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The 20 Best New Startups Of 2011
From the smallest panoramic camera in the world to a new mobile bank with access to 40,000 fee-free ATMs, startups have launched some cool things this year.
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We pulled together a list of the best new startups that launched in 2011.
Founders: Alex Payne, Josh Reich and Shamir Karkal
Funding: Raised $10 million in August and has raised ~$13 million to date.
What it is: People keep their money in more than one place and they get charged a lot of money by every bank. Simple (formerly called BankSimple) wants to merge all accounts into one and do away with fees by splitting the net interest between all of the banks involved.
It's partnering with Visa to create one, ultimate credit card that connects to all of its partner banks and 40,000 fee-free ATMs
It opened its beta a few weeks ago and will officially launch in 2012.
Founder: Dr. Ren Ng
Funding: $50 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, NEA and K9 Ventures, and other angels
What it is: Lytro is the first light field camera that allows you to "shoot now and focus later."
Here's how it works: 1) Take a picture 2) Upload it 3) Click on a blurry section that you'd like to highlight 4) Watch the image instantly shift focus from 2D to 3D.
Try it out. Click on different parts of the tree below to focus on different areas.
Founders: Paige Craig, George Ishii and Sizhao "Zao" Yang
Funding: $8 million from Redpoint Ventures
What it is: Betterworks is an employee rewards network for small businesses. Instead of having to scout out great deals for employees, small businesses and startups can use BetterWorks to offer their staff deals at local gyms, restaurants and more.
BetterWorks secures the partnerships, and all employees in its network can buy the deals, no matter which small business they work for or how many of their fellow employees sign up.
Founders: Eric Koester, Bo Fishback, Ian Hunter
Funding: $1 million seed round, $14.1 million Series A from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sands Capital Ventures, Ashton Kutcher, SV Angel, CMEA, Venture51, Crunchfund, Mark Ecko, and Artists and Instigator
What it is: Zaarly is a local marketplace for real-time requests. Need chips at your party in five minutes? Find a neighbor on Zaarly who will do it now. Think Craigslist meets Twitter.
Founders: Seth Goldstein, Billy Chasen
Funding: $7 million led by Union Square Ventures
What it is: Turntable.fm is a way to listen to music online with groups of people. Users can join chat rooms and battle to become a DJ in a socially-integrated experience.
Founder: Kevin Rose
Funding: Parent company Milk raised $1.5 million from angel investors
What it is: Oink is a recommendation app that lets you rate items at the venues you visit, like hamburgers and coffees.
For more information, here's a walkthrough of Oink.
Founders: Adam Pritzker, Jake Schwartz, Brad Hargreaves, and Matt Brimer
Funding: $4.25 million plus other unattributed amounts from Yuri Milner and others
What it is: General Assembly is a school for entrepreneurs with courses taught by the community and cheap desks to rent office space.
The founders believe school is important but feel traditional universities aren't training students to succeed in the 21st century. Prtizker says General Assembly fills that void by focusing on collaboration and innovation instead of lectures.
“People always talk about Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg all dropping out [of university]. The reality is they all thought of those ideas in college,” Pritzker tells Financial Times.
Founder: Tim Bentley
Funding: Giftly has a few million in funding; Thrive Capital and Dave Tisch are investors
What it is: Giftly offers a way for anyone to buy a gift card to any store in the world, even ones that aren't nearby.
Gift cards are designed by the gifter and sent via email. The recipient opens the email and unlocks the payment when they're in the store. Money (a refund for the purchase) is sent to his or her bank account.
For more on Giftly, check out our visit to its San Francisco office >>
Founders: Elliot Kroo and Jessica Scorpio
Funding: $3.4 million from CrunchFund, Netflix founder Marc Randolph, Time Warner’s largest shareholder Vivi Nevo, Redpoint Ventures, and others.
What it is: Car rental service for you and your neighbors. Rent cars from each other instead of from Hertz.
Founders: Mike Karnjanaprakorn and Malcolm Ong
Funding: $3.1 million round from Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital.
What it is: Skillshare is a way to learn anything from anyone. People post what they want to teach on Skillshare and then find a venue. Other Skillshare users can sign up to attend the course and pay for tickets.
Founders: Jason Goldberg and Bradford Shellhammer
Funding: $11.3 million to date; raised $7.7 million in August
What it is: Fab is a flash sales design and home decor site. It has scaled quickly with smart marketing and a viral invite scheme. The members-only site asks you to invite three friends before giving you access to its sales.
