Biz Stone said the other day “Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success.” These startups may not have started ten years ago, but they persevered and are committed to achieving success and so far they are doing well among others as the promising startups for 2013. We expect continuous growth in 2013. We selected these 8 startups based on the momentum they gained in 2012 and how fast users adopted the service, product or the app.
Let us know in the comments which startups are on your list of most promising startups in 2013.
Snapchat
Launched: 2011
Founders: Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy
Funding: $13.5 million Series A funding round led by Benchmark Capital, which valued the company between $60 million and $70 million
Snapchat is a photo messaging app.Using the app, users can take photos, record videos, add text and drawings, and send them to a controlled list of recipients. Users set a time limit for how long recipients can view their photos, up to 10 seconds, after which it will be deleted from the recipient’s device and the company’s servers. As of 28 November 2012, users had shared over one billion photos on the Snapchat iOS app, with more than 60 million photos or messages sent each day.
Codecademy
Founded: 2011
Founders: Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski
Funding: $2.5 million in Series A funding and $10 million in Series B funding.
Codecademy is an online interactive platform that offers free coding classes in programming languages like Python, JavaScript, and Ruby, as well as markup languages including HTML and CSS. To motivate users to participate, the site offers feedback, badges for completing exercises, as well as a function that keeps track of a user’s total score and displays it to others. The site also allows anyone to create and publish a new course using a Course Creator tool. In its first 72 hours after launch, Codecademy signed up 200,000 people for coding lessons.
RebelMouse
Launched: 2012
Founder: Paul Berry
Funding: $2 .5 million venture funding.
RebelMouse, a content aggregation and curation site that lets users set up a profile and pull in content from their social networking accounts. RebelMouse wants to solve a core problem with publishing on the realtime and social web. Rebel Mouse automatically generates a personalized page of content pulled from various social media sources and then use that page as a home page or embed it into your existing blog, microblog or website. Since launching to the public last June, RebelMouse has had 240K sites created and is hitting 1.5 million unique monthly visitors to its landing pages.
Smartthings
Launched: 2012
Founder: Alex Hawkinson
Funding: $3 million from First Round Capital, SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, CrunchFund, Max Levchin, David Tisch, Chris Dixon, Vivi Nevo, Alexis Ohanian; $1.2 million from Kickstarter users. Smartthings raised over $85,000 in one day when the project sought funds on Kickstarter.
SmartThings makes it easy to connect the things in your physical world to the Internet. You can monitor, control, automate, and have fun with them from anywhere – at home, office, or on the go. It’s selling kits with moisture sensors, power outlets, and motion detectors that turn previously dumb appliances such as fans and garage door openers into Internet-connected devices that can be controlled using the company’s smartphone apps.
500px
Launched: 2010
Founders: Evgeny Tchebotarev, Oleg Gutsol
Funding: $525k Series A from High Line Venture Partners, Deep Creek Capital and ff Venture Capital.
500px is a photographic community powered by creative people from all over the world that lets you share and discover inspiring photographs on the web and on your smartphone. The Toronto based startup launched its Web version in 2009and is aimed at aspiring and professional photographers. 500px has an algorithm that determines the best photography, and also the interesting people and interesting photographers. The algorithm was built in part using technology from an earlier 500px acquisition, Algo Anywhere. 500px is available for your iPad, iPhone and Android phones. The company acquired Algo Anywhere (recommendation engine) and Pulpfingers ( photo-focused iOS apps developers ) in 2012.
Gumroad
Launched: 2011
Founder: Sahil Lavingia
Funding: $8.1 million from Accel Partners, Chris Sacca, Max Levchin, SV Angel, Josh Kopelman, Seth Goldstein, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, CrunchFund.
Gumroad enables creatives to sell directly to their audience. Most people use Gumroad to sell the things that they’ve made including Writers, designers, game developers, musicians, artists, and filmmakers. These include songs, albums, videos, photos, and other things. Even T-shirts! You can sell anything that you can upload or link to. Gumroad supports all major credit cards (and some debit cards). That includes Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, JCB, and Diners Club cards.
MoviePass
Launched: 2012
Founders: Stacy Spikes and Hamet Watt
Funding: $1.5 million from AOL Ventures, Lambert Media Group, True Ventures, Moxie Pictures, MJ Eng, Ryan Steelberg, and Brian Lee.
MoviePass is a subscription service that allows customers the freedom to see movies in theaters at a fixed monthly price. You can select theaters, titles and showtimes from anywhere. When you sign up, you get an app for your smartphone and a membership card that works like a debit card. When you want to see a movie, just check in at the theater on your phone, then swipe your membership card like any other debit card.
Mailbox
Launched: 2013
Founders: Gentry Underwood and Scott Cannon
Funding: $5M Series A from Charles River Ventures , SV Angel, Kapor Capital, CrunchFund
Mailbox is a mobile email experience for iPhone + Gmail. More than 800,000 people are waiting to access the new iPhone app when released. Mailbox- that aims to transform their email experience. Mailbox will sync with the Gmail accounts of users and inform them about the number of messages, both read and unread, that are filling their inbox. The app, currently available only for iPhone users, will help users to ‘swipe’ away an unimportant email and schedule a time for it to return, choosing from a selected date.
