Y Combinator is a startup accelerator that invests in a large number of startups twice a year. It created a new model for funding startups. Twice a year, the company invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups. The startup accelerator works intensively with the companies for three months, to get them into the best possible shape and refine their pitch to investors. Each cycle culminates in Demo Day when the startups present their companies to a carefully selected, invite-only audience.

Y Combinator

Uncork Capital is a seed-stage venture capital firm that focuses on SaaS, consumer, marketplaces, hardware, and new technology startups. The firm currently investing out of two funds: a $200M Seed fund (Fund VII) and a $200M Opportunity fund (Plus III) earmarked for larger investments in mature, existing portfolio companies. Uncork Capital, formerly SoftTech VC was founded in 2004 and is based in Palo Alto, California, United States. Uncork Capital has adopted the Diversity Term Sheet Rider.

Uncork Capital

Cowboy Ventures is a generalist seed-stage fund focused on supporting extraordinary founders of all backgrounds to build legendary technology companies. Cowboy Ventures was founded in 2012 and based in Palo Alto, California, United States.

Cowboy Ventures

Liquid2 Ventures provides technology startups with seed-stage investments and is based in San Francisco, California. The firm was founded in 2015 by Joe Montana, Mike Miller, and Michael Ma.

Liquid 2 Ventures

Hack VC is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in the cryptocurrency, fintech, and marketplaces sectors. The company was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States.

Hack VC

Sequoia is a venture capital focused on energy, financial, enterprise, healthcare, internet, and mobile startups. The firm helps a small number of daring founders build legendary companies. It spurs them to push the boundaries of what’s possible. The firm seeks to invest in all sectors with a focus on energy, financials and financial services, healthcare and healthcare services, Internet, mobile, outsourcing, and technology.

Sequoia Capital

GTMfund is an early-stage fund focused on investing in hyper-growth B2B SaaS companies. The fund is comprised of 260+ go-to-market executives from the fastest-growing companies on the planet (Snowflake, DocuSign, Okta, Salesforce, Twilio, Square, Procore, etc). Our operators have been there, done that, from zero to IPO. We support our founders with everything GTM - from strategy to hiring and execution.

GTMfund

Insight Partners is a global software investor that partners with growth-stage technology and software companies. Insight has a deep focus in Fintech, Cybersecurity, AI/ML, DevOps, and Healthcare sectors. Across their people and their portfolio, they encourage a culture around a core belief growth equals opportunity. As of December 31, 2022, the firm has over $75B in regulatory assets under management. Insight Partners has invested in more than 750 companies worldwide and has seen over 55 portfolio companies achieve an IPO.

Insight Partners

Founded in 2001, Tiger Global Management, LLC (“Tiger Global”) is a New York-based investment firm pursuing a long-term approach to investing in leading, global public and private companies that leverage technological innovation. Tiger Global’s public equity business includes fundamentally oriented long/short, long-focused and crossover strategies, targeting investments in high-quality, public growth companies. The private equity business invests in early through late stage companies that pursue innovative approaches to new and existing industries, building on over 20 years of experience investing in hundreds of businesses in more than 30 countries with more than 90 portfolio company IPOs. With a strong track record investing across sectors and stages, Tiger Global aims to be a thought partner to companies and their management teams across their lifecycle in public and private markets. The Firm’s mission is to generate world-class returns for its investors and to do so in a way that makes its employees, partners and portfolio companies proud.

Tiger Global Management

Mutiny

Most Marketing teams can’t play a meaningful role in breaking through to target accounts because the 1:1 marketing strategies that work don’t scale, and what scales doesn’t work. Mutiny helps B2B companies generate pipeline and revenue from their target accounts through AI-powered personalized experiences, 1:1 microsites, and account intelligence. We are backed by Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global, Insight Partners, and Y Combinator.

An alumnus of Y Combinator, Mutiny provides a no-code website personalization platform. The firm provides solutions for B2B account-based marketing (ABM) and content marketing teams by serving website visitors with customized versions of the webpage to improve user experience and increase customer conversions. The firm leverages an AI system known as GPT-3, which learns from 150 million data points of anonymized proprietary customer data as well a company’s online data, to provide insights on different customer segments. It also uses machine learning to write “human-sounding” customized headlines. The firm's platform can also be integrated with popular marketing automation and CRM platforms including Hubspot, 6sense, Salesforce, and Marketo to ingest customer data and extend its capabilities. The firm claims that it has served ~50 million customers across more than three million company websites.

