Earlier this year, MIT announced that it would be creating DesignX, a new accelerator to support innovators within their community focused on making advancements within the real estate, urban planning and architecture spaces. And now the Institute has chosen the eight startups that will comprise the first cohort participating in the School of Architecture and Planning's accelerator program.
MIT hosted a pitch contest at the Media Lab last Saturday. At the competition, 15 startup teams composed of students, faculty and alumni proposed their innovative real estate ideas to a panel of judges. Those judges then selected the final eight teams who were to be a part of the inaugural cohort at DesignX starting in the spring.
While participating in DesignX, the chosen MIT startups will have access to targeted coursework, industry mentors as well as $15,000 in equity-free seed funding. Here are the eight ventures that will be kicking off the new DesignX accelerator, as well as their company descriptions provided by MIT:
- Nesterly is a platform to connect people with extra space in their homes to host long-term renters at affordable rates in exchange for help around the house.
- Virtual Collaboration Research (VCR) is developing Mediate, an AI supported, speech-driven spatial markup tool for virtual reality, enabling designers and architects to work collaboratively inside VR.
- Kumej is a light, collapsible floor-seater primarily aimed at allowing underprivileged students of construction site workers and rural schools in India to carry and create their own comfortable work-surface irrespective of the ground surface they are obliged to sit on.
- Urban Diagnostics is the “23andme” of cities. They are mining city sewers using DNA sequencing and metabolomics, building a global data analytics platform mapping the health and wellbeing of our cities.
- Hosta is an application that easily turns pictures and videos of living spaces into a 3D-model powered home management platform for simplifying the home renovation process.
- Learning Beautiful creates tactile, Montessori-inspired learning materials to teach computer science to young children, without the use of computer screens.
- Bitsence uses a small sensor to monitor human movement and behavior in physical space, delivering insights about activity over time to help improve cities, architecture and real estate developments.
- Equity is modeling a resident-driven development marketplace that matches occupants, designers, builders, and financiers of real-estate developments. It will link housing design with finance and match occupants with development suppliers.
