72 startups that will boom in 2020, according to VCs
Startup: 1Password
VC: Ethan Choi, Accel
Relationship: Investor
Total funding raised: $200 million
What it does: Offers a password manager for consumers and enterprises.
Why it will boom in 2020: "1Password is seeing explosive traction in the enterprise because users love the product and bring it into the workplace, bottoms-up. In just three short years since launching its enterprise product and with very little marketing and sales, 1Password has built a customer base of over 50,000 enterprise customers and millions of paid users," Choi says.
Startup: Abnormal Security
VC: Saam Motamedi, Greylock Partners
Relationship: Investor
Total funding raised: $24 million
What it does: Offers AI-powered cloud email security to stop known and unknown threats.
Why it will boom in 2020: "According to the FBI, business email compromise is the No. 1 cyber crime for enterprises," says Motamedi. "Unlike other enterprise solutions, their technology models the identity of users, graphs their relationships and analyzes content to stop attacks that bypass other solutions."
Startup: Abstract
VC: Jomayra Herrera, Cowboy Ventures
Relationship: Investor
Total funding raised: $54.25 million
What it does: Provides collaboration and version control for design teams.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Unlike engineers who have tools like GitHub to keep track of their work, designers have historically been left to manually track changes," says Herrera. "Abstract identified this gap and is quickly becoming the go-to place for design teams who want to move faster and collaborate better," she says.
Startup: Accolade
VC: Steve Singh, Madrona Venture Group
Relationship: Madrona is an investor in Accolade, via Matt McIlwain; the CEO of Accolade is Steve Singh's brother.
Total funding raised: $240.34 million
What it does: Software that helps companies and employees understand, use and manage their healthcare benefits.
Why it will boom in 2020: Accolade "radically improves the capacity to consume the right healthcare services," says Singh.
Startup: AirGarge
VC: Shaun Maguire, Sequoia Capital
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $2 million
What it does: AirGarage provides tech for parking garage companies that lets them sell spaces and enforce parking regulations without an attendant on duty.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Parking makes up a large fraction of the urban footprint of cities and it's currently inefficiently utilized," says Maguire.
Startup: AMP Robotics
VC: Shaun Maguire, Sequoia Capital
Relationship: Investor
Total funding raised: $22.58 million
What it does: Builds robots for the recycling industry that sorts through recycling.
Why it will boom in 2020: "AMP Robotics was born from the insight — all the way back in 2012 — that deep learning will commoditize computer vision, and computer vision + robotic arms is the future of automation," says Maguire.
He says recycling was the first choice for the company because it involves "some of the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs" that few people want to do, creating a labor shortage. "It's also good for the planet."
Startup: Auth0
VC: S. Somasegar, Madrona Venture Group
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $213.47 million
What it does: Auth0 provides authentication and authorization security as a service used by developers for their applications.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Auth0 has built an elegant solution to solve this problem for all kinds of developers across all kinds of applications," says S. Somasegar, adding: "Their developer-first and ease-of-use approach is a work of art."
Startup: Benchling
VC: Brian Feinstein, Bessemer Venture Partners
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $61.8 million
What it does: Collaboration and data management platform for drug development.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Benchling is helping researchers at pharmaceutical companies better collaborate and manage their research data internally. They are working with some of the largest biopharma companies in the world," says Feinstein.
VC: Kent Bennett, Bessemer Venture Partners
Relationship: Investor
Total funding raised: $64.03 million
What it does: A smart water machine that pours still, sparkling, and flavored water on demand.
Why it will boom in 2020: "What if MIT geniuses dedicated their lives to make your office water cooler delightful and cheaper than existing office beverage solutions? That's Bevi," says Bennett. "The company is growing incredibly quickly."
VC: Nicole Quinn, Lightspeed Venture Partners
Relationship: Investor
Total funding raised: $143.63 million
What it does: Calm is a popular meditation app, featuring partnerships with celebrities including Matthew McConaughey and, more recently, Lebron James.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Calm now has a full mental health offering with meditation, yoga, masterclasses and sleep stories. Often called 'the Matthew McConaughey app,' and with their latest LeBron James partnership, Calm has successfully leveraged celebrities to reach new audiences," says Quinn.
