It’s that time of year again: dozens of Silicon Valley’s top investors have packed Y Combinator’s offices in Mountain View, CA for the eleventh Demo Day, where the latest batch of YC companies show off what they’ve built (and look to secure their next round of funding). This is the biggest Demo Day yet, with 36 companies presenting — and the event has become so popular with investors that YC is now offering three different sessions spread across two days.
My notes on the presenting companies are below, along with links to any relevant stories we’ve already written about them. Note that some of the companies presenting today are off-the-record, so they aren’t listed.
FutureAdvisor — See our launch coverage here — Gives you personal recommendations on financial planning. The company says that human advisors won’t give some of this advice, because advisors want to keep getting their commissions. Why hasn’t anyone done it before? It took Mint to train people that it was okay to hand over real login credentials. 12% of visitors so far give full, real credentials to sign up. Over $170 million assets under analysis so far.
AdGrok — See our launch coverage here — Online marketing for the masses. Install it, and you’ll see a tab on the left hand side of the screen when you browse to your site. Clicking the tab will allow you to edit your AdWords campaigns as you’re looking at the products and content you’re serving ads against.
Koduco — See our coverage on their launch here — Multiplayer iPad games that focus on collaborative gameplay. Most games today don’t really take advantage of the tablet — Koduco is making games that are specifically built for it, allowing you to play with multiple people simultaneously using a single device. The studio released a new game yesterday, and also has an array of older board game apps.
FanVibe – See our launch coverage here — FanVibe, which was formerly known as FanPulse, is a sports-focused site that gives you a way to interact with friends and like-minded fans online. The site also offers stats and game schedules.
GinzaMetrics – See our launch coverage here — Provides a dashboard for monitoring your SEO performance, showing you how your keywords are performing without forcing you to manually compile your data. SEO is worth 9x Google Ads. SEO is a big market — companies across US spend $3B a year, due to grow to $5B in 2014. Currently, the service only scans data from Google and Yahoo, but Bing is coming soon.
HireHive – See our launch coverage here — Video prescreens for hiring. Have had 400 people already apply to jobs on HireHive. Airbnb has already used HireHive to collect written resumes and video. “Video hiring is going to happen and companies are willing to pay for it.”
Hipmunk — See our launch coverage here — Hides flights that you probably aren’t going to be interested in. In our first week alone we’ve sold $350,000 worth of flight tickets. In addition to that we’re easily profitable. Founded by former Reddit founder and youngest O’Reilly author ever (he wrote a book for them when he was 16).
PagerDuty — See our launch coverage here — “We wake you up when shit breaks”. Take alerts from your monitoring systems and call, SMS, email when something is going wrong. Track issues using a control panel. We’re profitable, growing 21% month over month revenue. Just broke through $10K/month. Have AdMob, 37Signals, StackOverflow for alerts. They either pay us or have to build it themselves. There are 3 million sysadmins x $500 per seat per year, is $1.5B market.
The Fridge — See our launch coverage here — “Facebook without Facebook”. Sharing your content without having to worry about accidentally sharing it with someone you don’t mean to have see it. Can be used for specific interests, temporary networks, sharing party photos among close friends. Soft launched in early July, growing 30% organic growth week over week.
Chart.io — See our launch coverage here — Founded by former TechCrunch Research analyst Dan Levine and Dave Fowler. During his time at TC, Dan worked on CrunchBase, would run custom queries, pass off to someone to put data into charts which was expensive and time-consuming. Spent a few months coding a solution. There should be a tool for everyone that can do this. There are other companies that do this — Tableau, costs a lot and requires consulting, training. Chart.io is real-time.
Gantto — See our launch coverage here — Trying to replace Microsoft Project, which doesn’t let users present directly from the app (you need to make them by hand in PowerPoint). Former VP Engineering and CTO of a public medical robotics company (Hansen Medical). MS Project makes $1 bilion a year. Launched 10 days ago 2000 signups since.
Brushes – Premiere illustrations done with iPad. 250K paid users. “You hold the record for the most profitable startup on Demo Day” — Paul Graham. Both are Apple veterans. “We will be the Adobe of touch devices”.
OhLife — See our launch coverage here “The personal journal you’ll actually keep.” 50% of people who write one entry on OhLife will keep writing at least every other day. We don’t have to wait for people to come to our site — we can email people every day and we can put a targeted ad in each email. Active users is steadily going up. 25% of support emails have actual word “love” in them.
Simperium (SimpleNote) –See our launch coverage here – Have the simperium platform and then simple products built on top of it, including Simplenote . 10K users earlier this year, now over 145K users. Over 400 third-party developers. Revenue earned through promotions and subscriptions. Started with simplenote as a showcase for the platform. Now we’re expanding our products to attract even more third party products.
GazeHawk –See our launch coverage here— Bringing eye tracking to everyone. It used to cost $40K to get custom hardware. Our technology lets you do it with web cams. Launched three weeks ago, already profitable. Clients include Ikea, Mozilla, Fandango. Going to eventually help use this to fix brand advertising.
Rapportive –See our launch coverage here — “Rich contact profiles inside Gmail”. See who a person is, recent tweets, LinkedIn. Third startup from the team (built and sold company before). Just raised a seed round. And they can now show you a company’s investors and recent news directly from your Gmail using CrunchBase.
MessageParty – See our launch coverage here — Chat+Location. In scenarios where groups and location are tied (high school students want to talk to each other, not the world). Another example is here at YC. First version arrived in App Store on Thursday. How come nobody has done it? It wasnt until recently that we’ve been able to take for granted that people have location-aware devices. MIT team.
Whereoscope — See our launch coverage here — There are 20 million families times $100 dollars a year is $2B market. Millions of parents have already paid AT&T, Sprint, Verizon for their tracking services. There’s a technology shift happening as location services move from carrier network to devices. 400 families using service.
Leftronic — Making large-screen dashboards for companies to see key metrics. Dashboard in YC office shows live Hacker News stats. We have all kinds of visualizations. WePay is another customer — shows where customers are coming from, how much they’re spending, and what they’re saying online. Companies are making dashboards themselves. We save them time and money. We are profitable, it’s viral. People pay hundreds per screen for our visualizations. Right now they’re in space for web dashboards for web companies, but could see it expand to finance, operations, marketing, CEOs.
inDinero — See our launch coverage here — inDinero can import data from bank accounts to create one financial dashboard. 3,000 businesses have signed up. We’re profitable. Startups in our space do well because businesses have no problem paying for someone to handle finances like this. Want to be single place for every business to manage finances. What Mint did to Quicken, we are doing to Quickbooks.
Teevox —See our launch coverage here — Turns mobile devices into remotes for the Internet. We don’t make users download software or acquire hardware. First product is a remote for watching things online. Released the app on Thursday. 1200 users in first 24 hours. Our technology allows us to remote control any website. Today announces will soon release API.
1000memories — See our launch coverage here — Front page of site has big photo, navigation at the top. Users can submit stories. Friends and family can share photos and stories. Memory pags are doubling every 14 days. Over 1,300 pages. Viral coefficient of 1.5, doubling every 14 days.. Obituaries cost $1,300 to put in the chronicle. What people want o pay for are custom domains, design templates, media storage. Goal is to become “the place” where everyone is remembered.
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