It sells really unique things too, like iPhone covers made from newspaper clippings.
Founders: Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski
Funding: $2.5 million led by Union Square Ventures
What it is: An online programming tutorial. It's an easy way to learn JavaScript, starting with the spelling of your name.
Founders: Adam Wilson and Ian Bernstein
Funding: Parent company Orbotix has raised $6 million
What it is: "It's the size of a tennis ball with a little robot inside that can be guided around," explains Foundry Group's Brad Feld. "It's fabulous for dogs and cats. Give it to an eight-year-old boy or girl and they won't let go of it. You can imagine the military applications for something like that too."
Founders: Jonathan Marcus, David Marcus, and Jack Zerby
Funding: $3 Million+ in funding led by Alex Zubillaga of the Rhone Group. Additional angel investors include Dave Morin of Path, David Tisch of TechStars, Vimeo founder Jake Lodwick, Joey Levin of Mindspark, and John Foley of Barnes & Noble.
What it is: An incredibly easy to use e-commerce site. Goodsie makes setting up stores very similar to setting up Wordpress blogs.
Users choose from multiple layout options, color pallets, background patterns, and typography without ever having to muck in code.
After writing about Goodsie's launch, I tried the service myself. Within a week I shut down my Yahoo e-commerce site and switched to Goodsie instead. The site looks better and is much easier to manage now.
Here's a video about how Goodsie works:
Goodsie.com from Hiidef on Vimeo.
Founders: Chantel Waterbury
Funding: $8.5 million Series A round led by General Catalyst Partners. First Round Capitaland other Chloe + Isabel seed investors participated.
What it is: Chloe + Isabel is a jewelry startup that turns each of its users into mini entrepreneurs.
Users are encouraged to sell the Chloe + Isabel jewelry lines to friends and at house parties. Chloe + Isabel designs and creates the jewelry, provides online training for its users/salespeople, gives them marketing tools and helps them build e-boutiques.
Founder: Lincoln Brown
Funding: $8 million; Ellen DeGeneres is an investor; so is at least one other A-list celebrity. Warner Brothers is affiliated with SoJo Studios; Ester Dyson and Dave Morinare on its advisory team.
What it is: SoJo stands for Social Joy. Brown's mission is to get people to play online games that actually impact the real world. In Zynga's games, users build fake farms and landscapes. In SoJo's WeTopia, most actions have some sort of real world, charity-driven effect.
Instead of virtual currency, SoJo's users earn Joy and they can spend it on projects like planting trees or giving schools clean water. Whenever Joy is spent on a project, SoJo gives one of its partnering charities money to accomplish the task, or a similar task, in real life.
Here's Ellen promoting it on her show (this advertorial crashed SoJo's site):
Founders: David Gilboa, Neil Blumenthal, Andrew Hunt and Jeffrey Raider
Funding: $13.5 million total; $12 million Series A led by Tiger Global.
What it is: Warby Parker is a prescription glasses online discount retailer. There are other online glasses retailers, but investors' excitement for New York-based Warby Parker seems to stem from its early traction and the big industry it disrupts.
"It's an overnight sensation which is very attractive," says an investor. "It came out of the gate fast and hard and solves a real problem. No one has been able to cut Luxottica [the force behind LensCrafters and Sunglass Hut] out of the market yet."
Founders: Matt Shampine, Jesse Middleton, and Adam Neumann
Funding: Backed by WeWork and some of its sponsors.
What it is: WeWork Labs is New York City's newest stomping grounds for aspiring entrepreneurs.
For $250/month, founders and freelancers with backgrounds ranging from PR and marketing to IT and biz dev can rent desks. The founders hope sticking talented people in a room together for months at a time will lead to great new startups.
Here's what WeWork Labs' office looks like >>
Founders: Joshua Topolsky and Marty Moe in partnership with Vox Media and its CEO Jim Bankoff
Funding: Backed by Vox Media
What it is: The Verge is the newest, buzziest tech blog and it's already breaking news. "The Verge's mission is to offer breaking news coverage and in-depth reporting, product information, and community content via a unified, modern platform."
Founders: Jeff Glasse and David Sosnow
Funding: Raised $120,514 on Kickstarter from 1,023 backers
What it is: Kogeto has been around for a little bit, but it launched it's latest, coolest gadget, Kogeto Dot, this year.
Kogeto Dot lets iPhone users shoot 360 degree videos on their phones. It's the ultimate (and smallest) panoramic camera.
The 20 Most Innovative Startups In Tech >>
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