Sponsored: 5 Brooklyn Startups to Watch in 2015

By BK Mag Partner

Photo credit: stereotyp_0815 via Flickr cc

Christine Zimmermann is the content marketing manager at Startup Institute: education for the innovation economy. Startup Institute’s eight-week program gives people the skills, mindset, and network to get a job and thrive in a high-growth career.

Etsy, MakerBot, and HowAboutWe are sources of a lot of the buzz coming out of the Tech Triangle. Still, Brooklyn’s got a lot of other high-growth companies on the cusp of stealing this spotlight. At Startup Institute, we’re keeping pulse of the BK tech scene to align our students with the best of Big Apple innovation in 2015. Take a look at some companies that we’re keeping our eyes on:

1. Charged.fm: From internships to management roles, sales, biz dev, design, programming, and marketing, Charged.fm’s robust list of openings make their super-charged growth anything but hush-hush. In their words, a “StubHub, Eventbrite and Ticketmaster all in one place,” Charged.fm has been making waves in the ticketing space for a couple of years now (since raising their seed round in 2012) but it looks as though these waves may turn into behemouths with the growth we’re expecting from them this year.

2. CartoDB: CartoDB’s cloud-based mapping platform is putting powerful, self-service mapping technology into the hands of the people and businesses that need it. And their recent $8 million Series A has officially put them on the map. The CartoDB team recently migrated headquarters from Madrid to Brooklyn; lucky for our fall cohort of students at Startup Institute, who got to experiment with their product– finding it intuitive as it was informative. The team at CartoDB believes that the future of GIS mapping and location-based services will be in customized experiences, and we’re ready to see some major disruption from them in 2015 as they put this hefty chunk of change to work.

Photo credit: Kevin Case via Flickr cc

3. Atavist: Atavist is enabling the next generation of multimedia storytelling, and if their $2 million in equity financing at the end of last year (following two sizable venture-rounds in 2012) is any indication, we’re likely to see them ride off happily into the sunset. They were featured in Inc.com last year as an emerging standout in the new-media landscape. In a time when the publishing industry is in serious flux, our hats go off to these guys for reimagining how to tell compelling stories, and proving that publishing can boom in the fast-moving digital age.

4. Bandwagon: Bandwagon closed $425 thousand in Venture funding just two months back, and are poised to take-over the streets of New York in 2015. Bandwagon matches passengers by location for taxi and car-sharing– both a cost and energy-efficient travel solution. As Bandwagon describes, driving conditions for this startup couldn’t be better, with vehicle ownership decreasing, and on-demand transportation services increasing.

5. Maker’s Row: “Made-in-America” really is making a comeback. In 2013’s State of the Union, Obama called this progress “our first priority,” and the Reshoring Initiative estimates 15% of recently added manufacturing jobs were previously located overseas. Combining these uplifting factoids with Maker’s Row’s efforts to connect American businesses with domestic manufacturers, maybe there’s hope for us yet. Maker’s Row now has 5,000 factories signed up–more than doubling their numbers from a year ago– and all signs point to 2015 bringing even more manufacturing to US soil. They’re giving our economy a boost, making a huge difference in health and conditions for factory workers, and thriving. Definitely a startup that worth watching, and rooting for.

Between big ideas, big growth, big disruption–BK is positioned to become NYC’s premier tech hub. We’re looking forward to seeing big news for the Brooklyn startup community in 2015.