Business Startup Spotlight Register

Business Startup Spotlight Register is a listing of various businesses and their entrepreneurial journey. The register includes business startups from around the globe. It is an evergreen catalogue we are maintaining for those interested in entrepreneurship and startups.

This listing includes an overview of each business, their location, the business member interviewed, as well as a link to the original article with more detailed information. Listings are in alphabetical order, with new additions on a continuing basis.

34 Bytes, LLC

Location: Manhattan Beach, California

Interviewed: Stephen Karlsgodt

Overview: 34 Bytes wants to make it easy for merchants to accept bitcoin. Bitcoin transactions can help prevent fraud and chargebacks and come in handy when faced with a lack of access to other payment services.

Allstacks, Inc.

Location: Raleigh, North Carolina

Interviewed:Hersh A. Tapadia, CEO

Overview: Allstacks solves the problem of friction between senior management and engineering management, where no one could satisfactorily answer the question of “how are things going?” We equip engineering leadership to answer that question in a quantitative, effective, and actionable way.

Arbit

Location: Baltimore, MD

Interviewed: Alex Bullington, CEO

Overview: If a company had a product decision to make, whether it be a certain color on a pair of Under Armour shoes or a new design of shirt for a clothing brand, consumers can be a part of the strategic decision making process for companies. These businesses could in turn save millions of dollars in market research and poor product delivery just by testing market sentiment before they release something.

Agribody Technologies, Inc.

Location: San Diego, CA

Co-Founder Interviewed: Jerry Feitelson, PhD

Overview: Agribody Technologies’ patent protected genetically modified/genome edited (GM/GE) plant technology is a field-tested approach to increasing plant yields and tolerance to diseases and abiotic stress in many key crop plants.

Arqlite SPC

Location: Buenos Aires, Argentina; Seattle, Washington, US

Interviewed: Sebastian Sajoux

Overview: Our product, the Arqlite rock, is an artificial stone made from different types of plastic waste and offers great technical properties, such as being three times lighter and ten times better insulation than rocks, at a competitive price. Unlike LECA, Arqlite rock does not need to be hydrated, thus making the process simpler. Arqlite rock has several other uses such as base and sub-base for road paving, drainage layering, and ballast for railroads.

AstroPrint

Location:San Diego, California and Malaga, Spain

Interviewed: Drew Taylor

Overview: AstroPrint is one of the only companies focused on building a platform for the sub $5,000 3D printer market. The mission is to turn 3D printers into machines that are so simple to use that they can finally reach mass adoption.

AtlusLearn

Location: Madison, WI

Interviewed: Daniel G. Guerra, Jr., CEO

Overview: AltusLearn’s online platform provides continuing education courses to individual healthcare professionals and healthcare employers. For professionals, AltusLearn enables them to meet and track professional license requirements or simply improve their professional skills. For employers, AltusLearn protects their workforce’s compliance through education and helps improve the overall skills of the team.

BareedEE

Location: Ramallah, Palestine

Interviewed: Shaher Husein

Overview: Customers would be at work all day, we would often be asked if they could send a package to our store to hold until they finished work. Those customers would usually pick up the packages and buy things from our store at the same time.The idea was originally to create a network of collection points to receive packages for people who were not available to do so.

Benja

Location: San Francisco, California

Interviewed: Andrew J. Chapin, CEO

Overview: For the end-user, we are able to offer products that they will not find on most deal sites from top-tier brands like Nike®, Under Armour®, Patagonia®, Columbia®, and others. The reason we are able to do that is because we work with vendors in an unconventional way. Rather than taking a commission or fee, which can range from 20-60% on other sites, we charge by the impression. In the end, we are telling vendors that they can get product in front of 1,000 qualified buyers for $10, which represents a huge cost savings and protects their margins.

BHive

Location: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Chile

Interviewed: Leonardo Marchant, CEO

Overview: BHive focuses on taking the bureaucracy out of the hands of companies and consultants letting them focus on their real problems, the projects. With a solid legal strategy and presence in four countries, BHive can fulfill a company’s need for a flexible and high level talent repository.

Biofilcom

Location: Bangladesh

Interviewed: F. M. Sarwar Hossain

Overview: The Biofilcom technology has no sewerage line required, manage the fecal solids on-site, does not produce fecal solids but compost, takes seven or eight years to fill-up the tank, and sustain twenty years or more.

BIOsens

Location: Ukraine, Kyiv

Interviewed: Andrii Karpiuk, CEO, CFO

Overview: BIOsens aims to solve the problem of timely diagnostics to improve people’s health. By using the Internet of Things (IoT), biosensors can produce rapid diagnostics of food safety in real time.

Bitfortip

Location: Athens, Greece

Interviewed: Panagiotis Pollis

Overview: BitforTip began with a favorite worn-out T-shirt. What if you could pay someone to help find what you’re searching for?

BlackBeltHelp

Location: Cleveland, Ohio

Interviewed: Ravi (Ron) Bhalla, Co-Founder & CEO

Overview: BlackBeltHelp not only offers business process automation, but also an integrated chat, voice, ticketing systems and service desk; we are pivoting to using big data and analytics to provide AI-enabled interactions for queries ranging from financial aid to IT support.

Boni Global

Location: Chicago, Illinois

Interviewed:Sarper Silaoglu, Co-founder

Overview: Boni seeks to be a “Virtual Assistant for Visually Impaired.” Our main ambition is to make the world a better place for people with disabilities.

