The 13 Sectors Startups Fall into

Startups come in all shapes and sizes, and as easy and as cheesy as that sounds, its true…sort of, not really?

I realized that most of the time when a person had an “ah ha! I’ve just thought of the next best business/app/website” moment, that it wasn’t particularly unique. But being the engineer that I was, I really wanted to begin quantifying and sorting through the startups that existed into certain bubbles and see how unique people’s ideas were, as well as seeing what really existed and what didn’t. For example, agriculture tech is so large that it encompasses sub categories/problems like helping farmers grow more crops, helping farmers better organize their crops, helping farmers become more independent from growing their crops, to helping farmers sell their crops faster, but in all honestly, how many startups solve each of those problems, and are they really doing a great job?

It was my frustration from a lack of understanding of these types of questions that began leading me towards this (still growing) project of mine to categorize startups by type/subtype. Before, to solve this problem, I took a bottom to top approach where I would look at individual startups and evaluate them, but I realized how inefficient that was. And thats why I decided to go from the opposite direction of taking a top down approach and so far here is how I categorized the startups so far.

And because this is a still growing list, if you have any disagreements with my categories, just comment below why you think that. If you think I’m missing a category, just give an example of a startup in that category and I will either explain why I don’t agree with you or I will add it into the list.

Below is the list of the 13 Startup Categories all startups fall into, as well as a short description, and a couple of examples in each category:

1. Healthcare: These startups aim to resolve problems that are commonly found in the medical services which include, hospitals, insurance, doctors, and patient relations. A few healthcare startups include: FlatIron, AiCure
2. Agriculture: These startups aim to resolve problems regarding crop generation, procurement, and distribution, as well as convenience issues farmers may have. A few agriculture startups include: Teralytic, Farmlead
3. Biotech: These startups aim to help problems inundating the drug discovery field, and tend to fall in the “human therapeutics” category. It aims to resolve issues in helping humans recover from ailments using a more bio based approach. A few biotech startups include: Freenome, Apostle
4. Clean Tech: These startups aim to make the world a more environmentally clean place. This means the transition from the wasteful practices many companies currently use to more cleaner alternatives. These can range from the purification of water, to storing energy, to making certain products more recyclable. A few clean tech startups include: Airthium, Tesla
5. Food/drinks: These startups aim to create certain food or drink products or processes to help in the food/drink creation. A few food/drinks startups include: Soylent, 5 hour energy
6. Transportation: These startups aim to help people go from location A to B in as fast, cheap and most convenient way possible. Transportation startups also include the delivery of physical goods from place A to B. A few transportation startups include: Uber/Lyft, SpaceX
7. Productivity: These startups aim to help connect/inform people as well as helping people minimize the inefficiencies in their career/self development oriented life. These startups can range from being a business to customer, or business to business solution. A few productivity startups include: Google, Facebook, Slack, Trello
8. Manufacturing: These startups aim to resolve issues in the manufacturing industries. They also desire to help modulate (make more modular) processes, as well as make them cheaper. Also included in this category are startups that create physical gadgets for customer use. A few manufacturing startups include: Form Labs (3D printing), Nest (home Internet of Technology), Nvidia
9. Financial Tech: These startups aim to resolve the financial issues people/businesses have. These companies can range from issues regarding savings, spending, investing, and general financial literacy. Startups in this field include: Mint, Robinhood
10. Education: These startups aim to help children learn and perform better academically. They do so with the aim of not only helping the child perform better, but to actually learn better. Aside from student oriented tech, education tech also include help streamlining lesson planning/evaluation for teachers and schools. Startups in this field include: Mindprint Learning, Fresh Grade
11. Advertising: These startups aim to help people create better advertising, advertising techniques, as well as data analytics on how well previous ads did. A few advertising startups include: Tapad, Adroll
12. Security: These startups aim to help provide better security for customers ranging in businesses, government, and every day people. Security is provided for things ranging from online personal information and hacking protection to name a couple. Security startups include: Block Armour, Armis
13. Entertainment: These startups aim to help provide novel means of entertainment to every day consumer customers. They also aim to provide convenience in getting access to entertainment. Entertainments startups include: Netflix, Moviepass

With this list still being in the evolutionary phase, you can come by periodically to see what has been updated.

You can also check out the map visually here: https://tacosushi.github.io/

While this is one way of organizing startups into categories, there were a couple of other ways I could have chosen. The most common counter example would have been: Software, Hardware, and Mobile. But as categorizing startups by that didn’t really seem to give any useful information to people on what the goal of the startup was, I decided that that category was insufficient and kind of lazy.

Anyways, comment below what you guys think!