We told you today was going to be a big day for summer startup accelerator classes. Earlier today we reported on Memphis’ highly successful medical device accelerator Zeroto510 and their summer class. Before that we reported on Techstars Boulder class for summer 2013.
Now we turn to Nashville Tennessee and the Jumpstart Foundry. This startup accelerator offers an intense program in Music City USA, that will “graduate” during the summer. Last year there were three startup accelerator demo days in Tennessee in the month of August. Gigtank, Zeroto510 and Jumpstart Foundry all had cohorts conclude their program and pitch at demo/investor day, in a succession of Thursdays.
Jumpstart Foundry supports it’s cohort with over 125 mentors and an intense program. Also as an added bonus, midway through the program the cohort will move to Nashville’s new entrepreneur center, slated to open next month.
Check out this year’s cohort.
● eVisit a secure and convenient mobile platform to facilitate communications between primary care providers and patients
● Chalky an elearning video platform where experts can earn money through remote coaching and teaching
● Gun.io an exclusive Elancelike marketplace to connect with the bestofthebest open stack developers
● InvisionHeart a secure mobile platform for emergency responders to communicate critical medical statistics to doctors during emergencies
● LoadTag a SaaS mobile platform for trucking and freight companies
● MyMedMatch a service to match underutilized specialized rehab equipment to patients who need it
● NewsBreak Media Networks videobased advertising, interaction and promotion platform for gas stations and convenience store networks
● Poliana an online matching service for politicalbased social networking and advocacy
● Rocket Link Mobile a platform for SMSbased text ads that pay users to sharing them
● Zingfin a financial services SaaS platform that facilitates ETF analysis
Charleson Bell, CEO at BioNanovations, pitches on stage at last year’s ZeroTo510 Demo Day
Earlier this morning we said it was going to be a big day for summer accelerators here at nibletz.com The Voice Of Startups Everywhere Else. We kicked it off with the Techstars Boulder Summer 2013 class. Now we’ve got the official list of startups selected to participate in the highly successful medical device startup accelerator in Memphis Tennessee, Zeroto510.
Last year, 5 out of the 6 startups in the first cohort at Zeroto510 raised “follow on” funding. Four of the startups raised an additional $100,000 while the 5th, Restore Medica, went straight to series A closing a $2.5 million dollar round.
ZeroTo510 is a cohort based medical device accelerator that prepares medical device startups to go through the 510k clearance process. This is a process that shortens FDA approval because the startup idea or product concept is improving on something that’s already been through the FDA process. Often times, these new products and devices solve problems that previous devices or methods manifest.
James Bell, the CEO of Handminder, a startup in last year’s cohort is back again this year leading a different team with a startup called Mobilizer. This device helps ambulatory patients become more mobile. When we spoke with Bell he said that the big problem their product is solving is the four highly paid technicians it takes to transport a patient on monitors, IVs and pumps from one section of the hospital to another. Mobilizer allows a more modular setup of equipment that can than be monitored by one technician.
The rest of the class includes:
AIS Inc. – This is a local team led by a biomedical engineering student from The University of Memphis who previously had a career in the Army. They are building a leadless, single-surgery (battery is external), GPS- and Bluetooth-enabled hybrid cardioverter defibrillator. Their product is targeted to pediatric patients because surgery is not required to replace the battery.
Better Walk – A team of biomedical engineering students from Georgia Tech are making a redesigned crutch that relieves the primary complaint of crutch users by eliminating the discomfort experienced in the underarm area due to axillary nerve damage.
Cuff-Gard – A nurse from West Memphis has designed a disposable skin barrier, worn by a patient, to protect and extend the life of blood pressure machine cuffs. The barriers are impenetrable; one side absorbs fluids or drainage from the skin, and the other side is a polypropylene backing that protects the blood pressure cuff from contamination.
Health and Bliss – A team from Baltimore, H&B is attempting to revolutionize the way people detect strep throat by introducing to the market a patented self-contained screening test. Strep Test Anywhere allows patients to be tested for strep throat in a convenient, affordable, and time-saving manner.
SurgiLight – This team has designed a novel LED light for use in surgeries and is led by an electrical engineering student from The University of Memphis. Connected by a long flexible tube, the light allows easier and better lighting to hard-to-access surgical sites.
During the recruitment process, we received competitive applications from around the United States, and we had two international applicants,” said Allan Daisley, director of entrepreneurship and sustainability for Memphis Bioworks in a statement. “The high quality of the applications made the selection of this year’s participants quite a challenge.”