BrandVR

Location: Detroit, MichiganandOrlando, Florida

Interviewed: Mahmoud “Moody” Mattan, Co-founder & CEO

Overview: BrandVR creates simple, easy to use AR/VR creation tools for businesses. Non-developers can use these tools to create stunning AR/VR experiences that will move the needle for their business.

BrewFund

Location: Johnson City, TN

Co-founder Interviewed: David Nelson

Overview: Each brewery needs a way to stand out from the crowd, bring more people through their doors, and connect with their customer base in unique ways. They also need to simplify their operations so they can spend their time doing what they do best: brewing amazing beer! At the same time customers love to share the experiences of craft beer even when they cannot be with their friends. Now they can give more than a gift; they can give the craft beer experience.

Bundle

Location: San Francisco

Co-Founder Interviewed: Karthik Vellanki

Overview: Bundle is a web platform for wholesale buyers to discover new suppliers and streamline interactions with their existing suppliers by managing inventory, ordering and paying on a single portal.

Calltend

Location: Austin, Texas

Co-Founder Interviewed:Mike Chang

Overview: By allowing our contracted call representatives to make money on demand and make calls from wherever, whenever and for however long they want, we get more engaged, highly motivated call representatives. Calltend is the new generation of call centers!

Capital Construction Solutions

Location: Chicago, IL

Co-Founder Interviewed: Cory Davis

Overview: Construction companies need a way to track best practices in the field in real time and ensure that their employees are always being trained. By using predictive analytics, companies can monitor and pivot from issues quickly before the problem starts to affect the project and other strategic partners.

Clock’d

Location: Madison, WI

Co-Founder Interviewed: Marc LaPierre (CEO)

Overview: Clock’d helps employers instantly post job and shift openings and fill them in less than 90 minutes. In the process, workers are paid instantly for the completed shift.

CodeSkools

Location: Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Co-Founder Interviewed: Thomas Brady

Overview: CodeSkools and its award winning, intensive coding-curriculum offer incoming high school seniors the opportunity to learn HTML/CSS/JavaScript and Ruby on Rails. We are preparing students for the technological revolution that is sweeping the world.

Cowtribe Technology, Ltd.

Location: Tamale, Ghana

Interviewed: Awin Peter Atibill

Overview: In Africa, smallholder farmers lose over a million farm animals worth over four billions of dollars to endemic livestock diseases that could be prevented with vaccines. Cowtribe has developed a platform that allows farmers to subscribe to livestock vaccines and get it delivered to them by qualified veterinarians.

DesignDODO

Location: Gurgaon, India

Interviewed: Sayantan Dasgupta, Communications Manager

Overview: Rahul built India’s first SaaS based design platform where you can create everything from social media posts to header images to visiting cards and many other items. Empathizing with Indian enterprises’ need to update their social media pages and engage their audience on every special occasion, the founders made sure that DesignDodo is a fully fledged, ‘desi’ at heart.

Digital Lens Rental

Interviewed: Nick Sutton

Overview: Both hobbyists and professionals have times when they are looking for photography equipment to use. Maybe someone cannot afford to spend $2,000 on a piece of equipment or maybe they realize it isn’t worth buying when they will only need that specific item a few times. We offer a wide variety of equipment for rent as well as hands on help to make people feel more comfortable with new equipment.

Distributed Energy Management

Location: Seattle, WA

Interviewed: Jimmy Jia, CEO

Overview: We help our clients leverage their critical utility resources for competitive advantage. The utility line-item should include bills, capital, operational, maintenance, facility, external incentives, financing, etc. Yet these costs are managed across an organization, with little clarity, coordination, or decision-making authority. When we implement our budgetary controls, company executives can see how their spending priorities are affecting their utility costs and business outcomes. This automatically motivates them to invest in technologies that reduce costs while improving revenue.

DivorceSecure

Location: Memphis, TN

Overview: We take a complicated, paper based process that people are not familiar with and guide them through it in a logical and simplified manner (like what turbo tax did for tax preparation). We create the ability to have the attorney and client work more as a team through creating a negotiation strategy based on the client’s preferences and the ability to collaborate online. We also eliminate a tremendous amount of data entry and reduce the potential for manual errors. Our goal is to simplify divorce and optimize outcomes for our clients.

Draft Fantasy

Location: Tel Aviv, Israel

Interviewed: Sam Guigui

Overview: As an avid fantasy sports user and having received tons of feedback from our users, it is clear that our company currently fills a need for our customers to interact with soccer in a personalized and social manner. We are seeking to build on this need by offering different variations of draft-style games to further engage our current users and build our user base.

Dreams.Build

Location: Christiansburg, VA

Founder Interviewed: Dakota Gallimore (Founder)

Overview: We fulfill the need of funding for startup projects. To provide a platform that allows anybody to sponsor dreams and innovations of tomorrow. We also seek to fulfill the needs of tackling each process in the startup’s development to produce an ecosystem for funding and idea creation.

East Africa Fruits Farm & Co.

Location: Dar es Salaam

Co-Founder Interviewed: Peter J. Msafiri

Overview: East Africa Fruits Farm & Company’s purpose is to eliminate post-harvest food waste by providing timely collection, storage, and transport of fresh produce through cold chain logistics. They create value for both customers and small farmers, ensuring they both benefit using an eco-friendly cycle.

Eazyhire

Location: Dar es Salaam

Co-Founder Interviewed: Josh Okpata (Jr) (CEO)

Overview: You know those items you need to use temporarily and would rather not buy but end up buying and only using once or twice? Never again. Now you can find and lease anything you need temporarily on Eazyhire. You also can lease items you own for others who need to share them and get paid for doing so.

