TechStars London’s Debut Demo Day: Meet The Ten Startups Who Presented

TechStars London held its 2013 Demo Day today, with a cohort of ten startup presenting, having graduated from the bootcamp-style 13 week program.

The startups presenting span a variety of industries and trends — from collaborative consumption to mobile payments and financial services, to game development and audio and video search.

TechStars previously said it received four times more applications to its London program than under the old Springboard operation, with a total of 1,302 applications from 72 different countries.

We’ll be breaking out our top picks later, but in the meantime here’s a round-up of the 10 startups that presented:

IPTVbeat Iptvbeat

Real-time analytics for TV viewing habits, delivered in a web dashboard form. The Slovenia-based startup was set up last year to serve national broadcasters, and reached 100,000 households thanks to those partnerships. Currently, the startup covers 250,000 households (with a third partnership announced today that will enable them to reach 1 million), already far more than competitors Nielsen and TNS, and it provides all the data live to broadcasters, which means they can actually see churn rates and watch users changing the channel or tuning in as it happens. Unlike existing solutions, Iptvbeat also enables tracking of time-shifted, DVR and TV Everywhere viewing, which is increasingly valuable data for TV service providers, broadcasters and advertisers.

ModaboundModabound

Monetising unworn clothes by building an online marketplace for women to buy and sell clothes locally, connecting them with other women in their area. Creating and publishing listings works with the same mechanics as posting a picture to Instagram, and payments are handled in-app via a third-party transaction processor. Modabound collects a commission on each transaction. Different from most online fashion resale marketplaces because of the tight focus on local. Modabound is targeting the Sex In The City Set first (aka New York City).

Moni_Logo_Only

Moni

Person-to-person mobile money transfer platform, aimed at simplifying the international remittance market. Moni is taking on the likes of Western Union, PayPal, banks and others who are already offering people the ability to send remittances to family in other countries in a market that is worth billions of dollars. The claim is that they are able to do it in an easier, more cost-effective and more ubiquitous way than any of the existing, big players, with a four-step process that lands money to the recipient’s bank account within 24 hours of it being sent. Co-founder Laurence Aderemi is an ex-Googler, where he was most recently head of mobile partnerships until leaving to form Moni; his co-founder Fernando Saturno had been an exec at Yahoo. Aderemi says that he was inspired to start Moni when finding out what a nightmare it was to send money to his mother in Nigeria. They have a prototype and regulatory approval in place already.

Screen Shot 2013-09-27 at 11.29.17OP3Nvoice

Pronounced “open voice”, OP3Nvoice is a platform enabling developers to add audio and video search to any application, to make that content searchable. It claims to be the “only” API to do voice and video search in this way, and say it’s providing “enabling technology to a whole new ecosystem.” They see opportunity for the tech in a huge number of verticals, from emergency response, to customer support, to investment banking, all of which they claim are looking for ways to unlock the value of the unstructured data housed in hours of audio and video recordings.

OsperOsper

Digital tools to teach young people how to manage money responsibly. The company has spent the past year speaking to families in the UK trying to find out how parents talk to their kids about money. It’s currently looking to recruit more families with kids to test its platform. The ultimate aim of the company is to help young people manage their own money with confidence (they describe themselves as a sort of “bank for young people”), but they appear to be pretty early stage, and focused on recruiting talent.

PayMins PayMins

A platform enabling online businesses to easily add the ability to accept mobile operator billing payments in a single click, with the idea that the easier experience will increase mobile customer conversion rates. “The only way you could get lower friction is by buying the thing just thinking about it,” said co-founder Patrick Walsh. The value proposition of PayMins lies in its ease of implementation for developers; “a single line of code” is required to get it up and running. As for why it has an advantage in an admittedly crowded space, the company has successfully lobbied government in the UK to change regulations around accepting payments to make sure its model is applicable, for one.

PeerbyPeerby

A peer-to-peer platform for borrowing items you need from your neighbours. It’s a play on collaborative consumption that intends to capitalize on the fact that people are unaware that it’s possible to borrow things from others they don’t know, but seem to be keen on doing so with a proper infrastructure in place. The startup already has a strong foothold at home in the Netherlands, and is looking to expand to more neighborhoods internationally. “The world is moving to an economy of sharing, and Peerby is the next step in that,” co-founder Daan Weddepohl said today.

PlayCanvasPlayCanvas

Web-based game development tools, enabling developers to collaborate in real-time, find dev talent within the community and publish games hosted on PlayCanvas’ servers. PlayCanvas also offers a marketplace for instant distribution, and since its games are HTML5-based, they’re instantly playable in any browser on desktop or mobile. It also offers APIs for monetizing the games. Games built with PlayCanvas appear much more advanced than browser-based games of old, based on what they showed off on stage.

QuanTemplateQuanTemplate

A cloud-platform taking the insurance trading market online, including document management, risk analytics and regulatory reporting. QuanTemplate says that the market they’re address is worth $4.7 trillion, and has been left behind compared to other financial trading industries. Brokers still physically queue to meet underwriters, for instance, and deal with reams of actual paper they lug around.

VetCloudVetCloud

SaaS and CRM for vets to help with front-end office management, appointment tracking and providing portable electronic health records for pets, with a long-term goal of becoming a big data platform for the pet industry and animal agriculture. In some markets, the startup is parntering with local government, and hopes to be able to eventually help contribute to the public interest, by doing things like detecting outbreaks of bovine maladies as soon as they start to appear, for instance.