“The Startup Universe” is an interactive visualization from visual content marketplace Visual.ly, information design agency Accurat, and graphic designer Ben Willers. In sectors from education to biotech to entertainment to security, it tracks startups, venture capitalists and founders, each category of which has its own style of visualization.
For example, a user can select Twitter from the “Consumer Web” category and see that it has received eight rounds of venture funding totalling $1.2 billion, with three founders and a long list of funders. Clicking on one of the funders, Ron Conway, brings up the famous Silicon Valley venture capitalist’s investments, which are displayed in a time series that shows the amount of each investment. Clicking on Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey brings up the entrepreneur’s work with Twitter and Square, the mobile payments company he co-founded in 2009.
The data, from free technology database Crunchbase, goes back to 1990, and spans 11,000 investors, 25,000 startups and 30,000 founders. The visualization was shortlisted this week for the 2013 Information is Beautiful awards in the category of interactive visualization.
