Five Interesting Startups Emerging From An Exciting Gainesville-Based Accelerator
A few months ago, I had the opportunity to connect with a couple of young entrepreneurs from Gainesville, Florida - the college town of my alma mater.
I was excited by the conversations with these guys because I could sense the energy, curiosity, and hunger that they carried with them as they continue to build an entrepreneurial organization called OneSixOne Group.
Earlier this year, they announced the early-stage accelerator that would be a core offering of their company. Yesterday, I joined a demo day where we heard pitches from five companies that recently completed the OneSixOne accelerator.
Some companies were seeking funding while others were looking for connections. Some had partially-functioning prototypes while others had a fully built platform with tens of thousands of active users.
All of the companies are deserving of some publicity based on the problems they are solving or the traction they’ve achieved.
I would urge you to take a look at these companies for two reasons: 1) to see if any of them would be interesting to you as a user/customer/investor, and 2) to be equally inspired as I am that some college-age entrepreneurs from my old hood are solving such interesting and diverse set of challenges.
Here are the companies from OneSixOne’s demo day:
Gainesville; University of Florida
EaseAlert offers a gentle pre-alert to prepare firefighters for the startling alarm in the fire station. This pre-alert reduces stress and mitigates the firefighter’s risk of dying from sudden cardiac arrest, the leading cause of line of duty death for firefighters.
Gainesville; University of Florida
LiveGreen tracks your carbon emissions from daily activities and helps you easily offset your carbon footprint to become carbon neutral. This is done through physical activities as well as supporting reforestation in American National Parks.
Gainesville; University of Florida
String provides accessibility to data-driven investing for everyone. String is quantifying the news impact on financial markets by showing the correlation between events happening in the real world and the portfolios of users.
Toppings:
Atlanta; Georgia Institute of Technology / Boston; Harvard College
Toppings takes a creative approach for an “on-the-way” food delivery facilitated by social networks. They uniquely utilize consumer’s social connections to create a delivery network. Toppings believe that the delivery model could help decrease delivery costs and will create a margin of profitability unlike other delivery networks in the space.
New York City; NYU
Divi Up is a payment solution for group trips and activities. Members of the group get access to a shared pool of funds via a digital debit card. Rather than designating one person to front the bill and be responsible for securing timely repayments, Divi Up allows users to create shared cash pools that can automatically allocate the needed funds and split the cost burden between members.
If any of these companies look interesting, let me know and I’ll pass you the information of the accelerator team.
Great concepts