Spotting an under-the-radar startup that could be the next Shopify, Coinbase or Snowflake has never been more difficult: A company doesn’t need to show much business progress to earn a billion-dollar valuation, or higher, from investors these days. That means finding up-and-coming startups below that threshold has never been more valuable to investors and potential employees.
The second edition of The Information’s 50 most promising tech startups hunted for the next big winners in financial software, cryptocurrency, the creator economy and artificial intelligence, among other hot sectors. The list, which can be found here, includes previously unreported financial data about the vast majority of the companies.
They include Hugging Face, which over the past year became a kind of Github for software developers who work with machine-learning models; Virtually Human Studio, the three-year-old developer of a blockchain-powered game in which participants can buy, breed and race digital horses as well as sell them to one another in a secondary market; and Chord Commerce, a nascent competitor to Shopify that launched its website and order-fulfillment software for retailers seven months ago.
