The Fast Growth 150: Riding The AI Wave To Success

Powered by the surging demand for AI tech and services, some channel companies have recorded double- and even triple-digit growth over the last two years. The CRN Fast Growth 150 puts the spotlight on some of the most successful solution providers in the AI era.

The IT industry has undergone a seismic shift in the nearly four years since OpenAI launched its free preview of ChatGPT in late 2022. While the first years of AI were marked by experimentation and early development, the real impact of AI on the industry—and especially the channel—has come over the last couple of years as a wave of AI technology, including applications and agents, has flowed from IT vendors into the market.

The AI wave has created both opportunities and challenges for the channel. Opportunities to bring a whole new class of transformative IT to their customers. And challenges in that solution providers, VARs, systems integrators and other channel companies have had to pivot on multiple fronts: Working with new vendors, changing their business models, learning new skills, and developing new services, in order to help clients get real value out of AI.

All this has spurred rapid growth for the solution providers that have successfully made the AI transformation. Many solution providers are not just succeeding today but thriving, recording double-digit and even triple-digit growth rates, as evidenced by the 2026 CRN Fast Growth 150.

The annual CRN Fast Growth 150 recognizes solution providers with annual sales of at least $1 million by their average two-year growth rate (this year for 2023 to 2025).

The 2026 list includes some of the channel’s biggest players including Carahsoft Technology (No. 63), Computacenter (No. 74), EPAM Systems (No. 120), SHI International (No. 129), CGI Group (No. 132), Wipro Technologies (No. 143) and Cognizant (No. 149).

This year’s list also includes other well-known names in the channel such as AHEAD (No. 25), DoiT (No. 26), Winslow Technology Group (No. 33), Blackwood (No. 49), Thrive (No. 58), BlackHawk Data (No. 59), NWN (No. 68), Blue Mantis (No. 72), EVOTEK (No. 105), Future Tech (No. 112), and ThunderCat Technology (No. 138).

Topping this year’s Fast Growth 150 list is Troubadour Technology, a Lowell, Mass.-based IT solutions provider founded in 2023 by industry veterans James Czarnecki and Mark Arsenault. Troubadour, which recorded nearly 700 percent two-year growth, describes itself as focused on “impact technology,” helping organizations align technology investments with business goals.

Troubadour delivers networking, data center, and cybersecurity solutions and services with a focus on modern infrastructure design, hybrid connectivity, cloud-managed networking and AI-driven operations. Despite its relatively young age, the company has achieved high-level partner certifications and status levels with a number of leading IT vendors including HPE, Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks and Extreme Networks.

Other solution providers on this year’s list have grown thanks to a number of factors including expanding their product and services offerings, acquisitions and mergers, or a combination.

Blue Mantis, No. 72 on the list with a 35.7 percent growth rate, has been aggressively expanding its technology and service offerings, including offering full-scale managed security services in September 2025 with the launch of its Mantis Protect Service. One month later the company debuted its AI Readiness and Enablement services portfolio to assist clients with AI enablement in such areas as operational deployment, data governance, and security.

“AI is moving faster than most organizations can keep up with, and midmarket companies are feeling it the most,” CEO Josh Dinneen told CRN in an interview. “They’ve been using AI through SaaS platforms like Salesforce and ServiceNow often without realizing it, but now they’re asking, ‘How do we take control of this and use it strategically?’”

But Blue Mantis, looking beyond organic growth, has also acquired a number of companies in recent years as part of its “strategic scaling” strategy. CEO Dinneen described the company’s May 2025 acquisition of North Shore Data Services, for example, as a move to “deepen our networking talent bench.”

At the 2025 XChange Best of Breed conference (put on by CRN parent The Channel Company) in October, Evotek CEO Cesar Enciso attributed his company’s 22 percent growth to several factors including partnering with early-stage startups—such as cloud security company Wiz—to bring “disruptive technology” to the solution provider’s clients. He also cited the approach taken by Evotek that everything starts with security.

Acquisitions A Key Growth Driver

While organic growth is critical for long-term success for solution providers, aggressive acquisition strategies often fuel much of the growth of the fastest growing companies on this list. Solution providers pursue acquisitions to expand geographically, add to their technology and service portfolios, and otherwise grow to accelerate market momentum.

Caylent, No. 12 on this year’s list, certainly owes at least some of its 123.1 percent growth rate to its October 2025 merger with fellow Amazon Web Services partner Trek10, creating a new heavyweight services provider in the AWS space.

But it’s not just the acquisitions that led to Caylent’s growth. In November, CTO Randall Hunt told CRN that Caylent’s unique AI portfolio and the company’s booming business migrating VMware customers to the cloud were major drivers of the company’s success.

Caylent’s momentum has continued into this year with its April acquisition of Amazon Connect consultant Pronetx, the launch of a dedicated Anthropic Claude business unit, and the appointment of Valerie Henderson as the company’s new CEO.

“The way we think about AI is not as something separate—where there’s an AI team or you’re an AI engineer—the entire Caylent business needs to be fueled by our AI platform,” Henderson told CRN in a March interview. Later on, in discussing the company’s goals, she said: “From a growth trajectory, we always expect ourselves to be growing at the same pace, if not higher, than AWS.”

DoiT, No. 26 on this year’s Fast Growth list with a 74.6 percent growth rate, also has been active on the acquisition front in recent years. In January 2025 DoiT bought software startup LiveDiagrams to boost its FinOps and cloud optimization offerings. And in October 2025 the company acquired cloud security tech developer CloudWize. (The company’s acquisition spree has continued into 2026 with the company’s purchases of Select, a developer of automated cost management and optimization technology, and AI FinOps startup Attribute.)