Niche e-commerce still produces compelling success stories. Read on to see how Brian built his. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you...
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ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) recently reported a strong second quarter that beat estimates. However, the company’s revenue outlook for the third quarter was below analyst estimates. ServiceNow’s Financials...
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Business travelers have become an increasingly important part of Airbnb’s business, according to a new blog post. The company says that Airbnb for Work, which launched in 2014, has seen bookings triple from 2015 to 2016, and triple again from 2016 to 2017. In fact, Airbnb says that almost 700,000 companies have signed up for and booked with Airbnb for Work.
Interestingly, the breakdown of companies working with Airbnb for traveler lodging are pretty diverse — employees from large enterprise companies (5,000+ employees) and employees from startups and SMBs (one to 250 employees) take a 40-40 split, with the final 20 percent of Airbnb for Work bookings going to mid-sized companies.
In July of 2017, Airbnb started making its listings available via SAP Concur, a tool used by a large number of business travelers. Airbnb says that this integration has been a huge help to growing Airbnb for Work, with Concur seeing a 42 percent increase in employees expensing Airbnb stays from 2016 to 2017. Moreover, 63 percent of Concur’s Fortune 500 clients have booked a business trip on Airbnb.
One interesting trend that Airbnb has noticed is that nearly 60 percent of Airbnb for Work trips had more than one guest.
“We can offer big open areas for collaborations, while still giving employees their own private space,” said David Holyoke, global head of business travel at Airbnb. “We think this offers a more meaningful business trip and it saves the company a lot of money.”
Given the tremendous growth of the business segment, as well as the opportunity it represents, Airbnb is working on new features for business travelers. In fact, in the next week, Airbnb will be launching a new feature that lets employees search for Airbnb listings on a company-specific landing page.
So, for example, a Google employee might search for their lodging on Google.Airbnb.com, and the site would be refined to cater to Google’s preferences, including locations close to the office, budget, and other factors.
While the growth has picked up, Holyoke still sees Airbnb for Work as an opportunity to grow. He said that Airbnb for Work listings only represent 15 percent of all Airbnb trips.
But, the introduction of boutique hotels and other amenity-driven listings such as those on Airbnb Plus are paving the way for business travelers to lean toward Airbnb instead of a business hotel.
Plus, as mobility and relocation become even more important to how a business operates, Airbnb believes it can be a useful tool to help employees get started in a new town before they purchase a home.
When weighing up the likely success of challenger banks in the U.K., two predominant schools of thought emerge.
Those who are bullish say that incumbent banks provide a lousy user experience, rip off customers, and innovate incredibly slowly — and therefore are ripe for the taking. Challenger banks just need to focus on what they do best and word of mouth-led switching will follow.
And then there are people who are less convinced who say that most consumers are happy enough with their current bank account and see no reason to switch. Besides, anything innovative a challenger does will be copied by incumbents eventually anyway.
But what if switching was only one means to customer acquisition? One argument I’ve sometimes made is that grabbing customers from a competing bank isn’t the only way to grow a challenger bank. Another customer segment is people who don’t have an existing current account, such as recent immigrants or young people who need to open their very first bank account.
In fact, incumbent banks have long targeted students, for example, with attractive student overdrafts or by setting up shop on university campuses. That’s how Barclays first won my business and why I still lazily bank with them today.
Enter challenger bank Monzo, which early on in its existence experimented with a Monzo ambassador program at a number of universities, with only limited success. Today the fintech is moving the funnel forward slightly by making its digital current account offering available to 16-18 year olds, opening up the bank to more than 1.5 million new young people.
Monzo says that 16- and 17-year-old customers can sign up for a Monzo bank account today by downloading the app. They’ll then receive a contactless debit card in the post the next working day. Certain banking features, such as overdrafts and spending on gambling, will be blocked until customers turn 18.
With more than 860,000 registered account holders and set to cross 1 million accounts in the next few months, Monzo has employed a number strategies to grow customers, with a heavy emphasis on viral features and a fresh, young brand.
