Investors may be cooling on early stage tech startups but that there are still some hot young companies in the sector, if you know where to look.
The folks at startup research company Mattermark did that for their subscribers last week, ranking 582 Bay Area companies that have raised $10 million or less. The growth scores of these 10 rose to the top, showing strong early traction.
In addition to funding, factors taken into consideration included employment growth, increases in social media and website traffic and inbound links to the companies. The momentum of more than half of the top 10 has slowed, according to Mattermark.
It is hard to fathom that back in 2009 VCs were far from convinced that Airbnb was ever going to be a big enough business to pump venture into. Fast forward to 2015 and businesses are being created that effectively sit on top of Airbnb, meaning that the then tenacious startup is now arguably an ecosystem in its own right.
London-based Hostmaker is one such business. It describes itself as an Airbnb hospitality management service, providing Airbnb hosts with housekeepers and concierge, as well as supporting them with things like pricing and marketing, including the listing of the property and providing professional photography.
The newest product from Quietyme, a startup based in Neshkoro, WI, is a white cube with a different pattern on each of its six sides.
That description may conjure up an image of dice, which of course give games an element of randomness. But Quietyme’s CareCube is designed to reduce uncertainty: patients in hospitals can use it to request specific services, rather that pushing a generic call button.
“When you press the call button, nurses don’t know if you’re dying or want a glass of water,” says Quietyme founder and CEO John Bialk. CareCube was designed to save nurses up to six hours a week, he says.
In the wake of digitization, European start-ups have become far more visible of late. This is due in part to the 86% increase in finance that they have achieved over the first six months of 2015 compared to the same period in 2014. Equally, it may be a result of the spectacular exits they have achieved or perhaps it is because the new heroes of the digital economy are also the new icons of the business world. Entrepreneurship is busy redefining itself in "old" Europe. Today, the practice of founding companies, achieving fast growth and selling up after a few years has become an accepted model. Moreover, the foundations of today's generation of start-ups have been built on much firmer ground than in the 2000s.
Bracket Computing, a startup with software that companies can use to securely run their applications and store data on public cloud infrastructure, is announcing today a $46.4 million round of funding. New investors Fidelity Management and Research Co. and Goldman Sachs are participating in the round.
Bracket pushes Computing Cell technology with a lightweight hypervisor dubbed a Metavisor. that’s meant to encrypt corporate data on clouds and unify management of virtual computing resources for applications on multiple clouds. Companies can use their existing IT policies with the Computing Cell.
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There’s been a lot of buzz covering the story of Quirky failing this summer (and filing for bankruptcy this week). It usually reads something like “venture backed company burns through mountain of cash without real business” or some other such garbage. I’ve found myself thinking a lot about the fundamental reasons why Quirky failed and think it’s a prescriptive story for hardware founders.
For years, the Department of Health and Human Services has been taking cues from the private sector's startup culture, encouraging employees to work on independent technology ideas.
On Thursday, HHS held a demo day for a few teams that joined its summer accelerator program, meant to build out technology ideas that could eventually be implemented in HHS. Here were a few ideas presented at the event:
Clover Health, an insurance startup based out of San Francisco, is hoping that with its data-driven approach it can rebuild healthcare for senior citizens from the ground up.
It wants that by tracking all the inputs of a person’s medical history from insurance claims and determining who the highest-risk patients are. Clover health then works with those patients to help them become healthier and improve overall clinical outcomes. To pull that off, the company has raised $100 million in an equity round led by First Round Capital and debt.