Startup: Catch
VC: Evan Moore, Khosla Ventures
Relationship: Investor
Total funding raised: $6.22 million
What it does: Catch offers health insurance, retirement planning, and tax withholding planning to self-employed workers and those without employer benefits.
Why it will boom in 2020: "It's crazy that benefits are still tied to employment. Catch is the first portable benefits platform built for freelancers, contractors, part-time, and other non-traditional workers, and they've seen significant momentum over the past year," says Moore.
Startup: Clari
VCs: S. Somasegar and Steve Singh, Madrona Venture Group
Relationship: Investors
Total funding raised: $121 million
What it does: Ingests data from a company's enterprise apps then uses AI for revenue analysis and forecasting.
Why it will boom in 2020: "More enterprises are looking to have a top-level leader who looks holistically at all aspects of revenue operations," says Somasegar. "Customer traction has set the foundation for a breakthrough in the next year and beyond.
"I have found that Clari is more accurate that the sales rep, sales manager, or the VP of Sales in predicting how the business will perform in the quarter," adds Singh.
Startup: Deliverr
VC: Talia Goldberg, Bessemer Venture Partners
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $70.1 million
What it does: Built a network of warehouses and AI powered software that allows any ecommerce seller to offer fast delivery of items to customers.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Deliverr is creating Amazon Prime for everyone else," says Goldberg, adding that the company has built "a sophisticated fulfillment network that enables any merchant to access fast and affordable two-day shipping."
Startup: Divvy
VC: Nicole Quinn, Lightspeed Venture Partners
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $180 million
What it does: Divvy is a real estate and mortgage company that buys the home and rents it back to the customer, with a portion of the monthly rent set aside as a down payment to one day buy the house themselves.
Why it will boom in 2020: "After a decade long bull market run, many are priced out of home ownership. Divvy turns your monthly rent payments into a down payment, allowing home ownership for those who could not otherwise it," says Quinn.
Startup: Doximity
VC: Sean Jacobsohn, Norwest Venture Partners
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $81.80 million
What it does: A business and professional social network for medical professionals which also lets them get continuing education credits for reading medical journals from their phones.
Why it will boom in 2020: "It now has over 70% of all doctors on the platform," says Jacobsohn. The company says it has more than 1 million users.
VC: Evan Moore, Khosla Ventures
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $4.6 million
What it does: Offers a robot lawyer that lets people easily do things like appeal parking tickets or sue companies over fines and penalties.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Consumers today want to hold companies accountable for their practices, and DoNotPay gives everyone the tools to do so. For example, you can sue Comcast, recoup hidden bank fees, and fight parking tickets. I'm particularly impressed with this team's speed of releasing new products," says Moore.
Startup: Eight Sleep
VC: Trae Stephens, Founders Fund
Relationship: Investor
Total funding raised: $73.86 million
What it does: Makes a smart mattress loaded with sleep technology such as dynamic thermal controls, personalized analytics, and sleep coaching.
Why it will boom in 2020: While direct-to-consumer mattress companies are in vogue right now, Eight is "tackling core issues people face with sleep to actually help them improve fitness in this core area of health. I was a user before I became and investor and have become a total believer in what they are doing," Stephens says.
Startup: Eternal
VC: Andy Weissman, Union Square Ventures
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $1.1 million, according to an SEC filing.
What it does: Still in stealth but reportedly building an avatar game/gaming social network, according to LA TechWatch.
Why it will boom in 2020: Founder Reggie James has somewhat of a cult following in the LA and New York startup scene for his newsletter Product Lost, helped by his role at Jump Bikes before it was acquired by Uber.
"The founder Reggie writes so eloquently about technology and humanity that I have to think it will be interesting," Weissman says.