The companies will matriculate through an intensive, mentorship-driven, 12-week program of instruction and hands-on activities designed to guide the entrepreneurs through the process. Each company chosen for the program will receive $50,000 in initial seed capital from co-investors Innova, a pre-seed, seed and early-stage investor focused on starting and funding high-growth companies in the healthcare, technology and healthcare technology fields across the state of Tennessee, and MB Venture Partners, a Memphis-based venture capital firm that provides equity capital and strategic direction to life sciences start-ups.
Zeroto510 partners with SeedHatchery, and Launch Your City, which provides the business portion of the programming and helps develop the medical device startups investible stories.
You can find out more about Zeroto510 here at zeroto510.com.
While the spring season for startup accelerators is coming to close with a variety of demo days across the country, the summer season is warming up. In fact today we’ll be reporting on three startup accelerators kicking off their summer program. We start the day with Techstars Boulder.
Techstars is one of the most successful startup accelerator programs in the world. They yield thousands of applications every year and only a handful of the best startups get picked to build their products as Techstars branded startups.
Without further ado here are the startups that got into Techstars flagship program, the Summer 2013 session at Techstars Boulder, Colorado:
Hull is like Startup Weekend online. Their website claims that you can build social apps in a weekend rather than in weeks. Hull handles hosting,social mechanics, and services integration so the person creating the social app can focus on the features.
LeChat hails from Oakland California and promises to be the next revolutionary messaging app. Their website says they are “messaging for modern organizations” and support a host of features including search history, multiple chats on screen, integration with dev tools, native mobile apps and a price poing of $1 per user per month.
According to the Techstars website Augur is a platform that makes mobile and web personal by intelligently tailoring the experience of each user.
Given Goods blends social entrepreneurship with e-commerce in a beautiful website that only sells products that give back. Sometimes here at nibletz we call this “slacktivism”, think Toms and other products that make a difference in the community.
Local startup Elihuu has a funny name with a serious mission. Their platform allows product people to design beautiful products and they help take care of the manufacturing. Their website says: Democratizing the process of design, invention, and manufacturing. We believe new technologies change the thinking around the production of consumer products.
Brandfolder gives users the tools to build a brand book that would typically cost thousands of dollars from an agency, easily and from a web based platform. While they plan to offer a premium paid product later on, their website says their branding tools will always offer a free option.
According to the Techstars website Prediculous is building social sports games for all fans. It looks like this Boulder based startup is pivoting from a social prediction game to something worthy of a much larger audience. Find them online here.
This bay area startup offers tax monitoring tools that users can use all year long in hopes to help them have a “good April” Mitchell Fox, co-founder of GoodApril has penned guest posts on several startup focused sites about preparing for and being proactive about tax season. Check them out here
Ads native is an ad server for native content based advertising. Their website says that you can monetize without compromising user-experience. You can find them online here.
We met the guys from Snowshoe last year on the sneaker strapped road trip when we stopped in Madison Wisconsin. They seem to have pivoted a little bit since then, now using their original technology as an authentication layer for the internet of things.
It’s accelerator graduation season for Spring 2013 accelerator classes. That means it’s a good time to talk about pitch decks. Our good friends at investorpitches.com have put together “The Anatomy Of A Winning Pitch Deck” in a great, easy to follow infographic.
There seems to be a lot of different ways to build a pitch deck. We’ve seen over 25 accelerator demo days in the last year and for the most part each accelerator has a different way of teaching startup teams how to build the pitch deck. For the most part, what you’ll notice is that all of the startup teams at each accelerator follow the same model, but each accelerators model is different.
investorpitches.com has assembled their best practices for building pitch decks that work for investors. Of course they warn “include all the pieces you need, and none that you don’t”.
The biggest part of the pitch deck is to make sure you combine story telling and selling to connect the mind and the heart. No one wants to see any founder stand up on stage and just read a bunch of slides. Most people in the audience are capable of reading the slides themselves. What the person pitching needs to do is narrate the slides and we’ve them together.
In working with some of the teams in the Seed Hatchery accelerator this week, it brought me to one of my biggest tips when helping people prepare for the actual investor day pitch. “The confidence monitor can help you or kill you”. The confidence monitor is a great thing for getting your place in your pitch and reminding you what’s on the screen. But you can very quickly turn that into just reading the monitor and forget the story telling.
