Startups and trends expanding: real-time data analytics, process automation in advertising, and market research platforms
While COVID-19 has presented challenges for some companies, many startups have accelerated considerably over recent months. As the Co-Founder/CEO of Intern From Home, a platform that connects students with startups for virtual internship opportunities, my team and I have had the opportunity to help hundreds of startups. I’ve had an inside look into which companies are full steam ahead right now, and I’m excited to share my insights here.
This analysis seeks to share three trends and discuss related companies that appear to be rapidly advancing. While the companies shared here are designed to be illustrative in nature, there are reasons to pay attention to them as examined in this piece.
Here’s the summary:
● There’s a refined focus on platforms for data analysis, including those that can be accessed by non-technical employees. Importantly, there is an emphasis on making data continually available, which opens up real-time monitoring.
○ Spark Beyond analyzes an organization's data, creates many hypotheses, and uses external data sets to narrow in on the most accurate analysis.
○ Sigma Ratings uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) for constant monitoring of risk threat. They have an opportunity to become the standard score for risk monitoring.
○ Diana AI can generate data insights based on questions via voice and search, allowing non-technical employees to access data without a need for technical help.
● Tools for process automation are allowing advertisers and content producers to personalize content and capture revenue opportunities.
○ Omneky uses AI to generate personalized ads for different buyer personas, allowing for a reduction in cost and increased conversion/ROI.
○ Vessel converts culture guides (with formats like Yelp) into interactive maps with video, increasing revenue opportunities for brands.
● Brands have realized their process for decision making is antiquated, and market research platforms are emerging to help them understand their audiences, especially Gen Z.
○ Perksy creates visually-appealing surveys that attract Gen Z so that customers like Airbnb and Pepsico can learn what young consumers actually want.
○ Zebra IQ enables brands to share surveys with consumers, with a focus on customer retention.
○ Teleport is TikTok meets Instagram with a Shopify-like structure, allowing consumers to share their opinion on short videos featuring a brand’s product.
Interested to learn more about these trends and companies? Keep reading!
Data analysis: in real time, continual, and accessible to non-technical employees
Companies focused on improving the ease for organizations to access data are not new. However, a trend that does seem to be accelerating are companies that are not just gathering data, but also generating insights that allow organizations to take swift action in a matter of minutes. For many organizations, their data —everything from daily customer activity to competitor research— is thought or advertised as being accessible, although in reality, it often requires written technical queries to access it. The creation of these queries are commonly left to the data or engineering teams at companies, who usually have more important and time-sensitive projects.
Due to this order of prioritization, by the time that people actually receive the data they need, it might be rendered obsolete due to the delay— not to mention the fact that there is often still work that needs to be done to fully analyze it. This issue is pervasive across organizations, and it is for this reason that it is well worth looking closely at the trend towards platforms that are allowing for rapid access to data accessibility and interpretation in real-time.
Spark Beyond takes a very interesting approach to using AI for data insights. This platform can quickly analyze an organization’s datasets, generate many hypotheses, and then begin to narrow in on certain hypotheses by connecting other data sets for analysis. This ability to utilize many other data sets as a mechanism for determining the most accurate hypotheses is extremely exciting. Many data analytics platforms have fully siloed their analysis within the context of an organization. By allowing for the use of other data sources when conducting analysis, SparkBeyond is opening a new window of opportunity for an innovative way to approach data analysis that shows great promise. Importantly, it has the ability to conduct these analyses in a matter of minutes, aligning with the broader trend towards real-time analysis.
Sigma Ratings is using advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) to discover risks for businesses. At its core, Sigma analyzes data from a variety of sources so that an organization can determine the risk of companies, which includes competitors, acquisition targets, or other important companies. Crucially, Sigma can keep continual tabs on risk threats. This notion of continual monitoring is extremely significant and aligns with the trend being observed towards real-time ongoing analysis. Sigma helps investors, financial institutions, sales teams, regulators, and those working on compliance. Sigma has the promise of becoming the industry standard for risk scores. In an analogous way to how a credit score determines the financial risk of a person, Sigma has the opportunity to assign scores that help interpret companies’ risk profiles. This opportunity is very compelling as it indicates that Sigma has the potential not only to help revolutionize the business risk management industry, but also to become the dominant company in the space.
Diana AI is a data analysis platform that relies on the use of voice and search. As a no-code platform, Diana AI is providing access to data for everyone in an organization, not just those with technical abilities. Similar to how you might speak to Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa, you can talk to Diana AI about the question you’re seeking to solve, and the platform has the ability to populate relevant data based on your request. Given this ease of discovery, Diana AI has a significant opportunity to increase the accessibility of data for non-technical people that can help better inform questions they might have. Diana AI can run queries in real time, aligning with the broader trend towards rapid analysis platforms.
