Best Tech Startups In California To Watch In 2021

Indranil Mukherjee
8 min readJul 27, 2021

In 2021, we’ve chosen the top 10 tech startups in California to keep an eye on. While conducting our research, we focused on the following aspects, however, this is not an entire list:

  1. Potential for profit
  2. Gains in employment
  3. The allure of exceptional talent.
  4. Engagement of the leadership team
  5. Environment of competition
  6. Interest in a job
  7. Traction for a brand or product

Furthermore, all businesses must be independent (not bought), privately owned, and employ 50 or more people. These businesses must be at least ten years old and based in California.

We’ve included a quick overview of the company in this post, including its founding history, headcount, top capabilities, and so on. Aside from that, we’ve included a URL where readers can apply for open positions at these tech startups in California directly.

So, here it goes our list of best Tech Startups in California:

Vladimir Tenev and Baiju Bhatt established Robinhood in 2013. The technology company’s objective is to “give everyone, not just the wealthy, access to the financial markets.” This mission gave it its name. Robinhood is valued at about $20 billion as of 2021. It has about 18 million users all across the world.

In 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020, Robinhood was recognized as a LinkedIn Top Startup. to keep up with its expansion Robinhood is on a hiring binge right now. Hundreds of registered financial service representatives are being brought in from places like Southlake, Texas. That is why they are one of the best tech startups in California. If you want to work for them, then good for you. Because they are also hiring. Check out Open Positions here: https://robinhood.com/us/en/careers/

Tony Xu, Stanley Tang, Andy Fang, and Evan Moore, all Stanford University students, established Doordash in 2013. Originally known as PaloAltoDelivery.com, Doordash was founded in June 2013 after receiving $120,000 in startup funding from Y Combinator in exchange for a 7% interest. They topped Uber Eats to take second place in overall food delivery sales in the United States in December 2018. It had surpassed GrubHub in total sales by early 2019.

It went public on the NYSE in 2021 with a $72 billion value. While DoorDash and other food-delivery tech companies are still fighting with California regulators over whether its “dashers” should be categorized as employees, Its goals, on the other hand, have only expanded. Its pharmacy and grocery delivery services have been added to the mix. It has doubled its personnel base for the second time in two years in terms of hiring. Doordash has changed its hiring procedure to emphasize “technical values” rather than “cultural fit.”

If you’re interested in working at one of the best tech startups in California, visit their career page at https://careers.doordash.com/.

SoFi, or Social Finance, is an online personal finance company based in the United States. Through their mobile app and PC interfaces, they offer a variety of financial products such as student loan refinancing, mortgages, personal loans, credit cards, investing, and banking.

SoFi was formed in 2011 by four Stanford Graduate School of Business students. The fundamental goal of the founders, Mike Cagney, Dan Macklin, James Finnigan, and Ian Brady, was to give more inexpensive solutions for people taking on debt to pay for their education. This mission quite successfully made them one of the best tech startups in California.

Sofi is continuously looking for forward-thinking workers with a growth attitude, which means they never want to stop learning. SoFi also offers paid internships in fields like product management, data science, and marketing. It’s a fantastic technology company for interns to learn and grow.

If you’re interested in working for them, you can always visit their website to see what positions are available at https://www.sofi.com/careers/

Instacart is primarily an online grocery delivery and pick-up service that allows users to order groceries from the comfort of their own homes, through mobile apps, or on a computer. This company was formed in 2012 by Apoorva Mehta. Its current revenue is around $1.5 billion.

“As Instacart expands, and we continue to understand what provides the best experience for our consumers, we are continually looking for ways to improve our service,”

Mehta said in an interview about one of the best tech startups in California, Instacart. Their main goal is to build a society where everyone may eat the foods they enjoy and spend quality time with their families.

They’re on the lookout for talented individuals to join their teams. People who thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic atmosphere and who can contribute fresh skills and ideas to Instacart’s diverse workforce. If you believe you possess these abilities, visit https://instacart.careers/current-openings/ to apply for a position.

Today, Samsara is a leader in the Industrial IoT (Internet of Things) industry. Their main goal is to improve the safety and efficiency of internet-connected sensor systems used by truck and other vehicle fleets. Samsara is now used by over 20,000 businesses all over the world to reduce fuel consumption, prevent accidents, automate manual operations, and increase product quality.

They are also recognized for employing non-male staff, with non-male employees accounting for approximately 30% of all employees in the United States. Samsara was founded by Sanjit Biswas and John Bicket. They’re searching for people that are passionate about using IoT to improve the efficiency, security, and long-term viability of our global economy. If you think you got the right skills to work on one of the best tech startups in California, you can apply for the open position here: https://www.samsara.com/company/careers/roles

Now coming to our last 5 Top Tech Startups in California

Databricks is an enterprise software company formed by Apache Spark’s founders. It arose from the University of California, Berkeley’s AMPLab project, which was engaged in the development of Apache Spark, an open-source distributed computing platform based on Scala. Databricks, which is based on a modern cloud Lakehouse architecture, combines the best of data warehouses and data lakes to provide an open and unified platform for data and AI.

