Companies in San Jose: 50,322 businesses and the 20 headquarters that reported $1.58 trillion

This page is for anyone trying to get a grip on the companies in San Jose and the rest of Silicon Valley's southern half: job seekers, founders looking for partners, suppliers and B2B sellers deciding whether to chase the giants or the thousands of smaller firms around them. It covers the biggest headquarters, the full count of businesses by sector and size, where the big workplaces are, and how to check a California company.

The biggest companies headquartered around San Jose

Ranked by revenue in each company's latest annual report on Form 10-K, among SEC-registered listed companies whose 10-K cover gives a principal executive office in Santa Clara or San Benito County:

Together they reported $1.58 trillion. Several fiscal years have just turned over, so this table uses the newest 10-K in each case: Cisco's year to July 2026 ($63.33 billion), Super Micro's to June 2026 ($39.06 billion, up from $21.97 billion) and Sandisk's to July 2026 ($20.25 billion, up from $7.36 billion) are the latest filings, not the prior year's. Intuitive Surgical ($10.06 billion), Arista Networks ($9.01 billion), Sanmina ($8.13 billion), Synopsys ($7.05 billion) and Agilent ($6.95 billion) come next. Meta, in Menlo Park, is in San Mateo County and outside this metro.

Chips and storage dominate the second tier: NVIDIA, Broadcom, Intel, AMD, Applied Materials, Sandisk, KLA and Western Digital reported $442.43 billion between them. Yet CBP counts only 255 semiconductor and electronic component manufacturing establishments in the metro, with 14,669 employees, so most of these companies' local staff work in design, software, sales and management rather than on factory floors.

How many businesses are in San Jose

The Census Bureau's County Business Patterns (CBP) for the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA Metro Area (CBSA 41940), all sectors, 2023:

That's 42,566 establishments with 1 to 19 employees (84.6%), 6,217 with 20 to 99 and 1,539 with 100 or more. The metro has about as many establishments as Nashville or San Antonio, but 113 with 1,000 or more employees against their 71 and 70. CBP treats each location with paid employees as an establishment, leaves out the self-employed and government, and measures employment in the mid-March 2023 pay period.

What Silicon Valley businesses do

Average pay is our calculation from CBP payroll, which counts all compensation, including bonuses, on the same basis as taxable Medicare wages on IRS Form 941, so stock pay taxed as wages is included and the tech averages run very high. Information employs more people than any other sector, at 1,913 establishments, and 206 head offices average 398 employees each. Even construction pays $102,925 on average.

Large employers

We couldn't open a ranked local employer list: the City of San Jose's and Santa Clara County's websites and the state Employment Development Department's labor market site turned away our automated checks, so we don't name employers here. CBP shows where the big workplaces are instead. Of the 113 establishments with 1,000 or more employees, 29 are in information, 20 in professional services, 16 in manufacturing, 14 in wholesale trade, 13 in health care and 8 are corporate head offices. Headcounts in the 10-Ks above are worldwide, so don't read them as local employment.

How to check a California company

For a private startup, bizfile tells you that the entity exists and is active; the 10-K-level detail you get for public companies simply doesn't exist, so ask for references and check who the investors are.

Prospecting Silicon Valley's mid-size software companies

The giants buy through procurement teams that are hard to reach. The mid-size software firms are where most sellers start.

Illustrative example. The company, prices and results are fictional; the counts are from CBP 2023.

Guadalupe Systems (guadalupesys.example) sells cloud cost monitoring to engineering teams.

• Software publisher establishments (NAICS 5112) with 20 to 249 employees: 65 + 39 + 42 = 146.
• It assumes 60% run mainly on public cloud with no cost tooling in place: about 88.
• Winning 9 in the first year at $48,000 a year each is $432,000.

The buyer is the head of platform engineering or the CFO, and the trigger is a cloud bill that grows faster than revenue, often visible after a funding round or a price change from a provider. Finding which of the 146 are growing their infrastructure, and who owns the bill, is the research Bebop does for each account.

Subject: [Company]'s cloud bill this quarter

Hi [first name],

At software companies your size, cloud spend usually grows faster than headcount, and nobody owns the line until finance asks why.

We show each team what it's spending by service and by feature, with alerts before a runaway job costs a week of budget. Could I run a free report on last month's bill so you can see where it goes?

[Your name], Guadalupe Systems

Next step: go deeper on the region's tech firms with tech companies in San Jose.