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Boston Area Startups to Watch

2010 January 3
tags: ,
by Coach Wei

Nine venture-backed startups IPO’d in 2009, but just one of them was based in Silicon Valley: Sunnyvale security firm Fortinet Inc. (Note that Fortinet is led by Tsinghua University alumni, also co-founder of NetScreen).

Close-by, San Francisco’s Open Table IPO’d in May.

Otherwise, it was all Massachusetts, Chicago, Seattle, and Texas. Massachusetts tops the list in 2009.

2010 should look different as we wouldn’t be surprised to see Silicon Valley-based startups Yelp, Zynga, Playdom, Tesla, Facebook and LiveOps IPO.

However, east coast does have a list of really good firms up and coming, not necessarily achieving stardom in 2010, but maybe in the next 2-5 years? Here is a short list of Boston based firms to watch for in the next few years in my humble opinion:

  1. BrightCove: Internet video platform. Jeremy and co have done really well and BrightCove is on the way to stardom (Thanks Dharmesh for the suggestion)
  2. Hubspot: marketing automation
  3. VisibleMeasures: Internet video measurement. Brian Shin and the team have achieved a lot over the last few years. I’m sure 2010 will be another stellar year for them.

The following companies are fairly new. Some of them are still in stealth mode:

  1. Akiba: Database virtualization. I expect nothing less than flawless exceution from my Nexaweb colleague David McFarlane
  2. Sonian: email and other messaging archiving. After closing Series A financing in 2009, 2010 is going to be a great year for Greg and the folks at Sonian.
  3. Performable: Stealth mode company led by my friend David Cancel. I know David well enough to know that this is going to be a great company.
  4. Yottaa: “stealth mode” cloud computing company that I’m personally involved with. I’ve not been excited like this for a long time. There are so many amazing things at Yottaa. For example, this is the place that I have the smallest brain among all team members (but thank god, I found ways to enjoy being the dumb person. A couple of days ago I asked Tony for “business justification” on something he proposed – couldn’t believe how much I sound like the manager asking for TPS report cover sheet in the movie “Office”). I have a hard time catching up with them. Ok, time to really learn some Ruby:-)

What other firms in Boston area are interesting? My list above is fairly biased towards “software as a service” related companies. Please leave suggestions in the comment area. Thanks!

Disclaimer: Part of this post is not my writing, but rather re-posted from http://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-no-longer-the-home-of-startup-ipos-2009-12.

from → Main Page, startup

  • http://www.HubSpot.com Dharmesh Shah

    It’s great to see all the success coming out of the Boston area.

    Thanks for including HubSpot on your list of startups to watch. We’re in great company.

    Though not quite a startup anymore, another company to watch would be Brightcove. Jeremy is brilliant.

    Cheers,
    Dharmesh

  • http://davidcancel.com David Cancel

    Thanks for including my startup on your list Coach. Humbling to be listed amongst those companies.

    Great addition Dharmesh with BrightCove. I would add Allurent to the list.

    Cheers,
    David

  • http://venturefizz.com Keith Cline

    Great list! All amazing companies.

    The VentureFizz LinkedIn community has a similar discussion going on…Predictions for 2010 – Who will go public? Who will be acquired?: http://bit.ly/4tePHG

    My list of potential “exit” (acquisition or IPO) companies for this year include:

    NameMedia, Carbonite, oneforty, Imprivata, & PatientKeeper