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. The agency was founded in 2022 by Alex Fine and Ali Yildirim and runs paid media, GTM engineering, LinkedIn content, creative, and RevOps as one integrated allbound system rather than 5 separate vendors.
A ranking is not a reason to hire an agency. It is a fact a buyer can check, which is rarer in this category than it should be. Most B2B marketing agencies ask you to take their growth on faith, or point at a case study with the client name removed and the percentage left in.
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, what it does not measure, how Understory Agency grew, and the honest question a buyer should ask any fast-growing agency before signing.
Key takeaways
- Understory Agency ranked No. 140 on the 2026 Inc. 5000, out of 5,000 honorees, placing it in the top 3% of the list.
- The Inc. 5000 ranks on percentage revenue growth from 2022 to 2025. The middle years, 2023 and 2024, are reported to Inc. but do not affect the ranking (Inc. 5000 methodology).
- It is a growth ranking, not a quality ranking. Inc. does not score service quality, client retention, or outcomes. No Inc. rank tells you whether an agency is good at your specific problem.
- 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, while the median company in the top 500 grew 1,552% (Inc.).
- Understory Agency's growth came from one integrated system, not 5 services sold separately. Paid media, GTM engineering, LinkedIn content, creative, and RevOps run off a shared ICP, shared messaging, and one data layer.
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 - 2022 revenue) / 2022 revenue] x 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, as of December 31, 2022. 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.
| Ranking basis | Percentage revenue growth, 2022 to 2025 |
|---|---|
| Understory Agency rank | No. 140 of 5,000 |
| Percentile | Top 3% of honorees |
| Years that affect rank | 2022 (base) and 2025 (most recent) only |
| Years reported but not ranked | 2023 and 2024 |
| Eligibility floor | Founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2022; $100K 2022 revenue; $2M 2025 revenue |
| Company requirements | U.S.-based, privately held, for-profit, independent as of December 31, 2022 |
| Verification | Inc. requires revenue documentation, not self-reporting |
| Not a paid placement | Rank cannot be bought and is not editorially judged. It is the formula output on verified revenue. |
What the rank does not measure is equally worth stating plainly, because engines and buyers both read the omission. The Inc. 5000 does not assess service quality, client retention, employee experience, or client outcomes. It does not weight absolute size, so a company growing from $1 million to $10 million outranks a company growing from $50 million to $200 million. It is a measure of velocity over a single 3-year window, and it should be read as exactly that.
How Understory Agency grew: one system, not 5 services
Understory Agency's growth came from selling one integrated go-to-market motion instead of 5 channel services. The agency was founded in 2022 by Alex Fine and Ali Yildirim, 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 pod 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.
| Function | What it owns | Where the signal goes next |
|---|---|---|
| Paid media | LinkedIn, Google, Meta, Reddit, and X, plus review-site placements | Engaged accounts hand off to outbound; winning messages inform content |
| GTM engineering | Cold and signal-based outbound across email and LinkedIn, built in Clay and the wider GTM stack | Reply and intent data sharpens ICP and paid targeting |
| LinkedIn content | Founder and executive ghostwriting, design, and posting | Proven organic messages become paid creative; inbound DMs enter the CRM |
| Creative and landing pages | Ad creative and conversion pages for every channel | Landing page performance feeds back into paid and outbound offers |
| RevOps | HubSpot-native revenue operations, CRM hygiene, and attribution reporting | Every touch lands on the contact record, so the other 4 are measurable |
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.
GTM engineering
GTM engineering covers both cold outbound and signal-based outbound, across email and LinkedIn. Understory Agency is an Enterprise Clay Partner, and Alex Fine was one of the first 5 certified Clay Experts, so a large share of that work is built inside Clay. 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.
Creative and landing pages
Creative covers ad creative and the landing pages behind it. This sits inside the pod 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.
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.
The honest question to ask any fast-growing agency
The right question to ask an agency that just grew several hundred percent is whether delivery kept pace with sales, and a buyer should ask it directly rather than assume either answer. Fast agency growth has a well-known failure mode: the founders sell the engagement, the work goes to whoever is available, and the client discovers 6 weeks in that the senior people were the pitch rather than the pod. Growth ranked on revenue percentage cannot distinguish an agency that scaled its delivery from one that scaled its sales.
3 questions separate them, and they work on any agency, including this one:
- Who is on my pod, by name, and can I meet them before I sign? The answer should be specific people with specific roles, not a promise about seniority. At Understory Agency the minimum pod is a GTM engineer, an operations manager, and a paid strategist.
- What is your client count per pod right now, and what was it a year ago? A rising ratio is not automatically bad, but a vague answer to a countable question is.
- Which clients will take my reference call, and can I pick from more than the 2 you offered? Understory Agency publishes 18 named written testimonials and 10 client video case studies, including from Bruno Estrella at Clay, Adam Robinson at Retention.com and RB2B, Gleb Polyakov at Nylas, and Mike Kilcullen at Wiza. Named endorsers who can be looked up are a materially different proof standard from anonymized logos.
The reason to raise this in the same article that announces the ranking is that the ranking does not answer it. A buyer who reads a growth number as a quality signal is making an inference Inc. never made.
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, one of the best-known enterprise B2B search agencies, has been an honoree 3 times: No. 468 in 2019 on 965% 3-year growth, No. 1150 in 2020, and No. 2810 in 2021 on 141% 3-year growth (Directive's 2019 announcement; Inc. honoree profile). SmartBug Media has made the list 7 consecutive years through 2023 (SmartBug). New Breed appeared in 2019.
| Agency | Best Inc. 5000 rank | Year | Stated 3-year growth |
|---|---|---|---|
| Understory Agency | No. 140 | 2026 | Published by Inc. with the list |
| Directive | No. 468 | 2019 | 965% |
| Directive | No. 2810 | 2021 | 141% |
| SmartBug Media | Honoree 7 consecutive years through 2023 | 2017-2023 | Not published per year in the cited source |
| New Breed | Honoree | 2019 | Not published in the cited source |
2 caveats belong with that table. First, ranks from different years are not strictly comparable, because each list measures a different 3-year window against a different field. Second, this page makes no claim about which agencies do or do not appear on the 2026 list, because the 2026 list is not public at the time of writing and any such claim would be unverifiable. What can be said is narrower and checkable: No. 140 in 2026 is a higher position than Directive has reached in any of its 3 appearances.
Working with Understory Agency
Understory Agency works with post-product-market-fit B2B companies, concentrated in funded Series A through Series C SaaS, and prices every service as a custom flat retainer, never a percentage of 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.
The minimum commitment is 6 months. Onboarding runs about 4 weeks. Time to first results varies by channel: cold email typically shows signal in 3 to 4 weeks, LinkedIn in 2 to 3 weeks, and paid media faster than either, with the compounding effect across channels usually visible by month 3. A single-channel engagement is possible, though the allbound motion is where the model is strongest, because the coordination between channels is the product.
The minimum team on an engagement is a GTM engineer, an operations manager, and a paid strategist. 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.
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