Startup companies, and particularly in the fintech space can make for great investments. There are a number of places to look for information about these. One is Investopedia, which regularly produces helpful information about worthwhile investments for its readers. Recently it produced a list of hot prospects for 2015, and the majority of the organisations listed below are featured on this list.
One such company is Slack. Slack is thought to be one of the best fintech firms to invest in. The organisation offers an internal communication platform and it has already gained 30,000 customers (organisations that use the service). The service is beneficial because it allows people that work for a company to be able to easily communicate with one another regardless of where they are working, and whether they are using mobile devices or laptops. The company has already achieved a $1 billion valuation in its two years of doing business.
Acorns makes for another exciting investment opportunity. The company is touted as a disruptor in the financial industry and it helps its users to invest spare change that is left after daily by placing it into a diversified portfolio. The way it operates is that the app rounds up credit and debit card purchases to the closest dollar. It then moves the money into the portfolio for the customer. This has proven extremely popular not least because it creates opportunities for regular people to get into investment. The company was set up in 2012 and has already secured $9 million in funding since its start.
Another fintech giant and well known name in many places is Uber. Uber is a company that effectively offers a taxi service which has had a revolutionary impact on this industry. Users can easily find taxis nearby and they pay for the service automatically through cards or PayPal attached to their accounts. The tariff is calculated carefully and comes out cheaper than regular taxis, which is one of the reasons that this business has been so amazingly successful. As Investopedia explains, “it just closed a new $1 billion round of funding, bringing its total to $5.9 billion since its 2009 launch.” Uber is one to watch.
Cloud hosting services have in some cases proven to have made excellent investment opportunities, and it is thought that Digital Ocean is one such company that is worth considering. Digital Ocean was founded in 2011, and has grown tremendously since its launch. In 2013 it was purported to be the world’s fastest growing cloud hosting service. It should not come as any surprise then that the organisation already has more than 400,000 customers and that it has secured $90.2 million in funding to date.
An educational fintech worthy of consideration meanwhile is ClassDojo. This is a great platform for communication and collaboration between parents, students and teachers. The platform helps teachers to encourage students, while at the same time providing the chance for teachers to help get parents involved. They do this by advising on progress at school. Amazingly, though the organisation was only set up in 2011 it already has 35 million users on the global stage. To date it has raised $10.1 million in private equity.
In the logistics and distribution industry a fintech to watch is SHYP. SHYP has only been around for a couple of years, and it has been breaking ground in the area of package shipment. The goal of the organisation is to reduce the stress associated with shipping packages. The company achieves this through collecting the items to be shipped, packing them and then shipping them at the cheapest possible rate. It is so far up and running in three cities in the USA (New York, San Francisco and Miami) and will start offering its services in Los Angeles soon.
For other potential fintech startups it is worth checking out Angel Trading. Here you’ll find a full list of trading startups for consideration. For example at the current time there is Yiftee, an online service that allows local gifts to be sent to friends, clients and colleagues. There is also QuantConnect which works to provide quants with the information that they need including free data, cluster computing and capital. Another good option at the current time that is listed is Digital Trading Solutions, which is an organisation providing automated execution of large orders and trading strategies for crypto currencies. Meanwhile, Coinsetter is a tool for Wall Street that helps with high performance bitcoin exchange, Hedgy operates in block chain derivatives and TigerTrade is an innovative approach to eBay for business to business companies.
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