Midwest startup accelerator gener8tor has selected five companies to participate in its third annual summer program.
The startups in this year's 12-week accelerator will receive $100,000 in funding, in addition to mentorship and potential connections to follow-on capital. Approximately 800 founders applied to be part of this summer's program, gener8tor Minnesota Director Adam Choe told Minne Inno.
"We have a very scrappy group of founders who are willing to hustle and continue to prove that," Choe said. "We feel good about these companies and the opportunities they're chasing."
Companies from the two previous summer accelerator programs have gone on to raise funding and grow their companies in their home cities. Minneapolis-based Kaleidoscope, part of the 2017 cohort, quickly closed on $1.3M after leaving the program and currently has 19 full-time employees at its office in the North Loop.
Swannies, another gener8tor grad in the Twin Cities, now has 10 full-time employees and offices in Minneapolis. And med-tech company SynerFuse raised $2.6 million this spring.
Gener8tor has increased its local offerings substantially since arriving in the Twin Cities in 2016. In addition to its original industry-agnostic summer program, gener8tor launched the OnRamp Insurance Accelerator with Allianz and Securian, as well as gBETA Medtech, an accelerator in partnership with Boston Scientific and Mayo Clinic for early-stage medical startups. Gener8tor has also recently started programs with the University of St. Thomas and the City of St. Cloud.
After the summer accelerator wraps up, startups will present their ideas at a demo day for members of the Twin Cities tech and startup community.
Here are the startups in gener8tor's summer 2019 Minnesota accelerator, which descriptions provided by gener8tor:
Pet Krewe designs and manufactures pet costumes, toys and pet crafting kits which are sold direct-to-customer, wholesale and through brick-and-mortar retailers. New Orleans, La.-based Pet Krewe says that it has experienced 224 percent YoY growth.
Qlicket makes HR talent retention software for high-turnover work environments. Pittsburgh, Pa.-based Qlicket targets enterprises with a significant percentage of their workforce in distribution centers. Its seven paying customers include Fortune 500 companies. The company recently raised a $1 million round of funding.
Y Translator utilizes artificial intelligence to automate video closed captioning and translations. Dually based in Minneapolis and San Francisco, Y Translator claims to be 10 times faster and cheaper than traditional captioning services. It has generated more than $9,300 since launching its MVP in November 2018. The company previously went through gener8tor's gBETA program.
WorldSibu enables businesses to create, deploy and operate smart contract systems in multi-cloud environments through its development kit and web platform. Developers download the kit, create their system, connect to their data centers and deploy it to their networks. WorldSibu says that it reduces this process from six months to two weeks. The San Jose, Costa Rica-based company has just over 47,000 organic downloads worldwide.
Predictive Health Partners creates a spending optimization platform that reduces wasteful healthcare spending, which the company estimates costs the U.S. market $200 billion each year. The Des Moines, Iowa-based company currently has four active platform clients and another 14 in the onboarding process.
