Just before Black and Mobile revealed its nationwide “comeback tour,” the Technical.ly newsroom got a tip that something was happening at the food delivery platform focused on Black-owned restaurants. 

The tip didn’t come in like others we get, like a message from the founder or a text from an excited staffer. It didn’t come from a person at all. Instead, one of our editors (shoutout Katie Malone) spotted that the recently quiet startup founded by brothers in Philadelphia was ranking unexpectedly high in a prototype of our newest data tool. She reached out, and sure enough, the founders were about to launch a 60-city tour en route to a new $1 million revenue target, which we shared last month.

Today we’ve launched the first version of that prototype, the Technical.ly RealLIST Startup Tracker, a dashboard of private businesses we’ve followed since their launch.

We already know the tool is valuable because, with the right context, data tells stories. Now we want to put it in your hands. 

It’s not only about data, because first you have to get on the list, which is what informs the companies on this new tracker. Back in 2017, Technically published our first RealLIST Startups: curated cohorts of companies three years or younger that our newsroom bet had the best chance of growth. With limited financial information and industry expertise, we had a theory: vibes mattered. 

Or rather, that a level of local backing could signal something at least as telling as any other insight into highly speculative early-stage startups. Like it or not, at the earliest stages, momentum matters. 

Our newsroom talks to lots of experts, and has a degree of training in macroeconomic trends, but in truth, the RealLIST Startups is our best summary of what we think a given startup ecosystem can expect to be its most representative cohort of disruptive companies — ones that grow big enough to change their industries for the better. Technical.ly has covered early-stage startups for coming on 20 years, so we are more aware than most of their volatility — the obvious bets that go nowhere, the stalled-out firms that suddenly find an opening. 

So, with the humility of any serious early-stage investor, our newsroom takes in what information we can, with a heavy reliance on the founding team, to assemble each year a pick of startups we’ll follow most closely. Less a trivial vanity project, getting the RealLIST nod matters, so each company included in the tracker has already overcome meaningful hurdles. 

Today’s first version of our RealLIST Startups tracker uses a proprietary score to rank a cross-section of companies that made it on the list, based on a weighted formula involving:

  • Pitchbook’s Exit Predictor score 
  • Total outside funding as tracked by Crunchbase and Technically reporting 
  • Patents held with the US Patent & Trademark Office
  • Longevity of operations
  • Visibility score based on industry-indexed Google search
  • Home ecosystem strength, via the Technical.ly Innovation Index

What does this tell you? Today, it essentially signals a prediction on the imperfect outcome of exit size – the final valuation at time of IPO or acquisition by another firm. By no means is this the end-all, but it does allow us to compare across markets. The top of the list includes several unicorns, spanning industries. Anyone on the list has done something serious, and already many companies have been acquired and others have closed – as you’d expect from any startup investment fund. 

As we expand to new geographies, new generations of startups will be added to this list. We name new RealLIST Startups in Q1 of each year, so look for a tracker update early next year. To ecosystem builders and economic development leaders, bring Technical.ly to your ecosystem so we can do this work for your entrepreneurs, too. In noisy startup circles, we intend to bring more rigor and context.

In 2027, we’ll inaugurate a decade of RealLISTs, which we intend to use as a chance to more rigorously stack the performance of our startup picks against public markets and other venture capital funds. This tracker will help. 

Already, though, a scan of that first sweep of companies we included tells a compelling story: In Brooklyn, we spotted now-unicorn Consensus; all of DC’s top three are still-growing; Stitch was among Philly’s acquisitions and Gopuff was already ascendant; and Baltimore might have the most acquisitions of them all. Delaware may have underperformed, and all markets include firms that didn’t find a sufficient market niche.  

So far, though, RealLIST Fund 1 looks strong, with more stories to follow.