Startups in San Francisco are almost as common as leaves on the ground. San Francisco has a vast startup economy.
Acquisitions and big IPOs occur at a steady pace. The five-figure monthly rentals and venues with $400 tasting have plenty of customers and that’s not looking to change.
While all of this made San Francisco a really expensive place to live in, the upside is that we have lots of great companies concentrated here. And these companies are creating products that are shaping the world we live in.
Let’s take a look at some of them and their websites.
Neat startups in San Francisco
Motiv
Motivs makes the Motiv ring. This ring monitors fitness, heart rate, and sleep, all in an attractive and compact metal ring. It is meant to be used 24/7 and is one of the most inconspicuous fitness trackers out there. The battery lasts three days and the ring is also waterproof. It is one of the hottest fitness tools on the market today!
Nurx
Nurx wants to be “Uber for birth control”. They eliminate a trip to the doctor’s office for birth control, allowing women to get a birth control prescription by using the Nurx app. Users just input their info into the app and a doctor reviews it. It is currently available in 16 states and looks to keep expanding. Delivery is cheap and Nurx even helps the uninsured choose and sign up for providers.
Virta Health
This online company creates individualized diabetes treatments. They hope to help revolutionize diabetes treatments and make life easier for those who deal with the condition. They are hoping to help more people reverse Type 2 diabetes without needing surgery or expensive specialized treatments. They offer treatment plans that have physician supervisions and the services of a personal health coach.
Brandless
Brandless offers consumer package goods from dish soap to olive oil to kitchen knives. They offer all of their products for the low, low price of $3 through their website. That’s very tough to beat! Brandless does this by living up to its name and avoiding traditional brands. They strive to build better relationships between their suppliers and their customers, helping people save money!
Trove
Trove contract with local moving companies that have some extra storage space on their properties. Customers can sign up with them to have professional movers pack up and move their stuff into storage to one of these nearby facilities. Their rates are at least $100 a month and depend on the amount of space needed for storage.
Spoke
Spoke makes use of artificial intelligence to automate help requests like sending a support ticket to IT or asking HR about company holidays. Spoke’s bots will answer employees’ routine questions. If the bot can’t answer, it will reroute the question to the correct team further up the chain. Spoek is still in beta, though it does include DoorDash, Turo, and Nuera as early users. Spoek has a lot of potential to help companies save time and money on fielding routine HR queries.
Instacart
Instacart is a mobile and internet platform that allows you to shop for groceries and have them delivered right to your door. With Instacart you can choose from a variety of local stores, as well as mix items from multiple stores into one order.
Stitch Fix
Stitch Fix is a personal styling service for women and men. All you have to do is fill out a style profile and a personal stylist will hand pick pieces to send you. Each box contains five items; you keep what you like and return the rest.
Brightwheel
Brightwheel is a mobile platform for early education. The app serves as a hub for schools and educators, childcare providers, camps, and after-school programs. It allows school administrators to monitor their programs, parents to follow their children’s day, and teachers to access easy tools for learning and assessments.
BuildZoom
BuildZoom is a site that helps both people and businesses find the right contractor for their projects. BuildZoom provides their recommendations based on license records, building permits, consumer reviews, and more.
Forkable
Forkable is “the best way to get lunch in the office.” Forkable uses AI to help you figure out what your office wants to lunch, and deliver from local restaurants.
Canvas
Canvas is an online platform that offers month-to-month car subscriptions. Canvas cars come with insurance, maintenance, and warranty coverage.
Creative Market
Creative Market is a marketplace for design, allowing independent creators to sell digital assets like fonts, graphics, and more to customers.
Optimizely
Optimizely is an optimization platform, providing website and mobile A/B testing and personalization for a variety of different brands. Optimizely’s platform allows businesses to run experiments to help them make better data-informed decisions.
Medium
Medium is an online publishing platform whose mission is to rethink how ideas and stories are shared around the world. Medium contains a collection of ameateur and professional publishers and allows users to sort content by topics that interest them most.
Slack
Slack is a communication platform that brings businesses and teams together. Think: AIM for work. Slack’s mission is to help connect people with the apps, services, and resources they need to get things done.
Le Tote
Le Tote calls itself “Netflix for women’s fashion.” With a subscription to Le Tote, customers have access to an unlimited closet of clothing and accessories. Once you receive your box, you wear the clothes, buy them if you love them, return them if you don’t, and the process repeats itself.
Coffee Meets Bagel
Coffee Meets Bagel (CMB) is a dating app that was created with the intent to inspire singles to feel good about dating again. How does it work? Every day at noon, guys receive up to 21 matches, known as “bagels.” They can like or pass. Then, CMB curates the best possible matches for women among the men who “liked” them. The women then get to decide who to talk to among their matches.
Modsy
Modsy is a design company that allows you to visualize and shop furniture and designs in the context of your own home. All you have to do is take photos of your home and Modsy does the rest, creating a photorealistic version of your rooms for you to explore and design.
Grammarly
Grammarly is a company whose AI-powered products help people communicate more effectively. Grammarly is available in both browser and desktop integrations to help users check their writing, wherever it may be.
HotelTonight
HotelTonight is an ecommerce platform that allows folks on-the-go to find great hotels at even better rates. When hotels have unsold rooms, they load them on the platform, HotelTonight screens them, then users have the ability to find the right place for them.
Postmates
Postmates makes it easier to get goods delivered all over your city. The Postmates platform connects customers and local couriers, who purchase and deliver goods from any restaurant or store in under an hour.
Zumper
Zumper is a house and apartment rental platform. Zumper makes renting easier for both tenants and landlords; they offer real-time alerts, instant online applications, and tenant screening.
