Thirty-two Kansas City-area startups are going head to head in KC Inno’s inaugural Inno Madness competition.
These startups embrace innovation and are ones to keep on your radar. Their niches range from finding ways to improve health care to providing more sustainable fashion to helping roommates find an easier way to split bills.
Each week, we’ll ask you to vote for your favorites with this question in mind: "Whom would you invest in?"
We hope this drives excitement and awareness for Kansas City’s startup ecosystem and introduces readers to a few companies they may not have known about.
Voting for the first round starts at 1:15 p.m. Tuesday and continues through Sunday. We’ll announce the Round 1 winners on March 7 and kick off Round 2 on March 8. (Here's what you need to know about the contest rules.)
Let's get started on Round 1:
To help guide your voting, here's a scouting report on the players:
- ApolloTech: An insurtech company that offers online enrollment solutions to insurance agents and consumers. Its central hub features the best carriers, ranging from healthcare.gov to private carriers and health sharing options. It wants to revolutionize how health insurance is done and put an end to the many Americans who suffer from financial and health hardships because they don't know their options.
- Artio Medical: Delivers innovative medical devices with the potential to provide impactful solutions to important unmet medical needs in the peripheral vascular, neurovascular and structural heart markets.
- Azella Advisor: Serves hybrid, independent and breakaway financial advisers and focuses on understanding their needs, goals and target audience to create effective marketing and high-quality leads. Its online platform uses a short quiz to help automate and streamline the branding process, and the startup also builds a customized website and marketing experience with a multichannel approach.
- Bodify: An app that helps online apparel shoppers find the right fit the first time. The startup uses artificial intelligence and computer vision to analyze a user’s photos and recommend the sizes and brands that best suit a customer’s body type.
- CryptoSlam: A leading aggregator of nonfungible token (NFT) data from a growing list of popular blockchains, including Ethereum, Ronin, Solana, Flow, Polygon, WAX and many others. CryptoSlam has supported the NFT industry from its infancy by being the first to track and organize NFT data, such as performance and history, across multiple blockchains.
- Daupler: Built incident response management software for cities, utilities and other service providers. In addition to the ability to triage incidents and aggregate reports from citizens, the software allows cities and other service providers to easily communicate with staff regarding routine maintenance for streets and utilities, and emergency incidents, such as water main breaks.
- EAR Micro: Designs smart micro-hearables that are half the size of others on the market. They can host native apps and feature built-in artificial intelligence, a variety of sensors and programmable features activated by voice, touch, head gestures and mouth gestures.
- Epigraph: A visualization technology startup that can create photorealistic images and augmented reality experiences without a physical product. To create the images for use cases, such as 3D product catalogues, it uses manufacturing data, computer-generated image (CGI) and machine-learning technology.
- Finotta: Arms community banks and credit unions with a coveted tool — the ability to revamp their mobile app with personalized customer experiences. The company’s software uses algorithms to analyze a customer’s financial lifestyle, such as where money is spent, to predict what that customer will need moving forward. The app then can promote financial services that fit those needs.
- First Boulevard: A neobank that’s open to all but is focused on building solutions tailored for the Black community that can break down the barriers of financial disparity and help them build generational wealth. Some current perks include early access to paychecks, a personal finance management tool and just-in-time financial education, which helps users track budgets and financial goals in real time.
- Fit Truk: Created a fully equipped mobile gym that’s attached to a truck and includes features such as a weather-proof sound system and app-controlled LED lights to set the mood. A variety of strength-training equipment is attached to the exterior for the startup’s cutting-edge group strength training workouts, which are designed to provide maximum results in a safe and fun environment.
- Fresh Factory KC: A premier selfie studio and event space located in Zona Rosa. It invites guests to #playpartyphoto in more than a dozen themed selfie sets celebrating Kansas City's fresh culture and its people.
- Hawaiian Bros: A fast-casual and fast-growing eatery known for serving island-inspired comfort food without the use of microwaves, fryers or freezers. Hawaiian Bros strives to spread the Aloha spirit by showing kindness and respect, and treating everyone as ’ohana, like family, in everything they do.
- Homebase: A hubless solution for smart multitenant buildings. Whether for multifamily, mixed-use, coworking or other commercial properties, users can stay connected with smart access control, community WiFi, device automation and digital payments.
