Startup failure. Auto & logistics patents. Govtech financing trends.
Net promoter
Hi there,
How was your weekend? Glad to hear that.
Mine was great. Thank you for asking.
First off, I have no idea why so many people are getting hurt due to suffocation out west. Can someone explain this?
AI in sales
We’re seeing a lot more funding activity into sales tools that use AI and machine learning. Several have been funded that are said to use AI to improve an organization’s sales calls.
Here’s a snapshot of a few prominent names in this area and how they stack up against one another on Mosaic score, funding and more. You can run this comparison on CB Insights after you log in using this company comparison screen.
Generally, there is a lot of activity among companies applying AI and machine learning to sales or customer support, as the search below illustrates. There are 139 companies focused on those areas right now as you can see.
Also, check out the Boolean logic of that search. Sweet, right?
Try doing that search on Google. Yeah — good luck.
You can run that search and modify it on CB Insights here.
Asian unicorn in the house
Our Net Promoter Score for last year’s Future of Fintech conference was 91. Pretty good, eh?
But…
One consistent comment we heard was that folks felt the speakers/content were a bit US-centric. And that we could have done more to discuss fintech trends in the rest of the world.
Vijay Shekhar Sharma founded and now runs the giant fintech company. The company has raised over $1.3B to-date including a $500M injection from Alibaba via its Ant Financial Services Group.
The company’s mobile wallet and mobile payments products were used by 147 million users in 2016.
Yes — 147 million.
In December 2016 alone, Paytm facilitated 1 billion transactions. The scale and growth they’re experiencing is unbelievable. See a snapshot below.
I’m really looking forward to our discussion with Vijay on what has driven Paytm’s success-to-date, where the company is going, their relationship with Alibaba/Ant and more.
Expect a much more global perspective on fintech at this year’s conference with several more amazing speakers to be announced.
You can get $1000 off tickets to The Future of Fintech conference until the end of this week (Feb 17th). Use the code FoFPaytm here. Rates went up at the end of Jan already and will go up again later this month.
#REKT
The tail end of 2016 into 2017 saw a number of startup deaths, such as the end of Cha Cha and Lily Robotics. We updated our list of startup post-mortems, which now has 204 stories of where companies went wrong and why.
This is yuge
Mr President.
We are humbled.
Thank you.
In this particular instance, we recommend you listen to the president and get our newsletter. 239,000+ already get it and except for the 7 of you who email us regularly to say how dumb we are, everybody else loves it.
We look at govtech financing trends since 2012. In 2016, funding to govtech startups hit $336M across 41 deals.
Exits down
In our recent Global Tech Exits report, we analyzed tech M&A and IPO trends through the end of 2016. Globally, tech exits dropped slightly last year, falling 4% to 3358 total M&As and IPOs.
The Industry Standard
CB Insights data is the most trusted by those in the industry and the media. A few recent hits.
Red Herring. A look at the femtech market with a reference to CB Insights research on startups in the space.
Financial Times. Hannah Kuchler (@hannahkuchler) reports on the effect of Snap’s IPO on the LA startup scene and refers to CB Insights investment data.
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