Startup: Evervault
VC: Shardul Shah, Index Ventures
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $3.2 million
What it does: Allows developers to integrate data privacy into their apps using simple developer tools.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Data privacy made simple," says Shah. "The best chance for private data to be treated with respect is to make data privacy super simple to implement."
Startup: Figma
VC: Ethan Kurzweil, Bessemer Venture Partners
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $82.87 million
What it does: Figma is a cloud-based collaboration tool for web design teams.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Figma has become the leading web-based design tool," Kurzweil says. "Designers can easily collaborate on designs Google Docs-style, and version control is no longer a tangle of emails, file names, and frustration over internal conflicts."
Startup: Flyhomes
VC: Elisa La Cava, Madrona Venture Group
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $158 million
What it does: A real estate agent that helps people buy and sell homes by offering financially-backed guarantees that lets homebuyers make a cash offer, then helps with the financing.
Why it will boom in 2020: "I used Flyhomes when I bought my house," says La Cava. "It is offering a new kind of financial flexibility for homebuyers that has never been seen before. Flyhomes quickly made a name for itself with its incredibly successful first product – helping the average Joe make an all-cash offer by first fronting the cash and then helping 'Joe' secure a traditional mortgage on the back end."
The company is now expanding into new services and new markets, La Cava says.
Startup: Grafana
VC: Gaurav Gupta, Lightspeed Venture Partners
Relationship: Investor
Total funding raised: $25.23 million
What it does: Offers a popular open source analytics and monitoring software for IT infrastructure.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Walk into any enterprise that needs to monitor IT infrastructure and applications today, and there's a very good chance you'll bump into someone using Grafana," says Gupta.
"With over 400,000 active installations and millions of users, it's arguably the most popular open source project for time series data, metrics, and monitoring," he says.
Startup: HashiCorp
VC: Arif Janmohamed, Lightspeed Venture Partners
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $174.53 million
What it does: Offers a number of popular infrastructure products that lets enterprise developers ditch legacy applications, move to the cloud, and build cloud applications.
Why it will boom in 2020: "The HashiCorp product suite for enterprise infrastructure has gained incredible traction among developers and helps companies adopt the cloud and build modern applications," says Janmohamed.
Startup: Headway
VC: Amit Kumar, Accel
Relationship: Investor.
Total funding raised: $6.29 million
What it does: Headway helps patients find mental health therapists who accept their health insurance.
Why it will boom in 2020: "It's no secret the country is having a mental health crisis, but what makes it especially painful is that care is unaffordable for most who suffer from this disease. Headway's thoughtful approach allows it to help the maximum number of patients," Kumar says.
Startup: Highspot
VC: Tim Porter, Madrona Venture Group
Relationship: Investor
Total funding raised: $212.2 million
What it does: Offers a broad suite of sales and marketing software, serving a market known as sales enablement.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Their customers love them," says Porter, adding, "the sales enablement market is hot and companies have realized they need a system of intelligence to help guide their salespeople on what to know, say and show to their customer prospects to maximize sales."
Startup: Incredible Health
VCs: Jomayra Herrera, Cowboy Ventures and Jana Messerschmidt, Lightspeed Venture Partners
Relationship: No relation. VCs just think it's cool.
Total funding raised: $17.41 million
What it does: A job-hunting site for nurses.
Why it will boom in 2020: "With the projected shortage in nurses in the US, Incredible Health plays an important role in ensuring hospitals are well positioned to fill job vacancies with high-quality candidates quickly," says Herrera, adding that the company has helped hospitals reduce average hiring time from 90 days to 30 days.
"2020 may become the year for the unbundling of LinkedIn with more startups focusing on vertical labor marketplaces," says Herrera.
Startup: Joby Aviation
VC: Byron Deeter, Bessemer Venture Partners
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $718.3 million
What it does: Developing a new class of electric, personal four-person aircraft that's like a cross between a helicopter, airplane, and EV flying car.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Joby is one of the many electric Vertical Take-off and Landing (eVTOL) mobility companies aiming to finally bring us flying cars," says Deeter. "I'm eager for this entire class of companies to bring product to market, and finally make this Jetson-era dream a reality!"
