Five startups pitched to potential investors and partners at gener8tor’s seventh Premiere Night on Monday at the Milwaukee Art Museum.
The companies, which were part of the accelerator’s 12-week mentoring program, were:
* AkitaBox, an application that hosts documents letting building and property managers keep track of building equipment and giving them information on maintenance and repairs.
Todd Hoffmaster, the Madison company’s CEO, said the data that arises as buildings are built is often essentially lost — either hidden away in supply closets, on software that’s too complex to operate or is lost when a longtime employee leaves the company.
That means that managers can’t keep track of crucial information, from warranties on equipment to information on who worked on what area of the building last or the original building plans, which are often recreated at a significant cost if a building is being remodeled.
“By one click of a button you can now answer all those sorts of questions,” Hoffmaster said.
Hoffmaster comes with years of experience as a UW-Madison lecturer in building information modeling, a construction coordinator and an innovation adviser for facilities. He spent six years at M. A. Mortenson Company, where he coordinated the construction of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery building — the first on campus that was fully designed and built digitally before breaking ground.
* needls, a company that wants to help small businesses advertise on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, automatically creating ad campaigns for businesses at a more affordable price.
The Toronto-based company from CEO Justin Hartzman started after his father, a realtor, needed help promoting his business online. Since he didn’t have too much time to help, Hartzman directed his father to an ad agency, but the company quoted him for $5,000 just for getting started.
“This is just not attainable for someone like himself and all the small businesses out there,” Hartzman said.
Current platforms, he says, work well but are geared toward marketing professionals who are familiar with industry terms, so those platforms don’t “help people like my dad.”
Hartzman’s platform instead asks a few questions of small businesses and gets five keywords that describe them. It then takes those keywords and creates hundreds of possibilities, using data science to target ads on social media to people who fit those profiles.
That means if someone asks online for a good realtor in the area, for example, the company’s system will place an ad for that user with 65 percent accuracy — double the industry average, Hartzman said.
* Player’s Health, an app that keeps track of youth athletes’ electronic health records, putting coaches, doctors, parents and players on the same page.
The app from CEO Tyrre Burks, a former professional football player, helps reduce liability to sports leagues, as last year saw $1 billion in sports injury lawsuits, including a lawsuit against the NFL and the first class action lawsuit in youth sports history.
Once a year, Burks said, parents would need to enter medical information on the app like pre-existing conditions and previous injuries. Leagues or coaches who haven’t kept track of this data well have had youth athletes die before, he said.
“We see parents as the key,” Burks said. “We want to put them back in control because they care the most.”
Through the app, parents are automatically notified of any injuries from coaches in the athletes’ several sports, and coaches can’t put a youth player on a field until they get a green light from doctors on the app — or a yellow light that comes with some warnings.
Coaches can also see macro-level information on the team’s injuries, being able to track the types of injuries that happen, on what kind of fields and other helpful information. The company’s collection of all the youth sports injury data can also be “extremely valuable” later on, Burks said.
The company is based in Chicago.
* Prescribe Nutrition, a platform from nutritionists that allows members to participate in wellness programs and connects members across the world in an online community.
The Minneapolis-based company has had 2,500 participants from around the world in their online programs, which offer products like meal plans, shopping guides, educational videos and discussion boards that the nutritionists in the company moderate.
“We connect people from Omaha to people in Amsterdam with the same health goals,” co-founder and CEO Katie Jasper said. “We’ve created a network of support.”
Jasper, a certified nutritionist with a master’s degree in holistic health, said there are endless online alternatives that focus on weight loss. Yet there’s little focus on overall wellness and offering a “one-stop shop for healthy living,” she said.
“There’s a gap in the market that no one else is meeting,” Jasper said. “Individuals need support that goes far beyond weight loss.”
* Tiz, a platform that eases the process through which alcohol retailers order products from distributors.
Three of the co-founders have had plenty of experience with the inefficient process of alcohol orders from distributors, as they worked with 21 sales representatives at their Chicago liquor store Ezra’s. The current ordering process hasn’t changed much since the end of Prohibition, co-founder Jonathan Mandell said.
“As a retailer, it’s extremely painful,” he said. “To find out any information about products, pricing, specials or discounts you have to solely rely on phone, email or texting your sales rep and waiting for a response or just waiting for your sales rep to come into your store. It’s disorganized, it’s inefficient and it’s not a modern way to run a business.”
It’s also an inefficient process for distributors, he said, with their sales reps answering the same questions on product prices from the roughly 150 accounts they manage.
Tiz, then, offers an online platform where retailers can order from distributors directly, allowing retailers to choose products and place them in an online cart. Distributors, meanwhile, see their orders come in real time, and their sales reps would now have more time to sell new products and promote specials that bring in more revenue.
