Observers initially expected the COVID-19 pandemic to hit the start-up world hard. 2020 was a year of uncertainty, lockdown, closures, layoffs, furloughs, economic crisis and despair. The work-from-home model, which has become standard for many businesses, was new and unproven and the start-up world seemed headed for the kind of dot.com meltdown that characterized the early 2000s.
But to the surprise of many, the tech scene rallied. Billions of dollars in new capital flowed into the sector and many start ups achieved funding rounds of hundreds of millions of dollars.
From Playcroco no deposit bonus codes to digital media platforms and from music education apps to public transit optimization software, the start up sector is alive and kicking.
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Some of the top start ups to watch in 2021 include:
Minute Media
Minute Media is a fan content platform that was ready to jump in to fill a gap when the pandemic hit and sports fans found themselves scrambling to stay engaged. The platform enables sports enthusiasts to create unique content. The technological solution allows fans or athletes to create content through a user profile.
Users can use images or videos that exist on the platform or upload material themselves. After the produce is reviewed by a Minute Media editor the final product is distributed on one of the content sites that the company partners with or on one of the company’s platforms.
During the pandemic, since there was less content revolving around the games, Minute Media started encouraging the creation of content that would describe what the athletes were doing off-season and how they were spending their time in lock-down.
The platform also took advantage of the anti-racism movement exploding in the United States to show fans how their favorite athletes were confronting those issues. Minute Media acquired The Players’ Tribune shortly before Covid-19 hit and that contributed to the company’s success as elite athletes were able to create content that the fans were anxious to view. As athletes became accustomed to producing content by themselves, the platform drew in more and more users.
Future plans include expanding coverage of women’s sports and esports.
Artlist
Artlist started out as a developer of content for video makers but has expanded to become a platform for building and maintaining a subscription-based catalog of music clips, sound effects and digital assets that video makers can use for their own videos.
Artlist is another start up that benefitted from the pandemic. As more people turned to social media during lockdowns, they started to explore content-creation. Artlist was there with a catalog of sounds and images that could be used to enhance their projects.
Artlist offers over a million digital options to content creators so that they can
Viz.ai
Viz.ai medical diagnostic devices use deep-learning technology to look into the grain. The Vis.ai system can detect urgent large vessel occlusions before they cause a stroke so that doctors can treat the occlusion pro-actively. Vis.ai was developed by an AI expert in conjunction with a neurosurgeon. They wanted to create technology that would provide physicians with a tool that would read CT scans in real time and alert the physician in case an occlusion is detected.
The physician would receive a phone app alert with access to the scan and other medical details relating to the patient so that a decision on treatment could be reached quickly by the hospital personnel treating the patient. Viz.ai has been cleared by the FDA and is already in use in hundreds of American hospitals.
Verbit
Verbit is an automated transcription industry that evolved due to the need for accurate transcriptions. Verbit created an automated text transcription technology for law, education and media content fields. The company’s tech doesn’t replace human transcribers but rather augments the services of 30,000 real transcribers representing 120 countries and dozens of languages.
Verbit transcribers work as freelancers, reviewing automated translation and correcting where necessary. The human transcribers must overcome the accents, industry-specific jargon, background noises and pace of speech that an automated transcription service cannot . But they don’t have the tedious job of transcribing the whole audio recording — just filling in where needed.
Once again, Covid-19 increased demand for the transcriptions as the move to remote learning emphasized the need for transcriptions of lectures. Verbit has also become one of the leading captioning providers in the world in the media sector. The company expects to expand into the law sector in the coming years.
JoyTunes
Joytunes is a music education app that’s designed to teach people to play musical instruments. Here too, the COVID-19 pandemic gave the platform a boost as more and more people decided that lockdown is the best time to learn to play a new instrument.
The JoyTunes guitar-teaching app has proved to be its most popular though its piano-teaching app has also proven to be a good investment of time and money. The company is now working on additional instrument-teaching apps and is collaborating with leading tech companies around the world.
Zoomin
Zoomin does exactly what its name says that it does — it helps companies deal with endless streams of reading by helping to organize and analyze the content so that readers can find the information that they need quickly and easily.
The Zoomin intelligent platform ingests the client’s content — manuals, API docs, support articles, etc and creates a unified and consistent source of Product Answers. Clients can then use the material on a customer service portal, in an online community, in a documentation site or within the product .
Elementor
Elementor provides website building tools that are offered as an open-source code, free of charge. There’s also a premium version for which there is a payment but the free-to-use model for the basic version was so successful that demand for the paid tools shot up, making Elementor a much sought-after product.
Elementor has benefitted by the increased demand for online shops. Many business owners have found that they need to sell online so Elementor’s easy-to-use website building tools have been much in demand. Elementor is now testing a cloud-based product which may soon make it one of the world’s largest website-building companies.
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