Beyond developing the vehicle, the whole flying-car industry will have to build everything from EV charger networks, to AI tools, to governance for regulators, he notes.
Startup: Knotch
VC: Steve Singh, Madrona Venture Group
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $34.28 million
What it does: Helps marketeers measure the effectiveness of their ads, including branded content-type advertising.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Great growth, incredible CEO," says Singh, referring to Anda Gansca, cofounder and CEO of Knotch.
Startup: LaunchDarkly
VC: Amanda Robson, Cowboy Ventures and Ethan Kurzweil, Bessemer Venture Partners
Relationship: Kurzweil is an investor. Robson has no relationship, just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $132.84 million
What it does: LaunchDarkly helped pioneer what's known as a feature management platform, where DevOps teams can quietly test new features in their live environments before rolling them out to production environments.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Developers want to spend their time building new features, not testing for bugs. LaunchDarkly gives them tools for exactly this," says Robson.
"LaunchDarkly is a feature management platform that has come to define its market, becoming the de facto standard in deploying product changes through flags...while also allowing for secondary use cases including canary testing and A/B testing," says Kurzweil.
Startup: Legion
VC: Sean Jacobsohn, Norwest Venture Partners
Relationship: Investor
Total funding raised: $10.5 million
What it does: AI powered HR tool geared toward companies with hourly workforces.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Hourly workers are more than half of the workforce, but until now haven't had access to a workforce management platform that's cloud-based, mobile-first, and AI-powered," says Jacobsohn.
Startup: Level
VC: Angela Strange, Andreessen Horowitz and Jana Messerschmidt, Lightspeed Venture Partners
Relationship: Messerschmidt is an investor. Strange has no relationship, just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $3.8 million
What it does: Helps small- and medium-sized businesses provide self-funded dental insurance.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Imagine a best-in-class consumer experience across multiple categories created by a team deep in insurance, payments and consumer experiences," says Strange.
"Supplemental benefits represent a fragmented $240 billion industry that hasn't changed much in the last two decades," says Messerschmidt.
Startup: Lever
VC: Aileen Lee, Cowboy Ventures
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $72.8 million
What it does: Offers recruiting software that helps companies ease the hiring process.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Recruiting can be so manual and require so much time and wasted effort. Lever streamlines that process to enable hiring managers focus on people, not process," says Lee.
Lee also notes that Lever founder and CEO Sarah Nahm is a leader in All Raise, a VC networking organization for women, and is becoming known as a role model in Silicon Valley.
Startup: Lexion
VC: Elisa La Cava, Madrona Venture Group
Relationship: Investor
Total funding raised: $4.2 million
What it does: Lexicon offers AI-enabled contract management software that can organize contracts, read them and extract terms.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Lexion is a natural language processing powerhouse that helps large and mid-size companies understand the thousands of contracts they have with their vendors and customers," says La Cava.
Startup: Lightstep
VC: Amanda Robson, Cowboy Ventures
Relationship: Investor
Total funding raised: $70 million
What it does: Helps developers find and fix bugs and performance problems across mobile apps, classic apps and newfangled micro-services apps.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Software is moving towards more scalable architectures that use microservices; this new format requires new management tools such as Lightstep for APM," says Robson.
Startup: Linear
VC: Stephanie Zhan, partner at Sequoia Capital
Relationship: Investor
Total funding raised: $4.2 million
What it does: Offers an easy-to-use tool for software developers to track bugs and other issues.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Founders Karri, Jori, and Tuomas have special empathy for today's builders. They are focused on building a tool for them, and it's exciting to see the amount of product love from the community already," says Zhan.
Startup: Mahmee
VC: Julie Yoo, Andreessen Horowitz
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $4.14 million
What it does: An online service for prenatal and postpartum healthcare that physicians and specialists can use to share patient info and that mothers can use to track health records.
