I’ve got three “Hot Zombies” for you this week.
As I noted last week, venture capitalists are throwing billions of dollars into a tiny handful of elite AI and defense giants. But in doing so, they’re ignoring an opportunity in their own backyard: "Hot-Zombie Startups."
These are high-quality businesses with real revenue and sharp teams that raised cash during the 2021 tech boom. But today, their runway is running out.
In a previous funding environment, they’d have snagged another round of venture capital. But today, with VCs focused elsewhere, they’re turning to a different source of funding: investors like you.
For investors who are willing to act, this is creating a potential goldmine.
The Shift: From Institutions to the Crowd
For years, ordinary pre-IPO investors had to sort through ideas that were pre-revenue or even pre-product. For the most part, you were taking a gamble on a founder with a pitch deck and a dream.
Not anymore. With VCs today focusing on a tiny set of deals, now you have a shot at funding startups that are far more mature.
Professional due-diligence has already been done. Customer bases have been built. Products are being sold and revenues are coming in the door.
Let me show you what I mean…
Three “Hot Zombies”
Here are three examples of high-caliber startups currently raising capital from investors like you:
- Future Cardia: A med-tech pioneer that designs AI-powered implantable cardiac monitors to continuously track heart health from home.
Future Cardia was incubated by top medical networks like Johnson & Johnson's JLABS and Stanford StartX. It already has 39 devices successfully implanted with over 60,000 hours of clinical data, and is moving quickly toward its FDA submission. Medical hardware requires patient capital that traditional software-obsessed VCs are ignoring right now, letting regular investors buy into an institutional-grade healthcare moat.
- Koios Medical: An FDA-cleared healthcare software system utilizing machine learning and artificial intelligence to assist radiologists in diagnosing thyroid and breast cancers with superhuman accuracy.
Koios has already built an immense clinical moat, securing over $5.5 million in total contract value with a 250% growth rate. Its system is trusted and deployed across 1,000+ top-tier hospitals worldwide including Cleveland Clinic, Mass General, and Sloan Kettering. With traditional tech VCs backing away from healthcare software metrics to chase chatbots, everyday investors can back an established, highly-integrated medical-market leader.
- RePurpose Energy: An innovative clean-energy company that upcycles used electric vehicle (EV) batteries into large-scale, low-cost solar energy storage systems for commercial buildings.
Instead of funding expensive battery R&D from scratch, RePurpose buys cheap, secondary EV batteries that still hold 70%-80% of their original capacity. This gives it an immediate pricing advantage in the exploding multi-billion-dollar commercial energy-storage sector.
As always, you need to do substantial research before making an investment decision. (Or let us do the research for you!)
But if you’re looking to invest in high-potential startups, these three could be a great place to start your search.
Your Playbook
VCs are so blinded by AI mega-rounds right now that they’re ignoring revenue-generating businesses that need capital to scale into big winners.
This is exactly how ordinary investors can win…
Instead of buying into public-market hype where valuations are bloated, we can hunt for venture-backed "hot zombies" and get in at attractive prices.
Keep reading Crowdability so you can hear about the highest-potential deals — before the rest of the market wakes up.
Happy investing
Please note: Crowdability has no relationship with any of the startups we write about. We’re an independent provider of education and research on startups and alternative investment.
