Download the full tour summary below, that includes Ntegra Innovation teams key findings and takeaways from their US Research Tour from Silicon Valley featuring the latest up and coming start ups emerging from the leading innovation ecosystem in the world.

In May 2015, a party of nineteen senior executives from the UK spent a week in Silicon Valley, California, visiting a selection of IT companies on the Ntegra Greenside 19th Annual Silicon Valley Research Tour.

The purpose of the tour was to learn about the latest developments in the deployment and application of IT and to discover how these are being exploited by major organisations for business advantage. We received presentations from 30 different companies of varying size and maturity, all of which were actively involved in providing products and services to help organisations become more effective in their use of technology. In addition we received presentations from our three host Venture Capital (VC) firms: Intel Capital, Andreesen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital.

Technology companies continue to attract unprecedented levels of investment and more and more are rapidly achieving billion dollar valuations in record time scales. On this years’ tour, we saw two early to market companies that were already valued at over $1billion. For example, Slack who are less than two years old, are valued at $2.8billion and have received funding of $322.8 million in the last twelve months alone.

Disruption remains the norm in Silicon Valley. Tech start ups are now an integral part of the business and technology landscape and ecosystems. Those organisations that are not embracing them will become more and more vulnerable.

In the sections included in the report, we will discuss some of the themes raised on this years tour in more details as well as an update on some of the companies we saw in 2014.