Startup companies can be black boxes—opaque operations with few public disclosure requirements. That makes it hard to see tomorrow’s standouts today. So the research firm CB Insights, with the support of the National Science Foundation, set out to build an algorithm to discern the health of startups through their publicly available data, and even identify ones that could grow to a billion-dollar valuation—making them, in one of the tech industry’s favorite buzzwords, unicorns.
CB Insights calls this algorithm Mosaic, and in the past, it has indeed pinpointed promising startups that went on to achieve unicorn status. For the company’s 2015 Future Unicorns list, for instance, it identified restaurant delivery Postmates as a contender. The on-demand delivery service is valued at $2.5 billion today. Also on that list was Dollar Shave Club, which Unilever acquired for a cool billion the following year. The Berlin-based meal kit delivery company HelloFresh, another 2015 future…
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Source : fastcompany.com
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