The summer of 2016 is over and demo day season in NYC is in full swing. Over the last four months, our friends at Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator groomed 12 companies in preparation for their demo day this week. These startups, the Summer 2016 ERA class, received $40K in investment, mentorship from over 200 industry professionals, and office space at ERA’s headquarters. Previous ERA alumni companies include Bespoke Post, Public Stuff (acquired), CardFlight, The Square Foot, TripleLift, and Seamless Docs.
The class includes startups focused on a variety of vertical and niches including augmented reality, healthcare, shipping logistics, and eyewear.
CLICK HERE TO SEE THE 12 NYC STARTUPS FROM ERA’S SUMMER CLASS
SensorKit
The wearable revolution is among us and this startup has built an exercise, activity, and gesture recognition platform. It’s fashionable to have a wearable and track your activity but what are you really tracking? Founded by Ken Kruger and Houtan Fanisalek, SensorKit has built an SDK for developers to detect actual movements and specific exercises. The company’s first application using the SDK, Your Move, can track bench presses, squats, and rows, reps, sets, and resting times. The second is Kettlebug, a fitness tracker that sits on your Kettlebell. Catered towards developers, this startup is building the infrastructure for wearables rather than chasing trends in particular devices.
CoLoadX
According to Statista, 60% of all world trade is done through ocean freight. In Europe, Asia, and North America that accounted for over $56 billion in revenue for ocean freight companies. Yet this is an industry, where there is very little technology integration, Founded by Fauad Shariff and Petere Miner, both experienced veterans in the shipping and logistics space, CoLoadX is cloud-based technology B2B marketplace that provides transparency and efficiency into an industry that has been notorious for a lack of both. The platform promises to deliver savings of up to 25% on ocean freight procurement costs through its use.
FROTH
Founded in August of 2015, FROTH, which stands for First Round On the House, is a beverage discovery and tasting platform where users and their friends can get their first round of drinks for free in exchange for providing feedback to the venue on the tasting and the experience. The company pivoted from the subscription drink-a-day model that it had when it entered ERA and now is focused on data-driven experiential marketing.
Turnout.ai
Founded by Dave Friedman and Julie Newman, Turnout.ai is an analytics platform that mines public sentiment data and with the use of natural language processing is able to provide targeted insight that are much more reliable and accurate than conventional polling firms. The company began the program as Mayvin.
Pairprep
Originating at Columbia University, Pairprep, founded by Sean Lanning and John Brozena, is a platform for creating and managing digital educational content. The platform has a number of features including the ability to digitize content so that the assignments can be more interactive and customized, a collaborative database for teachers to share and discover assignments, and it also allows teachers to digitize assignments so that they are able to grade quicker.
inkHunter
Thinking about getting a tattoo but not sure how it will look on your body? Inkunter, is a free app that uses augmented reality and your phone to show you in real time what a tattoo will look like on your skin. Users are able to upload their own designs or choose preset tattoos from a gallery. The app, originally developed in the Ukraine by Oleksandra Rohachova and Pavlo Razumovski, is currently available for iOS and Android.
Felix Gray
Remember the blue light craze recently associated with cell phones? Screen protectors were designed to prevent harm to users. Apple even recently introduced new color settings for iOS specifically for the evening hours. All this is to address digital eye strain or computer vision syndrome – yes, it’s a real condition. Well Felix Gray, founded by David Rogers and Chris Benedict, has taken it one step further and has now introduced fashionable glasses that mitigate the effects of the dreaded blue light as well as glare. This company just may be the blue light-friendly version of Warby Parker.
Caylent
Founded by JP La Torre, Jason McCellan, and Stefan Thorpe in August of 2015, Caylent is a platform for developers allowing them to build, manage, and deploy applications into the cloud in just a few clicks. Dubbed as “Dev-Ops-as-a-service”, the startup’s platform is already integrated with AWS, Slack, and Docker.
Koa
Founded by mortgage veteran, Mike Hartman, Koa is a platform for mortgages where buyers and sellers of secondary loans can come transact and manage their needs for pricing, due diligence, and servicing. However, it is not a marketplace but rather an infrastructure that can be easily integrated into third parties as a FinTech infrastructure play. The company started the program as ResiDDS.
DogParker
Dog Parker, founded by Chelsea Brownridge and Todd Schechter, is a service for man’s best friend and their owners. How often have you been out and about and you can’t find a place to put Buster when you need to pop into a shop or café that doesn’t allow dogs? With DogParker, dog owners can “park” their dogs in smart connected doghouses available on the sidewalk. The smart houses are climate controlled, sanitized, maintained, and monitored by video feeds so that owners have peace of mind.
ClearChat
Founded by Brendan Diaz, Jonathan Warren, and Andy Johnson in May of 2014, ClearChat is a secure messaging platform for enterprise teams that offers encryption and control over your data as offerings such as Slack, Dropbox, and Gmail have complete access to your files. In addition to chat, the platform also provides file sharing and file storage options. The platform has been texted by 20,000 users that are sending over 150,000 messages per month.
Karate Health
Karate Health, founded by Arif Sorathia and Brett Adelman, is a mobile platform for those affected with chronic conditions like lupus. The platform provides peer conversations along with the educational materials to improve outcomes. The company appears to have pivoted from its earlier iteration, which focused on medicinal adherence through incentivization.
