Columbia University is just about to finish the second class of its accelerator program focused on NYC student entrepreneurs, Almaworks. Demo day tomorrow will cap off the two month program for the 8 companies that were vetted and selected to receive mentorship from industry professionals including Roger Chen of Genacast Ventures, Alex Yagoda of Advancit Capital, and Mahbod Moghadam, Founder of Genius. The program provides no funding for the startups but also takes no equity as the IP remains with the student entrepreneurs while they are able to leverage the resources of the Columbia entrepreneurial community to draw investment, validate their product/service, and refine their offering. The first class has gone on to raise more than $4M in capital collectively thus far since graduating last fall.
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE 8 COMPANIES THAT ARE PRESENTING AT ALMAWORKS DEMO DAY
Cuttime
Cuttime, Ryan Ziemba, Jason Lekberg, and Swupnil Sahai in 2014, is a marketing intelligence platform that provides audience profiling and partnership recommendations for brands and recording artists. By reducing the time to sort through online and online consumer data, the analytics platform is able to suggest meaningful partnerships that make sense for both sides. Depending on the accuracy of the analytics and matching platform, there may also be a rosy future outside of music space for this startup.
Readism
Readism, is a web app and Chrome extension that will provide perosnalized and accurate estimated reading times for any article, book, or webpage. I’ve always been annoyed by the random numbers that often in appear in many articles that really take no account of the individual’s reading speed, level, or aptitude. Using natural language processing algorithims and real time analysis, it looks like this startup is focused on not only solving this annoyance but also allowing you to manage your time better and be more productive. FYI – according to Readism, it will take you 1 minute to read this article.
Parsegon
Parsegon, is an algorthim that translates 5 million permutations of English into texbook styled, object formatted math. Don’t know that means? Well here is a simple example: writing out a formula like this on you computer takes forever with all the special characters that you need to google to find how to access on your standard keyboard – 
. With Parsegon you will be able to just write out what you means in simple english and the formula will be rendered for you. While not a solution that addresses the needs of the masses, it is certainly a niche problem that needs to be solved for a subset of the population.
Froth
Froth is a monthly subscription service that allows subscribers to receive 5 drinks at partner bars for $10/month. Recently, we covered Hooch which offers a very similar service but provides a drink a day for the same $10/month. Given the similar business models but disparity in in value proposition, I fully expect that Froth will need to pivot and/or offer more drinks on a monthly basis.
Shruta Care
Shruta Care, is a discovery platform for healthcare services in India. The company is aiming to position itself as the ZocDoc of India where there is a burgeoning number of middle class individuals needing healthcare.
Runa Health
Runa Health is a recommendation engine that estimates your projected medical costs across all plans available based on your location. The site is presently catered towards the Hispanic community.
45S Club
45S Club is an subscription service for vinyl records, which according to the startup grew 52.8% in the US last year. This one seeks to gain traction in the the oldie but goodie crowd.
MyJAMS
MyJams is a discovery engine for performance artists to find opportunities to perform at local venues and bars.