College basketball teams duked it for the past month, striving to score the ultimate title of March Madness champion.
Meanwhile, BostInno held a little friendly competition of its own. We posed the question: Who's going to be the most valuable Boston-based company in five years?
We started off with two brackets, painstakingly pairing up 64 startups to battle over the top prize. You casted your votes, and the list was whittled down to a top two. And, after weeks of underdog wins and more than 40,000 votes later, you have picked the prevailing company.
But before we announce the winner, let’s look back on some of the big upsets that broke our Boston Startup March Madness brackets.
The first bracket’s No. 14 seed IdeaPaint pushed past social media marketing software firm Brand Networks (No. 3) and Dyn, seeded second, with major margins. The dry-erase paint company made it all the way to the Elite 8 before getting knocked down by sales analytics company InsightSquared.
The true Cinderella story of this year’s tournament, however, was Drizly. The alcohol delivery startup, seeded 15th, dethroned top contenders HubSpot, Actifio and Wayfair. While the company didn’t make it into the finals, Drizly’s winning spree goes to show that Boston’s willing to bet big on the booze delivery service.
Yet in true March Madness style, the pair of companies that made it all the way to the finals were the most surprising. Weight-tracking app LoseIt!, the No. 12 seed and leader of the first bracket, went up against free online privacy startup Abine, the No. 14 seed and the champ of the second bracket.
Throughout the tourney, LoseIt! beat out the likes of SessionM, GrabCAD and, at last, Drizly. Abine, on the other hand, knocked down Nanigans, Bit9 and Apperian on its path to the top two.
After a weekend of voting, the Boston Startup March Madness champion is … Abine. The “privacy for the people” startup bested LoseIt! in a vote of 438 to 333 votes. Over the course of the competition, Abine garnered a total of 3,641 votes in total.
Abine has created numerous online privacy products and offered them completely free to the public since 2008. The company has also inked deals with global security companies to introduce its product, Do Not Track Me, which blocks online tracking from advertising companies and social media, into their technologies and offerings. The startup raised $6.47 million in Series A in 2011, from local VCs Atlas Venture and General Catalyst Partners.
Congrats to Abine, and to all the startups who participated in this year’s Boston Startup March Madness!
