After 90 days under the mentorship of Techstars, 12 startups pitched their ideas to an enthusiastic crowd of investors and members of the tech community at NYC Spring 2014 Demo Day on Thursday. All the presentations were good, but these four startups really stood out.
Lynxsy
Founders: Susan Zheng (CEO), Connie Wong (COO), Quentin Tai (CTO)
With $250,000 in gross billings, Lynxsy plays matchmaker for recent college grads looking for non-technical startup jobs. Its claim to fame? Reducing hiring time for startups from 23 days to a mere 7.
Recent grads import their LinkedIn profile to the app and make a brief autobiographical video to apply. Employers review applicants' skill sets, prior experience, and communication skills. Then, they can hire and pay their new employees through Lynxsy. It's free for job seekers, which is a major incentive for cash-strapped grads.
Rival{Theory}
Founders: Amanda Solosky, Bill Klein (CEO)
"Emotionally intelligent characters are the future," Rival{Theory}'s Amanda Solosky said Thursday morning. The startup creates emotionally intelligent, responsive characters in video games using artificial intelligence. Characters learn about your preferences (for example, that your favorite color is blue and that your weapon of choice is a sword), respond to your voice, and can even jump from game to game with you.
Rival{Theory} presented its new software, Sentio, using Io, a character who recognized Amanda's voice. Io seemed to be a complex, responsive character. Sentio creates a profile that's based on its memory of you, and Sentio characters learn more about you over time. Its characters are driven by their own desires and change based on their experiences. Solosky said 6,000 developers will have access to Sentio when it's released on Jan. 15, 2015.
SocialSign.in
Founders: Mike Perrone (CEO)
SocialSign.in lets businesses build relationships with their customers using Wi-Fi as the medium. When a business uses SocialSign.in, customers who connect to the business' free Wi-Fi are prompted to sign in with their Facebook account or with their email address. Customers can access free Wi-Fi and are given calls to action: "Like us on Facebook" or "Download our app," for instance.
Aside from providing branded Wi-Fi, companies can tap into SocialSign.in's other benefits, like easily acquiring customers' email addresses for mailing lists, gathering visitor insights, and improving how they interact with their customers on social media. For instance, with SocialSign.in a company can look at its customers' top collective Facebook likes. Using this information, companies might cater to their clientele's music taste or preferred reading material.
Codestarter
Founders: Theresa Preston-Warner (CEO), Tom Preston-Warner (strategic adviser)
"We're on a mission to give a laptop to every kid who wants to learn how to code," Theresa Preston-Werner, Codestarter's CEO and cofounder said Thursday morning. The first nonprofit startup to participate at Techstars NYC, Codestarter raises money for laptops by crowdfunding them one by one.
After installing Linux and a bunch of programming languages on Acer Chromebook laptops, which cost $250 each, Codestarter sends the laptops to CoderDojo. The volunteer coding program then gives away the laptops to kids who want to learn how to code.
Preston-Werner's husband, Tom, the GitHub cofounder who resigned over a scandal last month, is Codestarter's strategic adviser. Since Codestarter is a nonprofit, Theresa asked investors to tell other companies they invest in about Codestarter. As incentive for donating money to Codestarter, companies will have their logos placed on each laptop they pay for. During the presentation, Theresa announced that the nonprofit, which she originally started under the name Omakase, already had 111 pledged laptops.
Check out the full list of participants in Techstars' NYC Spring 2014 Demo Day.