Why it will boom in 2020: Yoo sees a trend of using technology to drive down the cost of healthcare, particularly in "sub-populations of patients who traditionally have represented high-cost, high-variance care." Mahmee helps one of those groups: "Pregnancy is the top reason for hospitalization amongst women, and maternity-related spending has experienced double-digit increases in recent years," she says.
Startup: Materialize
VC: Saam Motamedi, Greylock Partners
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $8.5 million Series A
What it does: Offers a tool that allows developers to get instant results from searching big data warehouses, that works with popular open source big data software.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Traditional data warehousing is a huge and critical market with customers in every industry. As streaming and real-time data volumes explode, Materialize is building the first data warehouse for this type of data," says Motamedi.
Startup: Meet Cute
VC: Andy Weissman, Union Square Ventures
Relationship: Investor
Total funding raised: Undisclosed seed investment
What it does: Meet Cute is Weissman's brainchild, launched out of USV earlier this year and led by former USV analyst Naomi Shah as CEO and by USV founder Fred Wilson's daughter Emily Wilson. Meet Cute creates short, 15-minute audio fiction stories in podcast form, primarily focused on romantic comedies.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Because stories centered around human relationships are wonderful and delightful and fill us with hope," Weissman says.
Startup: Modern Animal
VC: Scott Nolan, Founders Fund
Relationship: Investor
Total funding raised: $13.5 million
What it does: Offers tech-enabled veterinary services on a subscription basis for an annual membership fee of $100.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Modern Animal is the only company taking a clean-sheet approach to all of veterinary care, bringing modern technology and innovations we've seen in human healthcare to animal healthcare. The co-founders previously ran a pet health company, Whistle, which was acquired by Mars Petcare in 2016," says Nolan.
Startup: Moveworks
VC: Ted Wang, Cowboy Ventures and Arif Janmohamed, Lightspeed Venture Partners
Relationship: Janmohamed is an investor. Wang has no relationship, just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $108.15 million
What it does: Offers AI-enabled, automated IT support.
Why it will boom in 2020: "AI is starting to see mainstream adoption in the enterprise and Moveworks is a great example of a company that's found a strong business use case by reducing the number of IT service tickets," says Wang.
"The Moveworks AI product resolves enterprise users' problems via chat, instantly and automatically," says Janmohamed. "It's magical!"
Startup: Mutiny
VC: Aileen Lee, Cowboy Ventures
Relationship: Investor
Total funding raised: $3.12 million
What it does: Offers an AI based platform that lets marketers automatically personalize websites to each visitor, without coding.
Why it will boom in 2020: "It was built by the former head of marketing at Gusto - born out of a realization that tech could be built to automate personalization," says Lee, adding that this is an area of AI in the enterprise that can "provide a direct business ROI."
Startup: Neuralink
VC: Scott Nolan, Founders Fund
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $158 million
What it does: Neuralink is yet another company founded by Elon Musk, best known as the CEO of Tesla and chief engineer and founder of SpaceX. It is developing brain-machine interfaces that can be implanted into the human body.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Neuralink's technology has the best chance of curing multiple neurological diseases, increasing the bandwidth between humans and machines, and someday enabling symbiosis with artificial intelligence," Nolan said.
Startup: Notion Labs
VC: Andrew Chen, Andreessen Horowitz
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $18.7 million
What it does: Offers a suite of productivity apps for teams or individuals that includes notes, wikis, collaborative documents, and task tracking.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Great startups are about great products, first and foremost, and I really admire how the team is deeply led by design/UX from the very beginning. Notion's app is simple but powerful, with lots of subtle upgrades from other note-taking and productivity tools," Chen says.
"The product is on a strong trajectory, and if the company succeeds, it could build this generation's center for all their work. We expect big things from Notion," he adds.
Startup: On Running
VC: Kent Bennett, Bessemer Venture Partners
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $3.98 million angel round
What it does: A Swiss company that makes high-performance running shoes.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Swiss engineers designed a sole that eliminates excess volume – thus they're the lightest and most comfortable performance running shoe I've ever worn," says Bennett. "Distinctive enough to be noticed (driving word of mouth) without looking so weird that you feel like you're in the cast of Silicon Valley."