Twilio
Twilio is a developer-friendly cloud communications company, facilitating business calls and messaging on its robust API platform.
Cloudpassage
CloudPassage is a cloud-based security company—providing leading software-defined security platforms for private, public, and hybrid cloud environments of any scale.
Skout
Skout is a global, social platform for connecting new people based on their geo-location.
Figma
Built by one of the recipients of Peter Thiel’s fellowships, Figma allows user interface designers to collaborate on projects in real time. Basically, Google Docs for designers. Designers can save different versions of projects and go back and build on them later.
Numerai
Numerai is a hedge fund run by an artificially intelligent system built by thousands of anonymous data scientists. All of the fund’s trading data is encrypted to prevent the faceless engineers from seeing what trades the fund is making and copying those trades themselves.
AutoFi
AutoFi’s platform lets car dealerships turn static websites into e-commerce platforms. Car buyers can browse financing options and apply for loans online or on the dealership’s mobile app.
Zipline
Zipline’s drones deliver life-saving medicines like blood and vaccines to patients in places that can’t easily be reached by road.
Gladly
People love to text, tweet, email and call companies with their complaints. For each complaint, a ticket is issued. This often leads to an already unhappy customer having to repeat their ticket number and their problem over and over to different customer service agents.
Atrium LTS
A software company that wants to help automate legal workflows.
Payjoy
PayJoy wants to give smartphones to the 2 billion people who live in areas with internet access but who don’t have a reliable way to get online.
Qadium
Founded by an ex-CIA agent, Qadium scans the internet on behalf of large companies, looking for devices that are outside of corporate firewalls and vulnerable to attacks.
Dote
Dote’s mobile shopping app was incubated on Apple’s “Planet of the Apps.”
Rothy’s
Rothy’s are women’s flats made from recycled plastic water bottles.
Holberton School
Coding schools in San Francisco are easy to come by, but Holberton School sets itself apart by not charging tuition.
Spoke
Spoke uses artificial intelligence to automate help requests like sending a support ticket to IT or asking HR about company holidays. Employees can ask Spoke’s bots routine questions, and if it can’t answer the bot will reroute the request to the right team. Still in beta, Spoke counts DoorDash, Turo, and Nuera as early users.
Trove
Early Uber employee Michael Pao came up with the idea for Trove with co-founder Jon Perlow somewhere on highway 101. They were driving from Menlo Park to San Francisco and noticed the massive number of self-storage facilities on the way into the city. They realized that, of course, the facilities were there because people like being close to their stuff, and Trove was born.
Why is San Francisco so profitable for local startups?
Some San Francisco startups that have seen stellar returns include Uber, Airbnb, Lyft, Dropbox, and Twitter. A diverse number of tech startups in San Francisco have made their mark and many more are starting to.
There’s almost a formula to startup success in San Francisco. This formula is not enough in itself—startup teams need to have a lot of drive, talent, connections, and timing. But it is a substantial help and much better than relying on luck.
Here are key points to having a successful startup in San Francisco:
Losing money is not a bug. It’s a feature.
To start with, keep losing money until you have left your competition well behind. This rule is the glue that holds the San Francisco startup success stories together.
While many other startup companies in other locations have thrived and succeeded by following this rule, too, it can be argued very well that San Francisco startup teams do it better than the rest.
Many of the most valuable tech and internet companies in San Francisco lose lots and lots of money or post tiny profits relative to valuations.
Uber for instance reportedly lost $4.5 billion last year, while Dropbox lost more than $100 million after losing more than $200 million the year before and more than $300 million the year before that. It took Airbnb nine years to post its first annual profit.
Salesforce has posted losses for most of its history, while Square has never been profitable on a GAAP basis. DocuSign lost more than $50 million in its last fiscal year and more than $100 million in each of the two years before that.
As you can see, losing money does not mean you won’t find success. Knowing the success of these companies, you might even think that more fiscally restrained are missing out.
Seed Stalls
Seed funds are important. Entrepreneurs need cash to stall out (along with a deep local talent pool). Both are found in plenty in the San Francisco area, which is why many startup founders there are willing to deal with the high costs of living and working in the Bay Area.
Seed funds are not indicative, however. Last year, 157 San Francisco startups have reported raising a seed or angel round, collectively bringing in around $200 million.
This does not seem like much, but it’s worth noting that initial figures may be misleading. After several months or quarters, it’s not uncommon to totals 50 percent higher.
Still, it’s clear that the city’s startup scene is no longer in its old high growth state. Some of the big companies in the area are taking a lot of the tech talent and the city is quite an expensive place to live.
All About The Ecosystem
San Francisco is chocked full of tech companies at all stages of their development. There are so far more than 1,400 companies in the city that have $10 million or more in venture funding. There is an amazing startup ecosystem that’s hard to find anywhere else.
The support system and potential found within San Francisco is one of a kind. While many startup founders may feel they can’t afford to live in San Francisco, they also often feel they can’t afford to lie anywhere else.
Ending thoughts on these startups in San Francisco
There are many opportunities for tech startups in San Francisco. The city has a unique and competitive environment that can be challenging, but it’s hard to find anything like it in the world.
If you enjoyed reading this article about startups in San Francisco, you should read these as well:
- Awesome Boston startups to watch in the upcoming years
- Amazing Australian startups that you can apply for a job at
- Innovative virtual reality companies and their neat presentation websites
- Startups in Amsterdam that you should keep an eye on (and their cool websites)
- Cool startups in Los Angeles that you should check out
- Chicago startups you should pay attention to in the next years
- Website showcase: Startups and tech companies in Austin
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