A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship includes all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that do not intend to go public, startups are new businesses that intend to grow large beyond the solo founder. At the beginning, startups face high uncertainty and have high rates of failure, but a minority of them do go on to become successful and influential.
Sequoia Capital is an American venture capital firm headquartered in Menlo Park, California which specializes in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. As of 2022, the firm had approximately US$85 billion in assets under management.
Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, and application development.
TechCrunch is an American global online newspaper focusing on high tech and startup companies. It was founded in June 2005 by Archimedes Ventures, led by partners Michael Arrington and Keith Teare.
Index Ventures is a European venture capital firm with dual headquarters in San Francisco and London, investing in technology-enabled companies with a focus on e-commerce, fintech, mobility, gaming, infrastructure/AI, and security. Since its founding in 1996, the firm has invested in a number of companies and raised approximately $5.6 billion. Index Venture partners appear frequently on Forbes’ Midas List of the top tech investors in Europe and Israel.
Accel, formerly known as Accel Partners, is an American venture capital firm. Accel works with startups in seed, early and growth-stage investments. The company has offices in Palo Alto, California and San Francisco, California, with additional operating funds in London, India and China.
Insight Partners is a global venture capital and private equity firm that invests in high-growth technology, software, and Internet businesses. The company is headquartered in New York City, with offices in London, Tel Aviv, and Palo Alto.
Highland Capital Partners is a global venture capital firm with offices in Boston, Silicon Valley, and San Francisco. Highland has raised over $4 billion in committed capital and invested in more than 280 companies, with 47 IPOs and 134 acquisitions.
Vista Equity Partners is an American private equity firm that invests in software, data, and technology-enabled businesses. With over $100 billion in AUM, it is one of the largest private equity firms in the world. Vista has invested in hundreds of technology companies, including Citrix, SentinelOne, and Marketo.
Startup accelerators, also known as seed accelerators, are fixed-term, cohort-based programs, that include mentorship and educational components and culminate in a public pitch event or demo day. While traditional business incubators are often government-funded, generally take no equity, and rarely provide funding, accelerators can be either privately or publicly funded and cover a wide range of industries. Unlike business incubators, the application process for seed accelerators is open to anyone but highly competitive. There are specific accelerators, such as corporate accelerators, which are often subsidiaries or programs of larger corporations that act like seed accelerators.
Revel Systems is an iPad-based point of sale system co-founded by Lisa Falzone and Christopher Ciabarra. It is now majority owned by private equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe.
Seedcamp is a European seed-stage venture capital fund, headquartered in London, launched in May 2007 by a group of 30 European investors. The fund's Managing Partners are Reshma Sohoni and Carlos Espinal.
Balderton Capital is a venture capital firm based in London, UK, that invests in early-stage, technology and internet startup companies in Europe. It is considered to be among the four-biggest venture capital firms in the English capital.
PandaDoc is an American software company that provides SaaS software. The platform provides sales processes software. PandaDoc is based in San Francisco, California with main offices in St. Petersburg, Florida. PandaDoc is document automation software as a service with built-in electronic signatures, workflow management, a document builder, and CPQ functionality. Some Belarusian-born employees of the company were persecuted in Belarus for participating in 2020 Belarusian protests.
Pluralsight, LLC is an American privately held online education company that offers a variety of video training courses for software developers, IT administrators, and creative professionals through its website. Founded in 2004 by Aaron Skonnard, Keith Brown, Fritz Onion, and Bill Williams, the company has its headquarters in Farmington, Utah. As of July 2018, it uses more than 1,400 subject-matter experts as authors, and offers more than 7,000 courses in its catalog. Since first moving its courses online in 2007, the company has expanded, developing a full enterprise platform, and adding skills assessment modules.
Bolt is an Estonian mobility company that offers ride-hailing, micromobility rental, food and grocery delivery, and carsharing services. The company is headquartered in Tallinn and operates in over 500 cities in more than 45 countries in Europe, Africa, Western Asia and Latin America. The company has more than 150 million customers and more than 3 million driver and courier partners. The company has plans for an initial public offering in 2025.
Bullhorn is a cloud computing company headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. The company provides customer relationship management (CRM), applicant tracking system (ATS) and operations software for the staffing industry. As of 2019, the company reported more than 11,000 customers in more than 150 countries. Besides its Boston headquarters, the company has operations in St. Louis, London, Brighton, Sydney, and Rotterdam.
eShares, Inc., doing business as Carta, Inc., is a San Francisco, California-based technology company that specializes in capitalization table management and valuation software. The company digitizes paper stock certificates along with stock options, warrants, and derivatives to allow companies, investors, and employees to manage their equity and track company ownership. The company also operates CartaX, a private stock exchange.
ActiveCampaign is a software as a service (SaaS) platform for small-to-mid-sized businesses and is based in Chicago, Illinois. The company offers email marketing, marketing automation, sales automation, and CRM functionality.