EEVET

Location: San Antonio, TX

Interviewed: Ben Hodge

Overview: For our customers, both artists and venues, the biggest problem is an empty room. We help them solve that problem by collecting exabytes of data which we feed to an Artificial Neural Network to help them book full room shows. EEVET discovers patterns within the music industry and delivers accurate booking recommendations.

Ennomotive

Location: Madrid, Spain; Santiago, Chile

Interviewed: Enrique Ramirez (CEO)

Overview: After globalization, companies need to be faster, more productive, more sustainable, etc., to stay competitive. Ennomotive helps those companies turn innovation into tangible results using our online platform to conduct challenges. Ennomotive is a global and cross-industry engineering community.

Fathom

Location: Grand Rapids, Michigan

Interviewed: Danny Vessells

Overview: 99% of Faraday’s competitors are based on changing the way the wine tastes, some are loosely based on science. Most are fake and people buy into it. Faraday’s method has been peer reviewed and is based on actual electro-chemical reactions stemming from electric field application. We are the first to use it as a commercial device.

Faraday Inc.

Location: Tampa, Florida

Interviewed: Clyde Snodgrass

Farmerline

Location: Ghana, West Africa

Interviewed: Alloysius Attah, CEO and Co-founder

Overview: We strive to connect small-scale farmers to information services, inputs, and resources to transform them into successful entrepreneurs.

flexReceipts

Location: Windermere, FL

Overview: Helps retailers better engage their consumers post purchase through enriched digital receipts. Retailers are struggling trying to find ways to drive customers back into their stores or to get their customers to be more loyal. flexReceipts helps by allowing retailers to publish targeted offers, product recommendations, dynamic content and more on their electronic receipts.

Flow MedTech

Location: Dallas, TX (HQ), Columbia, SC (SC Office)

Interviewed: Arnab Chakraborty, Co-founder, Chairman & Chief Product Officer

Overview: Flow MedTech has invested in a non-drug alternative solution to create a targeted solution to prevent strokes. We have developed a permanent implantable balloon device that inflates inside and conforms to an individual’s uniquely shaped left atrial appendage, thereby blocking it off, preventing clot formations, and reducing the high risk of stroke.

Fluster

Location: Zürich

Interviewed: David Dal Busco

Overview: Fluster seeks to fulfill the need of urban people seeking new roommates or room rentals in a more convenient way. It helps to save time in their search for what really matters to them.

Fluxee

Location:Chicago, Illinois

Interviewed: Raul Rosas

Overview: Fluxee leverages VR technology to allow customers to better visualize and interact with their teams on development projects. Our technology enables our customers to be in the same space at the same time with their team. This leads them to visualize and deliberate potential changes and make faster decisions remotely.

Garage

Location: Monterrey, Mexico

Interviewed: Abraham de la Rosa

Overview: Some people do not have time to go to the car repair shop nor do they enjoy it. A perceived risk exists of scamming by paying extra for something that did not need to be fixed in the first place. We thought of a solution to this by offering car maintenance services at your home with trusted mechanics that can do the job with professionalism and care.

Geo Verde

Location: Ghana

Interviewed: Festus Anane

Overview: We are an organization that drills water wells in villages lacking access to clean water. Many get water from rivers and become infected by diseases such as Guinea Worm Disease and River Blindness. Thousands die each year from drinking contaminated water from ponds or hand-dug wells.

HealPal, Inc.

Location: Austin TX, Dallas TX, and Sunnyvale CA

Interviewed: Sunit Sebastian, MD

Overview: We help cancer patients find the right cancer expert and clinical trial through matched peers.

Healthcast US

Location: Covington, KY

Interviewed: Dr. Glenn Lawyer

Overview: We help people avoid colds and flu by letting them know when they are active in their community. If you or a loved one does get a cold, we take the stress out by providing them the best possible care.

HERmixer

Location: Charleston, South Carolina

Interviewed: Terry Peterson

Overview: HERmixer makes enjoying flavorful adult beverages cheaper, while consuming fewer calories, and is ‘pocketable’ so it is easy to take in your pocket or purse. No cocktail mix on the market is this easy and common sense.

Hexagro Urban Farming

Location: Milan, Italy

Co-Founder Interviewed: Felipe Hernandez

Overview: Hexagro was founded with the objective of developing an innovative solution to increase healthy food accessibility in urban areas. Their team takes inspiration from nature for everything from their products to their business model.

Hostfully

Location: San Francisco, CA

Interviewed: David Jacoby, Co-founder and President

Overview: Hostfully helps hosts (both individual hosts and vacation rental management companies) be better hosts. Our value proposition is two-fold: We help hosts provide a more professional-looking experience to their guests. We save hosts time and money by decreasing the amount of unnecessary questions they get from guests. We make important information and local recommendations more readily accessible than the traditional, old-fashion method of out-dated and ugly binders.

HypeHash

Location: San Francisco/Sri Lanka

Interviewed: Ravihans Wetakepotha

Overview: HypeHash is the world’s first hashtag and social trend-centric product monetizing PLATFORM for the hottest trending topics on social media. For the first time, you can see key performance indicators for trending topics and hashtags! Consumers and sellers see what is hot and what is not. This eliminates ambiguity and creates an interesting viral loop where new products feed the same viral frenzy about the topic.

Infinity

Location: Dallas, Texas

Interviewed: Abhilash Pandey

Overview: Infinity is a secure identity verification platform built with blockchain technology. We aim to create OneWorld^TM Identity, where a single digital identity of an individual or organization can be used to access an array of services.

