My 10 Favorite Startups of 2015

I looked at more than a thousand startups this year. It’s a big round number. But what astounded me was how so many of them were turning new technology into incredibly exciting products and services.

This is the one time in the year I’m writing not from an investing perspective, but as a consumer. The companies below are my 10 favorites. The ones I’d like to take for a spin right now or that I might need sometime in the future.

A couple of qualifiers before I begin. Startups I’ve already talked about in previous posts were not mentioned below. I didn’t want to tread over old ground. And, second, the companies that really excited me as an investor are in our Startup Investor portfolio. I talk about these companies all the time to members of our Startup Investor service. No need to do it here.

Not that the ones below don’t have the potential to make investors some serious money. But I haven’t looked under the hood, so to speak. So I don’t want to give you the wrong idea that these are vetted in any way whatsoever.

But I have a feeling that several of these companies are headed for great things. Some are more proven than others. And some are crazier than others. But, collectively, they offer us a peek into the future and how technology is changing our world.

Happy holidays, everybody.

1. Premise. It gathers hard-to-get business and economic data from around the world in real time. And it uses the crowd to do it. Premise pays tens of thousands of people in 30 countries to monitor food prices and availability. Local residents take pictures of the items and add price and availability information to Premise’s website. The World Bank is its biggest customer.

2. Eligo Biosciences. It’s one of many exciting synthetic biology startups. Eligo has targeted a growing area of concern: the rapid rise of bacterial pathogens that are resistant to widely used antibiotics. Its modified antimicrobials infect and then kill only those bacteria resistant to antibiotics.

3. Impossible Foods. It offers meat, hamburgers and cheeses made entirely from plants. They have no cholesterol, hormones or antibiotics. And here’s the impossible part: They taste great. Or so say cofounders vegan celebrity chef Tal Ronnen, cheesemaker Monte Casino and Stanford professor Patrick Brown. They must be getting it right. Their investors read like a list of Silicon Valley who’s who: UBS, Khosla Ventures, Bill Gates, and Hong Kong magnate Li Ka-shing. 

 4. ComfortGuard. I liked this technology from Emerson so much I had to include it, even though it’s not a startup. ComfortGuard requires the installation of about $100 worth of sensors in a home’s AC unit, furnace and ducts. Add some software and a homeowner can see how their home’s heating and cooling is functioning… plus get warnings of imminent failures and reminders to change filters. While we’re waiting for the Internet of Things to take control of our homes, this technology fills in nicely.

5. Yunmake. Its first electric bike weighs 16 kilograms, takes four hours to charge, goes 25 kilometers on a single charge and goes as fast as 25 km an hour. And the foldable bike comes with an app that tracks speed, distance, battery life and light control. Its next generation bike is due out soon. Hopefully, its charge time will be reduced. Four hours is way too long.

Source: Tech in Asia

6. NextVR. It offers viewers high-definition 3-D livestream video. Watched with a headset, it provides viewers with new angles and perspectives never before experienced. Its camera televised an NBA game in October, the first live professional sports event to be shown in high-def virtual reality. This tech has huge potential.

 7. DeepMind. I really like the AI sector, and DeepMind’s neural networks are among the world’s most advanced (which is why Google bought it two Januarys ago). Google has replaced 60 of its “handcrafted” systems with DeepMind’s “artificial general intelligence” that can learn to solve tasks without prior programming. Neural networks have been around for decades. But the advances I’m seeing now are really impressive and will only accelerate through the current decade.

8. Evelo. Microbiomes is another sector destined to have a huge impact in the years ahead. Evelo is going far beyond current research that focuses on diseases of the gut. It’s developing cancer treatments that will search out tumors and surrounding tissue, killing the tumor cells or disrupting the tumor metabolic processes. Its bacterial mixes are all derived from bacteria found in nature.

9. Stockpile. Gift cards redeemable for stocks? What a great idea. It just might become my new go-to birthday and wedding gift. They come in denominations of $25, $50 and $100. And for expensive shares like Berkshire Hathaway, the cards will purchase fractional share amounts. If your recipient doesn’t like the stock you choose, they can swap it for another stock at no charge. It’s another well-deserved dent in the aging brokerage model.

 10. Magic Leap. This augmented reality startup is experimenting with an eyeglasses device that projects computer-generated images over real-life settings. These images – one is a tiny robot – can react to users and navigate a room. The possibilities are endless. I’m curious and excited to see what Magic Leap does with this amazing technology.