For Zebra Technologies, understanding where technology markets are headed is critical in maintaining and growing its global leadership position across supply chain, retail, and manufacturing. Through Zebra Ventures, the company evaluates hundreds of emerging technologies each year, while also advising major customers like Walmart, Target, UPS, FedEx, and Amazon on where innovation is moving next.

To do this at scale, Zebra relies on CB Insights as a foundational source of predictive intelligence. Tony Palcheck, Managing Director of Zebra Ventures, has used CB Insights for more than a decade. “It’s our first stop when evaluating new companies, markets, and competitive threats,” says Palcheck. “CB Insights helps us analyze opportunities faster and with higher confidence. It saves time, improves the quality of our analysis, and helps us see things we might otherwise miss.”

Zebra uses CB Insights as a triangulation engine. The platform brings together company data, funding history, investor quality, competitive landscapes, market maps, and other valuable signals such as press activity and hiring trends. This allows Zebra to validate what startups claim in pitch decks, challenge assumptions, and quickly understand where a company truly fits in an ecosystem.

CB Insights’ market maps play a particularly important role. Zebra uses them to segment crowded markets — such as warehouse robotics, inventory visibility, or frictionless checkout — into specific workflows and use cases.

“You may find 600 warehouse robot companies, but only 50 focused on relevant workflows, and then just 10 addressing Zebra’s priority use cases.”

The detailed market maps backed by comprehensive data, with predictive signals and AI agents on top, enables Zebra Ventures to narrow hundreds of companies down to a shortlist for deeper investigation. According to Palcheck,

“This screening alone saves roughly 20% of research time and allows Zebra to evaluate more opportunities without sacrificing rigor. Other tools may be good for knowing the investors, and what happened in the past, but the reports generated by CB Insights’ platform contain that information as well as detailed market maps and visual strategy maps, that help us to look deeper with greater insight. These are capabilities I haven’t seen on other platforms.”

The value extends beyond investing. Zebra regularly uses CB Insights’ research, market maps, and visualizations when presenting to enterprise customers. By tracking where capital is flowing and how technologies mature over time, Zebra can explain not just what is emerging, but when adoption is likely to follow.

“We watch money flows as early indicators. Three years after those early indicators, you often see those technologies reach real deployment. The early predictive signals in CB Insights are a powerful tool in seeing where things are headed.”

CB Insights’ AI-powered scouting tools further accelerate this process by surfacing recent developments, competitive context, and momentum signals in a single view — reducing manual research across dozens of websites and sources.

“You save us time and you also open new doors that we hadn’t considered. It’s a time savings and a quality improvement all at the same time.”

Ultimately, CB Insights helps Zebra do two things at once: go deeper on the opportunities that matter, and rule out distractions faster. The result is higher confidence decisions, stronger customer conversations, and a clearer view of where disruption may come next.

“CB Insights isn’t about predicting the future perfectly – that’s impossible. What it can give us is the best headstart, and the best intelligence to make smarter investments.”