5 new startup ideas that could emerge this year

Matt Ober is a general partner at Social Leverage. Matt was most recently the chief data scientist at Third Point, where he built the data analytics and technology platform used to enhance the firm’s investment capabilities in equity, structured credit, venture capital and cryptocurrency.

As we go into 2025, I have a bunch of startup ideas on my mind. Some of them are built on concepts I’ve discussed over the past year, including web scraping technology, data-as-a-service and the future of expert networks. I am also thinking about the relationship between gambling and trading exchanges: Could one superapp combine both of these concepts? 

You’ll find below a few ideas that I’ve been considering, in no particular order. I’d love to hear from you on what startup ideas could show promise this year. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any feedback or ideas to share.

Crypto meets web scraping: A crypto token for web scraping. Users would pay web scrapers via tokens. The more consumption and demand, the more tokens you accumulate. I think we will see this evolve in some fashion this year. I have seen crypto tokens for leveraging residential IP addresses. This is a similar idea.

Give to get private markets data: We need a Pitchbook and Crunchbase competitor. Give to get is where VCs give their deals, term sheets, and data and in return, get access. This would include funding round details, valuations, debt versus equity, etc. Allow for benchmarks and a whole lot more. It’s difficult to build, but like many successful data-as-a-service companies, the give to get model works really well. Markit has achieved this with many datasets. Data explorers did this with daily short interest. The playbook to execute this has been written before.

Demand-based data exchanges: Companies like CarbonArc are offering this. We could see this go mainstream and become a way for data vendors to monetize further and allow consumers to consume data when they need it. Pay per gigabyte or similar kinds of consumption models might work here.

Gambling and trading exchanges combined: Think of how this might play out: The ability to place a leveraged $TSLA trade while also doing a three-game NFL parlay betting on the 49ers and Patriots to win, while Baker Mayfield throws for over 400 yards. Gambling and trading combined in one app is what the younger generation wants. Maybe $HOOD gives it to us, or otherwise someone else will!

Decentralized expert networks: Expert networks were originally disrupted by the Tegus model. 

There is an opportunity to remove the middleman, give more of the cash to the experts and make it easier for end clients to find experts. Clients need to be able to connect directly with experts while minimizing the friction in the middle. We need to decentralize this, so experts can take calls, answer questions, record answers and get paid every time someone taps their knowledge. Think of a royalty every time someone taps your knowledge — even if that knowledge has been recorded in an audio clip, transcript or is provided in a summary through an AI Agent.

I share lots of ideas in private conversations and meetings throughout the year, but I am going to put in the effort to share a lot of these ideas in the future. I’m looking forward to seeing people execute on these ideas or meet people already working on them.