The Final 7 Disrupt SF Startups: Expect Labs, Gyft, Lit Motors, Prior Knowledge, Saya, YourMechanic And Zumper

Tuesday, September 11th, 2012
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This year’s TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco has been the biggest yet. Nearly 3,000 people poured in to watch a wonderful keynote by top product CEO Jack Dorsey, talks with legends like Reid Hoffman and Ben Horowitz, and they were standing in the aisles during Michael Arrington’s historic post-IPO interview with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg today.

Tomorrow, we end on a high note with the Startup Battlefield grand finale…

But before that, in addition to a panel on all things Apple with some of the world’s most vociferous Apple experts, we’ve got talks from Biz Stone, Evan Williams and Vinod Khosla planned for the day.

For the Battlefield, we’ve narrowed down the 30 companies in our startup battlefield to seven startups competing for the grand prize: the Disrupt Cup and a $50,000 stipend.

Finals judges Michael Arrington (CrunchFund), Roelof Botha (Sequoia Capital), Chris Dixon (Founder Collective), David Lee (SV Angel), Marissa Mayer (Yahoo!) and David Sacks (Yammer) will have the daunting task of picking a winner from the worthy.

Here are the seven finalists, in alphabetical order:

Expect Labs’ MindMeld app analyzes your conversations in real time and pulls pertinent information so you’re always in the know.

Gyft is a new mobile application that allows you to buy, save and redeem gift cards using your mobile phone.

Lit Motors’ C-1 is the world’s first gyroscopically stabilized, two-wheeled all-electric vehicle.

Prior Knowledge offers Veritable, a predictive database for application developers.

Saya Mobile provides an instant messaging and SMS service to feature phones and is geared specifically to emerging markets like Africa.

YourMechanic is a peer-to-peer car repair marketplace that enables mechanics to fix users’ cars at their home or office.

Zumper is building a more efficient apartment rental market using data from landlords to find the right tenants.


Company: Expect Labs
Website: expectlabs.com
Launch Date: 2011
Funding: $2.4M

Expect Labs is a technology company based in San Francisco, founded in 2011 by Tim Tuttle and Moninder “Mo” Jheeta. The two first met while working at the video search technology company Truveo and built a popular search platform that served as the engine behind some of the most popular video destinations on the web. During their time at Truveo, Tim and Mo witnessed how advances in distributed computing could enable complex analysis of media streams, including audio...

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Company: Gyft
Website: gyft.com
Launch Date: January 13, 2012
Funding: $1.25M

Gyft is a mobile gift card app that allows customers to buy, store, send, and redeem gift cards conveniently from their mobile device. Gyft is seamlessly integrated with Facebook so users can easily send messages and gift cards to their friends around special events. Consumers can also upload existing plastic gift cards to the app. Download Gyft for FREE today in the iTunes app store or at http://www.gyft.com.

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Company: Lit Motors
Website: litmotors.com
Launch Date: February 2010

Lit Motors are designing and developing the future of urban transportation. The company was founded by life-long builder and DIYer Danny Kim. Following a near-death experience while hand-building two Land Rovers, Danny was inspired to “chop the car in half” and invent a new vehicle platform aimed at urban drivers. He and his team are designing and developing a self-balancing two-wheeled electric vehicle — currently code-named “C-1” — that combines the romance and efficiency of a motorcycle with the safety and...

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Company: Prior Knowledge
Launch Date: September 2011
Funding: $1.4M

Prior Knowledge makes insight and predictions as easy as using a database, by building infer-structure – infrastructure for inference. Veritable, their predictive database, goes beyond traditional big data analytics by learning the deep structure of data and generating predictions that reflect all of these relationships. The complex probabilistic models behind PK’s infer-structure grew out of many years of research at MIT. Prior Knowledge continues to advance the state-of-the-art in probabilistic inference in order to tackle the size and complexity of...

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Company: Saya
Website: saya.im
Launch Date: August 1, 2011

Saya brings rich mobile messaging to billions of mass market devices in emerging markets

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Company: YourMechanic
Website: yourmechanic.com
Launch Date: February 1, 2011
Funding: $1.8M

We are building an online marketplace where you can find the best local mechanics. The mechanic will come to your home or your office to fix your car. We are disrupting the car repair industry the way airbnb disrupted the hotel industry.

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Company: Zumper
Website: zumper.com
Funding: $1M

Zumper is building a more efficient & transparent apartment rental market. Launched on the TC Disrupt stage in September 2012 in the final of the Battlefield competition. We’re hiring, get in touch!

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