It is the best of times to be a part of the vibrant startup ecosystem. There’s a massive demand for digital solutions offered by agile and young startups, as it gives them an early mover’s advantage in the race.
From DevOps to climate intelligence tech, we’re excited to share some exciting companies to watch, including a startup that helps to duck data breaches with virtual cards.
Lithic
Founder: Bo Jiang
Segment: Fintech platform
Data breaches are getting more frequent, and people aren’t comfortable sharing their credit card numbers with online sellers. This startup, known formerly as Privacy.com, offers an innovative way to make online purchases without sharing personal information — allowing anyone to generate virtual and disposable payment card numbers for free. That way, users won’t have to share their personal information with online vendors or payment platforms. The cards can be single use, or users can use different cards with different companies — tying each virtual card to their bank account or debit card.
No surprise, the concept has appealed to many. Until now, the startup had issued over 10 million virtual card numbers.
Recently, the startup raised $43 million in Series B funding to double down on its card issuing platform. There’s no doubt that platforms like Lithic help protect users when hackers steal information from company databases. If you used a fake name or one-time-only credit card number, your real credentials stay safe even when data falls into the wrong hands.
ShuttleOps
Founder: Damith Karunaratne
Segment: Cloud-based DevOps platform
It might sound like just another company offering DevOps solutions, but this platform can build and manage complex application delivery processes. Using ShuttleOps’ visual pipelines, developers and infrastructure professionals can easily connect to their respective DevOps tools to build codes. What’s more? Its simple drag-and-drop functionality lets developers build and deploy Docker container images to self-managed or hosted Kubernetes clusters.
According to the company, this helps with managing application runtime configurations and automating application delivery across all of the major cloud platforms, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. The platform, which eliminates the need to train operations staff on disparate artifact management, deployment and configuration management technologies, also offers several no-code multi-cloud Kubernetes capabilities.
Businesses seek simple, easy to use DevOps platforms, and ShuttleOps looks like the one that eliminates the issues surrounding maintenance, and integration, and provides transparency, consistency, and traceability.
Emoty.AI
Founder: Soner Abay, Ozan Yurtsever
Segment: B2B and SaaS emotion recognition solutions
Facial recognition technology is pretty well-known, and so now startups are taking it a notch higher to recognise the emotions that face display. This Turkish tech startup focuses on emotion detection solutions, using deep learning techniques to analyse specific physiological data, such as eye-tracking, microexpressions, pose detection, stress analysis and pupil analysis, among others. It generates insight by making mood analysis.
Emotion recognition technology, which has become a $20 billion market, has use cases across various industries, including healthcare and manufacturing, helping primarily in research and focus group applications. Even UX testing companies can benefit from emotion analysis.
There’s a continued growth of the technology, as marketers are increasingly using emotion detection in their work — if they can accurately read prospects’ emotional responses, they can achieve better results in customer acquisition. Just over a year old, Empty.AI is one of the innovative tech startups that is revolutionising the sector in the region.
One Concern
Founder: Ahmad Wani, Nicole Hu
Segment: Predictive Analytics
In the last few years, climate intelligence startups have emerged, offering predictive analytics platforms, combining machine learning with more traditional weather modelling techniques to train their models to enable organisations to better anticipate and prepare for extreme weather events.
And One Concern is one of the most interesting ones, as it builds a digital twin of the world’s natural and built environments to model the effects of climate change, offering its customers Resilience-as-a-Service in response to earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters.
It creates highly detailed digital models of cities by pulling data about streets and structures from various proprietary and open sources worldwide. Recently, the startup raised $45 million from Japan’s SOMPO.
With climate change intensifying across the globe, One Concern, by marrying hazard modelling with machine learning and artificial intelligence, is helping communities to be better prepared before and after a disaster strikes.
Local Logic
Founder: Vincent-Charles Hodder
Segment: Location intelligence platform
With more than 20 billion unique data points, this startup quantifies the “sense of place” for any given location. It combines geospatial, user-generated, and real estate data to offer a perspective on location, and through its predictive analytics — from macro development patterns to describing the micro experience of specific sites — helps to inform real estate decision making in the built environment.
It has built a digital twin of cities, quantifying the built world using data and AI to interpret the real estate market throughout the US and Canada, optimising projects for maximum affordability and minimal environmental impact. Through web tools, APIs, one-click reports and data analytics platform, Local Logic delivers location insights and brings transparency into the real estate market to build more sustainable cities.
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