Process automation for advertisers and content producers: allowing personalization and revenue opportunities to become more repeatable
Platforms focused on process automation have been successful for years, and this trend seems to be continuing— albeit with an increased specificity. In particular, there is a focus on streamlining processes and creating revenue opportunities for advertisers and content producers. Specifically, there is a trend towards helping automate the personalization and also increasing the engagement levels of content that has traditionally struggled to be engaging.
This trend is worth exploring for several reasons. As far as personalization goes, ads and other digital content is often impersonalized because it takes a significant amount of time to create personalized content. Given this, platforms that can help automate this process stand to provide tremendous value to a brand. In terms of levels of interaction, we live in a digital world that is increasingly interactive, but significant amounts of content have failed to make that transition. As such, a platform that can make content more interactive has significant opportunities to capture lost revenue.
Omneky empowers advertisers to automate the process of creating customized ads for each buyer persona. Using AI, Omneky is able to create text and media suggestions for ads for each subset of customers. Omneky is particularly exciting for several reasons: the company has the opportunity to help companies significantly reduce their marketing costs by significantly reducing both the cost and time of developing customized ads. Importantly, Omneky also has the opportunity to help advertisers increase conversion. Without Omneky, the process of developing ads relies on repeated trial-and-error; Omneky’s AI has the ability to make the process much more streamlined and data-driven, giving companies the opportunity to increase advertising ROI and decrease costs.
Vessel is focused on helping independent content publishers drive engagement and increase revenue by converting culture guides into video-focused maps. Remember the last time you went on Yelp, opened the map view, and clicked on actual restaurants or retail establishments? Instead of the traditional static photo and text description, Vessel provides quick videos for the consumer to take a sneak peek into establishments. According to Vessel, over $5B of revenue is uncaptured each month by publishers of food, travel, & city guides. Vessel’s opportunity to unlock a significant part of that uncaptured value is intriguing.
Market research platforms: brands are finally realizing they must use technology to understand customers
Market research platforms have gained momentum in previous years and that trend appears to be accelerating. There are logical reasons to see an advancement in platforms that reward consumers, especially younger audiences, for sharing their opinions. At its core, these platforms have the opportunity to offer tremendous value for decision makers at companies, especially for larger companies that might struggle to understand the purchasing process and mindset of their target customers.
This trend is particularly interesting for a few reasons: for one, much of the previous “competition” for these platforms has simply been executive teams making decisions with incomplete or a complete lack of data around their consumers’ preferences. Given this prior incomplete method of analysis, market research platforms have an opportunity to provide significant value. Secondly, consumers, in particular those in the Gen Z and Millennial demographics, are excited about sharing their opinions, especially when there is a reward for doing so.
These two elements of demand reveal why market research platforms are ramping up in popularity and have the opportunity to become a commonplace part of both the decision-making process at companies as well as the daily routine of consumers.
Perksy allows brands to make creatively-designed surveys that appeal to Gen Z. Their surveys use product images, emojis, and the like, and they have the visual appearance of the type of survey that a college/university student might be willing to do. In essence, Persky allows brands to meet Gen Z where Gen Z is at. It lists brands such as Airbnb, Pepsico, and Smucker’s as clients, and it has even been creating a “COVID-19 Weekly Consumer Pulse” report for brands to understand the shifts in the consumer landscape as they are happening.
Similar to Perksy, Zebra IQ connects brands with Gen Z for micro-tasks such as surveys and product feedback. However, unlike Perksy’s focus on providing more general consumer insights, ZebraIQ is focused on helping a brand retain their loyal followers. This focus on retention of followers, as opposed to Perksy’s focus on consumer insights, is worth exploring deeper. The market research space does not appear to be a winner-take-all-market, and there seems to be room for platforms focused on consumer insights and retention to coexist; however, a platform that effectively does both might have the biggest opportunity.
Teleport is a platform that pays consumers to share opinions on shoppable short videos. In ways, it feels like TikTok meets Instagram, with a Shopify-style element of how brands use it. The UI/UX of the platform is modeled similarly to the social media platforms on which young audiences spend significant amounts of time. The video-centric nature of the platform is geared towards this demographic’s interest in videos, and the fact that a myriad of brands can use this as a platform to sell their product (the app allows for checkout with Apple Pay) feels a lot like how Shopify became the source of sales empowerment for companies around the world.