These have included making friend-to-friend payments easy, either to people who already bank with the startup, or via the Monzo.me service, which gives users a payment link to share with friends.
The idea, as Monzo co-founder Tom Blomfield (picture above) often explains, is that unlike traditional incumbent banks that basically have zero network effects (perhaps beyond joint accounts), the challenger bank is designed to become more useful the more people who join it.
More recently, the challenger bank launched ‘Nearby Friends’, geolocation functionality that uses Bluetooth to let you see anyone else that uses Monzo who is nearby so that you can initiate a payment without needing their phone number to be in your contact book first.
Sramana Mitra: How did your VCs react on the topic of a virtual company? Fred Plais: This divides people a lot. The world is changing. People are starting to buy the story more and more. We need the...
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This feature from The Washington Post by Margaret Sullivan examines how the dwindling employment numbers in regional newspaper newsrooms is affecting local coverage and a set of common facts to argue...
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Sramana Mitra: Your first financing was US financing? Fred Plais: It was financed by French and Finnish VCs. It’s difficult when you’re pivoting. You get a business that’s not going that fast anymore...
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Boston has regained its longstanding place as the second-largest U.S. startup funding hub.
After years of trailing New York City in total annual venture investment, Massachusetts is taking the lead in 2018. Venture investment in the Boston metro area hit $5.2 billion so far this year, on track to be the highest annual total in years.
The Massachusetts numbers year-to-date are about 15 percent higher than the New York City total. That puts Boston’s biotech-heavy venture haul apparently second only to Silicon Valley among domestic locales thus far this year. And for New England VCs, the latest numbers also confirm already well-ingrained opinions about the superior talents of local entrepreneurs.
“Boston often gets dismissed as a has-been startup city. But the successes are often overlooked and don’t get the same attention as less successful, but more hypey companies in San Francisco,” Blake Bartlett, a partner at Boston-based venture firm OpenView, told Crunchbase News. He points to local success stories like online prescription service PillPack, which Amazon just snapped up for $1 billion, and online auto marketplace CarGurus, which went public in October and is now valued around $4.7 billion.
Meanwhile, fresh capital is piling up in the coffers of local startups with all the intensity of a New England snowstorm. In the chart below, we look at funding totals since 2012, along with reported round counts.
In the interest of rivalry, we are also showing how the Massachusetts startup ecosystem compares to New York over the past five years.
So what’s the reason for Boston’s 2018 successes? It’s impossible to pinpoint a single cause. The New England city’s startup scene is broad and has deep pockets of expertise in biotech, enterprise software, AI, consumer apps and other areas.
Still, we’d be remiss not to give biotech the lion’s share of the credit. So far this year, biotech and healthcare have led the New England dealmaking surge, accounting for the majority of invested capital. Once again, local investors are not surprised.
“Boston has been the center of the biotech universe forever,” said Dylan Morris, a partner at Boston and Silicon Valley-based VC firm CRV. That makes the city well-poised to be a leading hub in the sector’s latest funding and exit boom, which is capitalizing on a long-term shift toward more computational approaches to diagnosing and curing disease.
Moreover, it goes without saying that the home city of MIT has a particularly strong reputation for so-called deep tech — using really complicated technology to solve really hard problems. That’s reflected in the big funding rounds.
For instance, the largest Boston-based funding recipient of 2018, Moderna Therapeutics, is a developer of mRNA-based drugs that raised $625 million across two late-stage rounds. Besides Moderna, other big rounds for companies with a deep tech bent went to TCR2, which is focused on engineering T cells for cancer therapy, and Starry (based in both Boston and New York), which is deploying the world’s first millimeter wave band active phased array technology for consumer broadband.
Other sectors saw some jumbo-sized rounds too, including enterprise software, 3D printing and even apparel.
Boston also benefits from the rise of supergiant funding rounds. A plethora of rounds raised at $100 million or more fueled the city’s rise in the venture funding rankings. So far this year, at least 15 Massachusetts companies have raised rounds of that magnitude or more, compared to 12 in all of 2017.