Chances are you wrote your pitch out, printed it out, practiced it with the print out, and then for the last week or two you’ve been practicing without the printout. Nothing changes on stage. Don’t let the confidence monitor kill your confidence.
The other big thing to remember in all of this is that investors aren’t there to evaluate your ability to put together a Keynote or Power Point presentation. They are there to evaluate your startup, it’s traction, it’s success and it’s potential. Above all, don’t forget to build a product.
Check out the infographic below for what should go into your pitch deck.
With one week to go in the Memphis based Seed Hatchery startup accelerator program, one of their startups, ScrewPulp, has officially launched (isn’t it nice to see real products at demo days).
Long time readers of nibletz.com, The Voice Of Startups Everywhere Else, are very familiar with ScrewPulp and it’s founder, Memphian Richard Billings. Billings comes from a wide background of creativity, and media. At one point in his career, Billings was a radio disc jockey. Throughout though, he’s been a tinkerer on a very grand scale. For instance his home has a full movie theater and he’s building arcade and pinball machines in his spare time.
So what’s ScrewPulp? It’s a way for self publishers to generate traction by trading their wares for social media mentions, reviews and ratings. In it’s simplest form the model works like this:
– Author publishes their book on ScrewPulp
– The first 25 copies are given away free
– Those people are expected to engage with the material through reviews, ratings and social media mentions
– Readers can continue to get the newest books free as long as they support the model.
After the initial free period, publishers start making money on their book. Pricing is based on how well the book was received, or sales. What’s especially nice for publishers is the platform is non-exclusive and publishers get 75% of the take.
“I want to change a broken industry,” Billings said in a statement. “Screwpulp is removing the obstacles that discourage so many authors, and empowers everyone to take control of publishing’s future.”
ScrewPulp is a product of the entire LaunchMemphis ecosystem. The idea was conceived at a 48 Hour Launch event in June of 2012. From there, ScrewPulp was one of the startups selected to compete in a Global Entrepreneurship Week challenge, which included pitching the concept to Federal Court Judge John Fowlkes. At that contest, ScrewPulp won over $5,000 in cash and prizes.
ScrewPulp founder Richard Billings pitches his startup to Federal Court Judge John Fowlkes.
It was only natural for ScrewPulp to continue iterating and preparing for launch under the development and instruction of Seed Hatchery, Memphis’ cohort based technology accelerator.
“It’s been a fun uphill battle all the way, but we have our work cut out for us after investor day next week.” Billings told nibletz.com in an interview. He’s also very excited about the progress they’ve made to date. ScrewPulp soft launched last week with four books and four authors. In just one week, and with no promotion, marketing or media they now have 23 books from 23 authors, and 250 readers signed up for the platform.
To add to that momentum, ScrewPulp’s mentor, Publishing executive Joe Wikert, will be flying into Memphis to introduce the ScrewPulp team at Seed Hatchery Investor Day next week. Wikert was the Publisher and Chair of O’Reilly Media’s Tools Of Change conference. Wikert has also had executive positions with publishing giants, Wiley and Macmillan Publishing.
You obviously like to read, so go read a book at ScrewPulp.com
Here’s ScrewPulp’s first ever pitch at 48 Hour Launch
This Memphis founder also launched her startup at 48Hour Launch and is now a finalist in the Black Enterprise Elevator Pitch Contest.
Since starting our nibletz sneaker strapped startup road trip last year we’ve seen hundreds of startups pitch at countless demo days. Nick and I were finally relaxing with one of our advisors, Patrick Woods’ with a>m ventures, on the last night of SXSW and we had counted over 65 startups that we saw pitch through a variety of demo events at the annual festival.
We’ve also seen countless accelerator demo days and with it being May and most of the spring accelerators graduating this month, we’re on track to enjoy another dozen or so before we get to the thick of the summer. Speaking of summer, last August their were three accelerator demo days in Tennessee alone.
Startup community members and leaders are constantly debating “the rise of the accelerator” and where accelerators should focus their resources. Is the best accelerator model general tech and cohort based? Or vertical and rolling? Who knows, it will take several more iterations until each community finds the accelerator model that works best for them.
But what about demo day?
On Friday Business Insider ran this piece which references an indepth article about YCombinator and it’s historic demo day from the New York Times. In it, author Nathaniel Rich, quotes an investor saying that YC’s demo day, often thought of as the super bowl of demo days, “used to be a can’t-miss event, but that’s not so anymore. It’s a different vibe. Some major investors are starting to skip it.”
Rich points out that one investor said that YC Demo Day used to be a feeding frenzy for deal flow and it’s just not anymore.
