1. Startup Categorization and Similarity
Data and prizes courtesy of

2. Algorithmic Venture Capital
Rocketship VC makes Venture Capital investments based on data and algorithms
Team from Stanford, Amazon, NASA

3. Startup Categorization
As a data-driven VC, Rocketship identifies about 1M new companies every month!
A key step is to understand the nature of the company’s business
Problem: Classify these startups into a set of 74 categories

4. Examples Company_Name Company_Domain Description Category Lendable
lendable.co.uk
Provider of peer-to-peer lending platform. The company provides lending platform that makes borrowing money easy unlike banks, who hand out loans from piles of cash they look after on behalf of savers.
Alternative Lending
OMVeterinary
omveterinary.com
Provider and developer of regenerative medicine techniques. The company provides joint preservation and wound care treatment.
Biotech & Pharmaceuticals

5. Data Available for Categorization
Manually Curated Set: 5000 Companies with names, domains, descriptions and categories
Full data set: 500k companies with names, domains and descriptions
Rocketship will create a test set from the full set of companies to help with evaluation

6. Categorization Baseline
Performance of our current (simple) algorithm:
Category prediction accuracy: 60%
Top 3 accuracy: 78%

7. Startup Similarity
Given two companies, how similar are they in terms of their customer value proposition?
Direct Competitors (high similarity)
Indirect Competitors (medium similarity)
Unrelated (no similarity)
Use case: given a target company, find the K most similar companies
Ignore geography

8. Example Name Domain Description Competitor Level Zillow Zillow.com
Zillow is an online real estate marketplace for finding and sharing information about homes, real estate, and mortgages.
Target company
Redfin
Redfin.com
Redfin provides real estate search and brokerage services through a combination of real estate web platforms and access to live agents.
Direct Competitor
Openlistings
Openlistings.com
Open Listings helps anyone buy a home without an individual real estate agent. Buyers use their self-service platform to manage the process online
Indirect Competitor
Moovo
Moovo.com
Movvo is a Behavioural Analytics and Location Based Marketing Company, with a focus on retail and Retail Real Estates
Irrelevant

9. Training and Test Data Company data
500k companies with names, domains and descriptions
77k pairs of companies with some level of similarity
E.g., from Crunchbase
Manually Rated Set
5000 company pairs with name, domain and descriptions, rated as Direct Competitors, Indirect Competitors or Irrelevant

10. For more info on the dataset
me! Anand Rajaraman