December 8, 2015 - 14:17 AMT
Armenian SoloLearn among best Bay Area startups with under $10m funding

The research company Mattermark has studied young tech companies in Bay Area, in a bid to find and rank the 10 best out of the 582 startups with $10 million funding or less, Silicon Valley Business Journal reports.

In addition to funding, factors taken into consideration included employment growth, increases in social media and website traffic and inbound links to the companies. The momentum of more than half of the top 10 has slowed, according to Mattermark.

"We left out pharma and biotech companies because they typically raise more money at their early stages than tech companies do," Mattermark's Nick Frost said.

Armenian startup SoloLearn is among the top 10 hottest Bay Area startups, with a funding under $10 million. This is an online coding course provider based in Pleasanton and run by co-founder and CEO Davit Kocharyan. It has raised just $100,000 and employs only six people but its momentum score from Mattermark is the highest among this top 10. So it appears to be getting good traction on social media. Its backers include Granatus Ventures.

Among the remaining 10 hot startups are Product Hunt, a go-to for tech nerds to find out about the latest products and software, which get voted up or down by users; LeadGenius, a cloud-based sales acceleration software provider; CloudAcademy, a 500 Startups company that emerged this past spring with a platform to learn cloud computing and test skills, to name a few.