LinkedIn updated at the beginning of this fall the top of the most interesting startups in 2018. As expected, the top is dominated by tech companies. I’ll analyze in brief of few of them.

• Lyft (1^st place – transport). Without the fuss and oscillations experienced by Uber, the company has grown from 20 to 35% of the US car sharing market over the last two years. The company is assessed to be worth $ 15.1 billion, after a recent capitalization of $ 4.3 billion. The hi-tech transport market is clearly expanding, as the LinkedIn top also includes Bird (5^th place, electric scooters) or Aurora Innovation (9^th place – autonomous cars). And on a slightly different market, Flexport (ranking 13), whose mission is the digitalization of the freight transport.
• Coinbase (3^rd place – cryptocurrencies). It is an exchange/digital wallet for cryptocurrencies, which has spectacularly increased up to 20 million users, in spite of the recent devaluation of Bitcoin and other virtual currencies. Coinbase has built its success on reliability and transparency, as they consider themselves to be “something else than a company belonging into the “run-fast-and-break-things” class. The focus is on financial education. Blockchain technology, on which the cryptocurrencies are based, also powers Ripple (ranked 7^th), a cross-border money transfer business currently with over 100 clients of the major banks class, or Robinhood (ranked 6^th), whose ambition is to offer the services of a classic bank at more accessible rates, 
• Noodle.ai (4^th place 4 – artificial intelligence). Delivers artificial intelligence (AI) “as a service”. For instance, it has supplied to the biggest private aviation company in the world, XoJet, a learning algorithm that has improved the flight fares substantially. Also, it has contributed to the energy optimization of a steelworks facility in Arkansas, by predicting the power consumption so that the latter could resell the calculated surplus.
• Rubrik (10^th place – cloud). It is one of the companies with the most rapid growth. For instance, its client base multiplied times four in 2017, which has instated its statute of unicorn, being worth $ 1.3 billion. Rubrik delivers several server solutions and take pride in the ease of configuration (which takes less than 15 minutes) and speed of access. Cloud is included in the top also by the presence of Snowflake Computing (ranking 20^th), which, among other things, facilitates access to Amazon and Microsoft.
• Puls (11^th place – smart devices consulting). It has started as an on-demand repairs service for smartphones, to become a sort of consulting service for the various types of consumer devices, from Smart Home to home appliances. The idea is simple: they send you a specialist to your door in less than one hour. It has over 2,500 such experts in its database. I have selected this company, as it might fall into a category of “facilitators”, which gets connected with the services or others, the same as a part of the financial or cloud applications.

Above, I have tried to group the successful startups to prove that AI, cloud or transports are currently some of the hottest business fields. The offer is rather diverse for each of these fields, because, naturally, without an individualized and successful idea, no startup is a startup.