Boston companies are going public and getting acquired at a brisk pace too this year, and often for big sums.
At least seven metro-area startups have sold for $100 million or more in disclosed-price acquisitions this year, according to Crunchbase data. In the lead is online prescription drug service PillPack . The second-biggest deal was Kensho, a provider of analytics for big financial institutions that sold to S&P Global for $550 million.
IPOs are huge, too. A total of 17 Boston-area venture-backed companies have gone public so far this year, of which 15 are life science startups. The largest offering was for Rubius Therapeutics, a developer of red cell therapeutics, followed by cybersecurity provider Carbon Black.
Meanwhile, many local companies that went public in the past few years have since seen their values skyrocket. Bartlett points to examples including online retailer Wayfair (market cap of $10 billion), marketing platform HubSpot (market cap $4.8 billion) and enterprise software provider Demandware (sold to Salesforce for $2.8 billion).
Recollections of a frigid April sojourn in Massachusetts are too fresh for me to comfortably utter the phrase “Boston is hot.” However, speaking purely about startup funding, and putting weather aside, the Boston scene does appear to be seeing some real escalation in temperature.
Of course, it’s not just Boston. Supergiant venture funds are surging all over the place this year. Morris is even bullish on the arch-rival a few hours south: “New York and Boston love to hate each other. But New York’s doing some amazing things too,” he said, pointing to efforts to invigorate the biotech startup ecosystem.
Still, so far, it seems safe to say 2018 is shaping up as Boston’s year for startups.
Jeremy Almond: We have another product where most of the time when a payment that needs to be authorized goes beyond a certain amount, there are controls in place. Maybe your accounts payable clerk...
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This is a preview of a research report from Business Insider Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service. To learn more about Business Insider Intelligence, click here .
The healthcare industry is undergoing a profound transformation. Costs are skyrocketing, consumer demand for more accessible care is growing rapidly, and healthcare companies are unable to keep up.
Health organizations are increasingly turning to tech companies to facilitate this transformation in care delivery and lower health expenditures. The potential for tech-led digital health initiatives to help healthcare providers and insurers deliver safer, more efficient, and cost-effective care is significant. For healthcare organizations of all types, the collection, analyses, and application of patient data can minimize avoidable service use, improve health outcomes, and promote patient independence, which can assuage swelling costs.
For their part, the "Big Four" tech companies â Google-parent Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft â see an opportunity to tap into the lucrative health market. These same players are accelerating their efforts to reshape healthcare by developing and collaborating on new tools for consumers, medical professionals, and insurers.
In this report, Business Insider Intelligence explores the key strengths and offerings the Big Four will bring to the healthcare industry, as well as their approaches into the market. We'll then explore how these services and solutions are creating opportunities for health systems and insurers. Finally, the report will outline the barriers that are inhibiting the adoption and usage of the Big Four tech companies' offerings and how these barriers can be circumvented.
Here are some of the key takeaways from the report:
Tech companies' expertise in data management and analysis, along with their significant compute power, can help support healthcare payers, health systems, and consumers by providing a broader overview of how health is accessed and delivered.In full, the report:
Pinpoints the key themes and industry-wide shifts that are driving the transformation of healthcare in the US. Defines the main healthcare businesses and strategies of the Big Four tech companies. Highlights the biggest potential impacts of each of the Big Four's healthcare strategies for health systems and insurers. Discusses the potential barriers that will challenge the adoption of the Big Four tech companies' initiatives and how these hurdles can be overcome.
The Table of Disruptive Technologies. Imperial College London
Academics at Imperial Tech Foresight (ITF), an offshoot of Imperial College London, have been working to bring to life nebulous and intangible technological advances in a way you've never seen before.
They have created a table of disruptive tech, taking inspiration from the periodic table of chemical elements. It contains 100 innovations, ranging from the benign and everyday, to the mind-blowing and potentially terrifying.