Of course YC’s demo day is all the way at one end of the spectrum. Y combinator is said to take the best of the best and with hits like DropBox and Airbnb, the newer teams know they can set their valuations and standards higher, pricing a lot of smaller VC firms out of the deal. This either leaves VC’s empty handed or startups empty handed.
“The only way for a company to be overvalued is if there’s someone willing to pay that price,” Graham told the NYT. “So what they’re saying is: Going through Y.C. causes companies to raise money on better terms than they would have otherwise. We wouldn’t have the barefacedness to make that claim ourselves!”
Graham acknowledges that YC does take some bad startups though, saying sometimes investors can’t pick out the good startups; “Well, it’s not because the good start-ups look bad,” Graham says. “It’s because the bad start-ups look good! Which means we’re doing our job.”
Business Insider recently shared some of Mark Suster’s, a VC with GRP Partners and the founder of LaunchPad LA, best and worst sources of deal flow from his personal blog.
Surprisingly, blogging was revealed to be the best source of deal flow available. “The sheer number of relationships I’ve built through being public, transparent and being willing to engage in comments and through social media has enabled me to get to know entrepreneurs even before they launch their next company,” Suster said on his blog.
Investment bankers were said to be bad sources of deal flow, but the worst? Demo Day.
“Getting excited about a company at a conference and investing is a sucker’s bet,” Suster writes. “Entrepreneurs raising at prices not normally supported by progress face risks downstream when they have to raise more capital. And that fund raising is part of the job of being an entrepreneur – not something that gets in the way of your doing your job.”
Startup accelerators everywhere else are having a hard enough time getting investors in the door for demo day as it is. One accelerator participant in the middle of the country told us “outside of the investors that had a stake already in the cohort, no investors came to our demo day last year.” That can be hard to swallow.
As to the blogging, we have a handful of angels and VC’s that email us from time to time to get the vibe on some startup we wrote about. We also get thank you cards in the mail from startups that have gone on to raise money after getting their first piece of press from nibletz. To that end, we live off of our crowdfunding so to help out the everywhere else cause, click here.
On Tuesday at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013, Alexia Tstotsis got some of the more influential names in the tech/vc community to talk about women entrepreneurs and venture capital. David Tisch offered this tidbit in regards to what really pisses him off when VCs are talking to women. Aaref Hilaly (Sequoia) offered this opinion on why there is such a divide. Hilaly also called everyone to task to help increase the number of women entrepreneurs ready for venture funding.
While startup communities everywhere are starting to embrace and cultivate their women entrepreneurs. One startup community in particular has taken a very proactive role.
Eric Mathews, Andre Fowlkes and Elizabeth Lemmonds the team behind Launch Your City and Launch Memphis started a women’s initiative in 2012 called Upstart. Upstart is a multifaceted initiative with their latest phase coming into fruition now. It began with a meetup group, office hours for women entrepreneurs and a 48 Hour launch event for women founders.
Upstart is just one of the many startup community initiatives that Launch Your City has developed. They are also responsible for Seed Hatchery, a general tech accelerator that is two weeks away from their third graduation (demo day). Interestingly enough there are two startups in the class of six that have women founders; Boosterville and Mentor Me. A third woman entrepreneur, Rachel Hurley, started as a co-founder for one startup, Soundstache and has since segued to another team, Musistic. Hurley has always been active in the Launch Memphis startup community and took the challenge to apply to this years Seed Hatchery class.
In addition to all of this, Lemmonds, served as the moderator for the “Kick Ass Female Founders From Everywhere Else” at the everywhereelse.co inaugural conference. It was there and on a trip to Silicon Valley that Lemmonds continued to forge relationships with women entrepreneurs across the country, some of which will serve as mentors for the upcoming first session at Upstart.
The Upstart Accelerator basically starts as soon as Seed Hatchery graduates. The application deadline is May 24th and the application can be found here.Those accepted will be notified by May 31st. The session starts in Memphis at the Launch Your City Launch Pad on June 20th and runs until October 3rd.
Upstart participants will get access to the four M’s, mentors, milestones, money and Memphis. The Upstart team is encouraging women led startups from across the country and around the world to consider their program. Memphis is a great place to launch startups, cost of living is incredibly low and the startup community is close knit and growing. And YES their can be men on the team as well, but one of the cofounders must be a woman.
