Earlier this year, Dave Fontenot founded the largest undergraduate hackathon in the US.
MHacks brings together more than 1,000 students from universities around the world for three days of hacking and is sponsored by the likes of Google, Facebook, Andreessen Horowitz, Apple, Twilio, and Twitter.
Recently, Fontenot asked his following on Facebook for the hottest startups in Silicon Valley, and his question recieved an outpouring of interesting answers.
Firebase lets you build apps fast without managing servers.
Name: Firebase
Date founded: Septemeber 2011
Company size: 11 employees
Financing: This year, Firebase raised $5.6 million from Union Square Ventures and Flybridge Capital Partners, bringing its funding total to $7 million
Why we like it: Called the Dropbox of apps, Firebase dramatically simplifies app development (and its founders theorize that it could eventually serve about 95 percent of the applications on the web). Plus, the company boasts some pretty impressive customers, including CBS, BitTorrent, twitch, and Code Academy.
The founders of Nextdoor believes that good things happen when neighborhoods start getting connected.
Name: Nextdoor
Date founded: 2010
Company size: 60 employees
Financing: In October, Nextdoor recieved $60 million in funding from the likes of Greylock Partners, Benchmark, and Kleiner Perkins, bringing the company to a total of $100 million raise.
Why we like it: Nextdoor hopes to make neighborhoods stronger and safer and has over 22,000 using it around the country so far.
But the words of David Sze, an early investor in Facebook, Pandora, and LinkedIn, who wrote Nextdoor a $15 million dollar check on behalf of Greylock Partners, might be the best sign: "It has all the hallmarks of being the next great massively valued social network. I see every social network that comes out. I’ve sorted through all of them and passed on most of them."
Leap Motion is a futuristic, touch-free 3D motion-control and motion-sensing technology.
Name: Leap Motion
Date founded: October 2010
Company size: 80 employees
Financing: Earlier this year, Leap Motion raised $30 million from Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and Highland Capital Partners, bringing its total funding to $44.1 million.
Why we like it: The first computer to use Leap Motion technology will launch this fall and we're pretty excited to see all the cool things people will invent with Leap.
There is so much potential for this kind of gesture technology.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider