Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post written by David Cohen, founder and CEO of the TechStars startup incubator.
TechStars, the well-known seed accelerator program with operations in Boulder, Boston, Seattle and New York City has unveiled it’s inaugural Seattle class today at a Demo Day event attended by about 200 investors in Seattle. TechStars has now been operating for four years.
According to results data that TechStars has published, six of the first twenty companies to go through the program have been acquired by larger companies, and about 70% of its companies have been funded and/or are now profitable. This week, TechStars is debuting 10 new startups from the inaugural Seattle class. The teams presented on Thursday morning in Seattle to about 200 VCs and angel investors for the first time. These companies are about three months old and have two or three founders. Here are our notes on the startups that presented.
Highlighter.com: The startup allow you to highlight, comment, and share on blogs, ebooks and PDFs on any device and manage your highlights.
Deal Co-op: Deal Co-op is a self-serve, white-lable daily deal marketing service for local organizations, publishers, and more.
The Shared Web: The Shared Web is a web based version of Flipboard, serving as a place to discover and share what matters to you the most.
Cabin Fever Toys: The startup wants to tackle the problem of childhood obesity in the United States with toys that measure, encourage and reward outdoor exercise. Cabin Fever Toys are also coupled with an online experience to help reinforce desired behaviors with game mechanics.
Kinizi: Kinizi is aiming to be the place to go when you’re looking for low cost apartment rentals. They’re essentially applying the daily deal model to apartment search, and enabling landlords to quickly fill vacancies using short term special offers.
RewardsForce: RewardsForce helps casinos manage their loyalty rewards programs. The company allows casinos to use iPads or other portable devices to increase repeat visitors and customer satisfaction.
Thinkfuse: Thinkfuse is building tools for team collaboration, and is hoping to create more effective way for teams to manage and share weekly status reports called This Week Last Week.
World Blender: World Blender is creating social location-based first person shooter games such as GPS Assassin.
GoMiles: GoMiles helps consumers track their airline miles and helps educate users on the best ways to protect, earn more, or redeem reward miles.
Giant Thinkwell: Giant Thinkwell is an imaginative social gaming platform featuring celebrity-based games. Their first game is called Raising Uncle Jesse, where players hilariously give birth to a baby John Stamos, and then raise him over time.