Welcome to 2023 — and a new crop of D.C.-area startups to watch with bated breath.
The Washington Business Journal and DC Inno are peering at tea leaves and shaking the bones to divine which 10 companies may make that next leap from pre-seed to seed, pre-revenue to revenue, unknown startup to household name.
This year lives under the foreboding auspices of a potential economic downturn, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. Supply chains are projected to return to normal in the latter half of the year, while the world continues to readjust to a “post-pandemic” life, and maybe even learn a few lessons from the public debacles of giant speculative companies like crypto exchange FTX and self-driving car company Argo AI.
Instead, these 10 local startups collectively symbolize the region’s broader economic storyline and some new normals, including venture capital that’s branched beyond Silicon Valley and the Big Apple and a hybrid workforce that values mission-driven work and autonomy over the status quo. Each young company demonstrates a rising movement taking shape in the region, be it in artificial intelligence, health technology or diversity, equity and inclusion. Whether the economic pressures will help these startups crystallize into diamonds, or they ultimately bend and break, is still to be seen. But we will be watching.
Now, enough from me, let’s meet our startups to watch in 2023.
Click on the links below for more on each company: