Discover the Top 10 Startup Scouting Trends in 2024

It’s no secret that startups and scaleups around the world are driving innovation with technology development across all industries. This means it becomes increasingly important for established corporations to know about these solutions and partner with emerging companies. However, you might know from experience that startup scouting is a time-consuming process that does not always deliver the results you expect. Our goal is to help you save time and money – that is why we have asked our team of Innovation Analysts to consolidate their years of startup & scaleup sourcing experience into this comprehensive list. So, let’s get straight into the Top 10 Startup Scouting Trends you need to know in 2024!

2024: Startup Scouting Trends

1. Big Data
2. Artificial Intelligence & Human Expertise
3. Startup Scouting as a Service
4. Trend Intelligence
5. Real-time Startup Monitoring
6. Semantic Search
7. Open Innovation
8. Natural Language Processing (NLP)
9. Contextual Search
10. Automated Deal Flow

1. Leveraging Big Data & Data Enrichment

Imagine you’re fishing – yes, fishing. Hear us out! You use a wide net and catch 80 of 100 total fish in a lake. That’s 80% recall. But you also get 80 rocks in your net. That means 50% precision, half of the net’s contents is junk. You could use a smaller net and target one pocket of the lake where there are lots of fish and no rocks, but you might only get 20 of the fish in order to get 0 rocks. That is 20% recall and 100% precision. (Kudos for this analogy to u/question_23.)

Using Big Data for startup scouting allows you to get up to 100% recall. Combine that with data enrichment and the right filters and you get very high accuracy too! This means that your scouting process instantly becomes more exhaustive, efficient, and reliable because you get to see all results that precisely match your needs.

Another advantage of data-driven startup scouting is high objectivity. Because it doesn’t rely on personal networks, its results are impartial. What you get is a fair and unbiased list of relevant solutions.

2. Combining Artificial Intelligence with Human Expertise

Big Data already gives you an advantage compared to traditional scouting methods. Taking this even further, Artificial Intelligence in the form of a SaaS tool, paired with subject matter experts, truly takes startup and technology scouting to the next level.

Using the best of these worlds, you reduce time and money spent while simultaneously increasing accuracy and accelerating your innovation agenda. This data-driven approach also enables you to take control of the deliverables of your scouting project. A few of the criteria you get to define are:

• Technology-driven: from technology cluster all the way to specific technology
• Firmographic data: company age, location, size, team, business model, …
• Financial criteria: revenue, funding, grants, growth, …
• Company stage, maturity, popularity, and many other criteria

3. Redefining SaaS – Scouting as a Service

Let’s state the obvious – identifying the right startups and scaleups to partner with can take up a lot of time that you probably don’t have. Startup Scouting-as-a-Service gives you access to relevant startups, scaleups, and high-growth companies globally – in an instant.

For example, our SaaS tool provides you with complete control of your startup scouting journey thanks to its intuitive interface, various filters, and data visualization. The Big Data and AI-powered StartUs Insights Discovery Platform covers over 3.7 million startups and scaleups globally, making it the world’s largest resource for data insights on emerging companies. Because it is driven by data and easy to use, the Discovery Platform delivers more relevant results faster.

Read this report: Discover the #1 Startup Scouting Platform

4. Startup Scouting meets Trend Intelligence

The next-gen of startup scouting tools goes beyond and offers another feature that adds value to your business – trend intelligence! In short, combining startup scouting with trend intelligence enables you to:

• Understand & forecast trends
• Know what technologies are up and coming
• Monitor your industry to identify opportunities

While there are not many tools available that incorporate this feature yet, our Discovery Platform is one of them. We created a proprietary Trend Intelligence Graph, which revolves around 140+ mega-trends and 20 000+ emerging trends. This allows you to discover and track trends as well as analyze, compare, and evaluate them.

Trend Intelligence is a powerful add-on because it gives you the information you need to decisively act on current and future trends in your industry and technology verticals.

5. Real-time Startup Monitoring

SaaS-based startup scouting is less expensive compared to desk research or visiting fairs. Both of these methods cannot guarantee results; on the contrary, they are sure to miss many relevant solutions. Moreover, they are incredibly time-consuming, thus will only be carried out periodically. Startup scouting through a SaaS tool allows your corporate innovation team to scout – and monitor! – startups continuously. This is an incredible advantage because startup ecosystems are highly dynamic and known to rapidly develop or adapt to new technologies. Therefore, if you scout continuously, you don’t run the risk of missing out on disruptive innovations.

As automated web scraping technologies become better and faster, startup scouting platforms are able to update data on startups without delay. Through real-time startup monitoring, you receive regular updates on emerging companies that matter to you. Being informed ahead of time when new relevant startups and technologies emerge, or companies you already know shift their focus, allows you to spot market trends before your competition, mitigate threats, and seize growth opportunities.

