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The global startup ecosystem has always needed role models.
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Author | Amelie
Edit the | Juni
Image credit: Bonne Année
2023 has begun, and everyone hopes that in the new year, there will be more and better things happening. Looking back at 2022, the North American technology community is full of twists and turns, and it seems to be waiting for a revolutionary change.
Over the past year, we've seen the birth of many new technologies, and we've seen the rise of some traditional companies, along with the emergence of many new companies.
In this article, we will take stock of the latest trends in the tech world in 2022, dive into the application of new technologies and the prospects of emerging companies, and analyze the future development possibilities of some traditional companies.
In the "road of no return" of entrepreneurship, only innovative companies with a strong desire to seek change and break the situation, seek change and innovation, and think of progress will draw more strength in the difficult situation and win better development opportunities.
Time is speechless, mountains and rivers testify, those shining innovators in this year are the warriors who sounded the clarion call of this era.
01
IPO newcomers who rise to the challenge
In 2022, the US IPO market suffered a cold winter under the impact of tightening liquidity, and according to statistics, the size of fundraising so far this year was only $24 billion, the lowest level since 1990 and a sharp drop of 93% from 2021.
Source: Datawrapper
Of the 138 companies listed in 2022, the total cash value was $7.7 billion, down more than 94% from 2021.
Meanwhile, some of the high-profile IPO boom industries in early 2021 have not had a good time.
At the end of last year, Rivian Automotive, a new IPO company and highly sought-after electric vehicle startup written in the review article of the Silicon Rabbit Race, suffered a "Waterloo" this year, plummeting nearly 90% from its all-time high, and its performance was dismal; Food delivery giant Instacart's original 2022 listing plan was also temporarily stranded due to the volatile market environment, and its valuation was lowered from $39 billion to $13 billion; At the same time, payment giant Stripe, which was also preparing to go public in 2022, and Chime, the largest digital bank in the United States, have also lowered their valuations and postponed their listings.
However, there are also some enterprises that are facing difficulties in the economic downturn, and there are some potential dark horses that have been optimistic in the early stage.
Intel's self-driving company Mobileye
Among the few listed technology companies this year, Intel's self-driving company Mobileye successfully went public at the end of October, offering 41 million shares at an issue price of $21, raising a total of $861 million. At the offering price, Mobileye has a market capitalization of $16.7 billion.
Although Mobileye's valuation reached $50 billion before its listing in the first half of 2022, due to the sharp decline in the stock market caused by the Fed's continuous sharp interest rate hikes and the overall performance of this year's autonomous driving track, Mobileye's self-lowering listing is also an unexpected operation against the wind in the capital market.
Image source: Mashdigi
Some Wall Street analysts believe that Intel will spin off Mobileye and list at this time, one is to solve Intel's urgent need to encounter revenue difficulties; The second is to accelerate the development of Mobileye again with the power of capital before the large-scale application of autonomous driving.
But Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger explained: "This move is to break into the market for Mobileye." Autonomous vehicles are a strong growth area. We believe Mobileye should go public, which is the best way to maximize the company's potential. ”
Aleph Holding, Inc., the world's largest digital media partner.
Founded in 2020, Aleph Holding, Inc., headquartered in Miami, is the latest version of a company called IMS Internet Media Services, which is positioned to provide advertising distribution services to technology platforms in emerging countries, in July.
The company has commercial agreements with major digital platforms such as Twitter, Meta, Microsoft, Snapchat, TikTok, Spotify and Twitch, working with more than 12,900 local advertisers and reaching nearly 3 billion consumers in 77 different countries. and maximize their digital advertising potential. Become a key link at the heart of the global digital ecosystem by connecting the largest digital platforms with thousands of advertisers and billions of consumers in emerging and underserved countries.
Photo by Aleph Holding
In 2021, just one year after the company's founding, Aleph generated $168 million in revenue and $1 billion in total advertising sales in 2021. Also in this year, it received an exclusive $470 million investment from CVC Capital Partners. According to its founder, Gastón Taratuta, about 90 percent of Aleph's revenue comes from outside the United States.