InfiSecure Technologies

Location: Delaware, US

Interviewed: Abhilash Pandey

Overview: All online B2C businesses face a myriad of online frauds caused by bot traffic on their websites. More than 50%-75% of overall traffic on a website originates from bots. InfiSecure helps businesses gain insights on this major chunk of traffic. It gives detailed bot metrics on a website, and also provides 24/7 active protection against bad bots created by scrapers, spammers, hackers, and competitors.

Instanteaser

Location: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Interviewed: Doug Clayton, Bernardo Landeira

Overview: Instanteaser seeks to deliver a different service than the traditional mindset because they had experience in high scale productions using technology tools and project management. They want their clients to sell more!

Intelligrated Information International (3i)

Location: Cincinnati, OH

Interviewed: Tim Mielke

Overview: Having worked in the nutritional supplement industry for about a decade plus doing freelance work and my own research, I have seen just how uninformed buyers are when it comes to supplements. We want to put the buying power back in the customer’s hands.

iShine For You Auto Detailing

Location: Williamsburg, VA

Interviewed: Kenya Williams

Overview: We seek cars that are dirty on the exterior and interior, such as a car that has been neglected over the years or a car that is being traded-in.

iTREKKERS

Location: Tampa, Florida

Interviewed: Tom Mulliez

Overview: iTREKKERS removes the barriers to booking guided outdoors adventures by running a clean and transparent website for the booking process, connecting you with a professional vetted Guide, and providing all gear and equipment necessary for the adventure. Easily enjoy fishing, paddle sports, hiking, or camping in Florida with the help of iTREKKERS Guides regardless of your age or experience level.

Jobalo

Location: Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Co-founder Interviewed: Max Alway-Townsend

Overview: Jobalo helps businesses and everyday people hire high quality, local students. Jobalo is great for placing entry level positions, such as local yard work or an internship.

JRNL

Location: Las Vegas, NV

Co-founder Interviewed: Nick Jones

Overview: All people have experiences in their life that serve as “life triggers” that are meaningful and serve as moments for reflection. In many of those cases, the meaningful content is collaborative and the entire story is not only personal, but also a shared experience. JRNL strives to empower users with the ability to capture, record and amplify the meaningful content in life for reflection.

Kalaage

Location: Gurgaon, India

Co-founder Interviewed: Raghav Sharma

Overview: Kalaage is sourcing content from people around the world through an automated operation. Writers not only get to write and share their articles, but they get to see it published in reputed magazines and newspapers. We are providing a very strong value proposition and publications are getting to source content with ease.

KaraoQ

Location: Nashville, TN

Co-founder: Michael Amburgey

Overview: An estimated 93% of DJs still use printed songbooks and paper-slips for patrons. This becomes an exhaustive expense for the DJ and venue. The resulting pains are a negative experience for patrons and result in lower dwell times, less repeat patronage, and fewer dollars spent in-venue. We are changing that system.

KnKt’d

Location: Dallas, Texas

Co-founder Interviewed: Matt Holland

Overview: We help connect patients with providers daily, while creating better engagement, better outcomes, increased provider revenue, and lowering the clinical burdens so many clinicians face today.

Libryo

Location: Headquartered in London; team distributed in the UK, South Africa and Kenya.

Co-founder Interviewed: Peter Flynn

Overview: Libryo provides simple, up to date, summarized, organized and easily searchable sets of applicable legal requirements for any organization anywhere.

Livestock Bank

Location:Kigali, Rwanda

Interviewed: Hervé Tuyishime

Overview: Livestock Bank aims to share animals with farmers and to provide everything they need to raise livestock in quality and quantity.

LivePost

Location: Monterrey, Mexico

Interviewed: Diego Guadarrama

Overview: We want to become the best place to find the news that is happening now and help content creators make money while they cover the news.

Loople

Location: Baltimore, MD

Interviewed: Dave Phelan (CMO)

Overview: We are solving a problem for two stakeholders. Businesses are looking to increase sales. They offer discounts to drive traffic, but struggle to effectively market to potential customers. Traditional media is expensive and nearly untraceable. Loople provides businesses with a tool to reach consumers in their area, who are already looking to go out. For users, there is no easy way to find out what is going on at bars and restaurants. You can go to Yelp for reviews, search individual websites on Google, or make a reservation on OpenTable. The missing piece is the real-time information about a bar or restaurant. We are the easiest way to find this information!

MailGapp, Inc.

Location: Honolulu, Hawaii

Interviewed: Daniel Kaneshiro

Overview: MailGapp is a social impact startup. We first sought to end homelessness with our product. We expanded into the business side of the digital mailbox and courier service.

MapMyCustomer

Location: Cary, NC

Interviewed: Matthew Sniff. CEO

Overview: While many sales automation tools are built for inside teams, Map My Customers truly understands the challenges and meets the needs of outside teams.

Mergims

Location: Rwanda

Interviewed: Muhire Louis Antoine

Overview: Up to now Africa is the sole continent with a low presence of its merchants online. This not only limits possibilities to buy made in Africa products, but worse, limits the potential growth of African merchants. They are only limited to their neighborhood marketplaces. Mergims is offering simple and free of charge access to an online marketplace.

mesur.io

Location: Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Interviewed: Tom Rump

Overview: Mesur.io provides an IoT solution, combining smart sensors, a cloud-based data analytics platform, and an integrated visualization, which compiles environmental data in an easy to use interface, allowing for immediate action to be taken.

microPow

Location: Zürich, Switzerland

Interviewed: Pascal Guillet

Overview: microPow aims to assist consumers who want natural and convenient food products. We improve the shelf-life of products while intensifying the perception of contained aromas and flavors.

