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The numbers: 8,000 startup companies presented themselves to the world this year and 53,000 were founded over the last three years (per Crunchbase). Each year, Outsell’s analyst team is tasked with identifying and covering the top emerging players that operate at the intersection of data, information, and technology. The result is the Outsell 300: a list of companies that go through a rating exercise based on their uniqueness of approach to the market, market fit and pain points, significant addressable market, and ability to scale. The result is the Outsell 50, those 50 companies that our team believes our audience needs to keep a very close eye on as they disrupt, progress, and drive growth. At the end of this journey, we take the top 10 ranked companies and invite them to join us at the Outsell Signature Event to participate in a rapid-fire Emerging Company Growth Tank. One company will come away from the event as the Outsell Emerging Company of the year.

I’ve never been this excited about a selection of companies participating in the event. The mix of emerging technologies incorporating blockchain and AI, companies providing beautiful data, value, and solutions that push the needle, with a blend of verticals in agriculture, education, legal, science, finance, and beyond… the Outsell Emerging Company Growth Tank is sure to pack a punch as the kick-off session to the Outsell Signature event. I greatly look forward to seeing you there as these companies take the stage.

Ten companies were invited. Nine will be able to join us in London. Below is the list of companies along with a short self-description from each.

Henrik Hjelte — CEO and Co-founder — ChromaWay

ChromaWay was founded in 2014 and is an early pioneer of what is now dubbed “blockchain 2.0” technology. With great blockchain experts, ChromaWay provides a platform for smart contracts to issue and transfer assets through a blockchain. ChromaWay has been working with the Swedish Land Registry and other institutions and financial companies to provide smart contract solutions for the real estate field. Among many other successes, ChromaWay presented Postchain, a consortium database.

David Sikora — CEO — ALTR

ALTR was founded by a core team whose previous work was in algorithmic options trading technology. In that world, data was money. Security was incorporated in line with low latency and maintaining secure custody of data was vital. In that environment, the assumption was that the network would be breached, because architecturally, it’s simply too difficult to defend. And with cloud and device proliferation, it’s becoming more difficult all the time.

But outside of Wall Street, efforts to defend the network have created a crisis of trust. Can executives trust IT? Can IT trust users? Can anyone trust the technology that runs their businesses, especially in the cloud? It’s better to focus on what bad actors actually want: the data. By understanding how it flows, creating and enforcing policy to govern that flow, and protecting it in place when it’s not flowing, threats to data can be reduced to nearly zero. Digital trust can be restored.

Representative to be determined — Bombora

Bombora is the leading provider of intent data for B2B marketers. Bombora’s data aligns marketing and sales teams, enabling them to base their actions on the knowledge of which companies are actively researching what products, and the intensity of that consumption. Using this information, marketers can drive more qualified demand through the funnel while sales teams can prioritize accounts and have higher quality conversations. The source of this data is the first co-operative of premium B2B media companies. Members contribute content consumption and behavioral data about their audiences, which is aggregated into over 4,000 intent topics. In turn, they can better understand their audiences, serve advertisers, and monetize their inventories.

(Listen to my interview with Bombora CEO Erik Matlick here.)

Donald Clark — CEO — WildFire

We don’t have a shortage of content, we have a shortage of good learning. WildFire was designed in line with contemporary theory on how we learn and real practices that have been researched and shown to work in practice. The result is a tool that can take any document, PowerPoint deck, or video and turn it instantly into active online learning.

Kelly Bennett — President — B3 Insight

B3 delivers data-driven intelligence that is critical to the bottom line of many organizations that any user can understand and use. B3 has redefined complex data with industry-leading collection approaches and data experts who understand, convert, clean, and enrich data. Through easy-to-use, intuitive technology, B3 enables non-technical and technical business users alike to manage, analyze, and visualize growing datasets from a multitude of disparate data sources. By leveraging the most comprehensive data and relevant information, users can answer questions quickly and confidently. With decreased research and planning costs, and increased research and planning efficiencies, B3 contributes significant cost savings across an organization.

Founded by an energy market analytics company and a recognized leader in natural gas and oil with expertise in power, demand, and other energy segments, B3 continually seeks to innovate and evolve the way that complex data is turned into meaningful information.

Courtney Morris — President and Co-founder — ARTiFACTS

Created by an experienced team of academic publishing, media, software, and financial technology leaders, ARTiFACTS provides a platform that enables all transactions and linkages across all research artifacts, published or pre-published, in any form, not just articles. Through its unique blockchain engine designed specifically for academic and scientific research, it leverages the power of the community while providing the authority, rigor, and validity that community sites and standard archives can’t provide. It is unconstrained while delivering a ledger of record.

Rebecca Agliolo — Co-founder — CaseCrunch Systems

CaseCrunch specializes in predictive analytics, offering fast, affordable prediction systems powered by deep learning. The company builds lasting solutions for banks, insurance companies, law firms, and litigation funders. Its product helps organizations provide a more efficient complaint-handling solution to their customers and also work with law firms to improve litigation strategies based on data-driven analysis of the law.

Tyler Peppel — Founder and CEO — Tickr

Have you ever wondered why you manage your brand, products, and people with static documents like Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint slides, and PDFs while the world of information has moved online and into the cloud? Tickr has built the world’s first Performance Tracking Platform to unify all your data into one simple, cloud-based UI: marketing, enterprise metrics, social, CRM, and finance, all on one screen, in real time. It’s a simple idea that has the potential to change how all businesses are managed. The Tickr platform is deployed across market-leading companies in industries including consumer packaged goods, pharmaceutical, finance, and manufacturing.

(Listen to my interview with the CEO Tyler Peppel here.)

Michael Koeris — Founder and Chief Innovation Officer — Corvium

Corvium is obsessed with making the world a safer place to eat by providing organizations in the food industry with access to real-time factual information regarding the changing risk status of their operations. Its CONTROL workflow solution reduces food safety risk by accelerating the EMP testing lifecycle and eliminating repetitive, error-prone manual tasks that lead to unplanned adverse financial outcomes such as undetected contamination and recalls. CONTROL enables continuous visualization, monitoring, analytics, and up-to-date documentation of food safety testing across multiple production facilities. The INSIGHTS food intelligence solution works hand in hand with CONTROL to aggregate and visualize all relevant internal and external data while continuously monitoring data flows and providing tailor-made and up-to-date analysis of food safety performance across multiple production facilities.