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The top startup accelerators have a history of seeing the future in ideas that sounded silly at the time. After all, who would have foreseen billion-dollar businesses based on renting your air mattress to strangers, or shopping for their groceries?<\/p>\n
So when prestigious accelerators invest around common themes, it\u2019s worth taking note of what\u2019s resonating.<\/p>\n
With that in mind, we mined Crunchbase data on new seed investments by top-ranked accelerators, looking for similarities in their vision of where consumer and enterprise tech is headed. The data set looks for companies that raised first-time funding in the past six months from accelerators in North America with a standout record for backing startups that go on to secure much higher valuations.<\/p>\n
Here are the startup trends that are capturing the imaginations, and wallets, of top accelerators.<\/p>\n
The bots will help you<\/a>. Accelerator-backed startups are building a lot of AI-enabled tools to help businesses with customer support, sales and marketing. There\u2019s Claire<\/a>, a bot for testing consumer products and ad campaigns, and Scribe<\/a>, an AI-powered \u201csales development representative\u201d that can identify new leads.<\/p>\n For customer support, there is Eloquent Labs<\/a>, which uses AI to augment and replace live chat customer support agents at e-commerce companies. And if you are an airline and in need of better customer support (which is pretty much every airline), there\u2019s Techstars-backed ICM Hub<\/a>, a developer of \u201cartificially intelligent virtual agents.\u201d These are just a few of the AI-enabled business apps that raised seed funding this past year<\/a>.<\/p>\n It may sound far-fetched in 2017 to trust your finances to an AI-powered digital assistant with a cutesy name, but accelerators are betting that in a few years, that\u2019s going to change. One case in point is Penny<\/a>, a Y Combinator-backed mobile app that functions as a personal finance coach. It\u2019s one of several personal finance apps accelerators are rolling out.<\/p>\n Sure, you can still show up in person and sign a long-term lease on a home, office or shop. But a lot of startups<\/a>\u00a0are coming up with both simpler and more temporary ways to secure space. Perhaps part of the impetus is that two of the most famous and valuable private venture-backed companies \u2014 Airbnb and WeWork \u2014 are real estate-related, so it\u2019s a proven sector for generating a massive valuation.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n On the temporary space front, there\u2019s Bulletin<\/a>, which pitches itself as \u201cWeWork for retail space,\u201d and LoftSmart<\/a>, which finds rentals for students. On the efficiency side, Ikos<\/a> is aiming to make renting easier for residential landlords, while Rezi<\/a> pays landlords directly to rent their apartments. See a fuller list<\/a> of accelerator-backed real estate startups here.<\/p>\n Alongside increased interest in\u00a0smart buildings<\/a>,\u00a0ride hailing, mapping apps and real-time traffic updates have already done much in the past few years to transform how we get around town. Now, accelerators are hoping to take things to the next level.<\/p>\n A number of transport startups<\/a>\u00a0have launched with an analytics focus, such as Revmax<\/a>, a vehicle routing tool, and Gridwise<\/a>, which helps ride-hailing drivers maximize earnings. And for those worried that all these mapping and traffic analytics tools are making for inattentive, screen-gazing motorists, there\u2019s Text to Ticket<\/a>, which lets users submit videos of distracted drivers.<\/p>\n Interesting as many of these startups seem, it\u2019s worth noting that hardly any accelerator-backed startup grows up into a big company without at least a few dozen business model pivots along the way. So it\u2019s entirely possible that technologies initially targeted for one industry will end up deployed in another.<\/p>\n For now, however, we can sit back and enjoy (or fear) the vision of a future chatting with humanoid bots en route to one\u2019s temporary home or office using the most efficient route that technology can provide.<\/p>\nThe rise of the AI-powered consumer digital assistants<\/h2>\n
Real estate gets more temporary, efficient and on demand<\/h2>\n
Taking smart transportation to the next level<\/h2>\n
Pivots come next<\/h2>\n