"50 Future Unicorns"

Although it is sometimes difficult to get in to specific names it is always handy to know what areas are drawing financing,* in a way having Sand Hill Road do your initial screen from which you can develop strategies for portfolio investments.
Of course this approach would have missed Microsoft** but there were other ways to get Bill Gates and his minions into your consciousness.
From Fast Company and CB Insights, first up Fast Company:

Could these 50 hot tech startups be tomorrow’s unicorns? 
The next crop of billion-dollar phenoms may be dominated by companies that quietly help other companies get business done, not splashy consumer brands. 

Startup companies can be black boxes—opaque operations with few public disclosure requirements. That makes it hard to see tomorrow’s standouts today. So the research firm CB Insights, with the support of the National Science Foundation, set out to build an algorithm to discern the health of startups through their publicly available data, and even identify ones that could grow to a billion-dollar valuation—making them, in one of the tech industry’s favorite buzzwords, unicorns.

CB Insights calls this algorithm Mosaic, and in the past, it has indeed pinpointed promising startups that went on to achieve unicorn status. For the company’s 2015 Future Unicorns list, for instance, it identified restaurant delivery Postmates as a contender. The on-demand delivery service is valued at $2.5 billion today. Also on that list was Dollar Shave Club, which Unilever acquired for a cool billion the following year. The Berlin-based meal kit delivery company HelloFresh, another 2015 future unicorn, went on to a $1.7 billion after its late 2017 IPO, and its stock price has tripled since then.

Mosaic’s past success is one of the reasons the strikingly different makeup of this year’s Future Unicorns list—which you can read in its entirety at CB Insights’ site—is so intriguing. Postmates, Dollar Shave Club, and HelloFresh caught the last of the wave of consumer-focused e-commerce mania, but that wave is long gone in 2020. Most of the companies on CB Insights’ 2020 list cater to the needs of corporations, not consumers. In fact, 37 out of the 50 companies on the list have no consumer-facing products at all.

“There’s a lot of big companies that are looking for technology solutions and there’s a lot of startup companies that are building for them,” CB Insights cofounder and CEO Anand Sanwal told me. “From a revenue perspective, these are companies that have a repeatable, understandable subscription model. So you’re seeing less of these consumer-driven, hit-based businesses.”

Spotting unicorns
The Mosaic algorithm sifts through data on 280,000 tech startups tracked in CB Insights’ database, looking for traits shared by movers and shakers. These factors include how much investment money the startup has attracted—and how quickly it seems to be burning through it—as well as at the pedigree of the company’s investors and board members. It also looks for signs of momentum in customer growth, media coverage, and social media sentiment.....

....MUCH MORE

And at CB Insights:

....MUCH MORE
*One of the reasons we were able to glom onto Nvidia at $21 was stuff like 2014's "Deep Learning is VC Worthy" pointing toward A.I and other areas faster chips were allowing 'puters to tackle. Our first post on NVDA was May 2015's "Nvidia Wants to Be the Brains Of Your Autonomous Car (NVDA)" which was followed by a hundred more, including 2018's play on that first post title "UPDATED—NVIDIA Wants to Be the Brains Behind the Surveillance State (NVDA)" many with this introduction from May 2016's "NVIDIA Sets New All Time High On Pretty Good Numbers, "Sweeping Artificial Intelligence Adoption" (NVDA)":

We are fans.
Before we go any further, our NVIDIA boilerplate: we make very few calls on individual names on the blog but this one is special.

They are positioned to be the brains in autonomous vehicles, they will drive virtual reality should it ever catch on, the current businesses include gaming graphics, deep learning/artificial intelligence, and supercharging the world's fastest supercomputers including what will be the world's fastest at Oak Ridge next year.
Not just another pretty face.

Or food delivery app.

After hours the stock is changing hands at $38.31 up 7.70% which, if it holds through tomorrow's regular session, beats the old highs from 2007.

It worked out.

FinViz

 **See 2017's "The Venture Capitalist Microsoft Allowed To Invest Early" and 2014's"Will Venture Capitalists Drive the Next Spectacular Breakthrough?":

Originally posted on Saturday Oct. 4 this is worthy of a wider audience. Our answer to the headline query:

Maybe

If memory serves, David Marquardt and his Technology Venture Investors  were the only outside investor in Microsoft and only got that opportunity because he went to Stanford with  Ballmer, not because MSFT needed the money.

What I'm saying is that the whole VC and Sand Hill Road/Silicon Valley infrastructure which Mr. Thiel represents is not necessarily required.

So again,
Maybe....