Is reelyActive now the billion-dollar startup that some anticipated exactly ten years ago today?
On November 8th, 2013, our three-minute pitch won us the title “World’s Best Startup“, and a sizeable trophy, at the finals of the global Startup World competition in San Francisco. The motivations of that competition’s founder included answering the question of whether the next billion-dollar startup could originate from outside of Silicon Valley.
It’s safe to say by now that no, reelyActive was definitely not the next billion-dollar startup—at least not by any traditional investor metric! But we’re still here. So what are we then?
In many ways, we’re still the same: our vision is just as bold, and our technology continues to pioneer the future we long envisaged.
For technology to understand and respond to our world, it needs to be contextually aware. It needs to identify what’s happening at any given place and time.
From our November 8, 2013 pitch
And in some ways, we’re completely different: our destiny was not exponential growth as a venture-backed startup, but rather gritty, organic growth as a so-called“cockroach” startup.
In our 2013 pitch, we could boast of only a handful of early adopters. However, as of 2023 our technologies have been used all around the world in prestigious museums, leading hospitals, nuclear power plants, military bases and the world’s tallest inclined tower. And our work has been exhibited as art and cited in the prestigious journal Nature.
Should reelyActive one day be recognised as a billion-dollar startup, it would have to be for the value that we’ve created rather than the capital that we’ve raised! Although, even on that stage in 2013, we were already thinking four orders of magnitude bigger than that:
if the IoT really is [a] ten trillion plus market opportunity […], doesn’t it make sense to enable that opportunity as quickly as possible so we can all eat from a much larger pie?
From our November 8, 2013 pitch
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