To give you an example, cryptocurrencies (identified as Cr) are now part of our modern life, while battlefield robots (Br) sounds like something straight out of "Iron Man."
Each element is colour-coded and slotted into a space across two axis: The Y-axis ranks the potential for disruption from high to low, while the X-axis determines how soon it will become a reality. Here's how it breaks down:
The green elements in the bottom left-hand corner are happening now. The yellow blocks could come to pass in the near future. The red elements are a more distant concept, which could be 20 years away from becoming a reality. The final section of grey is fringe science, which TF identifies as "highly improbable, but not actually impossible."Finally, the elements have numbers, which relate to an example of the tech in action provided by ITF. They are also grouped into themes â the initials at the bottom right of each box. These themes include extreme automation and human augmentation.
The table was created by Richard Watson and Anna Cupani after reading a dry list of emerging technologies on Wikipedia. They spoke to experts to shape the table and produced a number of drafts using Post-it notes for each element before agreeing on a final version.
Maria Jeansson, who worked on the project, said it was designed as a visual conversation starter. "Some corporate organisations have used it in workshops highlighting things that they should be thinking about," she told Business Insider. "For some, they see things and say, 'We didn't imagine that would impact us.'"
The Democratic National Committee warned candidates running in the November midterms not to use devices manufactured by the Chinese electronics firms ZTE and Huawei, "even if the price is low or free," according to a CNN report published on Friday.
The DNC was reportedly considering purchasing ZTE phones for its staffers when it issued its warning, a senior Democratic source told CNN.
"It's very important that party and campaign workers not use ZTE or Huawei devices, even if the price is low or free," chief security officer Bob Lord reportedly wrote.
Lord also warned staffers not to use the Chinese-produced devices "anywhere within your staff - for personal or work-related use."
The warning comes amid government scrutiny of consumer devices manufactured by Chinese firms. Lawmakers like Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, have criticized and pushed for economic penalties against ZTE and Huawei for their "extensive ties with the Chinese Communist Party," and their "track record of doing business with rogue regimes like North Korea and Iran."
REUTERS/Sergio Perez
"In a country full of bad actors when it comes to hurting American jobs and threatening our national security, Huawei and ZTE are two of the absolute worst offenders," a group of bipartisan lawmakers said in a statement to block the US government from buying or leasing telecommunications equipment from the companies.
US intelligence agencies have also remained wary of the companies for possible cybersecurity risks. Agencies like the FBI, CIA, and NSA have expressed concern that companies like Huawei, which was founded by a former engineer in the Chinese People's Liberation Army, could be covert fronts for the Chinese government.
"It provides the capacity to maliciously modify or steal information," FBI Director Christopher Wray said to a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in February. "And it provides the capacity to conduct undetected espionage."
Following the intelligence hearing, ZTE fought back against the claims and downplayed any security concerns.
"As a publicly traded company, we are committed to adhering to all applicable laws and regulations of the United States, work with carriers to pass strict testing protocols, and adhere to the highest business standards," a ZTE spokesperson said at the time.
The US imposed a supplier ban against ZTE in April, after it was caught violating US sanctions and was found to have shipped US technology to Iran and North Korea. While the ban was in effect and the fate of ZTE's US subsidiary was uncertain, the company is believed to have spent $1.4 million to lobby Washington through parties and donations, according to a New York Times report published on Wednesday.
The ban was lifted in July, after the company paid $1 billion as part of a settlement agreement.
August 3, 2018
On August 13th, Iâm giving a talk as part of the Aspen Entrepreneur Showcase. Iâm doing an AMA moderated by Chris Klug on:
Entrepreneurship & Innovation in Rural CommunitiesAngel & Venture Capital InvestingThe GiveFirst Ethos and its Impact on StartupsForming Great Boards of DirectorsTechstars Accelerator Going InternationalMental Health and DepressionPhilanthropic GivingTrends for 2019And, since itâs an AMA, that means people who show up can ask me whatever they want.
