This year’s five startups to watch in Buffalo features a collection of companies that have developed their business models, raised money and begun to expand their potential markets.
What’s left now is to replicate successes – over and over again – reaching customers around the U.S. while growing their teams in Buffalo.
Startups is a descriptor so broad it can be rendered meaningless. You can have a startup when your mind hits that next brilliant business idea while you’re in the shower. We call ACV Auctions, which is now valued at nearly $2 billion, a startup.
The companies that follow are right at the crucial point where they have everything figured out but the scale. If they can unlock that last key, it’s supernova time.
The companies in this annual exercise are chosen from an unscientific sampling of local tech firms. Check out past lists here: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016 and 2015.
Spatched
Dante Batson-Griggs spent several years studying the transportation industry before he launched Spatched last year.
The last-mile delivery service aims to partner with small businesses to rapidly get products into customers’ hands, helping them compete with Amazon and other large corporations.
Batson-Griggs – who co-founded the business with his wife, Deidre – says it’s working in Buffalo, as monthly revenue has already surpassed $10,000.
Spatched plans to continue growing here – implementing tweaks that boost its profitability – while establishing its model in nearby cities. Before long, it plans to be nationwide.
Batson-Griggs said fundraising activity – which paused in March with the onset of the pandemic and subsequent tidal wave of customer interest in Spatched – will start again soon to support this growth.
Kyklo
Nothing to see here. Just a rapidly growing startup moving its headquarters in the midst of a pandemic from Bangkok to Buffalo, from where it plans to launch a concerted effort to tackle the American market.
Kyklo raised a total of $8.5 million this year, generating national press as it seeks to become the trusted e-commerce partner for distributors in the electrical and automation space.
The company is important to Buffalo in both practical and symbolic ways. It is among a wave of startups that see the city as a way of combining urban vibrancy with an affordable cost-of-living. That has long been a marketing pitch here, but only recently has it become a dynamic that attracts investments from growing companies.
Along with Kyklo, firms that started elsewhere such as Odoo, Squire, HiOperator are using Buffalo as an operational hub, for many of the same reasons that back-office banking, customer service and collections are big industries here.
CloudInsyte
Startup super couple Joshua Ferry and Katelyn Huber have spent the past several years honing the appropriate model to tackle a big commercial opportunity.
Their business, CloudInsyte, is a marketplace that seeks to match IT and cybersecurity providers with potential customers.
CloudInsyte spent the year doubling its team, including key hires Pamela Gupta as chief information security officer, Jason Sardo as executive vice president and Greg Ross as senior vice president of marketing.
The company came to a key insight this year, establishing an advisory practice to help customers build their digital infrastructure. Jamie Katz was hired to run that advisory service.
The business has matured. A high-level team has been recruited. The time is now.
“We’re going to drive home our messaging, make sure we’re getting out in front of the right vendors and show them what they’re missing out on,” Ferry said in October. “We are building the most innovative and data-driven security platform on the market by a long shot.”
Ellicottville Greens
Another entry on this list is several years removed from the earliest days of company creation and ready to make a big investment in marketshare.
Ellicottville Greens was co-founded by Gabe Bialkowski and Sal LaTorre in 2018, as a way of capitalizing on the trend of vertical farming in the U.S.
The key: Ellicottville Greens grows organic produce inside shipping containers that can be placed very close to customers such as restaurants and grocery stores. The end result is a mobile farm that produces fresh, healthy food.
Ellicottville Greens has four containers in operation right now, along with a growing list of customers. That gives Bialkowski, LaTorre and their investors confidence that the concept has legs both within and well beyond Western New York.
“We see ourselves in markets like Buffalo, Columbus and Cleveland, operating mobile farming units and working with distributors, grocers and larger restaurant chains,” Bialkowski said in December. “We’ll manage all the cost and you get the same produce, but now you get to say it’s grown a few miles away and harvested a day or two days before.”
HiOperator
This former 43North winner has charted a journey of expansive headcount and business growth in its two years of ... operating out of Buffalo.
HiOperator, founded and led by CEO Liz Tsai, is now engaged in a high-profile downtown search for its next office that can accommodate hundreds of employees. That alone gives the firm a unique position in these times when most people are working from home, and one of the few contemporary case studies of what happens when a fast-growing tech firm looks for office space in downtown Buffalo.
The tech-enabled customer service contractor saw a big boost in business in 2020 as well from new and existing clients, Tsai said earlier this year.
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