6. Semantic Search creates Better Results

Now, on to a more technical topic – semantic search understands the meaning and intent of search queries. It goes beyond keyword matching to pair keywords with relevant content. The technique takes into account synonyms and word relationships, thereby delivering more relevant results. What’s more, semantic search results are accurate even if you misspell a keyword or use a lesser-used synonym. In the context of startup scouting, this means that you’re able to identify far more startups compared to traditional search methods, like just relying on contacts.

For instance, the Discovery Platform features a semantic search that traverses a knowledge graph to deliver an exhaustive list of highly relevant startups for your query. It analyzes connections between keywords and their meanings to ensure that you don’t miss out on promising solutions that match your needs.

Read next: Scout the Best Startups with StartUs Insights’ Cutting-Edge Semantic Search Technology

7. Open Innovation: Collaborative Scouting

The open innovation approach shows that working with external partners advances innovation more effectively than siloed innovation. As many companies are now realizing, this is true for the process of startup scouting itself. In collaborative scouting, larger organizations come together to look together for and identify potential solutions. For example, this could be a company and an accelerator combining their expertise to scout startups tackling a particular business challenge. Another approach is for companies to get inputs from their suppliers or vendors before identifying startups that create value for them.

As the benefits of open innovation percolate through industries and companies find smarter ways to scout promising startups, collaborative scouting is a growing trend. It allows you to build your innovation network while spotting more technology trends than before. While working with startups allows you to derisk research and development (R&D), collaborating with other companies to spot and engage these partners benefits the innovation ecosystem as a whole.

8. Leveraging Natural Language Processing (NLP)

The power of data-driven startup scouting platforms lies in their ability to mine firmographic information from the wealth of unstructured and structured data on the Internet. To do so, these platforms leverage NLP algorithms. These algorithms process innovation data over the Internet and make it more accessible to computers. NLP summarizes text, extracts keywords, and identifies links between different texts. In the context of startup scouting, this means the technology understands who the startups are and what they do to generate summarized descriptions for you.

By incorporating NLP advances, startup scouting platforms ensure that you get the most relevant results. Our Discovery Platform, for example, matches the user’s intent with information on startups, in turn, almost eliminating irrelevant results. However, as an innovation manager, you can incorporate NLP in other parts of the startup scouting journey as well. Some use cases include generating better ideas from structured information and automating startup engagement.

9. Getting precise: Contextual Search

Contextual search is complementary to the semantic search that is highlighted in point six above. Instead of focusing on the meaning of the keywords, it focuses on the context they are used in. While semantic search ensures that the results are accurate, contextual search ensures precision. It takes into account other aspects of your search, such as other keywords or filters. For example, when a keyword is used in different contexts in multiple industries, contextual search understands the correct context.

This makes startup scouting platforms even better at eliminating irrelevant results. For example, the Discovery Platform hides or gives a lower rank to results where the keywords aren’t used in the correct context. This means you’re not wasting time sifting through irrelevant results. As both semantic and contextual search technologies continue to improve, startup scouting platforms will also continue towards high accuracy and precision.

10. Automated Deal Flow Generation

One popular use case of startup scouting is deal flow generation. Continuous deal flow includes accurate firmographic data including company description, company age, employee count, industry, technology, social links, meta descriptions & more. While you could get this data manually, it’s incredibly inefficient. Automating deal flow means not only saving a lot of time but also getting relevant solutions handed to you on a regular basis.

One example of a feature that makes sure you receive the results you are looking for is our ‘similar companies’ tool. It lets you discover new companies that are similar to the ones you already know and love. And just like that, it reduces your deal flow generation time from weeks to minutes.

How to effectively Scout Startups in 2024

Data-driven startup scouting tools such as our Discovery Platform provide you with instant access to emerging companies and technologies from around the world. The AI and Big Data-powered SaaS tool, covering over 3.7 million startups and scaleups globally, enables you to scan and monitor the entire innovation ecosystem in an instant. Regardless of what your innovation goals are, it gives you an exhaustive shortlist of relevant solutions that matter to you. This is how data-driven startup scouting reduces time and improves results:

• Identify relevant solutions fast & exhaustively: The Discovery Platform casts a wider net than any other startup scouting platform. No matter how niche your query is, it delivers more startups than anyone else.
• Scope topics & technologies within minutes: Filter results to narrow your search scope effectively
• Find similar companies: Input any number of companies you already know and love to discover new ones
• Add solutions to your knowledge base: Bulk export all discovered solutions

Book a free demo to learn how we use Big Data and Artificial Intelligence to scan the entire global startup ecosystem, making sure you discover all hidden gems.