PyCon 2021 Welcomes 8 Early-Stage Companies To Startup Row

2021 marks the tenth year that PyCon has granted booth space to early-stage startups that use Python in new and interesting ways. And what a decade it has been!

Startup Row has given over 100 companies a platform to share what they're working on with the Python community, and the past ten years of Startup Row shows off the technical diversity and depth of the Python ecosystem. Ranging from data science and visualization, to many flavors of back-end tooling, productivity and communication platforms, super-niche software applications, and even a couple of hardware ventures, the flexibility of the Python language and its uses are on full display on Startup Row.

Startup Row at PyCon 2021

Without further ado, here's the Startup Row lineup at PyCon 2021 (in alphabetical order):

• Bit.io is a cloud database company which allows data teams and data enthusiasts to upload, query, and share data repositories internally or with the world.
• Dagster is a data orchestration tool for machine learning, analytics, and ETL workflows featuring a user-friendly interface and data provenance tracking.
• Dropbase is a data tooling and infrastructure company which gives its customers the ability to turn offline data files like CSVs or JSON blobs into a live online database with a REST API.
• Noteable extends the Jupyter notebook ecosystem by creating collaboration, unit testing, data visualization, security, and deployment tooling for data users at enterprise scale.
• Resurface is building an API system of record which turns every API call into an observable transaction which facilitates auditing, performance monitoring, and usage analytics for data and DevOps teams.
• Sourcery is an AI-driven static analysis tool for Python which assists with code refactoring. Sourcery is available as a plugin for PyCharm and VS Code, and can operate on Github repos.
• Toolchain is a distributed build system which uses the open source Pants build system as a client. The company is founded and led by creators and core contributors to Pants.
• YData is a company building a data platform which generates and integrates synthetic datasets that replicate the behavior and statistical components of real data without sharing identifiable information from the user.

These new ventures join a long and illustrious list of alumni companies, many of which have returned to future PyCons as sponsors. Some examples include Docker, Mixpanel, Plotly, Nylas, Anvil, and Blameless, among others. On the other side of the coin, Startup Row companies have been acquired by PyCon sponsors like Amazon, Splunk, and Rackspace. Startup Row companies have collectively raised billions of dollars in venture capital, and several Startup Row alumni companies are themselves valued at over $1 billion. 

Over the years, Startup Row companies have made meaningful contributions to the open source ecosystem which drives Python's growth. There's perhaps no better example of this than Pandas, the popular data science library which was developed by the team at Lambda Foundry (SR '12). Pandas remains one of the most widely-used data analysis software packages in the world. Some of the machine learning frameworks, notebook tools, and other open source projects developed by more recent Startup Row companies will hopefully have similar impact and staying power.

PyCon 2021 may be happening remotely this year, but we're thrilled to bring these companies together on Startup Row.

Ways to help startups succeed

Here's how you can support companies on Startup Row:

• Work for a Startup Row company! Many companies presenting on Startup Row during the conference will also be at the virtual PyCon Jobs Fair on Sunday, May 16th. There's no better place than PyCon to find work that exercises your Python muscles, and there's no better way to make an impact at work than contributing your skills and expertise to an early-stage startup.
• Provide constructive product feedback, and ask questions at their booths. Big established companies are big, in part, because they've already figured a lot of stuff out. By contrast, startup companies are in a continuous, iterative cycle of discovery and product refinement. If there's a better way to do something in an interface, or if there's a missing feature which would make their product valuable to you, bring it up!
• Ask how you can be helpful. Maybe one of the companies on Startup Row seems interesting but they're not hiring for your area of expertise or you don't have feedback to give. That's fine! The startup ecosystem runs on goodwill and investments of time and effort. Maybe you know a great engineer or marketer who can take them to the next level. Maybe you run a meetup or write a blog. Offer that support if you're able to, or ask if there's anything they need help with. Community and connections are what enables great things to get built.