as SOC 2, GDPR, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS, CCPA, CMMC, and NIST CSF.

SOC 2 defines criteria for managing data based on security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. ISO 27001 is an information security management system (ISMS) that helps keep consumer data safe.

HIPAA is a law requiring organizations that handle protected health information (PHI) to keep it protected and secure. GDPR is a regulation in European Union (EU) law on data protection and privacy in the EU and the European Economic Area.

PCI DSS is a set of controls to make sure companies that handle credit card information maintain a secure environment. Drata also provides continuous, automated control monitoring and evidence collection. The automation is possible due to the integration of over 85 tools.

By providing this broad range of compliance-related services, Drata serves a wide range of companies in different sectors ranging from legal to finance, healthcare, technology, and aviation.

Some of Drata’s clients include Vercel, Lemonade, BambooHR, Fivetran, Abnormal, Calendly, Notion, ClearCo, Airbase, and Superhuman. Like ComplYant, Drata is a fully remote company that employs over 400 individuals.

Due to Drata’s commitment to securely serving businesses, it has maintained its Leader status in multiple Grid Reports such as Cloud Compliance and Security Compliance. Thus, the company ranked as the 2024 G2 overall Momentum Leader for Vendor Security and Privacy Assessment.

FedEx

FedEx is an American multinational company that provides businesses worldwide with a broad portfolio of transportation, e-commerce,
and business services. The company was founded by Frederick W. Smith in 1971 as Federal Express Corporation.

The brand was one of of pioneer companies that was specifically designed for urgent deliveries. In 1997 the brand reorganized as a holding company, FDX Corporation and by January 2000, the company changed its name to FedEx Corporation.

The brand employs over 500,000 full-time and part-time workers worldwide and recorded an annual revenue for the fiscal year ending May 31, 2023, of over $90 billion. The brand has the following operating segments:

• FedEx Express
• FedEx Services
• FedEx Ground
• FedEx Freight
• FedEx Office
• FedEx Logistics
• FedEx Dataworks

Through these operating segments, FedEx serves millions of small, medium, and large businesses operating in more than 220 countries around the globe. Each of these operating segments has a specified area of focus to help the brand maintain its position as a world-class logistics provider.

For instance, FedEx Logistics provides supply chain logistics for many multinational companies such as Target, ASUS, Walmart, LEGO Group, and Walgreens. The unit also provides trade management technology and services, cross-border e-commerce, specialty transportation, and customs brokerage.

The company’s mission statement reads:

FedEx Corporation will produce superior financial returns for its shareowners by providing high value-added logistics, transportation and related business services through focused operating companies. Customer requirements will be met in the highest quality manner appropriate to each market segment served. FedEx will strive to develop mutually rewarding relationships with its team members, partners and suppliers. Safety will be the first consideration in all operations. Corporate activities will be conducted to the highest ethical and professional standards.

FedEx

In the company’s over 50 years of existence, its mission statement has guided it in its commitment to connecting people and possibilities around the world responsibly and resourcefully, to achieve carbon-neutral operations by 2040.

Firerock

FireRock Building material provides high-quality building materials for custom homes. The company caters to distributors, architects, builders, construction companies, and all businesses that operate in the building, construction, and finishing industries.

The company was founded on fireplaces but currently includes other products such as steel doors and windows, pavers, slate and cedar roofing, and wood flooring.

A visit to the company’s website indicates several testimonials of satisfied clients that have done business with the company some of which include Paradise Builders, General Shale Corp, Sycamore Ridge Homes, and TCC General Contractors.

FireRock prides itself in providing superior services with high-quality products that can stand the test of time, hence, all units from the brand come with a twenty-year warranty.

Fusion Risk Management

This B2B business example was started in 2006 by David Nolan and John Jackson. The fusion framework system was launched in 2010; it seeks to help businesses anticipate, prepare, respond, and learn in any situation by equipping them with the software solutions they need to be successful.