Gene-editing biotechnology company Prime Medicine
In October, gene-editing biotech company Prime Medicine landed on NASDAQ, with Dr. David Liu and Dr. Andrew Anzalone as co-founders to officially operate the company in the summer of 2020. Prime Medicine officially debuted in July 2021 and announced that it had completed a $315 million round of financing, including a $115 million Series A round and a $200 million Series B round.
Prime Medicine is the third publicly traded biotech company that David Liu co-founded. Prime Medicine was founded on the technology mentioned by David Liu's team in a seminal paper published in Nature in 2019. In this paper, David Liu's team developed a next-generation gene-editing technology called Prime Editing.
To talk about the leader in the field of gene editing today, we have to mention David Liu. Born in California, he is a Broad Core Fellow, a professor at Harvard University, and a researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI).
Prime Editing, which in principle can repair about 90% of the 75,000 known pathogenic human genetic variants. Without the need for DNA double-strand breaks, higher accuracy, lower off-target, no need to rely on DNA templates, it can effectively achieve the free conversion of all 12 single bases, and can also effectively achieve accurate insertion and deletion of multiple bases.
Photo by Aleph Holding
The stagnation period in 2022 also provides a new start for the IPO market in 2023, and once market conditions improve, previously ambitious and high-profile companies such as Stripe, Databricks, Chime Financial, Discord, Reddit, Instacart, Plaid, etc., will definitely line up and join the listing team more quickly.
02
The unicorn continues to gallop against the wind
In the turmoil of 2022, the number of unicorn companies in the United States continues to grow.
According to the "2022 Mid-2022 Global Unicorn List" released by Hurun Report, the number of unicorn companies in the United States in 2022 is still ahead, reaching 625, nearly half of the total number of global unicorns, and China ranks second with 312.
Among them, financial technology is the main industry of global unicorns, followed by e-commerce, software services, health technology, artificial intelligence, etc., unicorn companies in the financial technology industry has the fastest growth in the number, followed by blockchain and enterprise services.
Fintech company TripActions
In December 2022, U.S. business travel unicorn and fintech company TripActions announced that it had raised $400 million in credit financing from institutions such as Goldman Sachs and Silicon Valley Bank. TripActions is currently valued at more than $10 billion, and the company said it will go public at a valuation of $12 billion in the second quarter of 2023.
Source: TravelDaily
Founded in California in 2015, TripActions provides businesses with a business travel booking service platform. TripActions analyzes the cost of flights, hotels, etc. for the trip to develop a rough fee rate, and if it spends less than this standard, the savings will be issued to the account of Lyft, Uber, Airbnb or Amazon in the form of a voucher card.
TripActions offers unique and innovative solutions for the business travel industry, giving travelers more choice and experience. The main thing is that the company not only allows employees to benefit from business travel, but also helps businesses save money. TripActions' main revenue comes from charging businesses about $25 in booking service fees after employees book a trip, as well as commissions on airline and hotel bookings. The TripActions platform saw a 400% increase in spending and revenue up 4.2x year-over-year in Q3 2022.
Deel, a remote office SaaS service provider
In May 2022, remote office SaaS service provider Deel received a $50 million Series E funding round with a valuation of $12 billion. Underpinning this valuation, Deel took only one and a half years to increase ARR (annual recurring revenue) from $1 million to $100 million, setting a new record for the fastest growth of a SaaS company and becoming the fastest growing unicorn company in the field ever.
Founded in 2019 by two young MIT graduates, Alex Bouaziz and Shuo Wang, the company helps companies hire anyone in any country and region in a compliant manner, thereby reducing cross-border and cross-regional recruitment costs and solving the problem of insufficient remote recruitment landing capabilities. The remote work and cross-border recruitment track, which is popular all over the world, is getting smoother.
Source: DEEL.
Deel designed its services to be simple and convenient, enabling companies to hire anyone, hire and onboard full-time or contractors in less than 5 minutes in any country and region in a compliant manner, without the need to have a local entity. With just one click, you can pay them in more than 120 currencies.
Its billing model is to charge a monthly fee for each employment contract according to the size of the company. It currently has 6,000 customers, including Coinbase, Dropbox, Shopify, and well-known companies such as Notion and Airtable.