Community service and helping people have been what Brittany Fitzpatrick’s life’s work have been about. But what makes this Memphian even more amazing is that she left a position with one of the most prestigious, well known brands in the non-profit space, Ronald McDonald House Charities, to start something of her own, again in community service.
As the communications coordinator for Ronald McDonald House Charities of Memphis, Brittany took the passion and drive she’s had since high school and through college at Howard University and Memphis University, and combined it with the tools available in recent day to double the groups social media reach. Ronald McDonald House Charities of Memphis works with the most well known children’s research facility in the world, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
Over the last six years, Brittany has been a mentor and helped other mentor’s in a variety of programs. Through her work with Ronald McDonald House Charities and other stops along the way, she found that mentorship was a great thing, but flawed in many ways.
(Brittany’s first pitch at 48 Hour Launch)
When she first pitched the idea for her startup “Mentor Me” back in December at a women focused 48 Hour Launch, she revealed that most mentor orgranizations spend more money re-placing mentors and mentees than they do setting up original pairs. Brittanny quickly realized if someone could fix the initial matching proces than these programs could focus on their original goals and save a lot of money.
That’s where her startup Mentor Me comes in. Mentor Me is a mentor and mentee online matching service that uses a variety of information given from both parties and an algorithm to make more successful matches. While Brittany is hesitant about using the verbage “e-harmony for mentor”, at the core that’s what it is and that’s why it’s going to be so successful.
(Here’s Brittany’s second pitch from 48 Hour Launch)
But the biggest factor in the success of Mentor Me is going to be a combination of the technology and the founder. Brittany is a dynamic young woman. Back in December, the prize for the 48 Hour Launch competition was a startup village booth at everywherelse.co. When Brittany came in second place she decided to crowdfund the people in the audience so that she too could have a booth for her startup. Within minutes her mission was successful.
We got to interview Brittany as she prepares for demo day at SeedHatchery, where she tells us about her latest venture into crowdfunding and what she’s learning at the Memphis startup accelerator:
So tell us what is Mentor Me?
There are 3 million kids in the U.S. being mentored. Yet, there are another 15 million waiting for mentors. Sadly, half of all matches between mentors and youth end within months – which does more harm than no mentoring at all. One of the top reasons for these pairs falling apart is poor matching.
Mentor Me provides cloud-based mentor matching and management tools that make mentoring more efficient and effective for both programs and mentors.
How did you come up with the idea?
The idea came from my own experiences as a mentor. I’ve been mentoring for 6 years now and have been through the process of getting matched with a mentee several times. Through these experiences, I’ve learned just how much of an impact mentoring can have for both the kids who are being mentored and for the mentors themselves. But, as with any process, there are things that can be improved and there are ways to use technology to make the process better for everyone.
Who else is on the team?
My Co-Founder and CTO is Sean Lissner.
Sean has a Bachelor’s Degree in both Mathematical and Computer Science from the University of Memphis. Sean’s specialties include: mobile applications, web applications, web services, distributed computing, embedded systems, cloud architecture, machine learning, and wireless sensor networks.
Before joining the Mentor Me team, Sean worked with large-scale, enterprise level application development projects, including FedEx’s Android mobile application. In addition to his passion for improving communities, Sean brings more than a decade of coding experience and a usability-centered design focus to the Mentor Me team.
Our advisors are: Austin Baker, President and Chairman of the Board of HRO Partners and Co-Founder of the University of Memphis MILE Mentoring Program; Jenny Koltnow, Executive Director of the Memphis Grizzlies Charitable Foundation; Emily Yellin, Customer Experience Consultant
What made you decide to apply for an accelerator?
I knew that going through Seed Hatchery would give me the best chance for success. With accelerators, you’re given a strong network of support through the staff and through the network of entrepreneurs who have gone through the program before you. The support of one’s fellow cohort-members is also invaluable. And of course the fact that they are mentor-driven is also innately appealing to me.
What have been your three biggest take-aways so far from Seed Hatchery?
My three biggest take-aways from Seed Hatchery thus far have been:
The importance of investing in yourself: I left my job right before Seed Hatchery to go all-in on my startup
You have to practice how you play.
Iteration trumps perfection
While some accelerator startups just sit around and wait for investor day, you’re out there fundraising now, tell us a little bit about your crowdfunding?
We kicked off a crowdfunding campaign to match our $15,000 investment by May 16. We’re about 10% of the way there. Our crowdfunding page is at www.gofundme.com/MentorMe.
What’s the reaction to Mentor Me been so far?