Mi Huerto Web SpA

Location: Valdivia, Chile

Interviewed: Stéphane Gartner

Overview: We designed a solution to solving the problem of exclusion of local producers from the formal market economy and by building a true local economy. Productive and consumptive communities who communicate with the end to match supply and demand perfectly should characterize this economy. This should also send financial transaction benefits to the ones who deserve it.

Modum

Interviewed: Marc Degen

Overview: Modum was a master thesis which turned into a startup that aims to simplify the process of fulfilling compliancy requirements for businesses. All while ensuring full data integrity at a lower price than the market delivers today.

Monikl, Inc.

Location: Tampa Bay, Florida

Interviewed: Zachary Senz-Kamler

Overview: Monikl is often called the dating website for finding a job. They match candidates to careers based on skills, personality, and workplace preferences. Personality and workplace preferences create a happier employee, which creates much lower turnover and less training and retraining costs.

MyStrengthBook

Location: Santiago, Chile

Interviewed: Avi Silverberg, CEO

Overview: With MyStrengthBook, athletes use our platform to build workouts. We capture the training variables input from the user to calculate key metrics that assess progression and performance. These metrics are embedded throughout the platform and pushed back to the user in the form of visual data. MyStrengthBook provides critical insight into an athlete’s training program, allowing users to understand what works and what doesn’t, and utilizing the power of data to build more effective workouts.

Needls

Location: Toronto, Canada

Interviewed: Justin Hartzman (above)

Overview: There are currently over fifty million small to medium size businesses (SMB) who are on Facebook with hopes of reaching new customers, but only three million of those businesses are using Facebook’s ad platform. This huge gap is because do-it-yourself options and traditional digital agencies are far too expensive and complicated for the SMB owner. Our goal at Needls is to help these small businesses grow by offering a SaaS platform.

Nest Egg Guru

Location: Honolulu, HI

Interviewed: J. R. Robinson, CEO, Co-founder

Overview: We produce affordable, client-facing software that helps financial advisors increase client engagement, improve education, and make their client relationships stickier.

NetObjex, Inc.

Location: Irvine, California

Interviewed:Raghu Bala

Overview: NetObjex understands how blockchain can be leveraged for enterprise and industrial use with innovative features. By utilizing blockchain technology as a fabric for IoT, NetObjex enables them to have their own unique identity using a universal blockchain ID and have their own wallets, and even make cryptocurrency payments to one another..

Neuroprofiler

Location: Vinon-sur-Verdon, France

Interviewed: Tiphaine Saltini, Co-Founder

Overview: Neuroprofiler is a behavioral finance game. We help Financial Advisors assess the Investor Profile of their clients that are in line with the last European regulations. Following the 2008 financial crisis, regulators have made it compulsory for Financial Advisors to assess the Investor Profile of their clients. This applies for 80% of countries in the world.

NFANT Labs

Location: Atlanta, Georgia

Interviewed: Dr. Tommy Cunningham, COO

Overview: We are shifting the standard of feeding care in the NICU to a more objective approach – to assess and track feeding performance and make feeding transition predictable. We provide the healthcare team with objective, actionable data to replace a largely subjective process. This in turn helps improve the continuity of care for the infant, resulting in improved NICU quality and better feeding outcomes.

Nomad

Location: San Francisco Bay Area

Interviewed: Ethan Reid

Overview: For our customers, we seek to solve the step of discovery. It is easy to order and pay for a product online, but the discovery has never really been improved beyond hunting for a product via menus or item types. If you see a product you like but don’t know the brand or model, it can be difficult to purchase it and often causes shoppers to abandon the effort. Nomad solves this problem by integrating into platforms and enabling users to find products simply by taking a picture or image of what they want.

NovoMoto

Location:Madison, Wisconsin

Interviewed: Mehrdad Arjmand

Overview: NovoMoto’s stand-alone solar-powered systems are cheaper, more efficient, and cleaner than the kerosene and diesel currently used in these off-grid, rural communities.

Notakey

Location: Riga, Latvia

Interviewed: Janis Kirsteins (CEO)

Overview: This is a smartphone based solution, which brings the same level of protection as a hardware token with the convenience of the phone. People receive a push notification and can authorize or decline the transaction. Most of the modern businesses are also using hardware tokens or smartcards for VPN access or workstation login, which is where Notakey again fits in well. By substituting hardware tokens or smartcards, we have been able to provide less intrusion from their work.

One Scientific, Inc.

Location: Johnson City, Tennessee

Interviewed: Jon Barnwell

Overview: The mission of One Scientific is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable hydrogen.

Pano

Location: Bristol, VA

Interviewed: John Cowan

Overview: Our app makes it easy for our users, currently college students, to meet new people, connect with the opportunities happening around them, and organize get togethers with their existing contacts in an extremely efficient way.

ParqEx

Location: Chicago, Illinois

Interviewed: Vivek Mehra, Founder & CEO

Overview: ParqEx formed as a response to a basic problem: the lack of available parking in Chicago. Every property is different; therefore, we have built in the flexibility to deliver value in multiple ways with little to no investment required.

Payzi

Location: Monterrey, Mexico at Startup Studio

Interviewed: Humberto Quintanilla Ramos

Overview: We eliminate cash from businesses and/or events, which eliminates major hassles in lines and the cost of potentially losing sales.

Pedius

Location: Rome, Italy

Interviewed: Lorenzo Di Ciaccio

Overview: Communication barriers are often limiting for a person that cannot hear. Using our technology, we are able to give back independence and freedom to communicate. Since 2013, Pedius enabled more than 20,000 users to make their first phone call in eleven countries with seven different languages.

