The hotel industry has undergone major shifts in the last decade thanks to tech, due to the rise of online travel reservation portals and distributed hospitality platforms, like HomeAway and AirBnB.
Investing in startups is like bird-watching, or at least that's the quote from legendary venture capitalist Mike Moritz.
Over the past two weeks, I have listened to 146 startups pitch in rapid-fire succession at demo days for Y Combinator and 500 Startups.
Of those startups, probably five or six will emerge as the next Airbnb, Dropbox, or Reddit. The founders of the next billion-dollar startup have probably run through their pitch deck in front of me.
The rest of the flock will disappear from the sky, selling to a bigger company, going adrift, or maybe shutting down entirely.
The Boston tech industry is entering a new age of enterprise IT. Long known for its companies in data storage, networking, and business software, the local sector is seeing a boom in startups that have a new spin on these traditional fields.
One of them is ClearSky Data, a roughly two-year-old effort from founders Ellen Rubin and Laz Vekiarides (pictured) that is finally talking today about what it’s building. Rubin, the company’s CEO, previously worked at Netezza and co-founded CloudSwitch, while Vekiarides was a veteran of EqualLogic. All of those companies were eventually acquired for big money—by IBM, Verizon, and Dell, respectively.
Hardware was the clear-cut theme of Day 1, but Demo Day 2 of Y Combinator’s Summer 2015 was a bit more… eclectic. Moving services! Streaming services! Hotel booking, augmented reality, esports! There was a little something for everybody today.
Want to see every startup that pitched today? Here’s the full roundup.
There are estimated to be over 13 million scientists globally, almost all of whom have to enter the results of their work manually, often by hand in a notebook. Sure, much of it gets entered into computers. But time is wasted managing data, and productivity suffers. The implications are pretty bad given the year we live in. Over 50% of R&D time is wasted, there’s significant material loss, and vital life-saving drugs take much longer than they should to get to market. Currently, it costs $2B to discover a new medicine.
The used car e-commerce space has caught the attention of prominent investors including Sequoia Capital, KKR, Tiger Global Management, Digital Sky Technologies, and Baidu.
Hoping to make the used car buying and selling experience more seamless and reliable, investors are putting major dollars behind startups providing online transaction platforms for used cars both in the US and abroad. The rise in funding comes despite the presence of huge incumbents in the multibillion dollar market including CarMax (NYSE: KMX, Mkt Cap: $13.3B) and AutoNation (NYSE: AN, Mkt Cap: $7B).
The home is a major hub for consumer technology startups offering everything from on-demand painters to smart washing machines.
Investors are pouring money into startups that are changing consumers’ home lives. While some startups are providing services that help with household chores, others are trying to transform your home itself by making it smarter. We used CB Insights data to identify 84 funded private companies that are making households more efficient and convenient.
The crew that turned Netezza into a $1.7 billion big data success story is back with Cazena, a Waltham, MA-based startup its founders say can bring big data to the cloud.
Cazena announced Wednesday that it has raised a $20 million Series B round led by Formation 8, with prior investors Andreessen Horowitz and North Bridge Venture Partners also joining in. That brings the total raised by Cazena to $28 million.