Using AI to automate, enhance and optimize marketing activities

Marketing Automation

<div>Mutiny offers a no-code platform that connects to an enterprise&rsquo;s existing data and website and leverages AI to automate website personalization. The company&rsquo;s AI system provides guidance on underperforming customer segments by recommending areas for personalization and leveraging other users&rsquo; site data to showcase examples. Additionally, the platform can generate a copy of a website based on that information. The platform can also be integrated with popular marketing automation and CRM platforms including Hubspot, 6sense, Salesforce, and Marketo to ingest customer data and extend its capabilities.</div>

Now anyone can become a software developer.

No-code Software

Mutiny eyes 200pc expansion after $2.4m seed round

An alumnus of Y Combinator, Mutiny provides a no-code website personalization platform. The firm provides solutions for B2B account-based marketing (ABM) and content marketing teams by serving website visitors with customized versions of the webpage to improve user experience and increase customer conversions. The firm leverages an AI system known as GPT-3, which learns from 150 million data points of anonymized proprietary customer data as well a company’s online data, to provide insights on different customer segments. It also uses machine learning to write “human-sounding” customized headlines. The firm's platform can also be integrated with popular marketing automation and CRM platforms including Hubspot, 6sense, Salesforce, and Marketo to ingest customer data and extend its capabilities. The firm claims that it has served ~50 million customers across more than three million company websites.The firm is one of the few to specialize in website personalization. It claims that compared to alternatives such as landing page optimization tools and A/B testing tools, its integration with existing audience data sources allows it to create personalized elements of a webpage catering to different segments. The firm claims that on average, Mutiny’s platform can identify 73% of website visitors through various data sources and drives 108% conversion lift.The Co-founder of Mutiny Nikhil Mathew also helped launch LiveGit, an online tool for real-time music collaboration.Key customers and partnershipsAs of April 2022, Mutiny was used by 7,500+ content marketers from firms including Carta, Twillo, Brex, ClickUp, and Amplitude.

Outbrain is an algorithm-based content recommendation and discovery platform that curates native advertising content from the open web, providing personalized content for brands to increase customer engagement. Outbrain also allows content publishers to amplify its reach by supplying content to the platform. As of September 2023, customers could access 7,000+ online content sources including content by the Washington Post, Guardian, and BBC.&nbsp;Outbrain has been a pioneer in the content recommendation space and was the first to introduce an algorithm-based content recommendation in 2008. It was also the first to introduce a self-service platform for content recommendation in 2012. In May 2021, it tested “QualityRatings,” a tool that implements quality guidelines for the content featured on its platform while using machine learning and AI to create a more personalized user experience. In September 2022, the firm launched <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/13122">Keystone</a>, a business optimization solution for publishers.&nbsp;Outbrain has made a series of acquisitions over the years while making enhancements to its product offerings. In November 2021, <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/6992">Outbrain acquired vi</a>, a contextual video intelligence platform for USD 55 million to grow its CTV and other display ads offerings. In August 2024, Outbrain acquired <a href="https://www.adexchanger.com/online-advertising/outbrain-acquires-teads-from-altice-for-1-billion/">Teads</a>, an SSP and video monetization company, to create an "end-to-end, full-funnel platform" by expanding into TV, video, and CTV advertising.&nbsp; Key customers and partnerships&nbsp;Outbrain’s customers include leading news media outlets such as CNN, MSN, and Sky News, serving more than a billion monthly users (by December 2022).&nbsp;&nbsp;In April 2022, Outbrain’s platform was <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/9907">integrated with ID5</a> to provide a privacy-first customer identification solution.

