Chips designed in Silicon Valley power the ICT industry around the world, enabling big corporations and startups alike to deliver innovative products and services. Some of these startups are on their way to become “unicorns”, companies that will eventually be valued at $1B or more. An interesting point is finding out which of these future unicorns will find their grazing prairies in Silicon Valley or in other spots within the San Francisco Bay Area, thus enriching the same tech-intensive and capital-intensive environment where many enabling semiconductor technologies come from. Let’s take a quick look at twenty-two of these Bay Area startups, with the help of a list compiled by market research firm CB Insights in collaboration with The New York Times. The original full list includes fifty companies around the world, and a first significant data is that the Bay Area alone makes up almost half of this group of thriving startups.
Fintech
Fintech (financial technology) is the largest category here, with five companies. Blend (San Francisco) is a digital lending platform for mortgages and consumer banking. Carta (San Francisco) helps companies and investors manage equity and ownership, on aspects such as cap tables, valuations, portfolio investments, and equity plans. Earnin (Palo Alto) is a community-supported platform mostly targeted at helping people with services such as protection from bank overdrafts, cash back rewards, immediate access to weekly or monthly salary, negotiation of medical bills. Marqeta (Oakland) offers an open API for payment card issuing, that can be used by companies to build their own payment solutions. Upgrade (San Francisco) is an online lending platform that combines personal loans with free credit monitoring.
