Finding Promise in a Time of Uncertainty
By Nathan Rubbelke - St. Louis Inno editor
As the calendar has turned to 2023, a comment from a recent conversation with Brian Hopcraft of Lewis & Clark Ventures has stuck with me.
During our Zoom call, I asked Hopcraft his thoughts about what the next year will mean for startups. He mentioned some venture capital firms have started pulling back on funding, but that Lewis & Clark Ventures still has an optimistic outlook. His reasoning, he told me, is that “great companies come independent of what the economy looks like.”
If there’s a mantra to describe St. Louis Inno’s 2023 Startups to Watch feature, it’s those words from Hopcraft. Entrepreneurship is never easy and the threat of a recession in the near term only adds to the challenge, but the nine companies on this year’s list aren’t throwing in the towel.
These are companies that are forging ahead and notching major milestones. They’ve raised funding, hired staff and landed big customers. They expect to surpass even more landmarks in 2023.
In choosing the companies featured in our 2023 Startups to Watch list, we focused on earlier stage companies, most of which were founded within roughly the past five years and have raised smaller amounts of investment. We compiled our list based on our own reporting and recommendations from within the St. Louis startup community. The final selections were chosen by the St. Louis Inno and St. Louis Business Journal editorial team.
What excites me about our 2023 Startups to Watch list is the diversity of the companies both in terms of industry and leadership. It includes firms in agriculture, health tech and software, plus even a drone startup. Five of the nine companies are founded or led by women, which is perhaps an indicator that efforts to diversify the local startup community, and particularly the founders of new companies, are yielding results.
As part of our 2023 Startups to Watch feature, we’ve written profiles on each of the companies honored. We’ve also included a roundup of milestones achieved by the companies that were on our inaugural Startups to Watch list in 2022, all of which you can read at the links below.