HR "start-up" company Rippling
Also in May 2022, Rippling valued the company at $11.25 billion after announcing a $250 million funding round led by venture capital firms Bedrock and Kleiner Perkins.
Its founder, Parker Conrad, is a well-known serial entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. Before founding Rippling in 2016, he was CEO of Zenefits, an HR software company.
Source: Rippling
Rippling mainly provides human resources and information technology operation management services for enterprises, such as employee onboarding and payroll management. The advantage is that it not only automates payroll, but also automatically manages the software tools, applications, and workgroups that new hires need — all of which it keeps up to date when employees are promoted, reassigned, or left. While this type of administrative work is not the most attractive business, it can save countless hours of time for the company's executives, as well as the hassle and costs that come with it.
"Reverse e-commerce" online wholesale platform Faire
Faire, a wholesale platform serving small and medium-sized brick-and-mortar retailers and brands around the world, was only born in January 2017 in the YC Incubator in Silicon Valley, but at present, it can be said to be one of the fastest growing technology companies in Silicon Valley and even the world. It took two years to become a unicorn with a valuation of $1 billion, and after completing its latest round of $416 million in May 2022, the five-year-old company has reached a valuation of $12.6 billion.
"The future is local." With such a slogan, Faire began to make an "anti-e-commerce" e-commerce platform.
Source: Faire
Under the pressure of Amazon's e-commerce monopoly, the key to Faire's ability to attract consumers to its platform is that it can always allow us to stumble upon something new and unexpected. "If you want to buy a USB cable for your phone, yes, you should buy it on Amazon. However, if you want to buy a special gift for your loved one, you can find it in the store we serve. ”
In the past few years when the epidemic has hit the real economy, many small businesses have opened the market through the Faire platform and made profits, which has also made Faire's alternative e-commerce development path smoother than many online e-commerce.
Devoted Health, a health insurance service provider
Founded in 2017, Devoted Health has reached a valuation of $12.7 billion after completing the largest ever round of funding of $1.23 billion for a private company in Massachusetts. The founders are two brothers, Ed Park and Todd Park, both graduates of Harvard University.
Devoted Health's main business is MedicareAdvantage health insurance for seniors over the age of 65. It acts as both an insurance company and a healthcare provider, using its software and data analytics to provide better and more effective care.
Source: Devoted Health
"Every member should be treated like Mom (or Dad)", its business philosophy is to treat each member as if they were their own parent, hoping to provide them with better health management solutions, including personalized medical guidance, world-class technology to streamline the consultation process, and cooperation with top medical institutions to build medical networks.
03
Small but beautiful "start-ups", pioneers of new tracks
What is the startup failure rate?
There is a high probability that 90% of startups will fail. Shikhar Ghosh, a lecturer at Harvard Business School, put the number closer to 75 percent in a study. Overall, the "real" failure rate of startups is estimated to be between 75% and 90%.
Still, there are people who are willing to take on the challenge and use all their resources to realize their ideas and achieve their wishes.
By 2022, there will be more than 70,000 active startups in the United States, and more than 40,000 in Silicon Valley alone. If a company is just starting out and is looking for outside investment to realize its ideas, it is a "startup". But the reality is that 10% of startups fail in their first year, and 50% fail within 5 years. In order to stand out from the entrepreneurial army, in addition to financial support, a sound business model, unique industry ideas, technical support, and excellent operation teams are indispensable.
Only by taking advantage can it become what Forbes calls a "bigger company," meaning that a startup can become a "bigger company" when it has annual revenue of $200,000 or more and has at least 80 employees.
From the fast-growing, promising startups, we can see more than luck.
AI intelligent innovation, "start-ups" vertical deep plowing
As can be seen in the 2022 AI Panorama Report (State of AI Report) released by the University of Cambridge in the UK, many startups were born from giants such as DeepMind and OpenAI this year, respectively studying AI technologies in different fields, such as: AGI, AI security, biotechnology, financial technology, energy, development tools and robotics.
图源：State of AI Report
According to The Information, the 7-year-old OpenAI company is currently valued at close to $20 billion and is expected to generate $200 million in revenue in 2023. Although AI companies are well-known as "gold-swallowing beasts", the industry's promising prospects have attracted a group of aspiring people willing to devote themselves to it to start a career.
