2015 was a big year for Chicago tech. We saw several multi-hundred million dollar exits, huge funding rounds, and a continued push to cement the city as a leading tech hub in the U.S.
But as the tech community begins to see more and more success, we wanted to take a look at the startups that are poised to reach the level where companies like Avant, kCura, ContextMedia and others are today.
Below, we've compiled a list of 16 Chicago startups to watch in 2016. These are startups that have made solid strides in 2015, and that we believe could blow up in 2016. Most are Series A (ish), have recorded a significant milestone, and are tackling their respective industries in an innovative way.
Here are the 16 startups to watch in 2016:
1. Tock
If you were launching a tech startup in the restaurant space, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better team than Nick Kokonas, Grant Achatz, and Brian Fitzpatrick. Kokonas and Achatz, the owners of award winning Chicago restaurant Alinea, and Fitzpatrick, the former Google developer who was influential in bringing an engineering department to Google's Chicago office, together founded restaurant ticketing startup Tock in December 2014. Tock lets people pre-order meals before they get to the restaurant, which helps customers secure a table at a popular restaurant and cuts down on no-shows for the places that use online reservations.
Tock is looking to change the restaurant reservation game that has been crowded by players like OpenTable. Tock has been slowly rolling out its service to a handful of restaurants, including Next, Aviary, and Alinea. The startup says it has raised a "few million dollars" from a who's who of notable tech and restaurant figures, including former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Elon Musk's brother Kimbal Musk, and award winning chefs Thomas Keller and Ming Tsai.
2. Gesture
Oak Brook-based startup Gesture is bringing technology to fundraisers and silent auctions by letting people bid on items and donate money from their phone. The startup, which rebranded in May from Auctions by Cellular, uses its technology to help non-profits, schools, religious groups, and other organizations get the most out of their fundraising events. Since Gesture launched in 2011, it has been used at more than 2,000 events and has raised more than $170 million. Gesture charges organizations a flat fee to use the service, and its technology has been used by non-profits like the Ronald McDonald House Charities.
3. Glidera
A Techstars Chicago 2015 graduate, Glidera wants to make it easier to save, buy, and use bitcoins. Glidera enables website developers to add bitcoin buying and selling services into their applications using the Glidera API. Glidera says it has built an "on-ramp to the bitcoin ecosystem" by handling the interaction with traditional banks and its bitcoin wallet partners, and people can buy and sell bitcoin from the wallet of their choice with the push of a button. Launched in 2013, Glidera says it's working to bring bitcoin into the mainstream.
As people are still trying to make sense of today's changing healthcare landscape, health insurance startup Harken Health recently launched to provide people with competitively priced healthcare. Based in Chicago and Atlanta, Harken Health offers features like no-charge primary care visits and a personal care team available by phone, email, text or video chat. The health plan was available in Cook County when the Affordable Care Act's open enrollment began on Nov. 1, and it represents a "new kind of health care company" as other players in the Illinois healthcare marketplace--like Assurant Health and Blue Cross and Blue Shield popular individual plan--have been shut down. In November, the startup opened four health centers in Chicago, ensuring that the service, despite its relative affordability, still remains relationship-based.
5. NuCurrent
As people spend more and more time connected to their devices, staying charged has never been a more pressing issue. To keep devices juices up without needing to stay plugged into a wall, NuCurrent has developed wireless power antenna technology. NuCurrent, which launched out of Northwestern University in 2009, creates wireless charging technology across a variety of products including cell phones and wearable devices. The company, which raised a $3.48 million Series A last year, has 17 patents and 34 more pending in US, Asia and Europe. NuCurrent landed a big hire this year in Glenn Riese, the former Motorola Mobility engineer who played a vital role in developing two of the company's most iconic products: the RAZR and the Droid. Riese was named NuCurrent's director of product engineering.
4D Healthware wants you to know you're sick, even before you begin to feel any symptoms. Based out of MATTER, Chicago's new healthtech incubator, 4D Healthware uses things like activity trackers and wearable biometric sensors to capture a patient’s relevant health history, and it uploads the data to its platform in real time, 24 hours a day. The company can then deliver care recommendations for each patient, which they can view from the 4D Healthware dashboard. Essentially, the startup wants to be like a car dashboard for your personal health.
7. HerbFront
The medical marijuana industry is just starting to take off in Illinois under the state's pilot program. Cultivation centers started growing cannabis earlier this year, the first Chicago dispensary opened for business this week, and a scene of marijuana entrepreneurs has started to form in Chicago. And HerbFront wants to be the Zillow for marijuana entrepreneurs. The company connects cannabis entrepreneurs with qualified real estate owners, and supplies zoning and mapping tools to iron out the logistics. HerbFront lets you search available listings, access State and Local zoning codes, and find the best location to grow your business. With the legal weed industry set to take off, HerbFront wants to be there for startups looking for the best place to settle down.
