Today, 13 startups are about to present to a room packed with investors, industry analysts and media at TechStars‘ 3rd Demo Day in New York. In case you haven’t heard of TechStars, it’s an elite mentorship-driven start-up accelerator that’s funded by more than 50 venture capital firms, and over 25 angel investors.
TechStars operates in 4 cities nationwide (Boulder, Boston, Seattle, New York) and has more than 300 mentors, 1,000 investors and 78 alumni TechStars companies in its network. Last year, TechStars received over 3,000 applications for approximately 50 positions, making the accelerator program harder to get into than Harvard or Yale with an acceptance rate of approximately 1.50%.
Here’s a look at the 13 new startups as we ready ourselves for the event. There will be plenty of announcements to report, so you’ll want to check back for more over the next few hours.
10 Sheet
This company is essentially turning the entire bookkeeping industry on its head by digitizing the entire process. 10 Sheet taps your bank accounts, lets you send in receipts and provides complete financial reports in return.
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➤ 10 Sheet
Poptip
Poptip is the most intelligent and evolved way to ask a question and get real-time results. Poptip integrates with existing networks and allows anyone to ask anything to any person or group.
➤ Poptip
Marquee
Marquee is “rewiring the way content is delivered on the Web.” The team is building a CMS that is flexible enough to be integrated anywhere and is driven by data.
➤ Marquee
Bondsy
Bondsy is “the easiest way to put things back into the world.” Hailing from Brooklyn, NY, we’ve heard word that his company is the social network of things. We’ll keep our eyes peeled to hear what’s next.
➤ Bondsy
Moveline
Moveline is a web startup that makes it easy for people who are preparing for a long-distance move to quickly gather the information they need to save money and make smart moving decisions.
We’re building a web application that makes it simple for people to learn about their options for moving their stuff and answer important questions like “how much will it cost to hire a moving company?” and “what size truck do I need?”
➤ Moveline
Classtivity
Classtivity, from NY, NY, is home to thousands of classes, easily searchable and bookable by you. Why? “Because finding a class shouldn’t be harder than taking one.”
Pickie
Pickie, from NY, NY, is a “personalized shopping magazine” that’s operating in the ” Social Commerce” space.
➤ Pickie
Condition One
http://vimeo.com/43866507
Condition One, a company that creates wild, 180 degree interactive videos for the iPad, has just announced that Mercedes, Discovery Communications, XL Recordings, The Guardian and Popular Science will be participating in its pilot launch. You can read our first look at C1 here.
Rewind.me
Rewind.me helps people create, manage, and benefit from a new personal asset: their digital history. The company has just recently closed a seed funding round of $800K.
SmallKnot
SmallKnot, from Brooklyn, NY, “lets you invest in the small businesses in your community in exchange for goods, services, special perks and benefits.” It’s community-powered crowdfunding for your neighborhood. You can read our first look here.
Karma
Karma, from Amsterdam (like TNW!), is the simplest of mobile providers. “We are reinventing connectivity, starting with our pay-per-use 4G hotspot that earns you free gigabytes of data when you share it. You can Bring Your Own Bandwidth to any Karma device worldwide. We call this: social bandwidth.” You can read our first look here.
➤ Karma
Lua
Lua Technologies, from NY, NY, is “a suite of digital tools that helps teams communicate, collaborate, and build community on site.”
➤ Lua
Wander
➤ Wander
Dave Tisch, Managing Director of Techstars NY, talked with TNW about how the program has evolved over the past three years:
Our first class we have about 550 applications, this past one (our third) we had over 1,600, so there has definitely been an increase in interest towards the program. We haven’t really expanded our class size (11 to 12 to 13) so it is much tougher to “get in.” I have been very impressed by the quality of the teams applying to our program, since we launched in program 1 and continuing to program 3, we have experienced founders, companies with traction and teams founded by amazing engineers and designers coming into the program. In terms of shift, we do see a lot more companies with a huge focus on product design and UX applying to the program, which is exciting.
As you can see above, this is certainly TechStars NY’s strongest group of startups yet. These 13 companies were selected out of 1,600+ applicants, and will be watched by over 700 people today as they pitch their hearts out.
For more, check out the results of TechStars Boston’s Demo Day last month!
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