What are the most interesting companies you’ve seen recently?
When you work in startups, every career transition is an opportunity to put your VC hat on and find for the next great company. After talking to a lot of people this Spring, here are a couple that stood out.
Intercom: This time last year, Slack was widely recognized as as the fastest rising startup, and by all accounts it continues to grow at an incredible clip. This year it feels like Intercom has arrived on the scene. The company got it’s start with in-app messaging aka instant chat. It turns out this approach is a much better customer experience compared to logging a case or digging through FAQs.
Intercom’s customer messaging platform has grown over time to include website chat, lead tracking, team inbox, on-boarding emails, push notifications, knowledge base and help desk. For many companies this provides much of the value you’d otherwise get from implementing a CRM or Marketing Automation platform, and it’s a fraction of the cost. Intercom recently passed the 100,000 monthly active user mark and they have 17,000 companies paying for the product. It’s a great example of a freemium model and great product design driving explosive growth.
ResearchGate: In terms of finding a tech company with a strong sense of purpose, this is one that caught my eye. The simplest way to describe them is LinkedIn for the scientific community. They’ve stitched together all the published scientific research providing a comprehensive view into what people are working on and where their research has been sited. Imagine LinkedIn, but the database starts full.
When an academic, corporate, or health researcher logins everything they’ve published is already been linked. They verify that it’s been linked correctly and maybe add things they’re working on that have not yet been published. This lets other scientists search for projects, avoid duplication of efforts, and collaborate with other researchers more effectively. It’s easy to see how this will accelerate the pace of innovation and the efficiency of research dollars at a global scale. That’s pretty cool. There’s a reason Bill Gates, Accel, Benchmark, Founder Fund and Ashton Kutcher are investors.
Flexport: It is awesome to see software companies transform traditional paper based processes that are fraught with inefficiencies. In the world of import export and global logistics, no one company is big enough to move product from origin to destination, so there are multiple handoffs between different companies. Today much of this communication is managed by phone, paper, and fax because that’s the lowest common denominator. Flexport aims to optimize the global trade network by positioning itself as the Uber of freight shipping. This Fast Company video with Ryan Peterson their CEO does a great job of telling their story.
DroneDeploy: While DJI has emerged as the dominant player when it comes to drone hardware, there’s a parallel race to build software for drones that facilitate new commercial applications. For example if you’re an insurance adjustor, a general contractor, or a farmer, you can now download an app for your phone that lets you plot the area you want to inspect. The software then builds the optimal flight path, captures the images, creates a 3D model, and analyzes the information.
You might want to use AI to confirm everyone on the job site is wearing their hardhat or count the number of orange trees. Vendors like DroneDeploy are also building the connectors back into the business systems so this data shows up on your reports and dashboards.
Seerene — There’s a popular thesis that every company is a software company. Whether you’re a bank, a healthcare provider, or a car manufacturer, software is now your most important asset. Everywhere you look it disrupting traditional players (Tesla’s market cap now exceeds that of Ford and GM), and its creating new market leaders. While companies have performance management systems in place for financial metrics and sales metrics, CIOs can’t easily access the same insights into their development efforts.
Seerene is really the first of it’s kind code+people management platform aimed at helping CIOs manage their codebase and engineering capacity. It lets them see across thousands of projects to understand timelines, effort, costs, and risks. In many ways it’s much like sales automation. There are parallels to managing territories, forecasting accurately, spotting risk to the business, and increasing rep productivity.
What’s amazing is that Intercom, Research Gate, Flexport, DroneDeploy, and Seerene are just the tip of the iceberg. We live in an exciting time with so many innovative companies springing up. If you’ve got questions or have another company that has caught your eye, post a comment below.
