
Story by
Harrison Weber
Harrison Weber is TNW's Features Editor in NYC. Part writer, part designer. Stay in touch: Twitter @harrisonweber, Google+ and Email. Harrison Weber is TNW's Features Editor in NYC. Part writer, part designer. Stay in touch: Twitter @harrisonweber, Google+ and Email.
Today, 13 startups will present to a room filled with investors, industry analysts and media at TechStars Demo Day in Boston. In case you haven’t heard of TechStars, it is an elite mentorship-driven start-up accelerator that is funded by more than 50 venture capital firms, and more than 25 angel investors.
TechStars operates in 4 cities nationwide including 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 quick look at the 13 startups as we ready ourselves for the event. There will likely be plenty of announcements to report, so check back for more over the next few hours.
Psykosoft
Murfie
Murfie is the “The friendly music market.” They offer a buying/selling/trading community for audio files, as if they were physical CDs. Hailing from Wisconsin, the startup is a modern take on the neighborhood record store.
Zagster
GymPact
GymPact hopes to help users exercise using real cash incentives. The Harvard educated team has already gotten quite a handful of attention (New York Times, CNBC), because the service actually fines you for not exercising.
DocTrackr
DocTrackr lets you secure manage and track shared documents. Headed up by CEO Clément Cazalot, this French startup is already profitable with $150,000 in annual revenues.
Mortar Data
UberSense
Libboo
Libboo is a web community of authors dedicated to creating the next digital bestseller. Libboo offers a way for writers to publish to Amazon and Barnes & Noble at the click of a button, and then build teams of influencers and fans to work together to create bestselling books.
Testive
Bison Alternatives
Shopsy
Simply Good Technologies
Laveem
Overall, the entire class looks quite promising, with a strong emphasis on design and function. Today will have a massive impact on the future of each startup, so we’ll have to check back later in the year before we know which companies will thrive.
TechStars Boston announced earlier that a second program will be happening this fall, so you can expect a completely new class of startups demoing here again this winter.