The reaction thus far has been positive. We already have our first paying customer and we’re in the process of getting more organizations on board for our beta test this summer.
One thing you learned about yourself in the accelerator?
I’ve learned so much about myself through this process. I think above all I’ve learned how to push myself outside of my comfort zone. I actually look for those types of opportunities now.
What happens May 17th?
The grind continues. Investor Day is just the beginning.
Paul Singh, the Washington DC based entrepreneur, who became a household name in many startup circles while he was a partner at 500 startups, has began sharing much more about his startup Dashboard.io. We had started hearing rumors that Singh was stepping down at 500 startups during SXSW and it was confirmed in March.
Singh returned to his DC roots to continue growing dashboard.io a project he says he started on the back burner. Dashboard.io quickly grew into a huge tool that 500 startups founders and other accelerator startups could use to reach investors, share information and talk with each other.
We recently took a trip to Silicon Valley and had the chance to talk with several 500 startups founders who found the dashboard extremely useful.
It began with the innocuous “initial commit” and a pitch of “Let me peek at your traffic data. I promise to keep it private, and I’ll anonymously show you how you stand up to everyone else on the platform.”
Once he started the initial project and it made it’s way on to Hacker News over 300 startups started flooding the system and adding their data. Soon after that Singh “turned off the spigot” and went back to focusing on 500 Startups. 500 was still young at the time and they resorted to using Google Groups to communicate with founders and mentors.
“The turning point came when a well known founder and mentor had enough and, frustrated and angry, handed in their resignation. They couldn’t see through the clutter to mentor our community, and just like that, one of our best was gone. That same night I revived Dashboard.io with a renewed mission — to build a better platform for the 500 family.” Singh writes.
As 500 startups grew, so did the internal dashboard system. The dashboard system has allowed 500 Startups founders, and 400 accelerator companies to communicate internally with VC’s, Angels and Mentors. Sarah Ware, CEO and Founder at 500 Startups alum Markerly, told us “The dashboard system gives us access to people that may not necessarily correspond with us outside of the system.” Being a 500 Startups company certainly gives a startup credibility but Ware added “potential investors and mentors get back to us quicker when the message comes through the system.”
Fast forward to today and Singh seems motivated by the ability to really help young companies grow through the use of dashboard.io. The tool, coupled with AngelList provides an unparalleled resource for startups. The best part is it’s free.
Singh recently explained in a Facebook post how dashboard.io will make money.
“we give the software away completely free — and in a Yammer-like way. We use the aggregate anonymous data to create content and sell portions of it. Think of us as the Bloomberg / Motley Fool of the private markets. We give away a ton of content (soon) via our blog and then monetize on the extremes”
One of Singh’s biggest priorities is confidentiality and privacy making two big promises to the Dashboard community.
I will keep your information safe. I will never sell or share your data with anyone, including your investors.
I will use that data anonymously to benefit our entire industry and move it forward.
The Brandery, the Cincinnati based, top 15 startup accelerator, has announced a new partnership with the E.W. Scripps Company and the Scripps Howard foundation, one of the most historic names in U.S. media, to offer two journalistic startups entry into the highly coveted summer time accelerator program.
The Brandery is heavily focused on branding, hence it’s name. It’s situated in the branding capital of the world, Cincinnati Ohio, home to Proctor & Gamble, the biggest branded company in the world. Cincinnati is also home to household names like Federated/Macy’s, and Kroger.
The Brandery has been very successful in preparing startups for the next level. 2012 class member FlightCar just raised over $5 million dollars in venture funding. The Brandery took three scrappy teenage dropouts from MIT and helped groom their idea of peer 2 peer car renting at airports into a startup that made it into Y Combinator.
ChoreMonster closed down a round of venture funding earlier this year and Pingage, co-founded by Brandery graduate Michael Wohlschlaeger also just announced major funding.
The Brandery’s strong core focus area and their even stronger mentor network attracted Brooklyn serial entrepreneur and founder of Brooklyn based Dumbo Startup Lab, to work on his startup, Off Track Planet.
Now, through this unique partnership, the Brandery will offer the chance for journalistic focused startups to go through their intensive program, have access to their mentor network and pitch at their very well attended investor day in the fall.
“Scripps is making an investment in the future of journalism with a fresh approach to news gathering and new products for news consumption,” said Adam Symson, chief digital officer for Scripps and a Foundation trustee. “This partnership with The Brandery is a great way for the Foundation to engage the broader entrepreneurial community in creating media-related businesses.”