Outbrain

Marin Software is an adTech firm offering a suite of solutions for brands looking to conduct search, social media, and ecommerce advertising. The firm’s “MarineOne” solution enables Brands to integrate their data under a single platform; coupled with machine learning tools, marketers can optimize ad spending across multiple platforms. In the case of search and social media advertising, Brands can increase their visibility across a number of search engines and social media platforms including Google, Facebook, and Apple Search Ads.&nbsp;In recent years the firm has been making enhancements to transform its Marine One Software as a complete marketing campaign management &amp; intelligence solution. In line with the firm expanded its ecommerce advertising solution capabilities by increasing the number of integrations to include Criteo’s commerce media platform and Instacart’s advertising platform. In <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/12159">2022</a>, the firm rolled out a number of new product and features including 1) MarinOne bidding, the firm's ad bidding marketplace, 2) MarinOne support, to enable advertisers to improve ad performance with multi-edit ad scheduling solutions, 3) social rules engine, to help automate workflows, and 4) <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/15019">Budget Optimizer</a>, an ad budget management solution. More recently, in April 2023, the firm introduced an automation tool <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/17565">“MarinOne Scripts,”</a> which integrates Python scripting with its MarineOne platform, providing marketers with customized and data-driven solutions to optimize campaigns.&nbsp;Key customers and partnershipsAs of October 2021, several brands from varied industries, including Nissan, American Eagle outfitters, and Harmony, use the firm’s solutions.In 2021, the firm made a number of new initiatives in 2021, including an <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/7635">integration with Amazon Ads</a> and a <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/6973">partnership with CitrusAd </a>to expand the ecommerce capabilities of its platform. In January 2023, the company announced an <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/16172">integration with Yahoo</a> to broaden access to programmatic ad content.&nbsp;&nbsp;

Marin Software

Founded in China, Terminus claims to have the first account-based marketing (ABM) platform that unifies the marketing and sales teams’ roles under a single platform. Terminus specializes in B2B marketing and, according to the firm, its “Terminus Data Studio” has one of the largest B2B account databases, which by September 2021, covered more than 70 million businesses. Terminus’s customer data platform (CDP) is fully integrated with its marketing automation platform, through which teams can run multi-channel targeted campaigns across many channels including email, ad networks, live chat, and the web. This can then be analyzed with Terminus’ suite of analytics and attribution tools. By September 2021, Terminus served more than 1,000 customers, including Salesloft, Foundry, and Quantum Workplace.According to a study done by Forrester (in Q2 2020), Terminus has been recognized among the ABM platform leaders.Through a series of acquisitions, Terminus has transformed into a marketing cloud platform offering a range of services. Its two latest acquisitions took place within 12 months. In November 2020, it acquired Growflare, a lead generation and account-based intelligence platform catering to B2B startups, followed by B2B CDP Zylotech in September 2021. Terminus hoped to capitalize on these to build the most comprehensive ABM platform on the market.

Terminus

Founded in France, Brevo <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/18241">(formerly Sendinblue)</a> began as an email marketing automation platform catering to small and medium-scale businesses (SMB). It has since extended its services to become an all-in-one marketing platform; the range of services found on Brevo's platform include email and SMS marketing, customer relationship management (CRM) tools, landing page creation, and Facebook ad management, among others. In November 2022, the firm launched an <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/14388">integrated meetings solution</a> that brings together scheduling, video conferencing, and payment solutions. In March 2023, the company <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/17462">unveiled “Conversations”</a> to manage customer conversations across messaging channels in one centralized location.Brevo’s platform is compared with other well-known competitors such as Mailchimp and Hubspot and is commended for its live support and fair pricing, making it a strong contender in the SMB space.&nbsp;The company has expanded its product offering through a series of acquisitions during 2021-2022. Brevo acquired three firms in September 2021 for USD 47 million: 1) Metrilo, a provider of customer analytics and marketing services for ecommerce stores, 2) Chatra, a live chat messenger app for increasing online sales, and 3) PushOwl, a customer re-engagement website that uses web-based push notifications. In March 2022, the firm <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/9009">acquired MeetFox</a>, a meeting scheduling and video conferencing platform. In September 2022, the company <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/13360">acquired Yodel.io,</a> an Austrian cloud-based phone system provider, to enable additional customer touchpoints, and reduce the overall digital marketing spend for SMBs. More recently, in February 2023, the firm <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/16271?industryIds=62">acquired Captain Wallet,</a> a mobile wallet marketing platform, to broaden its reach internationally. In December 2023, Brevo acquired <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/24833">WonderPush and Octolis,</a> two customer interaction platforms, to expand its CRM capabilities.&nbsp;&nbsp;The firm achieved <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/15834">USD 100 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)</a> at the end of 2022 while maintaining a positive EBITDA position.&nbsp;Key customers and partnerships&nbsp;The platform catered to 500,000+ customers across 180 countries as of end December 2022.