In 2022, Google's parent company Alphabet alone has at least 26 high-end AI talents leaving to start a business, and has launched its own startups, please see Silicon Rabbit Shuttle Door: 26 Google AI experts left: they went to the sea to start a business, and some raised 1.5 billion
In addition to Silicon Valley, AI startups in other startup cities are also in the limelight.
Mike Ruberry, principal engineer at lightning.ai New York-based AI platform provider, who jumped ship from Facebook in August, launched an application in September that streamlines the generation of synthetic data from computer vision machine learning models, which can be applied to logistics, inventory, warehouse management, retail and other fields. It has raised US$58.6 million since its inception, and just completed Series B financing in mid-2022;
Zowie, a startup also based in New York, is on its way to creating more powerful AI chatbots. The company's current AI chatbot can answer common questions without training, can be connected to all e-commerce and marketing platforms, promises to save two hours per customer service agent per day, and 70% of tickets will be automatically completed after 4 weeks;
TimeZest, a startup in Tampa, Florida, that provides hosting providers with scheduling automation integrated with Autotask and ConnectWise, with the goal of saving MSPs time and reducing various no-show situations. Their existing customers include F1 Solutions, Stratosphere Networks and Tech Experts, and will expand into larger markets in 2023.
AI Squared in Washington, D.C., is well received by technologists for its unique low-code, drag-and-drop model, which allows users to gain AI-generated insights from their web applications, skipping time-consuming development cycles. Since its inception in 2021, AI Squared has been valued at more than $50 million.
In the fintech industry, a rising star in the race against time
In the post-epidemic era, the use of technology to accelerate the improvement of public financial literacy has gradually been accepted by more and more people. Among the startups in this industry, educational games, wealth growth, and children's and youth education are particularly concerned.
In 2022, many startups will break through in their respective fields, racing against time in the free economy to seize a larger market among their peers:
Truebill, a personal finance app, announced a $45 million Series D funding round to help people stay on top of their personal finances.
Goalsetter announced a $15 million investment in its children's financial learning app, which allows it to further validate B2B business models.
Step, a financial services company that builds a mobile-based banking business for teenagers, announced a $100 million Series C funding round with more than 1.5 million users in less than six months on the market.
NOVO, A U.S. DIGITAL BANKING SERVICE PROVIDER, RECENTLY ANNOUNCED THE COMPLETION OF A $90 MILLION SERIES B FINANCING, WITH A POST-INVESTMENT VALUATION OF $700 MILLION. It offers free inquiry and debit card services through its mobile app, and the services it provides are also guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
In addition to these startups, in 2022, Forbes narrowed its list of the most innovative startups in the fintech space to 50, and a large group of crypto startups performed well among this year's newcomers.
For example, Alchemy, a blockchain infrastructure company established in 2017, whose main business is to provide blockchain development platform services for blockchain developers to improve user experience;
Chalnalysis, a crypto transaction monitoring development company that provides blockchain data and analytics to government agencies and private companies to prevent crime and money laundering, raised a whopping $537 million in its latest round;
Circle, a Boston-based fintech startup that provides digital currency storage and investment services, as the issuer of USDC stablecoins, has an issuance of $55 billion as of August 22, and the company is valued at $9 billion;
and OpenSea, a non-fungible token online trading marketplace headquartered in New York, which grew from a small entrepreneurial team of 5 people to the world's largest and most active integrated NFT trading platform in just 4 years.
The companies that will rise in 2022 are certainly much more than just those we have combed through.
The global startup ecosystem has always needed role models, not only individuals, but also companies. The country's economic lifeline needs more individuals and businesses to continue to rise with new role models, so that the entrepreneurial spirit of positive energy can continue to continue, so that more young people can draw strength and continue to set sail at full speed in 2023.
Reference source:
The 10 most anticipated IPOs in 2023. (Fastcompany)
Top 15 Emerging Technology Trends to watch in 2023 and beyond. (Security Boulevard)
Top 22 Startups to Watch in 2022. (UserGuiding)
Best Upcoming IPOs to Watch in 2023. (Wtop)
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