The Foundation’s financial support includes a $3,500 stipend for each of two founders of the company to cover their living expenses while they spend the summer in Southwest Ohio, developing their businesses and networking with consumer-oriented businesses. The funds will supplement the Brandery’s $20,000.
You can apply for the Brandery’s traditional program or their Scripps Howard fellowship now through May 1st at brandery.org
Techstars Chicago revealed their first class today. Back in February Techstars announced that Excelerate Labs the Chicago based accelerator that operates out of the 1871 space was becoming TechStars Chicago. They began taking applications at that time and announced the first cohort on Thursday.
This first official “Techstars Chicago” class will start May 28th and end on August 28th. TechStars Chicago participants will receive a round of seed funding, work space, an intense startup curriculum and mentorship from one of the best accelerator mentor networks in the world.
As with all the Techstars classes there is a wide range of startups across SoLoMo, healthcare, big data, analytics and even fitness.
Here is a complete list of the 10 startups that made it into the first Chicago cohort, as originally posted on the Techstars blog.
CaptureProof – The platform through which patients can securely and easily share photos and videos with their doctors.
HIPOM – A cloud-based solution that gives parents total control of the Internet access on all devices in the home.
Nexercise – A mobile app that makes fitness fun through the use of friendly competition, smart alerts and real rewards.
Pathful – A Web analytics platform that captures every visitor interaction with every element on a website automatically, making it easier for marketers and designers to understand visitor behavior.
Peoplematics – A cloud-based search platform that unlocks the data users store in the cloud with intuitive search and sharing across applications.
Project Fixup – A digital matchmaker that fixes people up on fun one-on-one dates.
SimpleRelevance – An analytics-driven email marketing platform that provides customized digital communication for every customer and every message.
SocialCrunch – The marketing data provider presents a new way to unlock the most provocative human insights for brands and their agencies.
Sqord, Inc. – The fitness platform that makes healthy, active play more fun for kids by allowing them to compete and earn points for everyday activities.
TradingView – A browser-based community for investors and traders to share and discuss their ideas.
Memphis’ Seed Hatchery accelerator is less than a month away from demo day for their third cohort of startups. This years class has some major standouts and Boosterville is one of them.
Boosterville was founded as Sodbuster by married couple Pam and Tom Cooper. The Cooper’s hale from Indianapolis Indiana and they are the only “out of town” team for this years Seed Hatchery class. I met Pam Cooper on Brad Feld’s alternative to Hacker News, the Startup Revolution Hub. Meeting woman entrepreneurs is nothing new these days however Pam and Tom admittedly have adult children, sometimes older than the other founders on the Startup Revolution Hub, and the other founders at Seed Hatchery.
I quickly struck up an online friendship with Pam that resulted in her presenting at the startup conference and facilitated an introduction into the Seed Hatchery program.
What makes the Coopers even more interesting is that Tom is the founding CTO of Cha-Cha and has been a distinguished CTO for the last 30 years. While I wouldn’t call them “startup rich” the Cooper’s have done well. Pam founded a successful cleaning business. Tom has hit a few doubles and triples in his career. Tom enjoys flying his prop plane when he can pull away from the computer screen.
That’s what makes Cooper’s truly unique. They aren’t in the Seed Hatchery program for the seed investment (which of course helps any startup, Boosterville included), they are in it for the grit and grind and the whirlwind business training that happens during a three month, intensive accelerator program.
While Pam sometimes jokes about being the “class mom” with this year’s Seed Hatchery, they work with the best of them, until late hours of the night and back again first thing in the morning. Tom made arrangements with his development job in Indianapolis to work from Memphis every morning before working on Boosterville.
So what is Boosterville?
It’s a new platform that combines the mobile wallet with a loyalty and rewards type program that benefits local schools. Pam and Tom grew tired of neighborhood kids hitting them up with the same popcorn tins, wrapping paper and World’s Finest Chocolate bars. The school fundraiser was destined for a disruption.
Boosterville has partnered with Peabody Elementary in mid-town Memphis and merchants in the Overton Square and Cooper Young neighborhoods for their beta testing.
The Boosterville mobile app is tied in with local merchants and local schools who have agreed to give a kickback to the school of the user’s choice when they checkout with the Boosterville mobile wallet. The Cooper’s live on the cusp of new technology, and to that end, where others have used Paypal or Google Wallet for checkout, Boosterville uses fellow midwestern startup Dwolla as it’s wallet back bone.