- HomeRoom: A residential real estate marketplace that brings investors, tenants and homeowners together in a Silicon Valley-inspired online and mobile platform. The startup helps random roommates sign a lease together in homes that are owned by investors.
- Kenzen: A physiological monitoring platform that includes a wearable device to keep workforces safe from heat, fatigue and overexertion on the job. Its data-driven insights also help companies maintain productivity.
- MatchRite Care: A HIPAA-compliant software platform that gives patients access to health records throughout all health systems. Through the unified portal, patients can access and share their medical records with hospitals, schools and specialty clinics, among others.
- Neer: Developed a real-time water management platform that uses machine learning to help cities and private utilities save money and become proactive with water, sewer and stormwater maintenance. In addition to identifying leaks, Neer can predict failures in water, sewer and stormwater collection systems.
- New Frontier Mobile Diagnostics: With a mission of “imaging for everyone," the startup addresses access to care by providing high-quality, on-site diagnostic imaging in doctor's offices, clinics and care facilities. New Frontier’s success will be measured by improved outcomes in the communities it serves, allowing patients to get conditions diagnosed earlier by making diagnostic imaging more affordable and accessible.
- Particle Space: Makes it easy for businesses to build real estate applications by providing a suite of premade services. Through Particle Space, companies can embed features such as custom maintenance workflow and custom property management and launch new proptech products in weeks, not years.
- Plabook: Gamifies learning and uses artificial intelligence, natural language processing and speech recognition to teach children how to read. It can analyze a child’s progress, recommend books and interventions, and provides a parent and teacher dashboard.
- PMI Rate Pro: Saves homebuyers money and makes mortgage lenders’ jobs easier. Its proprietary quoting tool allows lenders to easily compare all six national private mortgage insurance providers in about six seconds.
- Ronawk: A life sciences startup that’s garnering interest in new markets, such as cultured meat. Its Bio-Block platform includes different substrates that easily connect to one another like Legos and enable cells to grow in a 3D format. Bio-Block eliminates the need for subculturing, allowing scientists to rapidly grow cells and focus more time on high-impact experiments for developing next-generation therapies.
- Splitsy: Developed a mobile application that allows users, such as roommates, to automate the process of splitting shared recurring transactions such as rent, utilities, streaming services and more.
- Steadily: Serves landlords that want their insurance to work like other modern tools they love: fast and affordable with excellent service. Mobile-first and direct-to-consumer, Steadily is poised to rapidly remake the insurance segment.
- TealHouse Labs: Aims to bring sustainable and ethical fashion products to Kansas City and beyond. In addition to developing materials and software toward this aim, TealHouse has a line of vegan footwear.
- Tesseract Ventures: Helps American industries become smarter, better connected and more efficient with its next-generation robots, smart spaces, 21st-century software and radically connected platforms. It describes itself as a legion of inventors, dreamers, creators, engineers, technologists and innovators who believe that there’s nothing more human than technology and that today’s most radical technologies are tomorrow’s essentials for living.
- TripleBlind: Created a scalable solution for privacy-enhancing computation (PEC), allowing enterprises to securely share regulated and private data without decrypting it or introducing additional risks and liabilities. The software-only solution solves for a broad range of use cases, with a current focus on health care and financial services.
- Veeper: A Shopify app that tracks a customer’s spending habits over time and solves the problem of universal discount codes, which typically cause retailers to overspend. Veeper’s algorithm nudges shoppers to add more items to their cart to see their discount increase. The most loyal shoppers get rewarded the most.
- Vetelligence: Uses data and artificial intelligence to help employers find not just veterans, but the right veterans, for job openings.
- Vytelle: A precision livestock company reshaping how cattle producers worldwide optimize their herds. Through Vytelle’s integrated technology platform, generations of genetic gains can be made in just a few years. This allows producers to sustainably increase meat and milk production and ensure that they’re offering viable, competitive food choices for future generations.
- Yes! Athletics: A woman-owned sporting goods company that aims to empower young female athletes by filling a gap in the sporting goods industry. It offers traditionally male sports gear in feminine styles and colors, and no size conversion is needed.