Also published on Medium.
Facebook is trying to get into the dating game â and we've just had our first proper glimpse at how it might look.
The company is now testing its "Facebook Dating" feature internally. App researcher and reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong dug up the signup screen for the new feature, and shared screenshots on Twitter on Friday . We've republished her screenshots here, with permission.
The screenshots provide a new insight into how Facebook is planning to dip its toe into the world of dating, as well as the precautions it is taking to prevent abuse among its workforce. Jane Manchun Wong/Twitter
Users attempting to sign up are first greeted with a message titled "For Facebook Employees."
This product is for US Facebook employees who have opted-in to dogfooding Facebook's new dating product," the message reads. ("Dogfooding" is a tech industry term for testing products internally on a company's own employees.)
It adds: "This is not meant for dating your coworkers."
Facebook then asks employees to only use "dummy" data that will be deleted before the official launch, and signs off with a warning alluding to the toxic culture that can surround much of online dating: "As a reminder, Facebook policies such as harassment and code of conduct apply to all dogfooding activities."
Would-be users can then decide their privacy settings: Your Facebook friends won't be able to see your dating profile, and users can decide whether or not they want to allow anyone with mutual friends to see it. In other words, your Facebook profile and your dating profile should be as separate as you'd like them to be (emphasis on "should").
After that there are two questions on gender and sexual preferences, "What's your gender?" (options include Woman, Trans Woman, Man, Trans Man, and Non-binary) and "Who are you interested in seeing? ("Women, Trans Women, Men, Trans Men, or Non-binary people.")
The colour-scheme of the feature is distinct from the rest of Facebook. Instead of the traditional blue, it uses a soft, rosy red, with purple illustrations â perhaps an attempt to clearly differentiate it from the social network. Of course, this is just a test, and that could change before the official launch.
Another discovery made by Wong is that Facebook is apparently testing a dating feature called "Conversation Starters," which will help break the ice with your matches.
Facebook announced the dating feature at its F8 conference earlier this year, which came in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The company has come under considerable fire over its handling of user data and privacy issues, and it will need to walk a fine line as it launches Facebook Dating to avoid the inevitable privacy concerns.
In clearly separating users' dating profiles from their existing friend circles, the company appears to be trying to get ahead of the issue. It'll need to prove itself out to top Tinder, currently the most popular dating app going.
"This is going to be for building real, long-term relationships â not just for hookups," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said when it was announced . "We have designed this with privacy and safety in mind from the beginning. Your friends aren't going to see your profile, and you're only going to be suggested to people who are not your friends."
A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the company is currently "testing Facebook Dating internally (as we regularly do with new features)," but said they "don't have anything more to share right now."
A company called Rentlogic has raised $2.4 million to take the guesswork out of determining whether that cheap, beautiful New York apartment is actually a deathtrap wrapped in a brownstone’s clothing.
Renting in New York is murder already, but using Rentlogic, apartment hunters can figure out if their new housing situation could actually kill them (or put them at significant risk of bodily or property harm… or even minor inconveniences).
Investors in the company’s seed round include the Urban-X accelerator (which is a partnership between Urban.US and Mini); Urban.Us, an investor in urban technologies; the millennial-entrepreneur-focused investment firm, Kairos; and Seagram beverage company scion Edgar Bronfman, Jr.
Rentlogic already provides a grade for every building in New York — more than 1 million properties — but has added an inspection feature that it charges landlords for so that they can display a rating outside of their building. It’s like the city’s scoring grades for restaurants in neighborhoods.
“We grade every single property in New York,” says Yale Fox, the company’s founder and chief executive. “We have inspected 103 properties. Everybody is really happy with it and everybody is going to re-sign and we’re going to start scaling this out to every property in New York.”
Rentlogic scores buildings on a combination of around 150 different variables, including the ability to provide continuous heat and hot water, and whether or not a building has evidence of bed bugs or rodents.
The looks of the building doesn’t matter, Fox says. It’s more about the conditions of the building.