Perserbid

Location: Johnson City, Tennessee

Interviewed: Edwin Williams, Co-Founder

Overview: We have two main needs we are trying to fulfill. The main homeowner need is the ease of finding and managing contractors to work on your home. We want to simplify that process so that the homeowner can save time and stress on getting work done around the house..

Player’s Health

Location: Minneapolis, MN

Interviewed: Tyrre Burks

Overview: An athletic organization can be held liable for taking action that increases the risk of harm to an athlete, as well as failing to take action to prevent a foreseeable risk of harm. Player’s Health is a risk management solution designed to minimize the athletic organization’s liability exposure.

Phonism

Location: Tampa, FL.

Interviewed: Steve Lazaridis

Overview: Our goal is to help service providers automate many of the monotonous tasks associated with supporting and deploying VoIP to businesses. The current methods are outdated and service providers spend far too much time on non-value generating tasks.

Pick Up & Play

Location: Johnson City, Tennessee

Interviewed: Arshene Baigvand

Overview: Pick Up & Play brings people together to play enjoyable pick-up games in the easiest way possible. We are streamlining the process of finding and organizing games. More importantly, we want to break down the barriers that keep people from connecting with others to play together.

Ping X, Inc.

Location: Los Angeles, California, USA; Zurich, Switzerland

Interviewed:Drazen Zigic

Overview: Ping X provides useful and tailored information for the customers about their surroundings, in any location and at any time, from the safety-related perspective to local businesses and opportunities.

Pixo VR

Location: Royal Oak, Michigan

Interviewed: Sean Hurwitz, CEO

Overview: Pixo VR is apart from its competitors by the team, technology and timing. They have a unique mix of skill sets that perfectly align with their goals, along with our mutual alignment on the mission.

POLCO

Location: Madison WI

Interviewed: Nick Mastronardi

Overview: Our SaaS platform connects a multi-sided policy market. We help cities and local governments post and collect verified policy polls of their constituents. We help citizens learn what’s going on, vote, comment, and share with others.

ProcessMaker

Location: Durham, North Carolina

Co-founder Interviewed: Brian S. Reale, CEO

Overview: ProcessMaker improves efficiency with an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface that makes it easy for business analysts to model approval-based workflow.

Psychd Analytics Put Ltd

Location: Gurgaon, India

Interviewed: Mandy Sidana

Overview: In the ever competitive and fast paced world, companies need to find people who can perform not by hit and trial, but by sound data analytics. We use predictive people analytics to help them filter candidates that are more likely to perform.

QuickLaunch

Location:Chicago, Illinois

Interviewed: Neeraj Kainth (CEO)

Overviewed: QuickLaunch has considered the budget constraints for Higher-Ed institutions and built a technical and cost-effective solution. They’ve developed a single sign-on (SSO) product to reduce the number of logins while increasing security and reducing costs.

Quietyme Inc.

Location: Neshkoro, WI

Interviewed: John Bialk, CEO

Overviewed: When a business is losing money because of noise complaints, Quietyme is their only answer. Apartment property managers lose money from tenant turnover and reduced rent because of a loud environment. Hotels regularly give discounted room rates when a guest complains about the noise the morning after. Their average room rate is reduced as a result of poor online reviews. Hospitals are penalized by Medicare and Medicaid based on patient experience surveys, which include the patient’s opinion of how loud it was around their room.

R2 Robotronics Private Limited

Location: New Delhi, India

Co-founder Interviewed: Aman Singh

Overview: Today, if an enterprise were to operate multiple drones at the same time, they couldn’t do it. Our Cloud Navigation System (CNS) is made to fly drones in a semi-autonomous mode wherein the pilot does not fly a drone but a server does. The Flight Server maintains a link with all the drones in flight and keeps tracking them using a GSM-GPS combo. This tracking information is available to the pilot in the form of an interactive map, similar to that seen by an air traffic controller inside ATC Tower at airports.

Radial3D

Location: Honolulu, Hawaii

Interviewed: Evan Young

Overview: Radial3D enables people to collaborate in real-time over real life medical scan data from any web-connected device, similar to a “Google Docs for Medical Imaging.” This highly increases productivity and rapid problem-solving skills between groups of people. Healthcare professionals can now connect and effectively collaborate with their colleagues from around the globe by just sharing a link.

Realync

Location: Indianapolis, IN and Chicago, IL

Interviewed: Matt Weirich

Overview: Realync is helping multi-family and real estate professionals streamline the touring process by providing a way to instantly connect with them and show the individual exactly what they want to see.

Real Time Risk Solutions

Location: Chicago, Illinois

Interviewed: Cory Davis

Overview: Real Time Risk Solutions provides an end to end solution. We provide the knowledge base for the risk questions, a website that enables companies to configure field mobile apps and over 75 executive dashboards for them to analyze their risk across their own data points in real-time.

RealtyReturns

Location: San Francisco, California, U.S.

Interviewed: Rexford R. Hibbs, CEO

Overview: People are always looking for smart places to invest their hard earned money, but the stock market is too volatile with its daily fluctuation. We believe real estate investing is the solution to market instability. The problem is that high net worth investors (accredited investors) are the only ones who are able to participate in this asset class. RealtyReturns now gives everyday people the opportunity to invest in real estate for as little as $1,000.

Rentberry

Location: San Francisco, CA

Interviewed: Alex Lubinsky

Overview: Before Rentberry, the entire rental industry was not transparent. With Rentberry, the problem is solved for good. People can see the demand for each property listed on the platform. And they can offer landlords slightly less or slightly more depending on the situation.