This is made possible by providing tools enabling companies to make data-driven decisions so leaders can proactively manage future outcomes.

The brand offers 6 major services viz:

• Operational resilience.
• Risk management
• Third-party risk management
• Business continuity management
• Crisis and incident management
• Resilience copilot

These varied services provide different benefits. For instance, crisis and incident management software equip businesses that use the platform with actionable insights that they need to adapt to changing circumstances such as natural disasters.

It is equally useful in managing incidents, developing coordinated responses, and analyzing lessons learned with confidence from one centralized view. Thus, identifying gaps in existing processes, reducing time to resolution, better anticipating the next event, and avoiding disruptions to business operations and services.

Fusion Risk Management is the winner of the 2023 DRI International Award under the product/service provider of the year category. The brand serves businesses in several industries including insurance, financial services, technology, manufacturing, and data service providers.

The brand makes an estimated revenue of $64 million annually and has a workforce of more than 300 people.

General Electric

General Electric is an American conglomerate that has a deep and broad history of innovation dating as far back as the production of the first incandescent light bulb by Thomas Alva Edison in 1879.

The company was established in 1889 as Edison General Electric Company. It was after the company merged with Thomson-Houston Electric Company in 1892 that it rebranded and was incorporated in New York as General Electric Company.

Since its incorporation, General Electric (GE) has pioneered technologies that have spurred world-transforming changes and improved the lives of billions of people worldwide.

The brand employs more than 172,000 individuals and operates in 9 different industries including additive, aerospace, capita, digital, healthcare, power, renewable energy, and research. These have been merged into 3 broad categories which are:

1. GE Aerospace
2. GE Healthcare
3. GE Vernova comprises renewable energy, power, digital, and energy financial services businesses.

GE serves several companies in more than 170 countries through these aforementioned categories. Manufacturing and service operations are carried out at 75 manufacturing plants located in 26 states in the United States and Puerto Rico and at 130 manufacturing plants located in 32 other countries.

Some of the products manufactured by GE include aircraft jet engines, gas and wind turbines, electrical home appliances, medical imaging equipment, vacuum tubes, and digital cameras.

Services provided by the brand include generation, transmission, and distribution of electricity, industrial automation, and equipment services amongst many others.

GE has consistently led the way in driving technological transformations and has aided several businesses in contributing positively to the progress and growth of the world toward a brighter future.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is an example of a B2B business that functions in the social media management sphere. The company was birthed in December 2008 when Ryan Holmes sought a tool that could enable him to manage multiple social media accounts and networks in one place.

Since no tool that met his requirements was already in existence, he created one alongside Dario Meli, David Tedman, and the Invoke Media team. At the time, the tool was named BrightKit and served solely for publishing and scheduling on Twitter (currently known as X).

The tool was renamed HootSuite in February 2009, by November of the same year, its capabilities had expanded to include additional social media networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook. By December 2009 the brand became wholly independent of Invoke Media and officially launched as Hootsuite Media, Inc.

Currently, businesses can use HootSuite to publish and schedule posts, engage customers, monitor activity, advertise content, analyze results, integrate their social media pages, and even create content using OwlyWriter AI.

Localized versions of the tool are available in German, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish, and 50 more languages are planned to be added.

HootSuite’s workforce comprises over 1,000 workers operating worldwide and serving more than 4,000 businesses including Domino’s, Ohima, IKEA, SkyWest Airlines, the University of Chicago, World Health Organization (WHO), Landmark Properties, and Roche.

The brand has continued to improve its tools and made strategic acquisitions over the years to fine-tune the services it offers and better meet the requirements and expectations of its teeming customers.

HootSuite estimates that businesses that use the tool are likely to record over 636% increase in reach, year over year; more than 500% growth across all social channels; and over 250% increase in sourced revenue, year over year.

HubSpot

HubSpot is an American developer and marketer of software products for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service. It was founded by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah in 2006.