“It’s the same way a building would get LEED-certified,” says Fox. “It’s a good way for one landlord to differentiate their property as higher quality than a competitor’s in the same neighborhood.”
Launched initially in 2013, Rentlogic was born out of Fox’s own tragic experience as a new renter in New York. The Canadian transplant (and the son of a family of real estate professionals and small scale landlords) had come to the city for a new job and was looking at an apartment in the West Village.
After shelling out a $12,000 deposit for first month’s rent, last month’s rent and a security deposit, Fox settled into his abode in the tree-lined luxury of one of Manhattan’s most sought-after neighborhoods. The love affair with the building didn’t last long.
Unexpectedly, Fox started to become sick. Several visits to the doctor couldn’t identify a cause for his illness, until, finally, his physician suggested a mold-related illness.
“I asked the landlord to fix it and I wound up having to take the landlord to court,” says Fox.
By the time the court date arrived, Fox had paid to fix the mold problem himself and had little in the way of solid evidence to show a judge. So he built an app that would track the public complaints filed against the landlord and the public assessments that had been done on the building.
“I went to court and I showed the judge this model that I had put together and he said, ‘Welcome to New York and I’m sorry this happened to you… and you should definitely build an app, because New York City needs this.'”
Rentlogic founder Yale Fox
Fox, already enrolled in the TED Fellows program, built the app, initially called “RentCheck” and began marketing it to landlords and renters. “It was just a hobby because I was so angry about how things had happened to me,” says Fox. “We didn’t want to charge renters fees to the site. We thought having equal access to information could prevent this from happening in the future.”
Things continued as a nonprofit for a while until last year Fox hit on a business model. He designed a ratings card for the building based on the data his company had collected and showed it to his current landlord. “She said, ‘How much would you charge for it?'” Fox recalled.
Thus RentCheck became Rentlogic and a business was born. Fox charges landlords for assessments and to display a ratings placard that indicates the building’s grade.
Renters are willing to pay up to an additional $45 per month, according to a white paper, to sign a lease in a building that’s been independently certified. “People are willing to pay a little bit more just to not deal with the constant headaches that happen in certain kinds of buildings,” he said.
Fox appears to have launched Rentlogic at the right time. The market for housing in New York has softened as luxury apartments flood the market and demand softens, meaning that rents are coming down across the board.
But beyond being more competitive there’s a defensive aspect to getting rated in a market filled with demanding, complaint-prone consumers that have no qualms savaging any business, from landlords to local restaurants (although oftentimes the landlords and restaurants deserve it).
“A lot of times landlords are purchasing this because there’s no way to prove they’re not a one-star landlord,” Fox says. “This is accessible for big landlords and small landlords. In a zero-transparency and low-accountability marketplace, there’s no incentive for bad actors to improve their behavior, but with Rentlogic there is.”
The company is already making institutional moves. Fox has inked a deal with Blackstone about providing ratings for their $5.5 billion Stuyvesant Town acquisition on the Lower East Side, according to Fox. In addition, the company has partnered with a number of real estate brokers and roommate-hunting services like Nooklyn and Roomi to use its ratings.
While Rentlogic is scrupulous about using data to train its algorithm, it’s also transparent about how the algorithm works, according to Fox.
“Algorithms control so much what’s going on in the world and people just don’t understand them,” he says. So in the interest of full transparency, the company is putting together a building simulator where users can add problems and see how it affects a building’s rating on the Rentlogic site. The company also has an algorithmic review committee that reviews the results coming from the building assessments.
And while Rentlogic is starting in New York, the company has plans to use its machine learning system to hoover up publicly available data and provide grades for real estate across the United States.
Ultimately, Fox just wants to help improve the tenant-landlord relationship, he says. “I was in a terrible situation with a landlord who went to jail… I launched this site so no one would have to go through what I went through.”
Samsung just accidentally leaked details about the Galaxy Note 9, less than a week before it's set to unveil the new phone.
