As local startup accelerators go, Techstars Boston is still the most prestigious, and for good reason: Every class since I started covering the program in 2011 has had a number of terrific startups. But for the 2015 class, I think it was the first time I’ve left Demo Day thinking every single company was pretty solid. Maybe that’s because, for this class, many of the dozen startups were more mature than those in past sessions (more on that below).
Galen Moore gave the full rundown on what all of the companies do in his Demo Day preview story, so I won’t mention every company here, but I will offer up my main impressions from the event, held Tuesday night at the Back Bay Events Center.
1. Boston tech could get an especially big boost from this class. Six of the 12 companies in this class were from outside the U.S., meaning there’s little guarantee they’ll stick around after the program. But Techstars Boston head Semyon Dukach said all of the companies are staying in Boston now that the program is over. And, the startups are “all hiring in Boston right now,” he said.
2. It was clear that two startups in particular are on a tear. They are SmackHigh (an aggregator and social distributor of news for high school students) and Cuseum (which lets museum-goers engage with the art using their mobile phone). SmackHigh’s Giuseppe Stuto said the company has seen “explosive growth,” including growing to 80,000 monthly content submissions (800 percent growth) in four months.
Meanwhile, Cuseum’s Brendan Ciecko said the startup grew from working with five museums to 35 museums during Techstars, and should be at 150 museums by next year.
3. A number of companies had pretty good products before they even entered Techstars. Along with Cuseum, those included Hot (last-minute discount hotel booking); CartFresh (white label grocery delivery service); ThriveHive (marketing software for small businesses); and Provender (a farm-to-restaurant marketplace, more on them below).
Cuseum, Hot and ThriveHive all had seed funding before they entered the program, as well. All of that no doubt made a big difference in terms of how impressive they’re looking at the program's end—such as with ThriveHive, which is expecting to be at a $1 million revenue run rate by year’s end and expects to be adding $100,000 to that rate every month.
4. LovePop Cards wins the superlative for Most Adorable, and Netra wins for Most Likely to Minority Report Us. LovePop offers 3D pop-up greeting cards that it’s selling at seven retail locations right now, including three in Boston; the company is at a $1 million run rate. Netra, meanwhile, takes video from retail store cameras and analyzes the feeds for the purpose of helping retailers to understand customer behavior better (and sell more to customers). The software analyzes customers’ activity, clothing and hair—not for the purpose of facial recognition, but so that the software can correlate what a person is doing in one part of the store with what they’re doing in another part (where there’s a different camera), said CEO Richard Lee. The company is now starting five pilots and is getting paid for three of them, Lee said.
The vision is to become “the OS of agriculture.”
5. As far as changing the world for the better, Provender is the winner in my book. The company offers a marketplace connecting farmers and chefs—with the aim of giving better margins to farmers and lower prices to buyers, giving a big boost to local food in the process. Provender started in Canada and is active in the Eastern part of the country, and came to Techstars in order to launch in the U.S. During the three-month program Provender has grown to $210,000 in bookings on its platform, much faster than its growth rate in Canada, said CEO Caithrin Rintoul. Provender also now has a partnership with Freight Farms, a Boston startup that’s developed a shipping container farm system (and is an alum of Techstars Boston). The vision, Rintoul said, is to become “the OS of agriculture.”
All photos by Kyle Alspach.
