According to PG, LISP is the silver bullet programming language that unfortunately nobody uses. I was just wondering if there are any companies out there following his advice and using LISP to build a startup today.
While Franz Inc. wouldn't be considered a start-up we are very active in the "New" Graph Database, NoSQL movement. Our product AllegroGraph is written in our Lisp and we have a large number of users, some using the DB in conjunction with Lisp.<p><a href="http://www.franz.com/agraph/cresources/white_papers/" rel="nofollow">http://www.franz.com/agraph/cresources/white_papers/</a>
<a href="http://www.franz.com/agraph/success/" rel="nofollow">http://www.franz.com/agraph/success/</a><p>We also have several new use cases for Lisp and we have been trying to update these as we are permitted.<p><a href="http://www.franz.com/success/" rel="nofollow">http://www.franz.com/success/</a><p>I would also point out the Dr. Kalet has recently release a second edition of his Bio Informatics book the end of October.<p><a href="http://www.franz.com/success/customer_apps/bioinformatics/book_Ira-Kalet.lhtml" rel="nofollow">http://www.franz.com/success/customer_apps/bioinformatics/bo...</a>
Do you consider Clojure a Lisp (it certainly is), then there's for example prismatic: <a href="http://getprismatic.com/" rel="nofollow">http://getprismatic.com/</a>
There are many companies that use various lisp dialects. Not many would be described as startups, but a bunch of them exist. A quick scan of <a href="http://lispjobs.wordpress.com" rel="nofollow">http://lispjobs.wordpress.com</a> will give you a few names:<p>* <a href="http://grammarly.com" rel="nofollow">http://grammarly.com</a> a NLP startup from the Ukraine, they provide a grammar checking tool.<p>* <a href="http://dwavesys.com" rel="nofollow">http://dwavesys.com</a> a Canadian quantum computing company.<p>* <a href="http://agri-esprit.com" rel="nofollow">http://agri-esprit.com</a> is a French agriculture startup offering software for farms<p>* <a href="http://onshored.com" rel="nofollow">http://onshored.com</a> equipment scheduling and resource management software. From Chicago<p>* <a href="http://zenrobotics.com" rel="nofollow">http://zenrobotics.com</a> a Finish company making, you guessed it: robots.<p>* <a href="http://www.novasparks.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.novasparks.com/</a> FPGA<p>* <a href="http://siscog.pt/" rel="nofollow">http://siscog.pt/</a> Portuguese company, offers solutions for transportation companies<p>* And just today on reddit I read about <a href="http://bikefriday.com" rel="nofollow">http://bikefriday.com</a> whose powered by CL(read more: <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/1q1a1w/check_out_my_cl_project_custom_bike_configurator/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/1q1a1w/check_out_my_cl...</a> )<p>As you can see, not a lot of traditional "cat pictures as a service" companies, but javascript is good enough for those, they don't really need lisp, unlike a quantum CPU manufacturer :)
From Land of Lisp by Conrad Barski:<p>A fair number of large companies do use Lisp for some serious work. A long list of Industrial Lisp projects can be found at <a href="http://pchristensen.com/blog/lisp-companies/" rel="nofollow">http://pchristensen.com/blog/lisp-companies/</a>
ClimateCorp (who were recently acquired for ~£1bn) use a lot of Clojure, they've also open-sourced some of their Clojure projects: <a href="https://github.com/TheClimateCorporation" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/TheClimateCorporation</a>
<a href="https://nightweb.net/" rel="nofollow">https://nightweb.net/</a><p><a href="https://unfold.com/" rel="nofollow">https://unfold.com/</a><p>I know of a few other startups that use Clojure in various degrees, but the above two are probably the only ones I know of that are nearly pure Clojure.