After putting out a call for applications in May, MassChallenge announced on Monday the 21 startups that will join the first 2019 MassChallenge FinTech program.
From six months starting in January, startups will work 1:1 with one or more program partners including MassMutual, Putnam Investments, Fidelity Investments and FinTech Sandbox. At the end of the program, MassChallenge FinTech will award a total of $250,000 in cash prizes, all at zero cost and for zero equity.
As a honorary finalist, the list included also TellusLabs—a Boston-based satellite imagery and machine learning company building a living map of the world's food supply, now part of Indigo Agriculture. The acquisition was announced the week before MassChallenge released its list of winners.
Here are the 11 Mass. companies that were admitted to the first cohort of MassChallenge FinTech (description provided by MassChallenge and edited by BostInno).
Cake (Boston, Massachusetts): Cake modernizes end-of-life planning by providing guidance and 24/7 access to wishes and documents in the cloud.
Coalesce.ai (Boston, Massachusetts): Coalesce is an AI software company that automates tedious, mundane workflows for financial services firms.
Diffeo (Boston, Massachusetts): Diffeo is an AI-powered research assistant that uncovers relationships in disparate data and recommends the best insights next to your work. As we reported in June, Diffeo is essentially a combination of two startups, Diffeo and Meta Search, which merged last year to create the product it is today.
Digital Onboarding (Boston, Massachusetts): A.I.-driven customer onboarding platform. We automate time-consuming marketing tasks and maximize customer engagement and profitability.
Edmit (Boston, Massachusetts): Edmit’s software provides personalized, data-driven advice to help families understand the true cost and overall value of different colleges. In August, the company raised a $2.3 million seed round led by Founder Collective.
Elsen (Boston, Massachusetts): Elsen nPlatform is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for large financial institutions that enables financial professionals to effortlessly harness vast quantities of data to make better decisions and quickly solve complex problems.
Fincura (Boston, Massachusetts): Fincura is automating middle-market commercial lending through process digitization and risk scoring.
Gain Life (Boston, Massachusetts): Gain Life empowers individuals to achieve their best life.
Posh (Boston, Massachusetts): Posh is a conversational AI platform company out of MIT. Posh powers humanlike bots to automate routine enterprise communications tasks.
Surround Insurance (Cambridge, Massachusetts): Surround builds technology-powered insurance to protect modern consumers in an uncertain world.
Zylotech (Cambridge, Massachusetts): Zylotech continuously unifies/cleanses all available customer/account data, enriches it, and runs predictive analytics for maximum lift.
The full list of the members of the MassChallenge FinTech 2019 Cohort is available here.
