Picking the top tech startups to watch for 2021 is a bit like trying to find the sweetest, shiniest, and most delicious red apple in an orchard of a thousand trees with 50 pieces of fruit on every branch!
Yes, technology surges forward and that makes for an embarrassment of riches in terms of exciting new companies that show enormous potential for financial growth and becoming market game-changers.
Let’s power forward anyway and select a few fascinating companies we should all keep our eyes on in 2021.
Cockroach Labs
Cloud computing became “a thing” in 2006 when the tech behemoths, such as Google and Amazon, began mainstreaming the practices of sourcing software, computing power, word processing programs, files and more from web platforms instead of using desktop computers.
Now, some 15 years later, the true potential of cloud computing seems only to be beginning.\
Cockroach Labs was created by two former Google employees. Its main product is CockroachDB. This is a cloud-based SQL database that boasts “ultra-resilient” and “ultra-consistent” data locality capabilities. It also promises “massive scale” cloud applications.
Business exploded for Cockroach in 2020 thanks to the COVID pandemic which drove huge demand for cloud database capabilities for an array of purposes. The company expects to double its workforce from 200 to 400 this year. The company is also a double unicorn with a value of $2 billion.
Cohesity
Founded in 2013 by Mohit Aron, Cohesity makes software that helps IT grunts backup their data and gain insights from massaging data. It also helps manage information across multiple cloud-based providers. It makes it easier to store secondary data, such as backups, files, data collections and more. It does it all from the cloud.
This company raised a robust $250 million in a recent Series E funding effort. That brings its total to a healthy $660 million raised. Cohesity has a valuation of $2.5 billion.
Graphcore
A U.K. startup that makes processors designed specifically to handle AI workloads. It calls its units IPUs – Intelligent Processing Units. Just as cloud computing is transforming the tech ecosphere, AI is an equivalent-level agent of advancement today.
One of the reasons Graphcore is so exciting to watch is that it is providing solutions for what is perhaps the biggest factor holding back AI as a technology – the ability to process that massive amounts of data it uses. That makes Graphcore truly a company to watch.
Graphcore has attracted an impressive $770 million in funding.