Investors, media and mentors alike flooded the House of Blues on Tuesday morning for Techstars Boston's Demo Day for its spring batch of startups. Twelve teams took the stage to share their progress made in the past three months, under the wise vise of outgoing managing directors’ Katie Rae and Reed Sturtevant.
Get a closer look at what the companies have been up to below.
Amino is a mobile, micro-community platform for long-tail interests, organizations and brands. Prior to acceptance into Techstars Spring class, the startup (formerly named Narvii) staked out space in PayPal's Start Tank. Amino has already seen 500,000 downloads of its made-for-mobile app. Active users stay in the app for around 20 minutes, returning on an average of six times daily. What’s more, around 47 percent of those users are contributing content by posting to forums and creating their personal collections within their interests.
Change Collective provides a mobile platform for behavior change, powered by the advice of world-class experts and life coaches. While self-help books provide emotional inspiration, Change Collective's app fuels user follow-through, and brings in the support of users' loved ones and other users going through the same change. And the startup's beta numbers prove its potential impact. Change Collective sold more than 100,000 courses at $30 each during its Techstars stint. Though the average completion rate for an online course is less than 10 percent, Change Collective's courses have a completion rate of over 80 percent. Change Collective raised $1.5 million in January from NextView Ventures and Founders Collective, among others.
HermesIQ delivers actionable insights to physicians by unlocking the data in unstructured clinical reports. Physicians receive too much data to individually process daily, so HermesIQ filters out the important information for them. The startup’s technology automatically scans each patient's report and recognizes bits of significant data, like a nodule on a lung in a chest scan. The pulled data is then uploaded to HemesIQ’s cloud, where clinical providers can access it and schedule follow-up appointments in-app. The company has sealed a deal with Plymouth Bay Medical Associates, a 15-physician group in Plymouth, Mass. with more than 7,000 patients, and has two major partnerships in the works.
Mapkin is building a richer GPS navigation experience by crowdsourcing the way people naturally give directions. "At Mapkin, we want to make your GPS sound like a local," said Co-founder Marc Regan. Mapkin has a powerhouse team of former employees from voice intelligence tech company Nuance, as well as MIT. The company will first launch in the Boston area before taking its tech national. Using landmarks, user data and crowdsourced instructions from actual locals, Mapkin provides drivers with directions that actually make sense. Going beyond GPS, the startup's product warns people of the quirks in a specific area and recognizes when drivers are familiar with a location to tailor their directions.
Refresh aims to cut costs and energy from the bottled beverage supply chain with machines that purify, flavor and bottle water at the point of use with its eco-friendly vending machine. "Instead of bringing tap water to the factory, we bring the factory to the tap," said Refresh Co-founder Sean Grundy. Founded by a crew of MIT and RISD grads, the Somerville startup received $200,000 from the Dorm Room Fund in December.
WOO is redefining the way action sports are played, viewed and consumed with the first-ever onboard motion sensor device and app experience. The startup offers a tiny, waterproof and ruggedized motion sensor that clips on to your gear and measures performance in action sports. "Woo is almost like a score for action sports, that lets you compete against friends worldwide, independent of time and location," said Leo Koenig, WOO co-founder and an avid kitesurfer. WOO's ability to reach athletes with targeted ads has attracted the attention of big brands like Red Bull and Burton. The self-proclaimed "beach bums" behind WOO have already inked a $250,000 deal with retailers for this summer.
Cangrade helps companies make better hiring decisions using data science and predictive analytics. The startup examined hundreds of thousands employees specifically for soft-skill roles to create a statistical model that matched those personality traits to success on the job. Companies can employ Cangrade to find talent that fits positions by having candidates fill out a questionnaire during the application process. Candidates are then ranked according to their fit for the role. The startup currently has 15 clients, among them CareerBuilder, Sheraton Hotels, United Rentals and Molina Healthcare.
ecoVent gives people room-by-room control over home heating and cooling through a sleek wireless system of vents and sensors. The company's tech aims to allow every room in a house or apartment to have its own temperature tailored to the occupant's preferences. The room-by-room control and HVAC monitoring system eliminates temperature imbalances and lowers utility bills by around 35 percent. The company has four beta systems up and running: A brownstone in Cambridge; a condo in Beacon Hill; a town home in Woburn; and a single family home in North Reading. MIT-spun startup confirmed via email that it has raised $500,000 from angels in both Boston and Silicon Valley.
Litographs helps authors connect with fans by producing tasteful, customizable and unique literary merchandise. The startup, founded by two brothers and a fellow book-loving friend, creates merchandise like T-shirts, posters and bags for book lovers, printed with text from masterpieces like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The company has bootstrapped its way to over $1 million in revenue.
WorkMob helps the best freelance software developers find great projects by matching them to clients based on their proven skills and experience. The "Uber for developers" startup helps freelance developers keep their client pipeline full of quality leads, while giving companies access to top development talent. The platform also provides a questionnaire that clarifies the project description, putting it in terms that the developer can understand and eliminating inefficiencies stemming from miscommunication. WorkMob has 300 developers in its "Mob family," and another 1,600 who have applied. During its six-week beta, WorkMob helped 36,000 projects get done – a number that helped the startup secure a pilot partnership with WordPress.
Onion is an open cloud platform that makes it simple to create connected devices for the Internet of Things. The hardware-agnostic technology allows device vendors to create smart devices without needing to write a single line of code. Onion’s all-star team hails from Siemens, iRobot, Ericsson, comScore, and claims to have reached out to Apple’s Steve Wozniak, who told the company via email, “You are at the forefront of something that could be a huge part of the future.”
Sundar is transforming the way that creators discover and source unique materials globally for apparel and accessories. The startup offers business owners access to new global markets for their materials, such as cashmere, fine silks, embroideries and embellishments, while giving top brands access to unique and interesting materials with which to differentiate their products. Sundar has 300 suppliers in the pipeline and 50 buyers lined up in Boston and New York. The Ministry of Textiles in India, and the same institutions in Italy, are on board with the startup's mission, as well.