8. Kapow
Chicago startup Kapow is helping businesses and organizations across the US host killer events. Launched in 2012, Kapow creates an online marketplace for corporate events and lets companies browse from dozens of events in their city. Kapow's platform lets people find unique venues and book events online, saving companies the headache of scouring the internet for the perfect holiday party venue, company dinner, etc. Kapow is now in 20 US cities, and the company was on pace this year to open a new market every 20 days.
9. SportsLock
With the fate of daily fantasy sports potentially hanging in the balance in states like New York, Chicago startup SportsLock is definitely a company to keep an eye on in 2016. SportsLock is a fantasy sports site similar to Draft Kings and Fan Duel, but with some notable differences. SportsLock is a fantasy app that uses a bracket-stlye competition for daily, weekly, or season long games where people play head to head in groups and advance to the next stage of the bracket. The idea is that it combines the real-money component of daily leagues with the social element of season-long platforms. The company raised a $5 million Series A in June, and its investors include Robert Dupuy, the former COO of Major League Baseball.
10. Options Away
Purchasing airfare isn't always a pleasant experience. Buying a plane ticket is stressful in large part because it's one of the only purchases where there's no turning back from. A cancellation or change fee can at times be more expensive than the flight itself, which means when you click "buy," you're pretty much committed. But Chicago startup Options Away set out to give travelers more control over the experience. The startup lets travelers pay a few bucks to hold a flight in order to lock-in a low fare before they were ready to pay the full amount. You can hold the flight for up to 21 days and purchase whenever you're ready. If you cancel the trip, the hold expires and all you've lost is the fee. Options Away, which raised a $3.5 million Series A in March, partners with travel sites like American Airlines and Expedia to bring a buy button to their customers.
11. Akouba Credit
Techstars Chicago 2015 graduate Akouba Credit wants to change how small businesses get loans. Akouba's software, which debuted in April, uses an algorithmic underwriting platform to reduce the time and cost required for banks to give small business loans. Akouba works with the community banks to offer a software package that allows them to issue small business loans for under $1 million, and the startup just announced a partnership with Metropolitan Capital Bank & Trust of Chicago in November. While there are a ton of people in the business of alternative lending, few are selling directly to banks, which could provide a big opportunity for Akouba.
12. Specless
Chicago startup Specless, another Techstars 2015 grad, is making more engaging and responsive banner ads for brands. Specless optimizes digital ads across all devices quickly and easily, making the content look appealing on a phone, tablet, desktop or wearable device. Specless' ads are more fluid and flexible than traditional banner advertising, and publishers like ABC, NBC, Fusion, Deadspin and Gawker, have already used its service.
13. Rithmio
Rithmio has set out to make wearable technology smarter. The Chicago startup, which was founded in 2013 out of the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, is creating software that helps people get more precise information about their movements. Using wearable training devices, Rithmio's software can analyze things like how many strides you took on your morning jog, or how many shots you took during basketball practice. The company raised $3 million in June.
14. Infiniscene
The streaming video game industry is becoming massive. It might sound strange to some, but today video game celebrities are broadcasting their gameplay to millions of followers, and making serious money in return. Amazon acquired video game streaming service Twitch for nearly $1 billion last year, and YouTube launched a similar service--YouTube Gaming--earlier this year. Infiniscene, also out of Techstars, helps gamers more easily become broadcasters in just a few clicks using a web browser. The startup, which has six patents pending, is working with Twitch and YouTube Gaming to be featured in their "getting started" guides, and Infiniscene is also launching Xbox and Playstation apps.
15. Rippleshot
Rippleshot is helping banks better identify fraud. Rippleshot, based out of 1871, is a fraud analytics startup that uses machine learning algorithms and data analytics to help banks and credit unions catch fraudulent behavior. The startup, which just raised $1.2 million earlier this month, processes millions of payment card transactions in real-time and can pinpoint when a data breach has occurred, and then alert the bank before the problem becomes worse.
16. BauBax
In August, Chicago-based BauBax was crowned the most funded clothing project to ever be crowdfunded after it raised more than $3.7 million on Kickstarter. Created by Northwestern MBA student Hiral Sanghavi and his co-founder Yoganshi Shah, the Baubax Travel Jacket is billed as the "world's best travel jacket." It has 15 built-in features including a built-in neck pillow and sleeping mask, hand heating pockets and attached gloves, and a separate pocket for a drink, blanket, passport, headphones, and sunglasses for easily carrying the things you need--particularly during a flight. The jacket has since launched on Indiegogo InDemand, where it has raised over $10 million.
