For the 7th Time, Applied AI Leader Phenom Earns Spot on the 2026 Inc. 5000 List

PHILADELPHIA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug 11, 2026--

For the seventh consecutive year, Phenom, the leader in applied AI built to redesign work operations for hiring faster, developing better and retaining longer, announced that it has earned a place on the 2026 Inc. 5000, the annual list of the fastest-growing private companies in America. The list is the most prestigious ranking of the nation’s most successful independent and entrepreneurial businesses, recognizing companies that have achieved remarkable growth while driving innovation, creating jobs, and shaping the future of the economy. Past honorees include companies such as Microsoft, Meta, Oracle and Patagonia.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260811388061/en/

This year’s Inc. 5000 recognizes a new class of organizations redefining what growth looks like. From AI and advanced manufacturing to healthcare, consumer products, and professional services, these businesses are expanding their impact, creating jobs and proving that entrepreneurial ambition continues to fuel the U.S. economy. Honorees have collectively added more than 627,208 jobs to the U.S. economy over the past three years and the median three-year revenue growth rate was 130%.

“Every company on the Inc. 5000 has a story of perseverance, smart decision making, and a refusal to sit still,” says Mike Hofman, editor-in-chief of Inc. “Their growth reflects more than strong financial performance–it reflects creativity, resilience, and the customer focus required to build companies that make a lasting impact. We congratulate all honorees on this significant achievement.”

Phenom continues to earn industry acclaim for its bold agentic innovation, including a 2026 CODiE Award in the Best Productivity/Workflow Solution category for Phenom Voice Screening Agent, six-time Strategic Leader positioning in the 2026 Fosway 9-Grid™ for Talent Acquisition, and The A.I. Award 2025 for Best Use of AI in Human Resources.

Enterprises are already seeing real results from Phenom’s AI agents:

Those results are pushing enterprises to put more agents to work. A manufacturing organization that started with a single Voice Agent added Intake and Sourcing Agents to the same hiring workflow, streamlining communication with hiring managers and surfacing qualified candidates faster.

Limitless AI Agents that Act with Context

Phenom agents execute at every stage of the hiring workflow. Deployed across enterprise environments today, examples include:

Hiring a nurse, a warehouse associate and a software engineer are not the same workflow, and Phenom agents are built to reflect that. Each agent carries the context, skills requirements and compliance rules specific to that role, industry, location, and market, so hiring strategy stays coordinated across the enterprise while every role is still treated separately. Agents are orchestrated to work together across that workflow, so each one builds on what the last one accomplished instead of operating in isolation. This multi-agent approach gives enterprises a decisive advantage, helping them hire, develop and retain talent faster than competitors relying on one agent at a time.

“The invisible space inside every company, where work either flows or stalls, starts with how that company hires,” said Mahe Bayireddi, CEO and co-founder of Phenom. “Growth like this doesn’t happen because a company adds more AI. It happens because customers trust that AI to know the difference between their business and every other business it serves. We’ve spent years earning that trust by delivering AI that reflects the complexity, context and priorities of the enterprises we support.”

Where Human Resources Turns to Understand AI

Tune into AI Day to get a behind-the-curtain look at Phenom’s contextual intelligence, agentic orchestration and governance that empowers enterprise human resources teams to quickly move from AI pilots to production to impact. Broadcasting live from Phenom Studios on September 17 at 10 a.m. ET (4 p.m. CEST), it will be available on demand after the broadcast. Register at ai.phenom.com.

About Phenom

Phenom is the leader in applied AI built to redesign work operations for hiring faster, developing better and retaining longer. It understands unique industry and business needs for departments, teams, employees and candidates. This is AI that knows company DNA, powered by Engines that harmonize data and facilitate orchestration, Ontologies that guide every decision, X AI that creates hyper-personalized experiences, and Agents that work alongside teams with unprecedented speed and precision. Driven by a purpose to help a billion people find the right work, this is responsible AI that is enterprise-secure, compliant, and always explainable.

Phenom has earned accolades including: Inc. 5000’s fastest-growing companies (6 consecutive years), Deloitte Technology's Fast 500 (5 years), 11 Brandon Hall ‘Excellence in Technology’ awards including Gold for ‘Best Advance in Generative AI for Business Impact,’ Business Intelligence Group’s Artificial Intelligence Excellence Awards (3 consecutive years), The Cloud Awards 2025/2024, The A.I. Awards 2024, and a regional Timmy Award for launching and optimizing HelpOneBillion.com (2020).

Headquartered in Greater Philadelphia, Phenom also has offices in Canada, India, Israel, the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom.

For more information, please visit www.phenom.com. Connect with Phenom on LinkedIn, X, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.

About Inc.