On Friday, SamMobile spotted an intro video that had been uploaded to YouTube by Samsung New Zealand. The video reveals the design of the upcoming Galaxy Note 9 smartphone, along with a few details about the phone's internals. The video has since been removed, but you can still find versions of it on YouTube.
The video seems to confirm that the blue version of the Galaxy Note 9 will come with a yellow S Pen, a feature that leaker Ice Universe tweeted out last month (the phone will also come in black, brown, and purple , according to Ice Universe).
The video also tell us that not only is Samsung planning a 512 GB Galaxy Note 9, but the phone will also support a 512 GB microSD card. That means the Galaxy Note 9 will get up to 1 terabyte of total storage.
Samsung will officially unveil the new device at its Unpacked Event on August 9 in New York City, but until then, you can watch the full intro video below:
Domo CEO Josh James, center, celebrates his company's debut on the public markets in June.Domo/Nasdaq
The market for public offerings in the tech sector popped in the first half of this year and could get even better in the second half and on into next year.
But you'll likely have to wait have to wait until next year for the biggest of the so-called unicorns â the private tech companies valued at $1 billion or more, a group that includes Uber, WeWork, and AirBnB â to hit the market.
That's the word from some of the investment bankers who cater to the tech industry and work with companies that are preparing to go public. Investors are eager for new offerings from high-growth firms, while at the same time many companies are itching to go public after many years of being private, they say.
"The tech sector's going to be busy," said Brad Miller, global head of equity syndicate at UBS. He continued: "We're pretty bullish on the sector going forward."
It's already been a good market for tech IPOs. In the first half of the year, 24 tech companies went public, according PwC. That's already more than the number that debuted in all of 2016, and is 11 more than the number that went public in the first half of last year.
Jenny Cheng/BI Graphics
And the market valuation of the companies that have hit the public markets in the first half of this year â $8.7 billion â is up 77% from the same period last year, according to PwC. That figure doesn't include Spotify, which went public in a non-traditional way . Had its $26.5 billion valuation at its market debut been included, the total value of IPOs in the first half would have been seven times greater than in the same period last year.
Jenny Cheng/BI Graphics
Among the companies that have debuted this year are Domo , DocuSign, and Dropbox.
After the tech IPO market ended last year on a strong note, industry insiders were expecting the momentum to carry into this year.
"The first half of the year hasn't disappointed," said John Chirico, co-head of capital markets origination for the Americas at Citi.
What's helping drive the market is hunger on the part of investors for the ability to invest in fast-growing firms. On average, tech companies see a significant rise in their stock in the 30 days following their IPOs, the tech bankers say. That kind of immediate return can help boost the portfolios of institutional investors.
So they're demanding more such companies, because they're not getting that kind of quick-paced growth elsewhere. And investors are more than willing, for now, to trade revenue growth for profits.
Investors are being "compensated for taking risks in new companies," said Chirico. So, he continued, they're "asking to see more private companies."
Part of what's helping to drive the market â and increase valuations for new tech firms â is that investors feel like they have a better grasp on the risks faced by the companies that have gone public lately, Chirico said. Earlier this decade, as smartphones were coming to the fore, there was much more uncertainty about many of the companies that were going public, he said. It wasn't clear how many people would eventually use mobile devices or what kinds of things they would do with them. It also wasn't clear whether companies that had established themselves on the web, like Facebook, would be able to make the transition to mobile devices.
By contrast, many of the tech companies that are going public now are going after established markets, Chirico said. The question is no longer whether there's a market for their products, but how much of the market they can gobble up and how effectively the established companies in the sector will respond.
"These business models are well-understood execution risks," he said. "Investors love that. They can assess that."
But the market is also being driven by the eagerness of tech companies to go public, the bankers say. There's plenty of private capital still floating around, and at least some of the prospective companies are generating cash, so many don't necessarily need to hit the public markets to grow or stay float.
