By: Ben Freeberg
Operating since 2011, Flashpoint is taking a different approach to the accelerator process, and so far, the vision of founder Dr. Merrick Furst has come to fruition. Total fundraising for the first six batches of companies is over $300 million, and the valuation of these companies is approximately $1 billion.
So, how is this 8,500 square foot studio in Atlanta, Georgia churning out startups which are getting attention at a national scale?
Flashpoint’s greatest differentiator is in reducing failure to find authentic demand. Authentic demand is what the interest in your product or service feels like when your customers can’t not buy what you seem capable of delivering. Anyone can confirm their company’s hypothesis and vision by asking the right questions to the right people, but trying to disconfirm your hypothesis is much more difficult. Flashpoint provides tools to entrepreneurs that help them make products and services that mean something to people and that customers need to incorporate into their lives.
Dr. Furst believes that the most important thing an angel investor must assess when selecting a company to invest in is the founding team. We believe the same goes for startup accelerators. Dr. Furst invests in companies where the founder has a clear picture in her head of what has to be accomplished to achieve success. This is why Flashpoint is so exciting and different. The founders have a vision for their companies, and that vision has proved to be quite a powerful differentiator.
Let’s take a closer look at the product of Flashpoint’s vision.
Pindrop, a startup that combats phone fraud by analyzing and assigning risk to phone calls, recently raised a $75 million Series C round led by Google Capital. Andreessen Horowitz and Institutional Venture Partners came back to the table in this round, bringing total funding to date up to $122 million.
Voice is becoming a strong area of focus for all of today’s tech giants; take a look at Microsoft’s Cortana, Amazon’s Alexa and Facebook’s M. By creating an audio fingerprint, Pindrop is able to attack an ever-increasing issue in a tech-enabled, competitively differentiated way. The Company plans to focus on growing its U.S. reach, with near-term plans to expand to the U.K. Phone fraud rates in the U.K. exceed those in the U.S. by about fourfold, due to the U.K. having introduced EMV chips a long time ago, which makes stealing data more difficult and phone fraud more attractive.
Pindrop is leading the charge on the $20 billion market opportunity present in the voice anti-fraud space, which is just one small example of how Flashpoint’s companies are creating and sustaining authentic demand on both a national and international scale.
Register here to reserve your spot at Flashpoint’s NYC Demo Day on May 3rd. Starting at 10:00AM, you will get to meet the new batch of companies in the program and hear from Dr. Merrick Furst, who will discuss authentic demand and applying the science of behavioral economics to startups.