Inc. is the leading media brand and playbook for the entrepreneurs and business leaders shaping our future. Through its journalism, Inc. aims to inform, educate, and elevate the profile of its community: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters who are creating the future of business. Inc. is published by Mansueto Ventures LLC, along with fellow leading business publication Fast Company. For more information, visit www.inc.com.

For the seventh consecutive year, Phenom has earned a place on the 2026 Inc. 5000, the annual list of the fastest-growing private companies in America. The list is the most prestigious ranking of the nation’s most successful independent and entrepreneurial businesses, recognizing companies that have achieved remarkable growth while driving innovation, creating jobs, and shaping the future of the economy. Past honorees include companies such as Microsoft, Meta, Oracle and Patagonia.

BUNIA, Congo (AP) — At least 2,000 people have died in Congo’s Ebola outbreak, the fastest-growing on record, according to the latest data, as health authorities struggle to get help to remote localities due to rebel conflict, bad roads and work stoppages over payment issues.

Government data published overnight into Tuesday showed the outbreak has recorded a total of 4,381 confirmed cases, including 2,011 deaths. A total of 704 patients are in admission and isolation.

The outbreak was declared on May 15 but health authorities say sequencing showed it began months earlier, in February.

While it took about nine weeks for the outbreak to record the first 1,000 deaths, it’s taken just around three weeks for the figure to double, an evidence that the health crisis is moving faster than efforts to track and manage it.

It's already the second-largest outbreak in history, only behind the 2014-2016 West Africa outbreak that recorded more than 28,000 cases including over 11,000 deaths.

The Ebola outbreak is unlike most previous ones because the rare Bundibugyo virus responsible for it has no approved vaccines or treatments. Clinical trials for those have begun in Ituri province, the epicenter of the outbreak, in eastern Congo.

Aid workers say the outbreak continues to outpace response that’s been expanding across the five eastern provinces affected. Many health workers have gone on strike to protest lack of payment for their work since the outbreak was declared. And WHO has said most new cases are still being recorded outside of contacts being monitored, showing that transmission remains out of the control of health workers.

Ebola can be caused by different types of virus. Although the type responsible for the 2014-2016 outbreak is considered the deadliest, government data shows this Bundibugyo outbreak has killed a higher percentage of people as care and support are not getting to patients quickly enough. Many cases are reporting symptoms late or not at all.

The ongoing outbreak has so far had a case fatality rate of 45.9%, more than the 39.6% rate recorded in the 2014-2016 West Africa outbreak.

“In the absence of an effective vaccine, control (for the outbreak) rests on identifying cases and then nursing them in secure facilities until they recover or sadly perish,” said Paul Hunter, a professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia in the U.K.

In a remote region like this with an ongoing conflict and interrupted communications, routine surveillance can be very difficult and “identifying cases early enough to prevent spread can be impossible,” said Hunter.

The World Health Organization said on Monday that at the onset of the outbreak in one of Congo’s most remote and vulnerable areas, some cases were wrongly attributed to malaria and typhoid, and that early testing was conducted for the more common type of Ebola.

The WHO regional director for Africa, Dr. Mohamed Yakub Janabi, told a news conference that officials are “chasing the virus, the virus is ahead of us.”

The first Ebola virus to be identified was in 1976 near the Ebola River in what is now Congo. The current outbreak is the 17th — and largest — the Central African nation has faced.

A health worker dries boots that were washed to prevent the spread of the Ebola virus at the treatment centre in Bunia General Hospital in Ituri, eastern Congo, Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Dieudonne Dirole)

A health worker dries boots that were washed to prevent the spread of the Ebola virus at the treatment centre in Bunia General Hospital in Ituri, eastern Congo, Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Dieudonne Dirole)

A man arrives at the treatment centre in Bunia General Hospital in Ituri, eastern Congo, Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Dieudonne Dirole)

A health worker in protective gear washes her hands at the treatment centre in Bunia General Hospital in Ituri, eastern Congo, Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Dieudonne Dirole)

A health worker on the dignified and safe burial team, monitors a casket at the treatment centre in Bunia General Hospital in Ituri, eastern Congo, Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Dieudonne Dirole)

A health worker waits to be sprayed with disinfectant at the treatment centre in Bunia General Hospital in Ituri, eastern Congo, Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Dieudonne Dirole)

A health worker in protective gear walks at an Ebola treatment centre in Bunia, Congo, Monday, Aug. 10, 2026. (AP Photo/Dieudonne Dirole)

A health worker in protective gear looks on at an Ebola treatment centre in Bunia, Congo, Monday, Aug. 10, 2026. (AP Photo/Dieudonne Dirole)

A health worker in protective gear prepares to mop the floor at an ebola treatment centre in Bunia, Congo, Monday, Aug. 10, 2026. (AP Photo/Dieudonne Dirole)

Health workers in protective gear wave inside an Ebola treatment centre in Bunia, Congo, Monday, Aug. 10, 2026. (AP Photo/Dieudonne Dirole)