Y Combinator Summer 2013 Demo Day, Batch 2: Meet Meta, Lob, Amulyte, Weilos And More
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Just as the wheels of time continue to turn, the 49 new startups out of Y Combinator continue to churn.
Batch One is now behind us, and a new group of startups are taking the stage. As per usual, TechCrunch is here to bring you complete coverage of each of these companies, ranging from a “hearing aid 2.0” to a “Netflix for fashion” to “credit cards for old people.” [Update: For our favorites from across all three batches, check out TechCrunch’s top 8 startups from Demo Day]
And without giving away too many hints, there might even be a Google Glass competitor in this batch.
Batch 2: Go!
Amulyte: Amulet for aged
The pendant sells for $149 and the service is $29 a month to provide a little peace of mind to seniors and their families. The company is working with a retirement home on a test of the service and to get it deployed in the market, but it sees a $10 billion market opportunity just in the U.S. alone.
Check out our earlier coverage of Amulyte here.
Le Tote: Netflix for fashion
The service, which Le Tote likes to call “the Netflix for women’s fashion,” has proven quite popular since it launched in October 2012: The company is making $70,000 in monthly revenue and is growing by 30 percent month-over-month. Its user base, which currently spans 48 states, has a retention rate of 93 percent.
Check out more coverage on Le Tote right here.
IXI-Play: Robot toy for kids
The toy itself retails for $299 but it will also come with an app store and other accessories. It’s a hardware platform that can have customizable skins for different characters so it can either build its own IP or license out IP from other toy companies.
Butter Systems: Restaurant menu on a tablet
Sam Brin, Butter Systems’ co-founder (and younger brother of Google’s Sergey Brin), says his product boosts average check size by 13 percent. It doesn’t have to replace waiters, but can help cut down their workload with buttons like “Check please!” They’ll have to keep people from stealing the tablets, and compete with E La Carte, iMenu, MenuPad, and more. Tablet menus do seem inevitable, so it should be an interesting battle to watch.
Check out more coverage of Butter Systems right here.
Asseta: Capital equipment marketplace
The big problem with previous marketplaces of this type is that companies weren’t properly incentivized to list their used equipment, but Asseta has collected more than 28,000 equipment listings. So far, it’s done $212,000 in sales, and sees a $5 billion market opportunity, based on the $100 billion in used capital sales and its own 5 percent commission.
Check out earlier coverage of Asseta right here.
Hum: Chat to replace email
It makes it easy to see who else is currently viewing a thread. You can “read later” any threads you can’t get to right now, or pin important conversations to the top of the app. The company made a lot of bold claims about how it will transition you away from email as you use it more, but didn’t provide many specifics. Hum will have a steep uphill battle against incumbents like Yammer and Asana, and email, which has been harder to disrupt than most people realize.
True Link: Credit cards for old people
They give out credit cards to the elderly and route all transactions in the Visa network through their own servers, where they double-check the transactions to see if they’re reasonable (like spending a few dollars at an ice cream parlor) or to see if they’re from known scams. The company says credit card companies make $1.9 billion a year from this demographic.
Check out more coverage of True Link right here.
LocalOn: Web marketing platform for small businesses
Together LocalOn and the papers offers businesses white-labeled tools for building websites and other utilities web hosting, directories member billing, and widgets. LocalOn also sells to the newspapers themselves. While it’s a crowded market that’s tough to scale, someone has to get these businesses set up on the web, and then hopefully mobile.
Check out further coverage of LocalOn right here.
Weilos: Weight loss coaching
One of the reasons that Weilos works is that its coaches have been there — they’ve all lost weight themselves. Weilos is going after a HUGE market — the 200 million Americans in the U.S. who are overweight, and who spend $61 billion on things that don’t actually work.
Check out even more coverage of Weilos right here.
SoundFocus: Hearing aid 2.0
The app first gives the user a simple test, and once it understands your particular hearing ability, tunes your music from your iTunes music library or Spotify so that you can actually hear better. In the last week, SoundFocus reached 100,000 songs.
Eventually, the team will offer an adapter, and after that, wireless earbuds that will offer the same audio-tuned experience for all of your gadgets, not just the iPhone. Those headphones will only cost $70 but the total addressable market here is $9.5 billion.
Check out more coverage of SoundFocus right here.
Webflow: Responsive site builder for designers
According to Webflow, this “automates away the middle man” (a characterization that web developers may chafe at, to be sure) because “everything developers can do in code, designers can do in Webflow.” It’s attracted a lot of attention so far: In the two weeks since Webflow launched, 25,000 people have used the service, many of them using the app for more than three hours a day.
Check out further coverage of Webflow right here.
Lob: Printing API
The company says that it’s a hassle for startups to handle their relationships with local print shops, negotiate pricing and send files back and forth through e-mail. So they’ve built an abstraction layer that does this with one simple API call. They say that they’re growing at a rate of 200 percent week-over-week.
Check out earlier coverage of Lob right here.
Estimote: Retail store sensors
Ultimately, this aims to fulfill the same promise that NFC and QR codes have tried (and mostly failed) to deliver. So far, the response has been encouraging: The startup says it is already shipping devices to major retail partners all over the world.
You can check out further coverage of Estimote right here.
DoorDash: Restaurant delivery
The company is averaging 44-minute delivery times, thanks to its logistics software — and it’s doing that in the suburbs, not in cities, like most of the big new delivery startups. But it sees a bigger opportunity than just restaurants: Positioning itself as the “FedEx of today,” it hopes to provide a logistics framework that goes beyond food and can be used for any type of on-demand order.
You can find more coverage of DoorDash right here.
One Month Rails: Teaches Rails app building
Users can sign up, learn how to code in Ruby on Rails, but without going through a fully comprehensive curriculum like Codecademy and Learn The Hard Way. Instead, the user only needs to learn the essentials to build their intended finished product. For now, the company offers Ruby On Rails courses, but eventually the same product will be available for Python, JavaScript, etc.
Head on over here for further coverage of One Month Rails.
Regalii: Remittances to Latin America
But the current status quo for sending money is Western Union, which comes with its own set of problems: The recipient has to travel to the Western Union location which is often far away, wait in line for as long as several hours, sacrifice a 10 percent transaction fee, and then carry cash back home through a possibly dangerous area. Regalii aims to cut out all these issues by allowing people to send money for food and bills to their family members through SMS, for a flat fee of $3 per transfer. The payments can be used directly at stores that Regalii partners with to purchase food and other supplies.
The service has taken off in a big way since it launched: It’s growing at a rate of 67 percent week over week, with 1,100 customers being served last week alone — and that’s just by serving one neighborhood in the Bronx of New York City, sending money back home to the Dominican Republic.
Meta: Augmented Reality glasses
Meta is building the augmented-reality glasses that perhaps many Google Glass users were hoping for. Their initial device, which TechCrunch colleague Greg Kumparak said was a bit of a prototype, has seen about a half-million dollars of sales in the last week alone. While wearing the glasses, you’re able to manipulate augmented reality objects. Kumparak said he was able to move a floating rectangle around and expand and close it based on how he moved his fists.
Check out earlier coverage of Meta right here and here.
[Update: Read our highlights from across all 45 pitches here – TechCrunch’s top 8 startups from Demo Day]
Additional reporting by Colleen Taylor, Kim-Mai Cutler, Ryan Lawler, and Josh Constine.