Techstars unveiled on Thursday its brand new class of startups for fall 2014. The 12 teams – seven software and five hardware – make up the Leather District-based accelerator’s eighth cohort in Boston, and the first under the vise of new managing director Semyon Dukach. The session kicked off this week, and will culminate, after three months of pivots and practice pitches, in Demo Day on November 12th.
It's an especially international crew, explained Dukach in the accelerator’s announcement.
"We continue to be blown away with the quality of applications and love the diversity of their businesses, some of which have come to Boston from as far away as Australia, Holland, Croatia, France, Russia, and even San Francisco," wrote Dukach.
Techstars held Demo Day for its winter 2014 class in late April, celebrating its companies’ accelerated growth over the course of the program. Given the spring class’ progress, the fall batch will have big shoes to fill. For example, mobile micro-community startup Amino has collected $1.6 million in Series A from Google Ventures and Union Square Ventures. In an innovative marketing play, customizable literary merchandise maker Litographs blew through its $7,500 Kickstarter campaign for literary tattoos and raised around $46,500.
Take a look at the newest Techstars class, with descriptions courtesy of the accelerator:
Codeanywhere is a cloud based code-editor, development, and collaboration platform.
CoolChip designs next-generation kinetic coolers for electronics enabling quieter, smaller and cooler product experiences.
EdTrips makes field trips easy and drives more visitors to educational destinations by consolidating the booking and payment of trips among multiple locations and services.
Fairwaves develops disruptive open-source mobile network equipment and software to bring cell phone service to the next billion people.
Fortified Bicycle is building an urban cycling brand with MIT-engineered hardware.
Headtalk‘s platform enables a new kind of nonverbal communication with wearable devices.
Helloblock‘s API simplifies accepting online payments through Bitcoin.
indico is building the world’s first IDE for machine learning.
ROCKI is creating the standard for listening to the music you love on the speakers you already have.
Spitfire Athlete is building a brand that stands for strength and badassery among women, starting with a fitness app.
Streamroot cuts bandwidth costs for online broadcasters with native peer-to-peer video streaming technology.
Splashscore‘s influencer activation engine helps large consumer brands find and activate their most influential customers on social networks to drive more clicks, likes, leads, and sales.
