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Company Player Card - Eaze

Today we are featuring Eaze in our Company Player Card series. Eaze is an on-demand healthcare delivery service that enables patients to access medical marijuana easily, quickly, and professionally. Eaze links dispensaries and their drivers to patients. The company was founded in July 2014 and has raised $11.5 million in 2 rounds of funding. To see the full list of companies in the Cannabis Technology sector, contact us using the form on www.venturescanner.com.

Shortlisting companies that match your needs

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This is the third of a four-part series on how Venture Scanner enables corporations to research, identify, and connect with innovative companies. In the first post, we laid out our four-step process. In the second post, we dove into the first step in the process, exhaustively scanning emerging sectors. In this post, we'll review how we shortlist a set of companies that should be top-of-mind.

Venture Scanner Sector Maps

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The analysts at Venture Scanner provide coverage of different sectors and the companies within them. Here is a summary of some of the sectors that we are covering and their respective visual maps. To see the full list of companies, contact us using the form on www.venturescanner.com.

Exhaustively Scanning Emerging Sectors

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This is the second of a four part series on how Venture Scanner enables corporations to research, identify, and connect with innovative companies. In the first post, we laid out our four-step process, and in this post we will dive into the first step in the process.

How does Venture Scanner help corporations stay competitive?

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This is the first of a four part series on how Venture Scanner enables corporations to research, identify, and connect with innovative companies. In this post, we will layout our four-step process and in the next set of posts we will go deeper on each of the four steps.

Announcing the Venture Scanner Pulse Metric

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One of the top requests from you, our community, is to be able to quickly get a sense for how companies within categories stack up against one another. It is very common for some categories, like Automotive Telematics, Social Media Marketing, and Consumer Lending, to have over 100 companies within them. This makes identifying the short list of companies to meet with and vet for business partnerships a very arduous task.

Chart of the Week: Median Age of Companies Across Sectors

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I analyzed the data on the sectors we are covering and graphed the median age of the companies within each sector.Not surprisingly, Bitcoin is the youngest sector with a median company age of 1 year and Marketing Automation, Connected Transportation, and Future of TV/Video are the most mature sectors with a median company age of 6 years.Nader

Funding per Company per Sector

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Last week I looked at sectors poised for growth based on the percent of companies within a sector that have received funding. This week I sliced the data slightly differently to see if it would teach me anything new. I looked at the average funding per company per sector, for the companies that have received funding.Anteing Up: Bitcoin, 3D Printing, and IoT seem to be in the anteing up phase of funding. Investors are placing small bets and watching for companies to breakout to double down on.Doubling Down: Digital Health, Marketing Automation, Financial Technology, Retail Technologies, and Future of TV/Video seem to be in the doubling down phase of funding. Investors have spotted potential winners and have doubled down on their bets.All In: Connected Transportation seems to be in the all in phase of funding. A select group of winners are emerging with investors placing much bigger bets on them.Nader

Which Sectors are Poised for Growth?

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At Venture Scanner, we provide coverage on emerging sectors that have momentum in innovation and startup activity. These are the sectors that are transforming established industries or creating new ones. They are sectors that attract venture capital and corporate strategic interests.I analyzed all the sectors we are covering and looked at the total companies within the sectors and the percentage of those companies that have been funded.Broadly, I see 3 groups amongst these sectors.Group 1: Bitcoin and 3D Printing have limited funding activity and there are likely opportunities for continued early stage investments as the companies reach product market fits. Group 2: Connected Transportation, Marketing Automation, IoT, and Financial Technology have gained traction with investors and are building out their respective industries. These sectors seem poised to attract later stage investments and M&A activity, along with continued early stage opportunities. Group 3: Retail Technologies, Future of TV / Video, and Digital Health seem ripe for M&A activity and later stage investments. What do you conclude from this data?Nader

Evaluating and Scoring Companies: Analyst vs. Crowd vs. Programmatic

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External company evaluations and scores can help buyers and dealmakers narrow the field when assessing vendors or deal prospects, especially as the pool of available opportunities only grows.I see 3 approaches being used, and will offer my thoughts on each method below:Analyst evaluationCrowd evaluationProgrammatic evaluation1) Analyst evaluations are the bailiwick of research shops whose analysts look at a sector and use a specific evaluation rubric to classify companies. For example, Gartner uses the magic quadrant methodology, where analysts evaluate companies based on completeness of vision on the X-axis and the ability to execute on the Y-axis. They then group companies into leaders, challengers, niche players, or visionaries (see figure below).Pros: Analysts conduct primary research, talk to companies, and dig through operational details to synthesize a large amount of non-public data to form opinions.Cons: Analyst evaluations can be subjective and biased based on the relationship a vendor has with the analyst and can also be very limited as analysts do not have the bandwidth to cover all the up and coming entrants in any given sector. 2) Crowd evaluations use the power of the open web to enable the wisdom of the crowds to score individual companies. For example, ProductHunt uses a simple Reddit like model that allows their community to list and up-vote companies. Companies receiving the lion’s share of up-votes in any given sector are the presumed leaders in a particular sector.Pros: Crowd evaluations democratize scoring and can signal which companies have a high likelihood of pleasing customers. Cons: Crowd evaluations are broad in nature and don’t determine the fit of a company against specific customer needs, nor do they evaluate a company based on their operations and strategy.3) Programmatic evaluations use algorithms that take in available data from the web to determine an overall score for a particular company. For example, Mattermark uses week-to-week growth data on a company’s web traffic, mobile downloads, inbound links, Twitter followers, Facebook page likes, and LinkedIn followers to arrive at an overall score for the company.Pros: Programmatic approaches that leverage available public data can be a good signal for companies that are showing growth and can help buyers and investors find up and coming opportunities.Cons: The flip side is that programmatic approaches can favor socially trending companies versus companies that have a stable offering and an existing base of customers. Furthermore, they do not evaluate companies based on any specific customer needs, nor do they take into account a company’s overalls strategy and ability to execute.Ultimately, each of these approaches provides part of the solution, and at Venture Scanner we believe the final answer lies at the intersection of all these approaches. Our approach of “analyst coverage as a service” combines a sector analyst’s primary research with aggregated and synthesized data from the web to provide our customers with the necessary insights to make a decision. Are there other approaches or pros/cons that I’m missing?Nader

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