More than 5,000 organizations across the world use Databricks to provide massive-scale data engineering, collaborative data science, full-lifecycle machine learning, and business analytics, including Shell, Comcast, CVS Health, HSBC, T-Mobile, and Regeneron. Microsoft, Amazon, Tableau, Informatica, Cap Gemini, and Booz Allen Hamilton are among the company’s many global partners. If you are wondering how did they become one of the top tech startups in California it’s because of their founders. The founders of popular open-source projects such as Apache Spark, Delta Lake, MLflow, and Koalas established Databricks.

Databricks assists businesses in preparing all of their data for analytics, empowering data science and data-driven choices across the enterprise, and quickly adopting machine learning to stay ahead of the competition. Databricks help organizations innovate faster and tackle challenges like treating chronic disease through faster drug discovery, improving energy efficiency, and protecting financial markets by giving data teams the ability to process massive amounts of data in the Cloud and power AI with that data.

If you’re interested in working with this technology company to establish a career, go to https://databricks.com/company/careers.

Chime is a California-based financial startup that offers fee-free mobile banking services through Bancorp Bank or Central National Bank. Chris Britt and Ryan King created it in 2013. They don’t have any physical branches and don’t charge a monthly or overdraft fee, which is unusual.

Chime offers a variety of fee-free banking options, including no-minimum-balance checking accounts, automated savings, and early salary access. They launched Spotme, a fee-free overdraft solution that allows clients to withdraw up to $100 of their overdraft limit, in September 2019. Customers will be unable to access services after they hit the limit, but they will not be charged any overdraft fees.

They offer no-cost bank account opening and no-cost debit cards. Chime’s bank account opening process takes about 5 minutes. That makes it one of the best tech startups in California.

Their DNA is opposed to that of Big Banks, which profit from overdrafts and credit card debt. Chime has no costs and sends consumers their paychecks two days early. If you want to work for one of the coolest tech startups in California, go to https://www.chime.com/job-openings/ and apply for open opportunities.

Nuro is a robotics company based in the United States that combines robotics with artificial intelligence. It was founded by Zhu and Ferguson, the head software engineer and machine learning engineer of Google’s Waymo self-driving car project. Nuro was formed in September 2016 to accelerate the benefits of robotics in everyday life.

Nuro is well-known for creating self-driving delivery vehicles, and they were the first to receive an autonomous exception from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The R2 is Nuro’s second-generation self-driving vehicle, which has no steering wheel, side view mirrors, or pedals. This made them one of the awesome tech startups in California.

According to co-founder Jiajun Zhu, the company, which built a self-driving car pod for local delivery of everything from groceries to restaurant meals (no human required), demand for its delivery services has increased by 3x since the pandemic began. If you’re interested in working with them, go visit https://www.nuro.ai/careers and look at their job positions.

Figure is utilizing blockchain technology to disrupt the trillion-dollar financial services business. It was launched in 2018 by serial technology entrepreneur Mike Cagney, who also founded SoFi and grew it into a multibillion-dollar firm while serving as its CEO.

Figure is a financial technology firm that uses blockchain, artificial intelligence, and analytics to provide new home equity release solutions and other products that assist our consumers better their financial lives. They’re developing a blockchain technology that will radically change the way financial products are created and traded.

Proverance was first introduced by the firm as a private blockchain for financial organizations. The corporation resumed the product in mid-May 2021, making it a public open-source blockchain-based on Cosmos technology. If you wanna work for these tech startups in California check them out: https://figure.com/careers.

AppLovin is a major marketing platform that offers mobile app developers a comprehensive collection of tools to help them build their businesses. Adam Foroughi, John Krystynak, and Andrew Karam established AppLovin in 2012. AppLovin became a public company on April 15, 2021, with the ticker APP. AppLovin began trading at $70 per share, representing a total market capitalization of $24 billion.

Their goal is to make the mobile app EcoSystem a better place. AppLovin has played a key role in defining many of the world’s most popular mobile apps and game studios since its inception in 2012. AppLovin is a Glassdoor Top CEO employee’s choice award winner, a Certified Great Place to Work, and one of Inc.’s Best Workplaces. AppLovin was named one of the Bay Area’s Best Places to Work in 2019, 2020, and 2021 by the San Francisco Business Times and Silicon Valley Business Journal, as well as receiving the Workplace Wellness Award in 2019, which honors companies who are leaders in increasing employee well-being.

You can apply for the Open Positions in these top tech startups in California if you enjoy playing games and have game development experience: https://www.applovin.com/jobs/

While this list is not exhaustive, startup companies based in Los Angeles like ChowNow, Service Titan, Zwift, Dave, AlgoPay also deserve a shoutout.

We hope that you liked our content on the Top 10 Tech Startups in California. Thanks for your time.

If you are from India, check out this awesome content: https://awkwardgen.com/top-startups-of-india/

If you are interested to acquire skills to get a job in IT Sector check my previous blog here: https://awkwardgen.com/it-industry-for-beginners/

Originally published at https://awkwardgen.com on July 27, 2021.

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Indranil Mukherjee

Hey there, I am an IT professional, posting in Medium to make your life a bit easier.