Speaking of “a world where technology and product knowledge has been globally distributed”, economist Henry Chesbrough noted that “companies must look outside their R&D departments for sources of technology and innovation and growth”. This is true for all companies today. In the open innovation paradigm, companies must seek and collaborate with promising startups to stay competitive. To do this successfully, they leverage the speed and effectiveness of data-driven startup scouting platforms. The StartUs Insights Discovery Platform combines rich data on over 3 million startups and scaleups and semantic search technology to exhaustively scout highly relevant startups, scaleups, and tech companies.
In this report, learn more about:
- The Discovery Platform and what it can do for you
- Semantic search technology and knowledge graphs
- How semantic search makes allows you to scout startups more effectively
How Startup Scouting Impacts Your Business
Startup scouting is the process by which organizations identify and engage promising startups for collaborations, partnerships, or acquisitions (build, partner, buy strategy). This allows companies to combine their resources with the creativity and agility of startups. Consequently, this provides companies with a range of benefits that together contribute to a strong competitive advantage.
Selected benefits of startup scouting include:
- Quick access to new technologies and business models. Startups are developing new technologies and advancing disruptive business models. Working with startups provides you with access to these technologies and models.
- Rapid product development. Working with startups developing solutions that eliminate inefficiencies in your product development cycles allows you to rapidly develop and validate new products.
- Cost savings. Engaging with startups allows you to tackle bottlenecks in your process, identify new ways of building stuff, and derisk new product development. This leads to massive cost savings.
Today, scouting startups manually isn’t really an option anymore. It’s become expensive and inefficient. This is why innovation managers turn to data-driven SaaS tools.
Read this report: Discover the #1 Startup Scouting Platform
Whether you’re scouting startups on the internet or by scanning startup databases, you are limited by the kind of searches you can perform. Boolean or keyword-based searches allow you to identify startups whose websites may mention particular terms, but you have to go through a lot of irrelevant results to find a few hidden gems. Semantic search, on the contrary, understands the context behind the keywords and separates the signal from the noise, enabling you to scout startups more effectively.
Semantic Search & Knowledge Graphs
The Discovery Platform’s highly performant search makes use of our proprietary semantic search technology and knowledge graphs. It allows you to quickly and efficiently identify relevant startups for any given query. This type of search allows you to find the information you are looking for in a timely manner, without having to wait for long periods of time or sift through irrelevant startups. For example, when you search for material startups working on nanocomposites, it quickly shows you an exhaustive list of startups working in exactly that domain instead of other kinds of nanomaterial solutions or composites.
Mapping the World’s Information on Startups, Technologies & Innovations to Make it Accessible
The Discovery Platform maps the world’s information on startups, technologies, and innovations. To make this data accessible and turn it into actionable insights, it creates a knowledge graph that underlines the relationships between these technologies and their drivers.
A knowledge graph is a structured representation of knowledge about a particular domain or topic. It typically consists of a set of interconnected nodes and edges that represent entities and the relationships between them. Knowledge graphs are used to organize and represent complex, interrelated data in a way that is easy to understand and navigate. In the case of the Discovery Platform, the data consists of over 1,8 billion innovation data points. The network is an accurate representation of the global startup ecosystem and the emerging technologies they work on.
Our knowledge graph enables a lot of major features of the Discovery Platform. Some of these include:
- Trend intelligence. It identifies emerging technology trends for your industry as well as identifies the companies and startups advancing these trends.
- Keyword patterns. For any query, the Discovery Platform returns hundreds of keywords that are linked to the keywords used in the query. This allows you to keep improving the quality of your searches with each iteration.
- Similar companies search. Given a list of companies that you have from preliminary research, the Discovery Platform suggests companies that are similar to them. This allows you to quickly add to your list of relevant companies.
The Discovery Platform uses semantic search, a type of search technology that aims to understand the intent and contextual meaning of a user’s search query, rather than just matching the exact words of the query to words on a website. By using natural language processing (NLP), it determines the intended meaning. This type of search improves the accuracy and relevance of search results, making it easier for you to identify exactly the kind of startups you are looking for.