Brevo

Acquia provides a digital experience platform (DXP) to support medium to large enterprises that use Drupal, an open-source content management system (CMS) that provides the back-end infrastructure for websites and by September 2021, powered approximately 2.1% of websites on the internet. The core product offered by Acquia is a marketing cloud that provides a full suite of services to manage the customer journey. The platform features a customer data platform (CDP), unifying data across multiple sources; sales automation tools to deliver personalized marketing campaigns across multiple delivery channels; marketing campaign management tools to manage distributed marketing teams; and a content management platform to organize and monitor content.&nbsp;Having been built on the Drupal framework, which does not require any programming skills to implement, Acquia’s marketing cloud claims to be more accessible and agile than enterprise cloud solutions provided by incumbents such as Adobe and Oracle. In 2021, Gartner’s Magic Quadrant report named Acquia a leader in DXP platforms, while a study done by Forrester (in July 2021) found that customers of Acquia’s DXP solutions experienced a payback on their investment in less than six months, generating an average return on investment (ROI) of 589% over three years.&nbsp;Acquia has made several investments and enhancements to its DXP platform. In January 2021, Acquia, in partnership with Commercetools and Lucidworks, launched “Acquia Digital Commerce,” a service for creating personalized digital shopping experiences for customers. The firm has also added a number of self-serve features to its CDP such as <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/11422">“right to erasure”</a> to bolster the privacy and security features of its platform to cater to enterprise users. &nbsp;In&nbsp;<a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/35334">October 2024,</a> Acquia added AI capabilities to digital asset management solutions to accelerate campaign delivery.&nbsp;In September 2021, Acquia acquired Widen Enterprises, a digital asset management (DAM) and product information management (PIM) software company, for an undisclosed amount. As a result, customers can have a fully integrated experience on the platform, while the acquisition also added a further 700+ customers. In November 2023, the company acquired Monsido, a website accessibility and optimization solution from CivicPlus, to expand its platform capabilities.Key customers and partnershipsBy September 2021, Acquia counted one in four Fortune 500 companies, including Johnson &amp; Johnson, Bayer, and Xerox, among its customers. As of September 2024, the company served more than 4,000 customers globally.&nbsp;In June 2022, Acquia <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/11352">partnered with Workato</a> (enterprise-level workflow automation platform) to integrate with Acquia’s CDP to expand enterprise use of the platform. The integration added 100+ technology integrations compatible with Acquia’s marketing cloud.

Acquia

Firms positioned as an 'all-in-one' marketing platform,  providing a variety of functions across the MarTech stack

Startups providing platforms for planning and managing marketing campaigns.

Startups offering tools for finding and attracting potential customers with targeted ads.

Startups providing tools to automate the execution of marketing campaigns across varied channels.

Startups providing tools for gathering, cleaning, and enhancing customer data to provide deep analytics. This also includes firms offering account-based marketing (ABM) solutions to drive targeted and personalized campaigns.

Companies that use GenAI as a core part of their product offering for marketing

Uses AI/ML to enable marketing automation, making it a core part of many companies' products

Metaverse advertising is being explored by AdTech segments for in-game advertising

The in-game advertising segment is in development and has a niche relevance to this area

Marketing automation provides measurement and attribution solutions to measure marketing effectiveness

Personalization tools are mainly used in AdTech and marketing campaign automation

<div>
 
 Mutiny offers a no-code platform that connects to an enterprise&rsquo;s existing data and website and leverages AI to automate website personalization. The company&rsquo;s AI system provides guidance on underperforming customer segments by recommending areas for personalization and leveraging other users&rsquo; site data to showcase examples. Additionally, the platform can generate a copy of a website based on that information. The platform can also be integrated with popular marketing automation and CRM platforms including Hubspot, 6sense, Salesforce, and Marketo to ingest customer data and extend its capabilities.
 
 
 Users can then leverage the Mutiny&rsquo;s visual editor to make edits and personalize their websites content (such as banners, landing pages, surveys, and headlines) based on the insights received. Moreover, Mutiny uses machine learning to enable users to generate reportedly high converting headlines for their audiences.
 