The company’s target market was small business but it has since expanded to include medium and large companies. The platform consists of all the integrations, software, and resources needed by businesses to connect and enhance their content management, marketing, sales, and customer service.

These tools have been made available under different hubs such as marketing, content management software (CMS), sales, service, operations, and commerce hubs.

HubSpot’s connected platform enables companies to grow their business faster by focusing on their customers while reducing the time spent on other activities.

The brand serves more than 194,000 businesses operating in more than 120 countries some of these companies include Kahoot!, Eventbrite, Tumblr, DoorDash, WeightWatchers, Unipart, Reddit, and Casio

IBM

The International Business Machines Corporation commonly referred to as IBM is a multinational technology company that was established in 1911 as the Computing Tabulating Recording Company (CTR), a holding company of manufacturers of record-keeping and measuring systems.

The brand operates in over 175 countries and specializes in computer hardware, middleware, and software. It also provides hosting and consulting services in diverse areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology. Hence other businesses are its main customers.

IBM is the largest industrial research organization in the world, with 19 research facilities in a dozen countries. This led it to become the leading manufacturer of punch-card tabulating systems in 1924.

The company has been an industry leader in several emerging technologies, including electric typewriters, electromechanical calculators, and personal computers.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the IBM mainframe, exemplified by the System/360, was the dominant computing platform, and the company produced 80 percent of computers in the United States and 70 percent of computers worldwide.

By the above statistic, it meant that a large percentage of businesses that used computers depended on IBM. Although the brand lost a significant portion of its market share due to increasing competition, its divesting and concentration on providing computer services, software, supercomputers, and scientific research made it ranked among the top technology companies.

As one of the world’s oldest and largest technology companies, IBM has been responsible for several technological innovations, including the automated teller machine (ATM), dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), the floppy disk, the hard disk drive, the magnetic stripe card, the relational database, the SQL programming language, and the UPC barcode.

The company has made inroads in advanced computer chips, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and data infrastructure. It is among the world’s largest employers, with over 297,000 employees worldwide.

IBM currently operates under 3 broad segments; software, consulting, and infrastructure. Some of the brand’s clients include the Norwegian Air Ambulance Foundation, Sunstate Equipment, Genetco, Minnesota Counties Information Systems (MCIS), Nesco Resource, Hatco Corporation, American Packaging Corporation (APC), and Connectria.

Intel

Intel Corporation is an example of a B2B company. The company was founded in July 1968, by semiconductor pioneers Gordon Moore (of Moore’s law), Robert Noyce (1927–1990), and Arthur Rock (a venture capitalist) and is associated with the executive leadership and vision of Andrew Grove.

Although Intel created the world’s first commercial microprocessor chip in 1971, it was not until the success of the personal computer (PC) that this became its primary business.

The company is the primary supplier of microprocessors for most computer system manufacturers and also manufactures motherboard chipsets, network interface controllers, and integrated circuits.

Intel additionally produces flash memory, graphics chips, embedded processors, and other devices related to communications and computing. It is one of the world’s largest semiconductor chip manufacturers by revenue and is one of the developers of the x86 series of instruction sets found in most personal computers (PCs).

The brand supplies microprocessors for most computer system manufacturers. It also manufactures motherboard chipsets, network interface controllers and integrated circuits, flash memory, graphics chips, embedded processors, and other devices related to communications and computing.

Intel’s top customers include the US Department of Defense, HP, Lenovo, and Dell.

Livestorm

Livestorm is a B2B platform that was established in Paris, France in 2016 by Gilles Bertaux, Robin Lambert, Tom Forlini, and Vincent Garreau. It originated as a final-year project for HETIC business school.

The company was originally named Rumble but was later renamed Livestorm. The platform provides video conferencing software for webinars and virtual meetings. It also has tools for registration pages, email cadences, and analytics.

Thus serving as an excellent virtual tool that connects teams, and aids in interviewing, and onboarding of new staff, especially for remote businesses.

