About GrowFL Florida Companies to Watch

The GrowFL Florida Companies to Watch award, developed by the Edward Lowe Foundation, honors high-performance, second-stage companies headquartered in Florida. Since 2011, we have celebrated 750 companies for their innovative strategies, strong leadership, and significant economic impact. This program is a unique opportunity to recognize businesses that have moved beyond the startup phase and are demonstrably worth watching as they scale toward Stage 3 and 4 status. Selection is based on steady growth in revenue and headcount, as well as excellence in innovation, corporate culture, and community leadership.

2026 Eligibility Requirements

To qualify for the 2026 award cycle, your company must meet the following criteria for the year ending December 31, 2025:

• Entity Status: Must be a privately held, commercial enterprise headquartered in Florida (no nonprofits, subsidiaries, or publicly traded firms).

• W-2 Headcount: Employ between 6 and 150 full-time equivalent (FTE) W-2 employees, including the owner.

• Financial Scale: Have between $750,000 and $100 million in annual revenue or working capital from investors/grants.

• Previous Status: Must not have won this specific award in a previous year.

• Growth Intent: Demonstrate a clear capacity for future growth through evidence of sustainable competitive advantage and strong leadership.

Important Application Instructions

Before you begin, we recommend reviewing our Example Application to familiarize yourself with the required data and narrative questions. To avoid any potential technical issues, we suggest drafting your essay responses in a separate document and pasting them into the application once you are ready to submit.

Pro-Tip for Essay Responses: To ensure your formatting remains clean and consistent, we recommend drafting your responses in a separate document first. However, please avoid copying directly from Microsoft Word into Judgify, as hidden formatting code can cause display errors or cut off your text. Instead, first paste your text from Word into a plain text editor, such as Notepad (Windows) or TextEdit (Mac, set to Plain Text mode). Copy the text again from that program before pasting it into the application. This simple step ensures your responses appear exactly as you intended for the judges.

You can view the 15th Annual GrowFL Florida Companies to Watch Honorees here.

PLEASE NOTE: This application does not automatically save your progress. We strongly recommend saving your work frequently using the button at the bottom of the page to avoid losing any information. If you encounter errors during submission, please verify that all required fields have been completed according to the formatting instructions.