Philly’s top tech stories of 2021: New startups, huge VC raises and cryptocurrency captured our attention – Technical.ly Philly

Looking back at a year of reports can tell us about trends in the Philadelphia tech community.

Technically He does so each year by reflecting on the best-read stories in our community. Last year's list it was full of pandemic pivots, how to optimize remote work and digest what the company culture is like today. Now, the 2021 list tells us that companies are getting more global, startups influenced by the pandemic are catching their attention, and that local companies that are raising big, big rounds are still intriguing.

So let's dive into the latest Technical.ly top-read stories in Philadelphia.

Note: To formulate our summaries with the best readings of each year, we remove our RealLISTsas they are often our most read stories, but they don't tell us much about trends. But it is remarkable that readers love to hear about our 2021 Techncial.ly Awards winners; the RealLIST startups, our list of young companies poised to make an impact; the RealLIST Engineers, our list of influential local technologists; and the RealLIST connectors, our list of people you need to meet in the tech community. He tells us he wants to stay up-to-date on "who's who" and keep an eye on companies on the brink of real influence.

Interested to see how these trends have changed over time? In early 2020, in honor of Technical.ly's 10th anniversary, we gather the best-read stories up to that moment.

But for now, his top 10 of 2021:

Brother and sister co-founding duo Shivani shah Y Sagar Shah formed the idea of ForeverX, a dating app specifically targeting healthcare workers looking for a meaningful connection, in 2020. They launched the app this fall, with an initial focus on Philadelphia and New York, two cities close to the founders and with thriving sectors of the community. Health. The app uses the national provider identification number of a medical professional to verify their identity.

"We were looking to build something where like-minded people can communicate," Sagar Shah told Technical.ly. "Very few people understand the inherent sacrifices healthcare workers make, and the pandemic exacerbated these problems."

In May, based in Spring Garden Gopuff announced that he had partnered with Uber to bring their "everyday essentials" to Uber Eats customers through its network of micro fulfillment centers. But that deal received some scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission, with the agency claiming the deal could hamper competition in the online grocery and alcohol delivery space.

Min-Seok Pang, Associate Professor of Management Information Systems at Temple university Fox Business School, He gave us some context on the situation.

"If Gopuff tries to expand organically without partnerships, there will be no antitrust problems," Pang said. “The problem is that you are trying to partner with a much larger platform with a large number of customers. That is why it attracts the FTC in this case. "

In early 2020, Amber wanner close a five-year startup Candidate and a few months later he launched Vette, which aims to streamline the candidate search process. She is working with two co-founders: From Comcast former chief technology officer, Sree kotay, now Vette's chief technology officer and former airline pilot Austin george, now COO.

"And we especially found a new kind of market during COVID: an influx of these high-volume, low-to-medium level jobs, manufacturing jobs," Wanner said. "We found the blank within that area and we realized it was time to start."

Two friends and co-founders are behind Splinterland, a digital trading card game in which every action in the game takes place on the public Hive blockchain and every in-game asset is a non-fungible token, or NFT. Players can buy, sell and trade digital assets just as they would physical trading cards, and it is similar in concept to games like Magic: The Gathering, co-founder Matthew rosen Technical.ly said.

The team was looking to hire UX and UI developers and designers in June.

This autumn, Diverse strength CEO Sulaiman Rahman | launched the P4 Center (Public-Private and Philanthropic Partnership) to Promote Racial Equity and Excellence coworking space and events. The space was launched with the help of partnerships with organizations that "share our mission of promoting leaders in our community," Rahman told Technical.ly.

The 4,200-square-foot center includes an event space equipped with audio and visual resources and tools such as meeting projectors. Companies can sponsor talents who want to work at the center, while others can apply for membership.

The “ugly” grocery and produce delivery company had two big raises this year, both stories well read. But in April, it raised $ 200 million to accelerate growth fueled by the pandemic.

That round of VC was led by SoftBank 2 Vision Fund, with the participation of the usual investor Speed ​​up. Most recently, Misfits Market was valued at $ 2 billion, having raised $ 526.5 million so far, according to the company.

In its third major investment round since early 2020, dbt Labs - renamed from Fishtown Analytics earlier this year - announced the closing of its Series C at $ 150 million in June. Then the company was valued at $ 1.5 billion, CEO Tristan handy saying. The augmentation was designed to allow the team to accelerate the development of dbt, its open source SQL-based data analysis tool that has a strong community around it.

As the cryptocurrency became "normalized”This year, so did the infrastructure necessary to feed it. Enter Bitcoin mining, a process performed by specialized computers to secure the network and process each and every Bitcoin transaction. Miners are rewarded with new Bitcoins for their services, and the more miners there are, the more secure the network is, according to the idea.

VBit technologies, a blockchain infrastructure solutions company based on Washington Avenue, is getting into the game. In February, his leadership announced that they were opening a third mining location in Montana. Founder Don Vo He said it was important to him to build the VBit headquarters in Philadelphia when he started the company in 2018, because of its strong talent pool, he said.

Earlier this year, clinical data manager Alexandra hunt announced that he would run for US House of Representatives in Pennsylvania's 3rd Congressional District, which covers downtown, west, and northwest Philadelphia. You are running as a Democrat and your goal is to overthrow the Democratic congressman Dwight evans in next year's primary elections.

Among its main policies is a new agreement for education that addresses current disparities in the system, fights for economic justice and higher wages, in addition to addressing the crisis of climate change. Her career in public health has also made her a supporter of Medicare for All, a policy that she said would have saved many lives during the pandemic.

Our best-read story this year featured two nurses launching startups Lumify Care, with the uNight Light, a device that offers three lighting options for different functions to work in dark conditions. The couple launched the company in early 2021 and have been working full-time at the company since June. They were accepted for And Combiner summer cohort, when we were briefed on the process this summer.

“There have been no other fully nurse-led companies at Y Combinator. We have worked on the front line, and many times we see people building solutions when they have not experienced the problem they are solving ”, co-founder and University of Pennsylvania 1 cup Anthony Scarpone-Lambert saying. "And that fact inspired us to build Lumify Care."

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