Startup: OneSignal
VC: Martin Casado, Andreessen Horowitz
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $34.29 million
What it does: Offers a communication service that handles push notifications like mobile alerts, web alerts, emails, and in-app pop-up messages.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Started from gaming industry and mobile, the company has expanded to broader market and spanning across web, email channels," says Casado. "Today OneSignal is used by 1 million developers and sending billions of messages on a daily basis."
Startup: Papaya Global
VC: Talia Goldberg, Bessemer Venture Partners
Relationship: Investor
Total funding raised: $50.5 million
What it does: Manages global payroll, including cross-border payments for contractors.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Companies need access to the best talent without being restricted by geography. Papaya makes it easy for teams to hire, pay, and manage workers across the globe," says Goldberg.
Startup: PatientPing
VC: Julie Yoo, Andreessen Horowitz
Relationship: Investor
Total funding raised: $102.95 million
What it does: PatientPing offers a service that allows all of a patient's healthcare providers to keep the others updated so the patient gets better care.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Many health providers still encounter huge blind spots in knowing what happens to their patients outside of the four walls of their practice," says Yoo. "As the majority of reimbursement continues to move towards value-based care models, where providers assume financial risk for high-cost episodes of care, companies like PatientPing will be necessary to serve as the connective tissue."
Startup: Pilot
VC: Mark Goldberg, Partner at Index Ventures
Relationship: Investor
Total funding raised: $58.3 million
What it does: Offers accounting software and services for startups, including access to a human account manager.
Why it will boom in 2020: "With a combination of technology and people, Pilot has created a 10x product and is building a massive new fintech platform around it," says Goldberg.
Startup: Preset
VC: Martin Casado, Andreessen Horowitz
Relationship: Investor
Total funding raised: $12.5 million
What it does: Preset is the company started by the creator of Apache Superset, a popular open source project for data analytics and visualization, offering commercial support for the software.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Superset is one of the most popular open source projects in the world, and it's growth is buoyed by raising importance of data in guiding business decisions," says Casado. Casado sees Superset as a way to bring data analysis to teams in every part of the company, not just business analyst specialists.
Startup: Productboard
VC: Byron Deeter, Bessemer Venture Partners
Relationship: Investor
Total funding raised: $64.7 million
What it does: A cloud-based product management system that helps product teams prioritize and build the features customers most want and need.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Companies are increasingly looking to become product-led, and Productboard is the system of record for high performing product organizations," said Deeter.
Startup: Productiv
VC: Rama Sekhar, Norwest Venture Partners
Relationship: Investor
Total funding raised: $28 million
What it does: Offers tools that helps CIOs see how employees are using cloud software, also called software as a service (SaaS).
Why it will boom in 2020: "Productiv is pioneering a new category called Application Engagement Analytics that enables CIOs to take complete stock of their SaaS subscriptions, rightsize any license wastage, and measure the productivity gains being promised by all this spending on SaaS," Sekhar says.
It also helps track usage of apps that employees buy themselves and "CIOs are in dire need of better visibility into all the SaaS apps their users are buying," he says
Startup: Pulse Q&A
VC: Rama Sekhar, Norwest Venture Partners
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $10.81 million
What it does: Offers crowdsourced data and a community for tech executives that it promises is "a verified, agenda-free network."
Why it will boom in 2020: "CIOs routinely form peer groups to advise each other on market research and software purchasing decisions. Pulse Q&A is supercharging these social networks with a peer-to-peer platform," says Sekhar.
Startup: Qonto
VC: Philippe Botteri, Accel
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $35.8 million
What it does: Offers business bank accounts for freelancers, startups and small businesses.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Qonto is changing the game by providing a seamless online experience complemented by a suite of online services and integrations," says Botteri.
