Unicorns next door: high-momentum Bay Area startups

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.

CRM-related platforms

Three startups very different from each other are grouped here for the purpose of this article, the main commonality among them being the goal of helping companies interact with customers. Amplitude (San Francisco) provides a “product intelligence” platform tracking user actions to help digital product and growth teams instantly understand user behavior, build engaging experiences, and grow their business. Front (San Francisco) provides a platform for centralizing all conversations in a company – emails, live chat, social media, and SMS – helping to coordinate responses and message tracking. Segment (San Francisco) is a platform for collecting customer data from various sources – website, mobile app, servers etc. – and making them accessible to all teams within a company.

Company logos: Amplitude, Front, Segment

IT products and services

Again, three companies performing very different IT-related activities are grouped here for the purpose of this article. Datrium (Sunnyvale) sets out to simplify data lifecycle management by unifying multiple cloud environments in a single service platform. This includes disaster recovery and recovery from ransomware attacks. Domino Data Lab (San Francisco) is a data science platform that enables teams to rapidly develop and deploy models, by automating DevOps practices and work tracking. Mapbox (San Francisco) is a location data platform for mobile and web applications, providing building blocks to add location features like maps, search, and navigation.

Cybersecurity

Two startups from the list specialize in cybersecurity solutions. Expanse (San Francisco) is an enterprise software company providing what they call “Internet Operations Management” services. That includes mapping an organization’s “attack surface”, finding exposures and monitoring the Internet for risks and policy violations in real time. HackerOne (San Francisco) is a vulnerability management and “bug bounty” platform. The company partners with the global hacker community to surface the most relevant security issues of its customers before they can be exploited by criminals.

Retail tech

Retail technology is represented here by two companies. Faire (San Francisco) is an online wholesale marketplace that helps retailers find and test new products to carry in their stores, allowing them to return those products for free if unhappy. Product categories include apparel, beauty, stationery, accessories etc. Standard Cognition (San Francisco) provides autonomous checkout solutions for brick & mortar retailers. After starting the purchase process with an app on their smartphones, customers can pick the items they want and just walk out. No barcode scanning, no waiting in line. The solution is based on overhead cameras and AI-powered computer vision, and doesn’t use facial recognition. The company runs a demo shop in San Francisco, on Market Street.

Company logos: Faire, Standard Cognition

Autonomous driving

More closely related to hardware applications are two startups in the autonomous driving market. DeepMap (Palo Alto) delivers a scalable and maintainable high-definition mapping service for autonomous driving, offering centimeter-level real-time localization for various road types and driving conditions. Embark Trucks (San Francisco) develops self-driving trucking technology. According to the company’s website, Embark’s technology is already moving freight for five Fortune 500 companies in the southwest U.S.

Image credit: Deepmap

More startups

Each of these five more high-momentum startups belongs to a different application area. Alto Pharmacy (San Francisco) is on a mission to offer low price pharmaceuticals with same-day, free delivery, and real-time coordination with doctors and insurance companies. Benchling (San Francisco) provides an innovative software platform for biotechnology R&D. Checkr (San Francisco) checks people’s background to help candidates facing employment struggles as a result of a prior criminal record. At the same time, the company helps employer to expand their candidate pools by including these people. Farmers Business Network (San Carlos) is an online farmer community enabling members to share data about every aspect of farming – from seeds to chemical products – and providing them yield benchmarking, product performance analysis etc. Sonder (San Francisco) is a short-term rental booking platform for quality apartments and houses in quality neighborhoods around the world.

Company logos. Top right: Benchling

The ecosystem

The vast majority of the above-mentioned startups (seventeen out of twenty-two) are based in the city of San Francisco, and just five in other spots of the Bay Area. The role of San Francisco as an IT-hub (obviously owing to the presence of heavyweights such as Salesforce, too) complements Silicon Valley proper in an ecosystem where these two spots are connected by a number of ties: not just technology, but also venture capital (with many VC firms based in Menlo Park) and startup incubators. As for the latter point, at least seven of the above-mentioned startups (Amplitude, Benchling, Checkr, Embark, Faire, Front and Segment) have received seed funding from Y Combinator, a “seed accelerator” based in Mountain View.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 28th, 2020 at 10:03 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.