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The top startup accelerators have a history of seeing the future in ideas that sounded silly at the time. After all, who would have foreseen billion dollar businesses based on renting your air mattress to strangers, or shopping for their groceries?

So when prestigious accelerators invest around common themes, it鈥檚 worth taking note of what鈥檚 resonating.

With that in mind, we mined 附近上门 data on new seed investments by top-ranked accelerators, looking for similarities in their vision of where consumer and enterprise tech is headed. The data set looks for companies that raised first-time funding in the past six months from accelerators in North America with a standout record for backing startups that go on to secure much higher valuations.

Here are the startup trends that are capturing the imaginations, and wallets, of top accelerators.

AI Bots For Businesses Are Big

The bots will . Accelerator-backed startups are building a lot of AI-enabled tools to help businesses with customer support, sales, and marketing. There鈥檚 , a bot for testing consumer products and ad campaigns, and , an AI-powered 鈥渟ales development representative鈥� that can identify new leads.

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For customer support, there is , which uses AI to augment and replace live chat customer support agents at ecommerce companies. And if you are an airline and in need of better customer support (which is pretty much every airline), there鈥檚 Techstars-backed , a developer of 鈥渁rtificially intelligent virtual agents.鈥� Those are just a few of the AI-enabled business apps .

The Rise Of The AI-Powered Consumer Digital Assistant

It may sound far-fetched in 2017 to trust your finances to an AI-powered digital assistant with a cutesy name. But accelerators are betting that in a few years, that鈥檚 going to change. One case in point is , a Y Combinator-backed mobile app that functions as personal finance coach. It鈥檚 one of several personal finance apps accelerators are rolling out.

Real Estate Gets More Temporary, Efficient, And On-Demand

Sure, you can still show up in person and sign a long-term lease on a home, office, or shop. But 聽are coming up with both simpler and more temporary ways to secure space. Perhaps part of the impetus is that two of the most famous and valuable private venture-backed companies 鈥� Airbnb and WeWork 鈥� are real estate-related, so it鈥檚 a proven sector for generating a massive valuation.

On the temporary space front, there鈥檚 , which pitches itself as 鈥淲eWork for retail space鈥� and , which finds rentals for students. On the efficiency side, is aiming to make renting easier for residential landlords, while pays landlords directly to rent their apartments. See a fuller list of accelerator-backed real estate startups here.

Taking Smart Transportation To The Next Level

Alongside increased interest in聽,聽ride-hailing, mapping apps, and real-time traffic updates have already done much in the past few years to transform how we get around town. Now, accelerators are hoping to take things to the next level.

聽have launched with an analytics focus, such as , a vehicle routing tool, and , which helps ride-hailing drivers maximize earnings. And for those worried that all these mapping and traffic analytics tools are making for inattentive, screen-gazing motorists, there鈥檚 , which lets users submit videos of distracted drivers.

Pivots Come Next

Interesting as many of these startups seem, it鈥檚 worth noting that hardly any accelerator-backed startup grows up into a big company without at least a few dozen business model pivots along the way. So it鈥檚 entirely possible that technologies initially targeted for one industry will end up deployed in another.

For now, however, we can sit back and enjoy (or fear) the vision of a future chatting with humanoid bots en route to one鈥檚 temporary home or office using the most efficient route that technology can provide.

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