Investing in a startup can be scary business.
The truth is, about 90% of startups fail. For every massive success, such as Dropbox or Slack, there are thousands of failures, like Webvan and Pets.com. There are so many factors that contribute to the gargantuan success or colossal failure of a startup. Is the market ready? Are the founders young morons with too much money? Is their enough media buzz around it? Who are the investors?
Investing in the right startup can bank you millions, while investing in the wrong one can ruin you.
Startup Oddup, which just raised $1 million in seed funding, is doing everything they can to reduce the risk of ruin.
The company uses a team of analysts to score startups, much like a financial investment site would have their analysts score stocks. The scores are made available to their users and ideally, they use those scores to make promising startup investment decisions. Think Morningstar, except for startups instead of stocks.
Using a patent-pending scoring methodology, analysts create a series of subscores for each startup, which are then combined into an overall score between 1-100. Those subscores include product, growth, location, team, market, industry, investor quality, funding, media buzz, and competitors. The higher the overall score, the healthier the startup. Oddup also predicts the startup’s odds of survival and its future valuation, and makes a recommendation to either “buy”, “sell”, or “hold”.
Users are given a portfolio dashboard that allows them to track startups of interest to them. They can also see commentary from Oddup analysts, historical trends, and current valuation data.
Oddup isn’t the first into this space, with websites like Mattermark and Funderbeam offering similar data, but it does claim to go deeper than anyone else in terms of research.
With over 25,000 people signed up, Oddup already has a robust user base. They currently offer free accounts which allow users to search for startup data as well and view predictive ranks. For $99/month, a user gets access to analyst data, recommendations, and historical trends. Enterprise accounts are available to companies who want tailored analysis and a dedicated account manager.
If a startup wants to have themselves analyzed, Oddup will provide their own brand of audit for $499.
Located in Hong Kong, they are currently focused on Asian startups, but have plans on expanding to Sydney, Melbourne, London, Bangalore, and Bangkok in the next six months. They also plan on releasing a mobile app in the first quarter of 2016.
With corporate customers like J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and BNP Paribas, it seems like Oddup is headed in the right direction.