The brand has over 5,000 users some of which include companies such as Dolby, Pipedrive, Verizon, Intercom, and Klaviyo.

Mailchimp

Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius started a web design agency called the Rocket Science Group in 2001, their focus was on big, corporate clients, but on the side, they created a delightful email marketing service for small businesses which came to be known as Mailchimp.

Mailchimp was designed as an alternative to the oversized, expensive email software of the early 2000s. It offered small business owners access to many of the same digital marketing advantages that their much larger competitors enjoyed thereby enabling them to grow and consequently powering their success.

In the years that followed, Mailchimp continued to deliver results for budding entrepreneurs. Its products evolved with time to serve companies and marketing teams of all sizes and skill levels.

Some of the products offered by the brand include email marketing and transactional email. Its customers include Snappies, Blush Boutique Co., Robo 3D, Bay Sports, MindJournal, and Happily Ever Borrowed.

The company was acquired in 2021 by Intuit, a company with a long track record of driving small business success and solving customer problems.

In 2023, Trust Radius ranked Mailchimp in the Best Value for Price and Top Rated brands.

Morgan Sports

Morgan Sports is a B2B wholesaler of commercial fitness and combat sports equipment in Australia. The brand has been in existence for over 30 years and offers a diverse range of sports products, including martial arts supplies, functional fitness gear, boxing equipment, weight training tools, rugby league equipment, and much more.

The company is widely recognized and accepted by the sports community, catering to the needs of individuals, schools, clubs, fitness centers, franchises, retail stores, and government organizations.

The brand has a collection of more than 2500 premium home and commercial-grade sporting products which it manufactures in-house or in collaboration with world-leading suppliers. Their products include boxing gloves, heavy bags, martial arts supplies, CrossFit gear, battle ropes, kettlebells, commercial strength and weightlifting equipment, amongst many others.

Upwork

Upwork came into existence when Elance-oDesk was rebranded in 2015. The prior name is a combination of Elance which was founded in 1998 by MIT graduate Beerud Sheth and Wall Street veteran Srini Anumolu and oDesk which was founded in 2003 by two friends, Odysseas Tsatalos and Stratis Karamanlakis.

Elance’s first product was the Elance Small Business Marketplace while oDesk was created as a staffing firm. oDesk was eventually built into an online marketplace that allowed registered users to find, hire, and collaborate with remote workers.

This is the same model which Upwork currently operates; connecting businesses with freelancers or other businesses that can provide the services they seek.

Some of the top businesses that use Upwork include Microsoft, Nasdaq, Rancher, Bissell, and Coty.

See also: Marketing Strategies Examples for Small Businesses

Examples of B2B businesses in the USA

• Amazon
• Intel
• MailChimp
• Upwork
• Adobe
• IBM
• Airtable
• BlackLine
• Boeing
• Buffer
• Cisco
• ComplYant
• Curbell Plastics
• Drata
• FedEx
• Firerock
• Fusion Risk Management
• General Electric 
• HubSpot

See also: Tim Hortons Positioning Strategy

B2B examples in e-commerce

• Alibaba
• Amazon
• eWorldTrade
• Grainger
• IndiaMART

See also: Profitability of a Business: How to measure and improve profit

B2B services examples

Below are some examples of B2B companies that provide services:

• Hootsuite
• Lyfe Marketing
• Oracle
• Slack
• Qualtrics
• Wework

See also: Importance of Budgeting

B2B product examples

Below are some examples of B2B companies that provide products:

• AutoGlobalTrade
• Curbell Plastics
• Ferguson
• Mckesson
• TradeIndia
• Quill

See also: Chick Fil A Marketing Strategies and Marketing Mix

Conclusion

B2B companies are broadly classified into those selling goods, providing services, or software that other companies use. We have discussed various examples of B2B businesses that exist in diverse industries.

The existence of these diverse B2B companies is a major contributing factor to the continued existence of global trade around the globe leading to the creation of jobs and the provision of all the goods and services that we use.