1st Edition - My first list of startups to keep an eye on
This ranges from newly launched to soon to be unicorns
Long time coming but finally decided to get this newsletter out into the market for the new year. I’ve been looking around a bunch of startups recently and thought I’d put together my first list of startups together!
Some of these startups will be just straight out of the market whilst others have been in the market for a while. I guarantee some of these you will have never heard of 😊
If you know someone who’s interested in tech and startup, don’t forget to share the newsletter here with this link.
Ok, let’s get into the list of startups!
Carousell
I recently wrote about this startup but I wanted to talk about Carousell again because it’s a company that has been making recent headlines in Asia. This Singaporean company saw a gap in the market that many missed, clouded by the other many e-commerce players surrounding the industry.
Historically when you think of buying or selling used goods, you think of eBay. Even Amazon attempted this but decided to let it go to stick to their bread and butter of a standard worldwide e-commerce store.
When Quek and his co-founders began the company in 2012, the concept was simple; make selling used goods easier.
Historically doing this on other sites required you to take a photo, upload it onto your computer, make the listing on your computer, and so on.
This was time-consuming and tedious.
To aid this, the focus was that sellers could use their phones to capture photos of the product and then list them all on their phone. This simplified the entire process and helped establish Carousell into the e-commerce space.
Following their recent venture raise, they’ve almost hit the coveted unicorn status ($1 billion dollar valuation or more). 2021 will be an exciting time for this company and I am looking forward to keeping up with their progress.
Copy.Ai
This is something relatively new that leverages the new GPT-3 Open AI engine. To put it in simple terms, Open AI built this model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. They’re the company that built an AI that beat a professional Dota team and Go champion.
Historically, I’ve avoided using AI for helping create ad or landing page copy but this is surprisingly refreshing. Although it’s not perfect, it’s a great tool that helps create the base of what you need to do.
I’ve taken a screenshot of what Copy.AI can do below with an example around Facebook headlines. So far they’re offering a free 7-day trial without even a credit card or email sign up!
Checkbox.Ai
As an Aussie, I had to include one local to me. I still remember when Evan Wong was just starting out Checkbox back in 2016. Although he doesn’t know me personally, I have many mutuals that are close friends with him so I remember seeing his posts pop up regularly on my LinkedIn as well as in-person conversations (before COVID19 hit of course).
Checkbox.ai focuses on compliance and workflow automation to help build solutions internally to operationalize their risk and compliance policies. This could mean assessing vendors to doing internal audits.
The growth of this company has been tremendous. They recently raised a massive angel round of $1.77 million which is enormous by Australian standards. They are also tackling an area in the market that has been historically untouched due to how complicated and annoying it is.
Originally the company focused on legal compliance but has since seen an opening beyond that as well as the no-code space. In my opinion, this was a super smart move, and excited to see what the team brings forward into 2021.
Next Edition—Submit your own!
This will be a short introduction list just because the goal of the newsletter is to be an introductory post of what to expect.
If you have a startup you’d like to submit, please use this form here.
Also, you don’t have to have a startup of your own! If you’ve seen something interesting link it through too, I’d love to see new startups.
Lastly, if you have any feedback on the newsletter including what you’d like to see, please share it with me 🙂