Y Combinator Winter 2013 Demo Day, Batch 1: Meet Wevorce, FlightCar, Thalmic, And More
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It’s Demo Day time once again for Y Combinator, the startup incubator that has become a Silicon Valley institution since shaping its first class of startups back in 2005.
A handful of us TechCrunch writers are here in Mountain View, Calif, at the Computer History Museum, where the 47 startups that made up YC’s Winter 2012 class are set to pitch to a room filled with tech investors, executives and press (as you’ll see from our co-bylined posts, covering YC Demo Day is a group effort.)
This is the 16th ever Demo Day being put on by YC, and this class is notably smaller than the past two startup classes to graduate out of the program — 66 startups graduated from YC’s Winter 2012 class, and 84 startups graduated out of Summer 2012.
Kicking off the event with onstage remarks, Y Combinator founder Paul Graham said that he feels like the contracted size of this class means that there are essentially no weak startups in the bunch — which will make it more competitive for the investors on hand. All of YC’s Winter 2013 companies are in the process of raising equity funding, aside from one company that is a non-profit, which is looking for donations. All the founders will be adhering to the recently composed “Handshake Protocol” when negotiating investments on-site, he said.
As always, TechCrunch will be on hand with full Demo Day coverage. Not all of these startups are ready for publicity — so some are presenting their apps on an “off the record” basis — but we’ll be covering all the on the record pitches in a series of posts. 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.
Here are the 16 companies that presented in the first on-the-record batch from YC Winter 2013 Demo Day:
Wevorce: The tech-powered standard for civilized divorce
Wevorce offers a system for handling divorces that attempts to avoid the pain and cost of going to court. It covers six broad steps — divorce planning, co-parent planning, a parenting agreement, financial mapping, financial agreements, and divorce settlement. Its service is a combination of divorce professionals and online tools.
Apparently, the system is working for early customers. The company says that 109 out of 110 Wevorce clients have never gone to court with their divorce cases.
Airware: The DOS of drones
FlightCar: Airport car sharing
Fivetran: A spreadsheet for number crunchers
Thalmic: A wearable gesture device
CircuitLab: Circuit design tools
The founders estimate their market to be $500 million, because of CircuitLabs’ influence over which components the developers using the platform choose and targeting companies like Nintendo who compete to sell parts. They describe the product as “Adwords inside an engineering tool.” Upstream of the supply chain, the startup is seeing 15 percent week over week growth, with 80,000 users since its launch a year ago. Read our previous coverage of CircuitLab here.
SimplyInsured: Kayak for health insurance
With SimplyInsured, you don’t need a broker. You just go online and get side-by-side comparisons of all the major providers. The company has been seeing 60 percent monthly growth in recurring revenue for the past six months.
Zaranga: Vacation rental marketplace
Zaranga wants to bring demand-based dynamic pricing to the vacation rentals market. It wants to do what Airbnb did to Craigslist, but to incumbent vacation rental-by-owner site VRBO. Zaranga addresses the special needs of property managers including special integration, custom terms and conditions, and variable pricing to make sure they get the highest rate possible. The site’s listings are nearly doubling each month. The “Airbnb for…” model might seem a bit tired, but there’s still unused inventory in plenty of verticals. So while Silicon Valley might want something fresh, it doesn’t mean Zaranga won’t succeed. Check out our launch story for more info on Zaranga.
Microryza: Kickstarter for science
With Microryza, research is no longer limited to universities. “It turns everyone with a credit card card into a modern day patron of science,” the founder said. Read our launch coverage of Microryza here.
Buildzoom: Yelp for contractors
The company makes money by partnering with contractors and charging them a 7 percent commission. You can read more in our launch coverage.
Errplane: Real-time application monitoring
In one of the most aggressive pitches of the day, Errplane lashed out at its incumbent competitor, saying “We’re going to turn New Relic, into a relic.” Check out our launch story on Errplane for more info.
Padlet: Put stuff online
The founders described the typical Padlet use case as needing to share images of Abraham Lincoln for a class, asserting that Google Docs or Facebook wouldn’t quite cut it. The company hopes to monetize by attracting hundreds of millions of people to its simple tool, 2 percent of which are (hopefully) paid. Read our earlier launch coverage of Padlet here.
BitNami: App store for server apps
BitNami is an app store for enterprise applications that runs in the cloud or behind your company’s firewall. The founders say that you can search for apps on the site, hit the “launch” button, and have an app that’s configured and ready to use in minutes.
The company is already profitable, with millions of dollars in recurring revenue (presumably annually). Customers include MasterCard, Boeing, and Fiat. And it says there are 1 million new deployments of its software every month. You can read more in our launch coverage here.
Teespring: Kickstarter for T-shirts
Teespring is one of the hot Demo Day startups because it joined Y Combinator when it was already earning serious revenue. Since then it’s been growing 46 percent per month and will do $750,000 in revenue in April alone. Its founder Walker Williams claims Teespring will be bigger than Threadless by the end of the year. The Internet is bringing together like minds, and Teespring could help people express their affinities in the real world, while funding the groups and earning a tidy profit itself. Read our earlier coverage here.
Posmetrics: POS feedback on tablets
The founders call the response aggregation tool a “real time pulse on location” and hope to pick up some of the millions that chains like Sears spend on broken feedback systems. Their research shows that 35.6 percent of customers give feedback when stories use Posmetrics to cull it, versus the very inefficient 1.9 percent that respond with email surveys. The product also alerts managers immediately to negative responses.
The founders assert that clients have seen a 1.5 Tripadvisor star increase since using the platform, and that even a one-star Tripadvisor increase results in 28 percent greater revenue. The startup hopes that its subscription model will eventually be used in over 1.1 million retail stores. Read our launch coverage of Posmetrics here.
Watsi: A nonprofit to fund treatments
Watsi is Y Combinator’s first nonprofit. (Or, as YC’s Paul Graham joked, it’s the incubator’s first company that’s “intentionally” not-for-profit.) It’s a crowdfunding platform for global health care. For example, the first patient it helped was a 12-year-old girl in Nepal whose parents couldn’t afford transportation to the country’s capital for surgery. Watsi’s community crowdfunded the project in eight days.
The company says that it’s working with 13 medical organizations, and that it funds 17 patients per week on average. And 100 percent of the donations go directly to fund the medical care, with Watsi planning to cover costs several ways, including optional tips. You can read more of our coverage here.