Like much of the country, New York City has experienced its share of battle scars in 2020 from the pandemic, causing a lot of questions around whether or not NYC’s startup ecosystem will survive.
As longtime NYC enterprise software investors here at Work-Bench, we turned to the numbers to understand the impact that the pandemic has had on NYC’s enterprise community. While we’re not out of the woods yet, our 2H 2020 NYC Enterprise Tech Funding Report showed NYC enterprise tech had its best year yet, with $5.8B raised in 2020 in 189 deals, far outpacing the $3.3B raised in 2019 in 114 deals.
As we pulled together our annual, top NYC Enterprise Startups to Watch list (see 2020, 2019, 2018), it’s clear that seed companies are still very much growing and thriving in NYC across multiple enterprise categories.
See below for the top 16 NYC enterprise Seed startups to watch in 2021:
Bigeye is an automated data monitoring tool that measures the health and freshness of data to ensure high quality and completeness across all datasets. Investors include Costanoa Ventures and Point72 Ventures.
Proximo Data empowers data product managers to take control of data quality and build data trust with automated monitoring, configured domain specific testing, and a workflow to manage data issues. Investors include IA Ventures, Background Capital, and Fathom Capital.
Rasgo is a feature engineering platform that simplifies data exploration, wrangling and feature selection in order to speed up the creation of machine learning models. Investors include Unusual Ventures.
BackboneAI helps companies work together more efficiently by automating their intercompany data processes and optimizing communication through technology. It transforms supplier and customer relationships through real-time data synchronization, fast API connectivity, and third-party application and database integration. Investors include Fika Ventures, Boldstart Ventures, GGV Capital, others.
Qri is an open source platform that syncs, versions and automates datasets to enable fast discoverability of assets and collaboration among users. Investors include Bob Young, Co-founder of Red Hat (via Hippo Ventures).
Shipyard is an automated application deployment platform that manages ephemeral environments for development, QA, product and sales teams, enabling them to deploy applications in a secure and fast way. Investors include Contour Venture Partners, Array Ventures, Heavybit, and Work-Bench.
Conducto is a workflow instrumentation tool that simplifies complex CI/CD and data science workflows through seamless code debugging and collaboration. Investors include Jump Capital.
TakeShape is a content management platform that enables collaboration and access to distributed content and powers JAMstack projects through a secure and instant GraphQL API. Investors include Haystack.
OthersideAI is an AI-powered email assistant that takes summaries and notes, and generates them into personalized, written messages. Investors include Madrona Venture Group, Hustle Fund, Chapter One Ventures, Active Capital and others.
Anima is a design tool that automates front-end development, enabling teams to turn high fidelity prototypes into developer friendly code that engineers can build upon quickly. Investors include Hetz Ventures and Y Combinator.
Undock is a collaboration platform that allows users to seamlessly see mutual availability across a group, all from within their email. Investors include Lightship Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Lerer Hippeau and others.
Upstream is a social professional networking platform that allows users to join communities and attend events to meet other professionals and build meaningful connections to further their careers. Investors include 8-Bit Capital, Human Ventures, NYVP, Basement Fund, and Others.
Correlated Labs is a self-serve customer expansion and retention platform that empowers B2B revenue teams to leverage data to optimize proactive customer engagement and automate workflows.
Walnut is a customizable product demo platform that enables sales teams to automate templates and data capture and roll-out sales demos in a secure and reliable way. Investors include NFX, A.Capital Ventures, SV Angel and more.
Cased is a security and compliance tool that securely searches and analyzes audit trail data and controls access to sensitive data workflows. Investors include Founders Fund.
Sublime Security is an email security platform that gives IT and security teams full control over their email environment, enabling them to write, share and enforce custom rules for phishing defense, DLP, and compliance. Investors include Slow Ventures, SNR, Inner Loop Capital, and others.
*Work-Bench Portfolio Company
If you’re building an enterprise software startup, coming to NYC to sell to enterprise customers, or thinking about GTM and raising venture capital for your Seed II round, we’d love to hear from you.
Huge thank you to Priyanka Somrah for contributing to this post.