 
 In October 2022, the company acquired Intellipse, an AI marketing platform, to leverage the company&rsquo;s AI expertise for conversion marketing, copywriting, language classification, predictive models, and GPT-3.&nbsp;
 
 
 Key customers and partnerships
 
 
 As of October 2022, Mutiny&rsquo;s customers included Dropbox, Snowflake, Qualtrics, and Carta. The company also claimed that over 100 million people across over 4 million companies have seen a website personalized by the platform&rsquo;s AI engine.&nbsp;
 
 
 Funding and financials
 
 
 In April 2022, Mutiny raised USD 50 million in Series B funding led by Tiger Global and Insight Partners at a valuation of USD 600 million. The funds were earmarked for investment in product development as well as for expanding its operations and business reach. The company planned to double the size of its 40-person team by 2023.
 
 
 
</div>

Index offers a no-code platform for enterprises to build dashboards for internal use to obtain insights on business metrics, investor updates and operation overviews, among others. As of June 2021, the product remains at beta, with a limited early preview. The platform provides prebuilt templates, and also has tools for users to build their own dashboards. The dashboard can be integrated with multiple apps including Hubspot ((customer relationship management data), Stripe (payment data), and Postgres and MongoDB (databases), slack (remote working) and Google Sheets (spreadsheets), among others. The company raised USD 2.6 million in Seed funding in October 2020. It intends to invest the funds in hiring two engineers (in addition to the two founders) and continuing to refine and develop the product. The founders aim to reach USD 1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and expand their product distribution.

Index

<div>
 
 Stencyl offers a drag-and-drop no-code platform that enables users to create and publish web and mobile games. Users can build their game logic using the platform&rsquo;s pre-built code blocks, design visual elements via an in-built graphics editor, and publish across a range of platform&rsquo;s such as IoS, Android, Windows and Mac. Moreover,&nbsp; Stencyl also enables users to embed ads into their games as a secondary source of revenue.&nbsp;
 
 
 Key customers and partnerships
 
 
 As of February 2024, Stencyl was used by over 500,000 registered developers. Apps created on Stencyl have reached top slots in the Apple App Store and Google Play, and its most successful web games have been sponsored by major publishers including ArmorGames, Kongregate, and Newgrounds.
 
</div>

Stencyl

Universe offers a no-code platform for users to build websites that can be added to social media pages. Websites can be built using drag and drop blocks to add images, videos, and other content to create a mobile-first website. The Platform offers creative controls, 30 pre-made themes, and block features to allow users to create a custom site and/or open an e-commerce store directly from a mobile phone.The company began as a landing page builder and progressed to developing websites, which include tools for adding shopping blocks. Universe targets micro businesses that are not tech-savvy.<a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/20509">In July 2023 </a>, Universe launched the beta version of Generative Universe Sites (GUS), an AI-powered website designing tool. This solution provides a conversational interface for users to dictate their requirements for a website and then generates a customized web page.Funding and financialsIn December 2021, Universe raised USD 30 million in a Series B funding round led by Addition to develop the company’s block-based system for website building named “GRID,” expand its commercial offering for startups, and extend GRID to more platforms and devices. Additionally, the company used the funds to expand its reach in new markets and grow its employee base.

Universe

Readymag is a web-based drag and drop tool that enables users to create websites, presentations and digital magazines. Its customers include large enterprises such as AirBnB, Forbes, Esquire, and IDEO.

Readymag

UserGuiding is a user onboarding tool that helps create interactive guides for customers. Functions include user onboarding, feature adoption, in-product messaging, and customer feedback, among others. As of September 2020, the company had over 2,000 global enterprise clients. UserGuiding raised USD 1.1 million in seed funding in August 2020, which it intends to use to expand its operations by increasing its workforce, accelerating global expansion, and enhancing product development.

UserGuiding

Allows users to create apps for their own businesses by using their data and ideas and converting them into apps to improve their workflow.

Platforms that allow users to create online/mobile games in a no-code environment.

Platforms and tools that enable users to build mobile-based apps using templates and tools (widgets) in a visual environment.

Platforms that let users create workflow and process management systems in a spreadsheet format integrating with databases. This also includes data science tools, which enable users to run predictive analysis on data sets through drag-and-drop functions using artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

Tools that allow users to build websites, ranging from blogs to e-commerce sites, in a visual environment without the need for coding. Often has no-code tools to integrate with other online tools, such as payment gateways.

Offers solutions for building internal applications and automations for enterprises

Many solutions enable users to leverage AI/ML for predictive analytics

Offers solutions for building enterprise-specific applications and automations

Some solutions leverage GenAI to enable users to build application and website templates without coding

Mutiny

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