Startup: Qualia
VC: Mark Goldberg, Partner at Index Ventures
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $95.18 million
What it does: Cloud software for real estate transactions.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Creating a digital closing process for real estate transactions is an obvious evolution in an industry that relies heavily on paper and offline communication," Goldberg says, adding that by becoming "the super-connector" for the industry, "there's massive potential to expand into new areas."
Startup: Rasa
VC: Gaurav Gupta, Lightspeed Venture Partners
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $14.22 million
What it does: Open-source AI software that helps developers build chatbots.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Remember falling in love with the Star Trek computer on the USS Enterprise? In 2020, natural language technology finally catches up with that early '90s vision of humans conversing with computers," says Gupta.
"In 2019 downloads grew from 300,000 to over 2 million, proof that developers are flocking to the technology," he says.
Startup: Restaurant365
VC: Brian Feinstein, Bessemer Venture Partners
Relationship: Investor
Total funding raised: $127.5 million
What it does: Restaurant management accounting software popular with chains and franchises.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Restaurants have historically been neglected and underserved by software. With over 1 million restaurant locations in the US, Restaurant365 is attacking one of the largest vertical software markets," Feinstein says.
Startup: Retool
VC: Amit Kumar, Accel
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: Undisclosed seed round
What it does: Retool allows non-developers to create simple apps and workflows to be used internally, to manage business processes. It's part of a growing trend known as low-code/no-code development.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Companies have limited engineering bandwidth and often aren't able to invest the appropriate amount of resources into internal tooling," says Kumar. "Low code/no code tools like Retool are being rapidly adopted to fill in the gap."
Startup: Shopmonkey
VC: Nina Achadjian, Partner at Index Ventures
Relationship: Investor
Total funding raised: $10 million
What it does: Shopmonkey provides software for auto mechanics to run their businesses.
Why it will boom in 2020: "There are 280 million cars in the US and there are over 1 million car mechanics. Much of this industry is dominated by mom-and-pop auto repair shops that have no software to allow them to communicate with customers, track how much time it takes technicians to do repairs, order inventory or process payments," Achadjian says.
Startup: Silo
VC: Mike Duboe, Greylock Partners
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $3 million seed round
What it does: Silo is a wholesale marketplace for growers, distributors, and retailers of perishable food that helps automate pricing, orders, payments, and broader logistics.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Produce wholesale is a $150 billion+ market, still handled through paper price sheets and phone calls. Bringing this online not only saves time & money throughout the system, but also impacts the massive problem of food waste (estimated at 30-40% of food supply)," Duboe says.
Startup: Skilljar
VC: Tim Porter, Madrona Venture Group
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $20.12 million plus an undisclosed private equity funding
What it does: Skilljar offers a customer training platform to help businesses improve customer retention — in other words, tools to help teach customers how to get the most from your products.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Skilljar provides a vital tool to customer success teams to effectively train and delight customers," Porter says.
Startup: Snyk
VC: Philippe Botteri, Accel
Relationship: Investor
Total funding raised: $229.51 million
What it does: Snyk a security tool for developers that lets them easily find and fix security holes in open source libraries and containers.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Security needs to shift left to developers, so that applications are built securely, instead of relying on audits from security teams. Snyk is at the forefront of this trend and we see a massive potential," says Botteri.
Startup: Solv Health
VC: Nina Achadjian, Partner at Index Ventures and Mike Duboe, Greylock Partners
Relationship: Greylock is an investor (though James Slavet). Nina has no relationship, just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $23.05 million
What it does: Allows people to book and pay for same-day appointments to Urgent Care centers, rather than wait days for their primary doctor.
Why it will boom in 2020: "While the urgent care market has reached $18 billion and 7,700 locations, the technology to power these businesses and connect consumers to care has lagged," says Achadjian.
"Solv's two-sided marketplace is a fundamentally better experience for finding care providers, booking appointments, and managing the entire process," says Duboe.
Startup: Substack
VC: Andrew Chen, Andreessen Horowitz
Relationship: Investor
Total funding raised: $21.21 million
What it does: Substack lets writers get paid when people subscribe to their email newsletters.
