This article was published on March 27, 2013

Here are four of the best startups from the second batch of Y Combinator’s Winter 2013 Demo Day


Here are four of the best startups from the second batch of Y Combinator’s Winter 2013 Demo Day

If you’ve never attended Y Combinator’s Demo Day, you might be interested to know that the day is filled with surprisingly brief pitches. Two minutes of presentation time is afforded to each company, all eager to gain funding from one of the many venture capital firms represented in the room. This year, 47 companies presented, a much smaller number than the last Y Combinator class.

After the lunch period today, the startup accelerator resumed its startup pitches. Here’s a look at our favorites from the second batch of startups from this season’s class:

Zenefits

An employee benefits management service, Zenefits looks to help companies better implement health care and other benefits, such as 401k, payroll, transportation benefits, and more. It is 100 percent free and can work for companies with a dozen employees to those with more than 100. Zenefits says that when a new employee signs on with a company, it needs the person’s email address and it will handle all the necessary paperwork without using any actual paper.

Competition for the company from services, such as TriNet, will be fierce.

Meldium

With the recent cyberattacks on businesses and government infrastructures, whether it be through unknown sources, organizations, or even phishing scams, businesses want to find a more secure way to manage their IT infrastructure. When integrated, Meldium offers employees a single sign-on, no passwords to remember, automated on-boarding dashboard to the company’s online apps.

The <3 of EU tech

The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!

Now your whole team can log into Heroku without worrying about access permissions, or vulnerabilities.

To date, the company has more than 2,000 users and more than 400 companies. It believes that it can help to control access to infrastructure because IT administrators can manage permissions and easily purge someone from the system when they leave the company.

Meldium is charging companies $2 per month for access. That figure likely has significant upside potential.

Goldbely

Calling itself the ‘Fab for Food’, Goldbely takes food from one of thousands of mom and pop restaurants and shops and gets it delivered to you regardless of geographical location. The company says that it is doubling its sales month over month, and 50 percent of users have ordered from the service more than once. Today, the service is also announcing a new partnership with Facebook Gifts, meaning that now users can have tasty food delivered to their friends anywhere around the US.

The company isn’t going after the big market leaders like Omaha Steaks, 1-800 Flowers, or Harry & David. Rather, it said that it’s going after the small and medium stores around the country that don’t know how to market themselves online.

Semantics3

A data service company, Semantics3 is looking to build the most complete database of products and prices on the Internet. It says that it hopes to capture the world of e-commerce in one centralized location. The company is seeing a 20 percent weekly revenue growth and is “profitable”. The hope is that by collecting all the data, Semantics3 will license it back to e-commerce merchants so that they’ll know how their products stack up against others. This data could also be used for mobile apps, brands, and hedge funds.

See related: Here are our six favorite startups from the first batch of Y Combinator’s Winter 2013 Demo Day

Get the TNW newsletter

Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.