Take a moment and think about some of the biggest and most impactful companies doing business today. In Silicon Valley, there’s Apple, Google and Zoom. In San Francisco, you’ve got Salesforce, Twitter and Uber.
What do all of these companies have in common? They were all launched in the Greater Bay Area by ambitious entrepreneurs who saw this region as the best place to find creative leaders, skilled workers and risk-taking investors.
In this inaugural Startups to Watch feature, the San Francisco Business Times and Silicon Valley Business Journal set out to identify the founders and their startups we think might be onto the next big thing. Reporters Sara Bloomberg and Sonya Herrera explored a number of companies to come up with a list of 20 that deserve extra attention.
To qualify for this list, all of the companies had to be less than 5 years old and had to be considered an “early-stage” company with less than $50 million in venture capital funding. From there, we looked for diversity in industries, in the backgrounds of founders and levels of financial support.
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