Karsten Strauss writes: We looked at 35 promising companies and subjected them to our own grading formula, keeping in mind the track records and skills of the founding teams, and chose 25 startups we think have billion-dollar valuations in their futures
What we learned was that technology is transforming industries the world over and investors are backing young companies that promise to change the face of e-commerce, food tech, financial services, and the enterprise.
We took a look at some of the trends we’re seeing in the high-value startup space. What industries are the startups dismantling? Why are venture-backed companies are taking longer to go public, how dpes that affects valuations, and what venture capitalists are doing in response.
Among some of the top startups we’re taking a closer look at is Tanium, the product of father and son cofounders, became the latest $1 billion startup at the end of March (S David and Orion Hindawi have now received over $140 million from Andreessen Horowitz, the VC firm’s biggest single bet ever, to reinvent cyber security for massive corporations. FORBES’ reporter Brian Solomon took a look at how Tanium’s back-end architecture lets clients like Visa, Amazon, Best Buy and the U.S. Department of Defense view and control every one of their hundreds of thousands of networked computing devices in seconds.
Docker also made the winners circle. In just two years, Docker has become one of the most popular open-source projects in tech, its app containers downloaded more than 300 million times. Docker is an open platform for developers and sytems admininstrators to build, ship, and run distributed applications, whether on laptops, data center VMs, or the cloud. The big enterprise players are lining up to partner with it from IBM to Microsoft and VMware. And it’s just raised $95 million at valuation just under $1 billion from top investors in venture as well as Coatue and Goldman Sachs.
Personal loan startup, Avant (formerly AvantCredit), has been racking up customers by taking the headache out of getting a quick handout. Loan Star) Revenue grew 971% to $75 million in 2014, and CEO Al Goldstein says Avant can more than triple that this year as it surpasses its 200,000th customer. Its valuation so far? We estimate $875 million.
Cyber security, an open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications, whether on laptops, data center VMs, or the cloud and a personal loan business.