Y Combinator Winter 2013 Demo Day, Batch 2: Meet Lollipuff, Goldbely, And More
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Y Combinator Demo Day, where 47 startups are taking the stage to pitch investors and press, continues to roll along. Here are short descriptions of the second group of presenting companies (the descriptions in the headlines come from the companies themselves).
As we mentioned earlier, it’s a smaller batch of startups this time around, and since many of them are presenting on an off-the-record basis, this is the last group that we’ll be able to write about today. You can also check out our picks for the top seven startups from Demo Day, and our thought piece on a leaner, stronger, more modest Y Combinator.
Screenhero: Screen sharing
The company relates what it has built to YC alum Dropbox, since it’s “one of those products that lots of people want, but you have to get a lot of little things right” in order for it to actually be useful. Read more about Screenhero here.
PayTango: Biometric ID as a service
While payment cards may be on the way out, PayTango will have to compete with a slew of mobile wallets that are based on your phone. PayTango may need to rely on its strength in security, and focus on businesses where verified identity is critical. That might not be your local quickie mart. Read more about PayTango here.
Strikingly: Mobile optimized site builder
The founders are aiming to do for website building what Twitter has done for blogging — simplify it; they use an example of the blind person who easily created their website on Strikingly. “Mobile has reopened the entire website building market,” the founder asserted, viewing their market as the 75 percent of U.S. small businesses, such as event planners, that still don’t have a unique website. Read more about Strikingly here.
Prizeo: Celebrity raffles
According to Prizeo, it’s not only charities that benefit from celebrity- and brand-oriented philanthropy: Raffles are a great way to collect rich consumer data, making Prizeo a unique way to monetize and expand influence. The potential here is big, the company says — there are tens of thousands of “influencers” with hundreds of millions of fans around the world, and brands have told the company that they are willing to spend some $50,000 per campaign. Read more coverage of Prizeo here.
StyleUp: Daily fashion emails
Lollipuff: Authentic product auction
Since its soft launch in January, the platform has fulfilled over $45,000 in orders, growing 10x in three months. The startup has also seen 13 percent week-over-week user growth in the same amount of time.
Founder Fei Deyle came up with the idea after starting a successful blog as a designer authenticator. Deyle brings up the crux of the buying-designer-goods-online problem in one statistic: 75 percent of Herve Leger sold on eBay is fake: “Would you spend $3k on ‘Chanel’?” Eventually she’d like to scale this authentication process by a combination of software and human expertise.
“Over half of our users have never used eBay before,” she says, estimating the authentic designer retail market to be at $30 billion. Read more coverage of Lollipuff here.
Swish: Preorder platform
Swish has made a full-service pre-order platform that handles listings, payments, escrow and fulfillments. It seems to be hitting a nerve: Since launching last month, Swish has already become profitable. Going forward, Swish says it aims to be the marketplace on which a new generation of hardware sales will take place. Read more coverage of Swish here.
Semantics3: Product data
If it can sell a $12,000 a year license to just the top 1 percent of the 2 million U.S. e-commerce merchants, it could start earning $240 million a year and help a new wave of commerce entrepreneurs succeed. Read more coverage of Semantics3 here.
Medisas: Transfer patient info between shifts
Medias founder Gautam Sivakumar brings up a scary statistic that 66 percent of all serious medical errors stem from errors on these notes, resulting in the deaths of 10K people every month.
Optimized for web tablet and mobile, Shanharam assert that their SAAS powers a better doctor shift handoff and is a $1 billion market, “Enterprise sales happen fast when people are dying,” he says. He sees the opportunity as much bigger than just the handoff notes, which he calls “the spine of the medical record market.” “We can eventually save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people,” he says.
Swapbox: Dropbox for packages
Swapbox, which currently has 18 kiosk locations active in San Francisco and has inked a deal for a 15-kiosk pilot in Houston, claims that they have a leg up on Amazon Lockers (and, presumably, YC alum-turned-Google acquisition Bufferbox) because it’s an independent company. “Simply put, Amazon Lockers only work for Amazon,” Swapbox says. “Everybody can use a Swapbox.” Charging $2 per package, Swapbox says that it can quickly scale up to a $150 million annual revenue run rate with 10,000 locations — and that’s just 10 percent of the addressable market. Read our earlier coverage of Swapbox here.
Wefunder: Startup investing for everyman
Investors can cash out when their startup goes public, gets acquired, or sells stock on the secondary market. Wefunder will have to compete with FundersClub from the last Y Combinator class and other equity crowdfunders. But if the JOBS Act goes into effect as expected, it could make bottom-tier venture capitalists obsolete. That’s because like top-tier VCs, Wefunder believes the crowd can add value along with their cash. With 60 investors instead of a round of six comes an army of evangelists, recruiters, marketers and testers who could give their startups an edge. Read more coverage of Wefunder here.
Zenefits: Automated employee benefits
“Usually setting up health benefits involve a couple of weeks and a dozen trips to the fax machine,” Conrad says, “Zenefits is ‘set it and forget it,’” mechanizing a process that has thus far been completed using people and paper.
With Zenefits, all a small business needs to do is enter a new employee’s 401K info like name, email, salary, stock options, and hire date, and the startup generates an offer letter and a flow for getting insurance memberships up and running.
The service is offered free to clients, but makes revenue as a form of lead generation for insurance companies, making a $50K a year commission per company. “It’s rare to have a free service to clients with such significant reoccurring revenue,” Conrad says. Read more coverage of Zenefits here.
Terascore: School test software
In a surprising move, Terascore’s business model is to get teachers, not school districts, to pay for its platform. The districts are just too slow moving, but the startup believes teachers will pay $9 a month and change their behavior to get more of their precious off-hours back. Read more coverage of Terascore here.
Lawdingo: Lawyer marketplace
This is a big market: Legal services is a $250 billion market annually in the U.S., and law firm advertising is a $4.5 billion market. This startup aims to “elegantly” address both sides. Read more about Lawdingo here.
Meldium: Password manager for companies
With Meldium, a given team signs up for a single Meldium account, and members can use it in the form of a browser extension, enabling sign-ins for some 400 independent apps, including Box, GitHub, Salesforce, Box and Google Apps.
“When you fire someone you know they’re out,” founder Boris Jabes said, on the benefits of Meldium versus something like Google Docs to hold sensitive login information. The startup currently has 2,000 users and companies seem to be adopting Meldium from the bottom up because of the problem it solves, “My office manager can use this!”
The founders estimate the size of the market as $1.3 billion a year, with 55 million knowledge workers and 2 percent of that paying for the premium version. “It’s 2013 and we have these amazing cloud services managed with a spreadsheet,” Jabes reiterates. Read more about Meldium here.
Goldbely: Fab for food
And it seems to be taking off. Goldbely, which today announced a partnership with Facebook Gifts, says it just broke $100,000 in total sales and is seeing 100 percent month-over-month growth since its late 2012 launch, with 50 percent of its customers coming back as repeat users. Goldbely says it’s targeting an $11 billion market that is incredibly fragmented and dominated by lackluster brands — the top three players in the food gifting space are Omaha Steaks, 1-800 Flowers, and Harry & David, not exactly gourmet food providers. Read our earlier coverage of Goldbely here.