Why it will boom in 2020: "The new economy is increasingly filled with platforms and tools that let talented people take their skills and turn that into a living, whether that's as a Twitch streamer, Shopify store operator, or as a writer on Substack. There are already dozens of writers on Substack earning six-figure incomes doing what they love," says Chen.
This model "could provide a new, complementary industry to ad-supported media/journalism," he says.
Startup: SVT Robotics
VC: Ted Wang, Cowboy Ventures
Relationship: Investor
Total funding raised: Undisclosed seed round
What it does: Offers a software service that connects any enterprise software system to any robot.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Robots have finally become commercially viable, however, each robot provider has their own set of standards and capabilities creating a barrier to end user adoption," says Wang, adding that this service "provides a bridge" that will help companies adopt robots faster.
Startup: Tally
VC: Angela Strange, Andreessen Horowitz
Relationship: Investor
Total funding raised: $92 million
What it does: A credit management service that helps people pay their credit cards on time, increase savings and develop good financial habits.
Why it will boom in 2020: "There's more than $1 trillion of credit card debt in America. A large percent should be paid of faster and refinanced but the system is still too complicated," says Strange."Tally will automate your financial life, starting with credit card debt. It's like Google Maps, but for your finances."
Startup: Tatari
VC: Parker Barrile, Norwest Venture Partners
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: Undisclosed seed round
What it does: Tatari offers data to measure the effectiveness of TV marketing campaigns.
Why it will boom in 2020: "TV still commands $70 billion per year in ad spend. Tatari is making that spend more transparent, more data-driven, and more effective," says Barrile.
Startup: Transmit Security
VC: Shardul Shah, Index Ventures
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $40 million
What it does: Lets devopers add biometrics such as eye, fingerprint or facial scans to their mobile apps.
Why it will boom in 2020: "The founders Mickey [Boodaei] and Rakesh [Loonkar] have been working on a bold vision for the past five years to transform how businesses can deliver safe customer experiences. That vision will come to fruition this year," says Shah.
Startup: Verkada
VC: Trae Stephens, Founders Fund
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $69.8 million
What it does: Verkada is building smart, internet-connected building security cameras for the enterprise.
Why it will boom in 2020: "There has historically been a big gap between what has been available for the consumer with Nest/Ring/et cetera, and the clunky enterprise camera systems that businesses use. Verkada has closed that gap and delivered feature-rich cameras with an elegant user interface," says Stephens.
Startup: Voxel51
VC: GV general partner Karim Faris
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $2 million
What it does: Video analytics software that uses AI to analyze raw video footage and images into actionable intelligence.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Helps you unlock the value in video. Voxel51 has built impressive computer vision algorithms able to cost effectively classify objects in video at scale," says Faris.
Startup: Webflow
VC: Stephanie Zhan, Partner, Sequoia Capital
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $73.5 million
What it does: Offers visual software that makes it easy to build a website with no coding required.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Webflow is defining a new category around visual development and what I love most about that is that it enables anyone of any skill or background to build beautiful websites using simple yet powerful tools," says Zhan.
Startup: Wyze
VC: Parker Barrile, Norwest Venture Partners
Relationship: Investor
Total funding raised: $21.3 million
What it does: Affordable smart home products.
Why it will boom in 2020: "Most American homes are still analog, with mechanical locks, plastic light switches, no in-home cameras, etc. That's starting to change at a very rapid pace, " he said adding that Wyze is as gaining a solid reputation as "the most affordable" among popular smart home brands.
Startup: Zapier
VC: Ethan Choi, Accel
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Total funding raised: $2.56 million
What it does: Zapier allows anyone to easily connects apps together to automate sharing data between apps. The company is also known for growing to 300 employees with only one small round of funding.
Why it will boom in 2020: "The number of [cloud] apps we use everyday has exploded," says Choi, and "Zapier is enabling an era of the "citizen developer" by making it super easy for anyone to connect apps and create workflow automations without needing to know how to code."