Rescoper

Location: Covington, KY

Interviewed: Robert Clark

Overview: Rescoper helps teams who need better project management. We remove all of the tedious work involved to achieve those results.

ReviewTrackers

Location: Chicago, Illinois

Interviewed: Chris Campbell, Founder and CEO

Overview: As an all-in-one solution for managing online reviews and customer feedback, ReviewTrackers helps companies create experiences their customers will love. We help streamline their workflow and automate the collection, reporting, and analysis of their reviews and feedback data. We also make it easy for them to request feedback and generate new reviews. ReviewTrackers rolls all this data into our interactive reporting dashboard, where users can quickly gain insights and identify opportunities for improvement.

Road-Aid

Co-founder Interviewed: James Bridgers

Overview: With the government serving as the primary customer, our data provides the information that allows City Departments of Public Works and State Departments of Transportation the information to efficiently maintain safe road infrastructure. Through our automated, comprehensive, and frequent collection, we provide a weekly report, pothole work orders, and the data to justify road infrastructure funding for governments to address the problem. Our data provides the mechanism to satisfy the goal of Departments of Transportation to increase safety for drivers and road construction crews.

SampleServe

Location:Traverse City, Michigan

Interviewed: Russell Schindler

Overview: SampleServe has many advantages over our competitors, but the most important is our distribution model. We “white label” our application and offer it through participating laboratories as the lab’s own branded application. The data collection mobile application, which is a significant time saver, is offered to the laboratory customers for free.

Schateen

Location: Colombia

Interviewed: Herberth Vargas

Script

Location: Tampa, FL

Interviewed: Aaron White , Pat Cahill

Overview: Script’s mission is to streamline school processes to eliminate paper and wasted time and provide data for smarter decisions and financial peace of mind. In the end, we provide a value proposition for administrators, teachers, and parents.

Shopyak

Location: Santiago, Chile

Interviewed: Adam Humphrey

Overview: We focus on customers that need to sell one hero product online quickly with a focus on sleek design and boosted conversion. Shopyak is an intuitive store builder making it impossible to build a single page ugly store.

SimPath

Location: Knoxville, TN

Interviewed: Jeremy Baldi

Overview: SimPath’s core technology, TNT-cloning, offers the first truly scalable DNA assembly resource. Our services are faster and more cost-effective than alternative solutions. We offer researchers the tools to expand their work and be more innovative.

SmartBridge

Location: Santiago, Chile

Interviewed: Hua Wang, Co-Founder

Overview: Our main product is an expert medical opinion – a review of diagnosis and treatment from a handpicked oncologist who is likely a chief or chair of a major academic medical department.

Smartware Labs

Location: Charlotte, North Carolina

Interviewed: Shiv Kalola

Overview: Smartware Labs is working to disrupt the healthcare industry by helping users lower their stress levels and risk of disease. We are looking to solve hhealth-relatedissues through preventative care.

Social Arcade

Location: Dublin, Ireland and Covington, Kentucky, USA

Interviewed: Mariano Di Murro – CEO

Overview: Social Arcade takes away any need for programming knowledge, allowing these agencies and in-house creative teams to save thousands in outsourcing and creates engaging, branded content.

SolarIoT

Location: Los Angeles, California

Interviewed: Ethan Horoschak

Overview: SolarIoT is the only company to combine individual solar project creation, cooperative investment open to any investor, and peer to peer energy transactions built on the blockchain.

Spira

Location:Richmond, Virginia

Interviewed: Elliot Roth- Co-Founder

Overview: Spira is technology for people to create their own nutrition. We focus on social impact, basing success on the carbon absorbed, the meals created, and the algae farming businesses helped.

Stone Mountain Technologies

Location: Johnson City, TN

Interviewed: Michael Garrabrant, President

Overview: Gas heat pump technology provides a leap in efficiency without sacrificing the comfort gas heating customers are used to. SMTI’s “Thermal Compressor” technology allows the current gas/oil heating equipment manufacturers to offer exciting, new very high efficiency products to their customers, at a much faster pace and with lower risk compared to trying to figure out how to do it themselves from “scratch.”

Strime

Location: Saint-Etienne, France; Viña del Mar, Chile

Interviewed: Romain Biard

Overview: Strime simplifies a lot of this process by allowing the client to write directly on the video. The client saves time, and the video producer can directly see the comments on the video, which is way clearer for him.

Taste. Find Local Favorites.

Location: Charleston, South Carolina, United States (corporate headquarters), in 31 cities

Interviewed: Andy Seavers

Overview: When you look at a review or star rating, you are gambling away your night, hoping that your decision will lead to a good experience. The problem is that you don’t know “the taste” of the person who left the review and the five-star rating system is broken. We have created a better way.

TheMonetizr

Location: Northern Kentucky

Interviewed: Andris Merkulovs

Overview: With just two lines of code, TheMonetizr can turn any mobile application asset into buyable merchandise. It engages the application user in the application accomplishments. We leverage social influence, assuming loyal application users proudly advocate their achievements to their friends.

Time Doctor

Location: Remote, no corporate headquarter

Interviewed: Liam Martin

Overview: Time Doctor allows entrepreneurs to make sure their team is working at peak efficiency.

Tio Home

Location: Florida and North Carolina

Interviewed: Sanjay Patel

Overview: TiO is common sense home automation that is uncommonly simple, providing a unique approach to automation and control systems.

