The Fastest Growing Areas of Startup Investment in 2015 | Hacker News Reader

The Fastest Growing Areas of Startup Investment in 2015

tomtunguz.com

41 pointsprostoalex20 comments

As the article even points out, "fastest growing" in % means almost nothing. I funded this niche market for $1 last year, now I'm funding it for $100. Look at that 10000% growth! And yet it still doesn't provide the absolute values, or even numbers of funding from other categories for comparison. In short, not a useful presentation of data.

https://xkcd.com/1102/

Thanks for the feedback. I did provide the total amount invested ytd (approx $50B according to Mattermark) and the second table shows share of total venture dollars by category, so multiply the two and you get aggregates by sector.

Hey friend, how can I get in on this niche market??

According to the article, investment in 'Photo Sharing' is growing by 150%.

Leaving aside the ambiguity in that statement, is there a list of 'photo sharing' startups that have received investment recently?

It's also weird - my gut feel is that photo sharing is done. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Flickr, Dropbox, Apple iCloud stuff, Google+ stuff, Smugmug... etc.

If the investments are going to those companies (and if they are considered "startups" still), I'd understand. But small companies trying to "disrupt" this space!?!?

I'm suspicious of the data on this one. Or that the investors are not very good at investing.

Thank you for this article, the data is great. Since you've speculated as to the causes of the declines in the markets with large declines could you speculate on the reasons for the fastest markets to be growing as quickly as they have? Or on markets which you would think should be growing more quickly but aren't?

Totally missed agtech. The food and agriculture sector is the third largest market in the world, it employs $1.3b people, and the tech is in the earliest days.

Here's the data for ag tech. For 2012 - 2015 (ytd).

167, 561, 456, 108.

Pretty big drop-off in 2015. On an annualized basis, if the trend continues, we should expect a 50% decline.

Those figures are in $M

Url changed from http://qz.com/457818/bitcoin-space-travel-venture-capital-fu..., which points to this.

Both are worthless, and will not be used to try to attempt passing the beginner stuff.

;-)

Interesting data:

Banking - 65%

Bitcoin - 151%

The fact that the time horizon is spread over 3-4 years makes the analysis misleading.

Case in point, Bitcoin was a nonfactor in 2012 (hence the high "growth"), but VC for Bitcoin firms has dried up in 2015, with most Bitcoin startups either dying or pivoting to more generic financial instruments/blockchain tech.

Hey, I'm the author. Actually, the data doesn't support this statement. Here's financing by year for BTC companies in $M (non inflation adj). Note 2015 is only through June, so BTC investment should grow 45% y/y, if the pace holds.

year industry amount($M) 2012 Bitcoin 4.75000 2013 Bitcoin 54.47459 2014 Bitcoin 259.57000 2015 Bitcoin 189.40000

I'd be interested where you're getting your numbers - there was a popular article floating aroudn a couple of days ago about VC capital invested into Bitcoin already passing the 2014 total: http://cointelegraph.com/news/114862/bitcoin-capital-investm...

189m seems low considering 21, inc. alone raised over $110m.

it's mattermark data.

You should reclassify this as Blockchain, and separate the application on currency (Bitcoin). The bigger fundraising events this year has been around the "Blockchain" technology while investors' appetite to startups focusing on Bitcoin as a currency has dwindled significantly.

And I'm curious why a longer time horizon makes the data misleading. I calculated over 3 years to minimize the risk of aberrations/flashes in the pan. What time period would you suggest?

> I calculated over 3 years to minimize the risk of aberrations/flashes in the pan

That's the issue. VC funding patterns are so long-tail and erratic that consolidating them misses that variation. It could be one startup accounting for the bulk of a funding, but we can't say the industry as a whole has grown.

Although with the BTC numbers you cite, that might not be relevant. Hmm.

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