Dear Startup Investor,
Summer is around the corner. A good time to kick back and relax? At least just a little?
A far-fetched notion for the seven startups we’re updating below. They’re busier than ever, from hopping from festival to festival (Bohemian Guitars) to wrapping up current fundraising efforts (Ansa).
Here’s the full scoop on the summer plans of seven startup teams in our Startup Investor Portfolio…
Care at Hand | Recommended: March 2015
Portal: OneVest
Care at Hand surveys home care workers. Then uses the resulting data to reduce hospital readmission rates.
The founder – Dr. Andrey Ostrovsky – is returning home to Maryland this summer. And he has the state squarely in his crosshairs.
He says Maryland is unique. It’s the only state that has a waiver to set its own Medicare payment rates.
And Maryland has put its hospitals on notice: Change your ways or suffer the consequences.
They’ve been told to improve quality through enhanced care coordination with outpatient providers. If they can’t demonstrate progress within five years, their waiver will be discontinued.
Care at Hand’s challenge? To get Maryland’s home care providers to use its unconventional data-driven solution.
Andrey is off to a good start. He’s already landed The Coordinating Center of Maryland to help him launch the service.
By the way, welcome back to my home state (and yours), Andrey.
StackIQ | Recommended: April 2014
Portal: OurCrowd
StackIQ helps companies manage their cloud infrastructure via its automation platform. So far, it has helped more than 150 customers automate more than 1 million Linux servers.
Manual labor saved? How about over 560 years’ worth of installation and configuration tasks.
StackIQ hit the road last week. Its Factory Seminars tour began in San Francisco. At each stop, it’s building a commercial Hadoop cluster in just two hours.
Future stops include New York, Atlanta and Chicago.
Bohemian Guitars | Recommended: February 2015
Portal: Onevest
Bohemian Guitars has a busy summer ahead. It will be showing off its unique guitars at various music festivals every weekend until Labor Day. Last weekend was the Shaky Knees Festival in Atlanta, where Bohemian Guitars is headquartered. Before that was the SXSW (South by Southwest) expo.
By the way, Bohemian Guitars reports that it sold out its entire inventory at SXSW.
Ansa | Recommended: December 2013
Portal: Onevest
Ansa’s messaging app lets users set their messages to “self-destruct.” It’s a feature that more and more users are demanding. It’s built a system so secure, the company itself can’t access the messages exchanged.
Nearly 200,000 individuals now use Ansa, double the number of a few months ago. Ansa is popular in the U.K. and Middle East, and also continues to gain customers in the U.S.
I talked with Ansa’s co-founder, Natalie Riley, the other day. She said the company is ready to go big. It has finished the product development stage. The app is debugged. And it’s gone through multiple iterations to optimize customer satisfaction.
Natalie once told me that Ansa is a cross between Snapchat and WhatsApp. Both companies are valued above $15 billion. Natalie believes that Ansa, with its unique mix of privacy and control, can grow to an equal size.
In my last update, I noted that Ansa was completing a tweak that would let users send messages to friends who don’t have the app themselves.
Natalie told me that over a fifth of Ansa’s new users are coming on board this way.
Since Ansa’s $500K seed round was oversubscribed, the team has decided to expand the round to $1 million to secure additional funds for user acquisition. As a favor to Startup Investor members, Ansa will keep the same terms originally offered in December 2013.
Send an email to natalie@ansa.com if you’re interested.
Dealflicks | Recommended: December 2014
Portal: AngelList
Dealflicks brings loyalty programs to the movies. It’s now serving over 220 movie locations. Just in April alone, it signed up 22 movie complexes. And in the first week of May, eight more joined Dealflicks. Here’s a map of where they are now…
Click on this for the interactive version.
Apploi | Recommended: June 2014
Portal: OurCrowd
Apploi is disrupting the retail jobs market. The Boston Globe wrote an article last week on Uniqlo opening 18 stores in the Boston area in the past year, noting that the sheer volume of hiring would be a challenge for any retailer.
The article calls Apploi’s digital jobs application a “streamlined, Zen-like process.” Here’s an excerpt…
The Japanese clothing retailer Uniqlo calls it the “30-second job apply,” a near-instant digital application that includes a personality-screening video interview. It’s a streamlined, Zen-like process for the stylish international chain, which has set up sleek in-store iPad kiosks next to its trademark stacks of neatly folded T-shirts and stylish faceless mannequins. Job seekers can also go through the process on smartphones and other personal devices.
One of Uniqlo’s store’s hiring managers, Abigail Grimm, said that “Unlike paper applications, when you couldn’t get a sense for someone’s temperament until you saw them face to face, the video interview captures an applicant’s energy and vibe.”
And the latest restaurant franchise to take advantage of Apploi’s technology? Panera.
Click here for the video.
SpeechTrans | Recommended: December 2013
Portal: Onevest
SpeechTrans provides speech translation through its software. It’s now exploring a move into the complex but lucrative industrial segment.
There is no shortage of challenges in this space – from background noise to using Google-like glasses that can do the job.
SpeechTrans recently conducted its first demo for a shipyard that employed a large number of Hispanic workers. It generally went well. An attending executive of the client company said the smart glasses provided “incredibly accurate” translation.
But it also surfaced a couple of hiccups. Things to work on: background noise and preloading technical terms into the software’s vocabulary.
For its next demo, SpeechTrans plans on using the Kopin voice command system. As you can see from the drawing below, it includes a much-needed noise cancellation feature.
So, those are our updates for this week.
We’ll be checking in soon to give you the latest developments on our Startup Investor Portfolio.
Sincerely,
Andy Gordon
Startup Investor Portfolio
