Automation is fundamentally changing our economic landscape. For startups, automation influences how they form, develop products, interact with prospects, and scale up. Smart startups are finding ways to automate everything from cyber-threat detection to IT alert management to contract discovery.
And if you stop and take a moment to think about all the things you, personally, do each workday, there’s a good chance any task you complete on a recurring basis that is repetitive and routine may well be automated soon.
Heck, a good chunk of the Big50 startup competition is automated, everything from email alerting to fraud detection in the voting to other aspects of how the startups are judged. These days, if you’re not automating manual, error-prone, recurring processes, you’re probably falling behind your competitors.
First up this week is a security startup that has automated threat detection, followed by an automated IT alert consolidation startup, and later on, we’ll even see a startup designing wearables that have automated software on the backend that helps retail employees do their jobs more effectively.
How these startups made it into the Big50-2017
To recap, the Big50-2017 competition started with more than 160 startups.
Through three rounds of challenges, the Startup50 team whittled that down to the 55 startups we are featuring in the Big50-2017. (Yes, there are 55 startups in the Big50. You got a problem with that?)
First, startups had to pass the fundamentals test. Have they raised sufficient have funding, attracted a solid team, developed a viable business idea that tackles a real-world problem? Do they have on-the-record customers, are they targeting a viable market niche, and have they launched an MVP that’s moved the needle?
Next, if the fundamentals were in order, startups had to fight their way through the Online Voting and Social Media challenge.
Those still standing, then had to face the Content Challenge. Startups pitched the Startup50 team their best story ideas for a forthcoming podcast.
The 55 startups featured in the Big50-2017 startups excelled in each of those three challenges.
Come back in fifteen minutes or so, and you’ll see our first “Automation at the Core” startup, one that could have been lumped in with the security startups of the past couple of weeks, but instead serves as our transition into automation. Stay tuned. . .