However, the stock market has been on a long bull run, one that will end sooner or later. There's the sense among some of them that they should go out while the public window is still open, Miller said. After being private for years, there's also the feeling among those companies that it's time to hit the public markets, he said. Such a move could help those companies' employees realize the value of their stock options and help the companies themselves make acquisitions using their shares.
"It's just the next phase for some of these companies," Miller said.
But don't expect to see the most prominent of the still-private companies hit the market just yet. Those companies still have access to private capital and don't have any urgency to go public. But several of those companies are reportedly preparing for it.
That could set up 2019 to be a big year for IPOs.
"It feels like there's lot of activity that we're likely to see in the second half of this year, going into next year," Chirico said.
After nearly a decade of effort, SpaceX and Boeing are preparing to launch the first NASA astronauts on commercial spaceships.
On Friday, NASA announced the first nine astronauts who will risk their lives on the first crewed missions of Boeing's CST-100 Starliner and SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft in 2019.
The goal of NASA's Commercial Crew program, as it's called, is to taxi astronauts to and from the $150-billion International Space Station (ISS). Accomplishing that would close an increasingly expensive gap in the US' space-travel capabilities.
In 2015, NASA selected astronaut Sunita "Suni" Williams and three other " space pioneers " to test then fly the new spaceships.
Williams is slated to fly aboard Boeing's second test flight to the ISS.
"Five years ago, this would have been like, 'No way, what are we doing asking commercial providers to be able to do this?'" Williams told Business Insider in June. "Now it feels like a natural progression for space travel."
Williams has flown inside three spaceships, served as commander of the International Space Station, lived in orbit for 322 days, and piloted 30 different types of aircraft for the Navy.
This extensive resume has come in handy over the past three years, as Williams has worked closely with Boeing and SpaceX. She and her colleagues have poked and prodded spacecraft mock-ups, tried on new spacesuits, fiddled with control panels, tested out simulators, and provided frank and sometimes critical feedback.
Here's why NASA needs Boeing and SpaceX, what Williams thinks of their new ships and suits, and how she's preparing to blast off into the uncharted territory of a new space race .
This story was updated with new information. It was originally published on June 24, 2018.
This is a preview of a research report from Business Insider Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service. To learn more about Business Insider Intelligence, click here .
The healthcare industry is undergoing a profound transformation. Costs are skyrocketing, consumer demand for more accessible care is growing rapidly, and healthcare companies are unable to keep up.
Health organizations are increasingly turning to tech companies to facilitate this transformation in care delivery and lower health expenditures. The potential for tech-led digital health initiatives to help healthcare providers and insurers deliver safer, more efficient, and cost-effective care is significant. For healthcare organizations of all types, the collection, analyses, and application of patient data can minimize avoidable service use, improve health outcomes, and promote patient independence, which can assuage swelling costs.
For their part, the "Big Four" tech companies â Google-parent Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft â see an opportunity to tap into the lucrative health market. These same players are accelerating their efforts to reshape healthcare by developing and collaborating on new tools for consumers, medical professionals, and insurers.
In this report, Business Insider Intelligence explores the key strengths and offerings the Big Four will bring to the healthcare industry, as well as their approaches into the market. We'll then explore how these services and solutions are creating opportunities for health systems and insurers. Finally, the report will outline the barriers that are inhibiting the adoption and usage of the Big Four tech companies' offerings and how these barriers can be circumvented.
Here are some of the key takeaways from the report:
Tech companies' expertise in data management and analysis, along with their significant compute power, can help support healthcare payers, health systems, and consumers by providing a broader overview of how health is accessed and delivered.In full, the report:
Pinpoints the key themes and industry-wide shifts that are driving the transformation of healthcare in the US. Defines the main healthcare businesses and strategies of the Big Four tech companies. Highlights the biggest potential impacts of each of the Big Four's healthcare strategies for health systems and insurers. Discusses the potential barriers that will challenge the adoption of the Big Four tech companies' initiatives and how these hurdles can be overcome.Copyright © 2020 iStart Valley.
