The startups featured today are five that I selected based on their answers about macro-economic pressures on startups, as well as factors such as funding, named customers, and the founders’ track records. I then used these to fine-tune ChatGPT’s selection skills to select the next batch (coming Tuesday). You can read more about the selection process here. Startup50 will feature 15 more Challenge #1 Winners throughout May.
Graphiant
Year founded: 2022
Funding: $33M
Market sector: Enterprise private networking
What they do: Provide Network-as-a-Service solutions
How macro-economic turmoil is impacting their sector: “Market turmoil is affecting our sector in multiple ways. The collapse of the mid-market banks and the overall effect on the financial services industry is creating concern in the market and slowing projects. Tensions with China also affect the service providers that leverage Chinese-made technology in their backbone.” – Matthew Krieg, VP of Sales & Marketing for Graphiant
How they will navigate macro-economic pressures: “Graphiant is uniquely positioned to address both market concerns as a network service built on technical innovation. The operational simplicity, security, and 50+ percent lower TCO that Graphiant delivers are compelling to enterprise customers and service providers.” – Matthew Krieg
Jetstream Software
Year founded: 2016
Funding: $6+ million
Market sector: Disaster recovery and business continuity
What they do: Provide cloud-native disaster recovery
How macro-economic turmoil is impacting their sector: “The current market turmoil is having three major impacts on the disaster recovery sector: 1) With the uncertainty in the market, many companies must cope with budget constraints, which can affect their ability to invest in disaster recovery efforts. This can result in delays in implementing critical disaster recovery measures and, in turn, impact the recovery time in the event of a disaster.
“2) Market turmoil can also increase the risk of disasters such as cyberattacks, which can result in data breaches or system failures. Such events can have a significant impact on business operations, and without effective disaster recovery measures in place, the recovery time can be prolonged, resulting in significant losses.
3) Market turmoil can also lead to a reduced focus on disaster recovery efforts, as companies may be more focused on their financial stability. This can result in a lack of attention to disaster recovery planning, testing, and training, which can impact the effectiveness of the disaster recovery efforts in the event of an actual disaster.” – Tom Critser, CEO and co-founder of JetStream Software
How they will navigate macro-economic pressures: “JetStream Software was founded because existing Continuous Data Protection solutions in the Cloud are complex and expensive. If organizations continue to use their existing approach for disaster recovery, the business impact of data loss and recovery time due to ransomware, malware, and natural disasters will increase exponentially.
JetStream Software views the current market turmoil as an opportunity because we provide a patented disaster recovery technology that reduces costs compared to traditional solutions while delivering full protection capabilities of near-zero data loss (RPO) and near zero-recovery times (RTO) for mission critical workloads.
JetStream DR for Azure VMware Solution (AVS) reduces the complexity for the customer to continuously protect all their data-center applications, while minimizing downtime, lowering operating costs, and enabling a shift from CapEx to OpEx through an on-demand subscription model.” – Tom Critser
QuSecure
Year founded: 2019
Funding: $14.2M
Market sector: Quantum encryption and cryptography
What they do: Provide “post-quantum cybersecurity” that protects enterprises from quantum and classical cybersecurity threats
How macro-economic turmoil is impacting their sector: “While market conditions may slow traditional buying cycles, government and private enterprises know that they need crypto modernization now to ensure that they, their constituents, customers, and shareholders are protected from growing cyber threats.” – Paul Fuegner, Head of Marketing for QuSecure
How they will navigate macro-economic pressures: “The mainstreaming of AI and the growth of quantum computing are reminding IT leaders, cybersecurity teams, and corporate boards that the paradigm of one key and an unintelligent cryptographic algorithm that has kept us safe for decades is now vulnerable. Moving forward, networks will need to be able to adapt cryptographically to changing attack and threat patterns in real time. QuSecure has developed an Intelligent Cryptographic Switched Network (ICSN) orchestration platform. This capability solves one of the most complex problems in upgrading networks: securing data endpoint to endpoint and all the way in between, even on legacy systems.
“The recent Federal government mandates from NSM-10, the funding from the Endless Frontiers Act, and the fact that QuSecure has been granted a SBIR Phase III award all mean that our company is in a fantastic position for growth in 2023. Also, QuSecure has begun working with Red Hat to deliver bundled cyber-solutions for the public and private sectors. Additionally, QuSecure in collaboration with Accenture recently accomplished the first successful multi-orbit data communications test secured with post-quantum cryptography (PQC), which refers to cryptographic methods that are secure against an attack by a quantum computer. This demonstrates that crypto-agility, or successfully rotating to a less vulnerable algorithm, is a viable security approach.” – Paul Fuegner
SupportLogic
Year founded: 2016
Funding: $62M
Market sector: Customer service and support software
What they do: Develop AI-powered customer support and service team software
How macro-economic turmoil is impacting their sector: “Market conditions are creating financial pressure to cut operational costs, including headcount. This directly impacts customer service and support teams, which we directly serve.” – Joe Andrews, CMO of SupportLogic
How they will navigate macro-economic pressures: “Because SupportLogic helps improve support agent productivity and operational efficiency, companies can maintain or improve service levels with fewer staff. We have also transitioned from a traditional seat-based SaaS licensing model to user-based pricing (UBP), which lowers the initial entry price for customers and lets them see value quickly. This pricing model appeals to companies facing budget constraints.” – Joe Andrews
Zenhub
Year founded: 2014
Funding: $14.7M
Market sector: Enterprise software development
What they do: Provide cross-organization productivity management software for development teams and other stakeholders
How macro-economic turmoil is impacting their sector: “The widespread move to remote/hybrid work environments has made a huge impact on how software teams collaborate. What’s more, in today’s macroeconomic climate, companies are carefully evaluating their tool usage and finding ways to do more with less. That means evaluating their vendor contracts to find out how they can consolidate functionality from multiple software solutions to fewer or even a single solution that everyone can use.” – Aaron Upright, co-founder of Zenhub
How they will navigate macro-economic pressures: “The fact that we just raised significant funding [a $10M Series A round announced in March] is a testament to the demand for solutions in software development, but also for our specific approach to collaborative software development. Now that ‘every company is a software company,’ enterprise software assets and development programs have become prioritized by stakeholders far beyond the development team. Zenhub is one of a very few organizations that provides a single, unified solution that enables developer teams to share progress with internal and external stakeholders, while still giving them the tools they need to get more done with less.” – Aaron Upright
