By harnessing solar power and the water vapor in the atmosphere, Cody Friesen of Source Global hopes to turn drinking water into an unlimited resource for the entire planet.

Startup accelerator MassChallenge Mexico takes a distinctive, equity-free approach to helping new ventures get off the ground. Camila Lecaros talks about the keys to its success and the trends shaping the growing entrepreneurial ecosystem across Latin America.

As one of the leading Black VCs, Base10 cofounder Ade Ajao has a unique perspective that could help lead to more opportunities for minority and other underrepresented founders.

The era of ever-rising valuations and near-limitless funding may be over, but venture investors like Gautam Nadella remain optimistic about the long-term potential of digital transformation and innovation.

Why is it so hard for successful scale-ups to maintain their rapid pace of growth? New McKinsey research identifies principles to help guide founders and leaders through the critical trade-offs and decisions that mark this pivotal period in their development.

With VC funding flowing less freely than it recently did, founders need to do an even better job selling their start-up vision to prospective investors. Here are some keys to achieving investor pitch excellence.

Despite being the world’s fourth most populous country, Indonesia has traditionally had a very small number of retail investors. Fintech unicorn Ajaib is out to change that, and so far its bet appears to be paying off.

With a family background in construction, Versatile co-founder Meirav Oren is bringing the power of AI to the job site.

It’s no secret that plant-based foods and alternative meats have been soaring in popularity in recent years. On today’s McKinsey on Startups podcast, we learn more about this dynamic entrepreneurial sector in a guest episode from The Venture, the podcast on business building from Leap by McKinsey. Earlier this year, McKinsey’s Andrew Roth spoke to Eat Just CEO and cofounder Josh Tetrick. Founded in 2011, Eat Just has been a pioneer in the sector, producing eggs using mung beans and cultivated...

Mike Packer of QED Investors talks about the VC firm’s data-driven approach to fintech investing, the growing opportunities in Latin America and other emerging markets, the state of embedded finance, and what it means to fight the tyranny of .8 to the powe

Across Latin America, millions of micro-merchants still use pen and paper to track their business. Treinta thinks its super app can bring them into the digital age.

On this episode of McKinsey on Start-ups, we talk to David Berry, the founder and CEO of Valo Health, a human data-driven startup hoping to fundamentally alter the drug discovery and development process. Berry, a serial entrepreneur who has founded more than 30 companies (five of which are publicly traded), believes the industry’s longtime approach to generating new drugs is too costly, slow, and ineffective to keep pace in the battle against disease. Valo is one of scores of AI and machine...

Since the pandemic began, educational technology (or edtech) and remote schooling have gained traction. Growing numbers of students and adults were initially forced to rely on virtual classes and teaching, and since then many have chosen to stick with this relatively new method of learning. In this back-to-school guest episode from the McKinsey Israel on High Tech podcast, senior partner Andrew Goodman and Aviel Lazar of edtech company Chegg discuss the evolving edtech market and what lessons...

Chris Herd is the co-founder and CEO of Firstbase, a remote-work infrastructure provider that helps both new ventures and large established companies onboard and serve their growing ranks of employees no longer venturing into the office. Chris and cofounder and CTO Trey Bastian actually launched Firstbase a year before the pandemic fueled the rise of remote work; as they were attempting to get their fintech startup off the ground, they learned firsthand how challenging it can be to get new...

Itamar Zur is the cofounder and CEO of Veho, a next-generation logistics startup that is out to reinvent the delivery experience for e-commerce brands and their customers. In just two years, Veho’s delivery and return logistics platform has grown to 900 employees and is on track to be operating in 50 US markets by the end of year. Earlier this year, only a few months after its Series A raise of $125 million, Veho raised another $170 million, bringing its valuation to around $1.5 billion. By...

Ilan Gur is the founder and CEO of Activate, an innovative non-profit organization that offers two-year entrepreneurial fellowships to scientists to try to bridge the gap in the US innovation ecosystem between the research lab and the startup world. Activate offers a wide range of resources, knowledge and networks to its fellows so they can begin to turn their cutting-edge ideas and technologies into real-world practical solutions, and businesses. The fellows are primarily focused on climate...

In two recent McKinsey on Start-ups special guest episodes, we examined the emerging contours of the metaverse. Today we are pleased to feature the third and concluding episode in the special three-part series from At the Edge, the new podcast from McKinsey’s Technology Council. McKinsey senior expert Richard Ward talks to Mina Alaghband about a number of near-term metaverse use cases in the industrial, consumer goods and retail sectors, as well as even more innovative applications for...

Once primarily focused on execution and on-time delivery, product manager roles have been heavily transformed. They are now expected to serve as a mini-CEO, acting as the glue that binds the many functions that touch a product, from engineering, design, and customer success, to sales, marketing, operations, and finance. And amid growing societal concerns about responsible stewardship, product managers are having to incorporate privacy, sustainability, and inclusion into their already complex...

Back in April, McKinsey on Start-ups featured a special guest episode exploring the meaning and potential impact of the metaverse with tech futurist and advisor Cathy Hackl. The episode was the first in a three-part series from At the Edge, the new podcast from McKinsey’s Technology Council. Today, we are pleased to feature the second episode, with noted metaverse investor and author Matthew Ball. In his discussion with McKinsey’s Mina Alaghband, Ball offers his perspective on the dynamics of...

Adrien Nussenbaum, cofounder and co-CEO of Mirakl, joins McKinsey executive editor Daniel Eisenberg on this episode. Mirakl, the leading SaaS platform provider in the rapidly growing enterprise marketplace sector, was started in France about a decade ago by Nussenbaum and cofounder and CEO Philippe Corrot, who had sold their previous start-up, a digital gaming marketplace, to French retailer Fnac. The company helps both B2C and B2B companies set up their own online marketplaces, where they...

Apps that aim to provide on-demand emotional, mental or spiritual support have soared in popularity in the last few years, some explicitly religious, others tied to meditation, psychotherapy or mindfulness. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, given the stressful world we live in, especially more than two years into the pandemic, when many people haven’t been able to regularly seek out their normal refuges in person. One startup helping fill this need is Glorify, a freemium, subscription...

For all the often-breathless talk in the tech sector these days about the metaverse, no one quite agrees on how to precisely define it. But there seems to be a growing consensus that whatever it is exactly – virtual and augmented reality on steroids, the convergence of our physical and digital identities -- it is poised to become a major factor in both our personal and professional lives. In this episode of McKinsey on Start-ups, we begin to explore the metaverse with a guest episode from At...

Based on demographics alone, Pakistan is a country whose start-up ecosystem should have been thriving for quite a while. It has, for starters, the fifth largest population in the world, approaching 230 million. And that population is both overwhelmingly young, with a median age of 22, and bi-lingual, with the fourth largest number of English speakers in the world. Add to that one of the fastest-growing middle classes, more than 100 million mobile broadband subscribers, and hundreds of...

Deidre Paknad, co-founder and CEO of Workboard, is the guest on this episode of the podcast. Workboard is a leading platform provider in the fast-growing space of OKR software, a sub-category of enterprise planning software that helps customers manage and track their progress on Objectives and Key Results, the increasingly ubiquitous corporate planning method invented by Intel and popularized by Google. Paknad is a seasoned Silicon Valley entrepreneur whose prior start-up had been acquired in...