Tomboy Organic Skincare

Location: Deer Lodge, TN

Interviewed: Melissa Kreis-Stephens, Founder/CEO

Overview: I started formulating recipes in 2001 (while teaching) after a high school science experiment produced a very effective remedy for poison ivy. A business idea was born. Our products address sweat, dirt, and exposure to the elements, deliver results, and fill the adventure skin care niche.

Trakti Ltd.

Location: London

Interviewed: Luigi Telesca, Co-founder and CEO

Overview: At Trakti, we streamline procedures and transform old contract templates into intelligent contracts. This can easily deploy smart contracts in the blockchain, improving operational activities while reducing administrative costs for medium to large organizations of more than 25%-30%.

TripHappy

Location: Santiago, Chile; Delaware, MD USA

Interviewed: Calvin Hawkes

Overview: The most important factor when booking travel accommodation today is location. Yet the majority of booking sites fail to provide sufficient information to their users, resulting in decreased conversions and lost traffic. We offer our clients location intelligence products to help their users in the accommodation booking process.

TrekMarker

Location: Cincinnati, Ohio

Interviewed: Josh Rose, CTO

Overview: TrekMarker offers quick in-line feedback to customer’s complex software documents analyzed against thousands of best practices to prevent software project failures.

TSOLife

Location: Tampa, Florida

Interviewed: David Sawyer, Founder & CEO

Overview: TSOLife was created with the conviction that life should be celebrated, passed down, and remembered. TSOLife seeks to be a home for personal stories, helping people to preserve their legacies and pass down life stories before it is too late.

Udu, Inc.

Location: Raleigh, NC, with development offices in Durham, NC

Interviewed: Frank Boosman, VP Product Marketing

Overview: Udu finds the data our customers didn’t know existed, adds the structure it doesn’t have, enriches it in ways they might not imagine, and delivers it to their analytics systems as a service in any format on any schedule.

uHoo

Location:Singapore

Interviewed: Dustin Jefferson Onghanseng

Overview: uHoo can detect the air quality and check the chemical composition, dust, humidity, air pressure, carbon monoxide and more resulting in a healthier home and workplace.

Urban Valley Farms

Location: Knoxville, Tennessee

Interviewed: John Borden, Carson Bone

Overview: Urban Valley Farms provides high-quality organic food solutions that are nutrient dense, economical, and sustainable, consequently limiting humanity’s footprint.

Virtual Fantasy League

Location: Vancouver, Canada

Interviewed: Gary Ma

Overview: The Virtual Fantasy League is a free-to-play model, which means everyone can enjoy the entire experience of the game for free. It has nothing to do with gambling. Now everyone can be included risk free, including the fastest demographic of fantasy sports players (teens and people under 21).

VSSL

Location: Hurricane, UT

Interviewed: Dan Allen

Overview: In a world of increasing home electronics that often add unnecessary complexity, VSSL offers multi-room streaming audio products that improve quality of life through simplification.

We-Convert

Location: New Delhi, India

Interviewed: Ashutosh Srivastava

Overview: People below the poverty line are forced to work under huge piles of garbage to manually segregate the recyclables and non-recyclables just to earn a Euro a day. We-Convert realized the root cause of the problem is with the mindset of the citizens. No other company/organization seemed to solve this big issue. We took the challenge.

WeMontage

Location: Neenah, WI

Interviewed: James Oliver, Jr.

Overview: WeMontage customers love the product because the large, unique format gives them more love, happiness and inspiration from their photos than they get from traditional picture frames. Some places nails in walls aren’t allowed, like dorm rooms, assisted living facilities, and some apartments. WeMontage is perfect in those instances. Finally, the cost is substantially less than custom picture frames or popular canvas wraps.

WorkAmerica

Location: Washington, D.C.

Overview: For our community college partners, we help them solve their need to get jobs for their students. For our employer customers, we help them find in-demand skilled talent. They have extreme difficulty finding and recruiting talent in the skilled trades, and partnering with 1200 community colleges across the country is not an option for budget constrained corporate HR departments, so we make access to talent from all of these schools not only possible, but easily accessible from their own office.

WorkingforBitCoins

Location: Boston, Massachusetts

Interviewed: Milad Afdasta

Overview: WorkingforBitCoins is disrupting the workforce. Their innovative use of blockchain technology eliminates the challenges that come with hiring people from across the globe, resulting in a borderless workforce.

Xcellent Life

Location: Washington, D.C.

Interviewed: Victor L. Brown, CEO

Overview: Xcellent Life uses data analytics to evaluate a comprehensive set of health factors to provide a highly personalized experience for end-users. The goal is to understand the health signatures of the human body; thereby identifying oncoming issues well in advance so they can be avoided.

yoJanus

Location: Charleston, South Carolina

Interviewed: Seth Abramson CEO/Founder

Overview: yoJanus is the only site that gives you in-depth reviews on what it is like to live at that particular rental for both apartments and single-family homes.

Zid Zid

Location: Cincinnati, OH

Interviewed: Moulay Essakalli

Overview: Zid Zid empowers preschool children, teachers and parents to learn languages together. We did not build an app to put a child in front of a screen alone. We design specifically around how children learn best, which is along with their teachers, parents, and caregivers.

Ziweto

Location: Lilongwe, Malawi

Interviewed: Byton Simwela, Co-Founder

Overview: Ziweto Enterprise provides farmers with affordable and accessible veterinary solutions. Since 2015 the company has managed to establish four agro-vet shops through bootstrapping, grants and investors and managed to hire six trained veterinarians to manage the shops. We have so far served over 10,000 farmers with affordable veterinary services.

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