The world's population is rising quickly, particularly the urban middle class in Asia, Africa, and South America. At the same time, infrastructure in many developed nations is in dire need of both modernization and revitalization. According to the Global Infrastructure Hub, an initiative created by the G20, global infrastructure spending needs to reach $88 trillion from 2018 to 2040 to meet the needs of a growing -- and more modern -- world.

And one small company, NV5 Global Inc. (NASDAQ: NVEE), is making headway to become a much bigger player in global infrastructure. Since it went public in 2013, its sales have grown an incredible 478%, helping send its stock price up nearly tenfold.

Global transportation, energy, and communications networks will see tens of trillions of dollars invested in coming decades. Image source: Getty Images.

Yet even with these impressive returns, NV5 remains a small company. Its total revenues over the past 12 months are only $384 million, and its market capitalization is just shy of $1 billion. In infrastructure terms, this is a small fish in a vast ocean, and management has used that small size as a big growth advantage. Furthermore, I expect that advantage should continue to pay off for investors for many years to come.

What NV5 does

Infrastructure isn't a fast-growth industry, but it is absolutely immense, has many different parts, and can be incredibly lucrative for companies that prove very good at their specific disciplines. For NV5, that's engineering and consulting for five different markets, which it categorizes as construction quality assurance, infrastructure, energy, program management, and environmental.

NV5 has around 2,000 employees working from one of 100 global locations. The majority of its employees are highly skilled professionals, including engineers, architects, project managers, surveyors, and construction professionals. While it has some notable scale, it's much smaller than industry giants like Jacobs Engineering (NYSE: JEC), with more than 400 offices and nearly 80,000 employees, or McDermott International (NYSE: MDR), which has more than 40,000 employees in 54 countries.

NVEE Revenue (TTM) data by YCharts.

What makes NV5 an appealing investment

While Jacobs and McDermott are far bigger companies, NV5 is big enough that its scale helps it win more complex and bigger projects than smaller engineering firms, but it's still small enough to drive substantial growth by acquiring many of those smaller firms.

According to industry data, there are more than 144,000 engineering firms in the U.S. alone, with the vast majority of those being small firms with a single office or only a few locations. And since going public, NV5 has acquired more than 30 of these smaller firms, quickly integrating them into its operations and systems in order to improve the returns they could generate as stand-alone entities.