Easily Eliminate Irrelevant Results
For example, if you are looking for startups working on AI-powered drug discovery solutions, the semantic search understands this and provides information about relevant startups that use AI technologies for any use case in drug discovery. This allows you to easily identify startups that are relevant to your search and make more informed decisions.
The Discovery Platform’s semantic search technology results in major strengths compared to similar platforms:
- High recall. Unlike keyword-based searches that return results with specific terms, the Discovery Platform returns results for related terms as well. As a result, it provides you with a greater list of relevant startups for your query.
- High precision. Because semantic search understands relationships between terms, it lowers the odds of returning irrelevant results when you scout startups. Consequently, any query on the Discovery Platform delivers startups with high precision.
- Ranked results. The results of your query are ranked according to their match with the search query. This ensures that the most relevant results are at the top of the results, further speeding up your startup scouting process.
Fast, Highly Performant Search that Delivers Results within Seconds
The combination of our knowledge graph, a powerful semantic search technology, and exhaustive data on global innovation come together to enable a highly performant SaaS tool. Our Discovery Platform is able to handle industrial-scale queries as well as multiple queries simultaneously. This gives you full control of the search process and delivers highly relevant startups fast and exhaustively. So instead of weeding out irrelevant startups, you can focus on engaging relevant startups. This provides you with more startups per dollar spent as compared to any other startup scouting tool – saving not only money but also time.
Broadly speaking, three things happen in the few seconds between when you hit ‘search’ and when the Discovery Platform returns startups relevant to your query:
- Analyzing and understanding the query. The Discovery Platform analyzes the keywords in the query to understand their meaning and the relationships between them. This includes identifying the main concepts and entities mentioned in the query, as well as the relationships between them.
- Gathering context and identifying relevant results. The semantic search system traverses the knowledge graph to gather additional context and understanding about the query. It follows relationships between entities (keywords, startups, technologies, etc) to gather more information about them. Based on this context and understanding, it identifies the most relevant startups in response to the query.
- Returning the results. The Discovery Platform returns a ranked list of the most relevant startups on its intuitive interface. Each startup is accompanied by additional metadata that you can view to make more informed decisions. Further, you can use a range of filters, such as for location and founding year, to narrow down the search results based on your needs.
Bring Accuracy to Startup Scouting with the Discovery Platform
Our unique combination of exhaustive innovation data, knowledge graph, and semantic search makes the Discovery Platform the best tool for your startup scouting needs. Its powerful search has a number of benefits over other data-driven startup scouting platforms:
A more comprehensive view of the startup ecosystem. The knowledge graph accurately maps the startup ecosystem by organizing and representing a wide range of information about startups and technologies. This allows you to identify potential open innovation opportunities that might not be obvious from more limited sources of information.
Filter and rank startups based on their relevance. The Discovery Platform features industry-leading recall for both broad and narrow searchers. This means that you get access to far more startups than you would with other tools. To make evaluating them easier for you, it ranks the results and allows you to filter them based on further constraints.
Additional context and information about startups. It also provides additional information such as funding, company size, and other metadata. This allows you to evaluate a startup’s strengths, weaknesses, and potential more accurately, leading to better decisions.
Try the Discovery Platform Today!
Regardless of your objectives and specific needs, your startup scouting initiatives deserve the support of the most capable search. With the Discovery Platform, you get access to thousands of highly relevant startups in seconds. Thanks to iterative and parallel searching, you get full control of manipulating the search to get the most out of it.
“StartUs Insights feature a comprehensive and exhaustive database for the investigation of relevant startups and technologies”, noted Matthias Neundorf, business promotion manager at Kyocera. “The sophisticated user interface guarantees an efficient and intuitive exploration of contained information.”
To sum up, our highly performant search combines speed, exhaustiveness, and precision to save you hours of time and thousands of dollars.