Dwolla’s founder Ben Milne knows Tom well and is very enthusiastic about what Boosterville is doing.
Despite their age, and experience, Boosterville is treated the same way every other startup in the Seed Hatchery class is treated. They’ve been going up and down in the weekly rankings like every other startup and they went through a name change and a couple pivots during the past two months.
Boosterville will graduate from the Seed Hatchery program on demo day which is May 16th and will coincide with the Memphis in May festivities. For more info on Boosterville visit boosterville.com.
Hattery strategist, and Engine Advocacy co-founder Michael McGeary (photo: hattery.com)
Nashville’s Entrepreneur Centre Director, Michael Burcham, played host to Mike McGeary, a strategist with Silicon Valley innovation lab, Hattery.
Currently the Hattery has a west coast location in Silicon Valley and an east coast location in New York City. Hattery invests in early stage startups and helps the startups with support in design, engineering and business development.
If you think you’ve heard McGeary’s name before it’s because you probably have. In addition to being a strategist with Hattery, McGeary is also the co-founder and chief political strategist with Engine Advocacy a group connecting startup founders and entrepreneurs with government officials to create change in the entrepreneurial/startup space. They were recently intricate in a startup pilgrimage to congress. McGeary also worked with TuneIn and on two presidential campaigns.
Hattery is looking to take their unique model to another state and Nashville seems to have caught McGeary’s eye.
“There is a great energy here and I’ve read about it and heard about it because Nashville has been really good about talking about its success stories,” McGeary told the Nashville Business Journal during the Nashville Technology Council’s TechVille event. He continued; “It has been really fun and interesting to see the companies created here, how the community is being built in a really unique way. I think there is a lot of growth potential here.”
Burcham, who is one of Nashville’s biggest advocates for entrepreneurship and startups as well as the leader for Startup Tennessee, Startup America’s Tennessee region and the second region in the United States, characterized the possibility of Hattery relocating to Nashville as a “giant deal”.
“He already works with so many investors and organizations in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, so for us to have someone sitting here that has access to those places, that’s enormous,” Burcham said, who reached out to McGeary about three months ago via Twitter. “My goal is to turn that from a conversation into something real.”
Burcham is looking to overflow the new 22,000 square foot, multi million dollar entrepreneur center with as much programming and resources as possible. The Hattery program would add another great avenue for Tennessee startups to take advantage of. Although still under wraps,we do know that there are other nationally known accelerator brands looking to partner with the new entrepreneur center when it opens in June.
If anyone can sell Nashville’s startup and entrepreneurial community it’s Burcham. He’s a salesmans salesman and with his vast experience in the startup space, coupled with his down home Nashville personality, it’s hard to not fall in love with the guy and his passion.
The team behind the Hattery is filled with Silicon Valley success stories and they’re looking to spread the wealth across the country. Their portfolio includes; Bright Funds, Cloud Physics, Zubhium, and Hipiti.
Evernote is known for it’s great relationship with developers. They hold hackathons on just about every continent, they hold the “devcup” and they support every single bit of creativity that developers can build using Evernote as the backbone. Some of the things that have come out of Evernote developers are really cool, and go way beyond the “notepad app” that Evernote started as. (my favorite Evernote app is Hello).
Now Evernote has announced they are expanding on the relationship with their developers once again. Evernote is opening a new on-site accelerator bringing their developers to SiliconValley. Docomo and Honda have partnered with Evernote to make the accelerator possible.
No matter where you are based, if you’re selected for the Evernote accelerator you and your team will be flown to Silicon Valley, you’ll get living accommodations, free food, office space, access to Evernote developers and engineers, group work sessions and feedback sessions and more. At the end of the program Evernote’s Rafe Needleman told Venturebeat, that “they’ll hold a demo day for Silicon Valley investors and press.”
Currently there are six billion API’s per month across the Evernote platform and Needleman and team are looking for even more. “There’s a million different ways to store, use, and get access to personal and private data, and so far we’ve only built eight of those apps,” Needleman says.
Teams chosen for the accelerator will come from the DevCup. Once they arrive in Silicon Valley not only will they be working with Evernote but they will also be working with Docomo Innovation Ventures and Honda Silicon Valley Labs. This could be a big benefit for Evernote developers whose apps deal directly with mobile and wireless or transportation.
Kyle
We told you today was going to be a big day for summer startup accelerator classes. Earlier today we reported on Memphis’ highly successful medical device accelerator Zeroto510 and their summer class. Before that we reported on Techstars Boulder class for summer 2013.
