Amino Apps
What it is:
Amino's business model harkens back to the days of chat rooms, where people with specific interests could find like-minded individuals to talk to online. But instead of messaging via chatrooms, Amino uses apps to create communities around different topics. Anyone can create an app on any topic through Amino — examples so far include anime and the HBO show "Westworld" — and launch it through the Amino platform. Once it becomes popular enough to have a dedicated following, it becomes a standalone app in the App store.
Amino relocated from Boston to New York City earlier this year after raising a $6.5 million Series A. Venrock's David Pakman serves on Amino's board.
Founders:
Ben Anderson and Yin Wang
Total funding:
$8.3 million from Venrock, Bantam Group, GV, Slow Ventures, Union Square Ventures, and more.
Website:
Slice
What it is:
Slice — formerly MyPizza — is a mobile app that lets you order pizza from local pizzerias. Much like Seamless, users log on to the app and place an order at their local pizza place rather than calling it in. Founder Ilir Sela, an Albanian immigrant, created the company after watching friends and family struggle to create online ordering for their pizzerias.
Though Sela has been growing the business on his own for years, 2016 has been a major revamp year for the company. In less than 12 months, Sela has added more than 100 employees without any recruiting. It counts more physical pizzerias as partners than there are Domino's locations in the US.
Founder:
Ilir Sela
Total funding:
$3.32 million from Primary Venture Partners
Website:
Dia&Co
What it is:
Dia&Co is a clothing subscription service for women who wear size 14 and up. Founded by two Harvard Business School graduates, the company was founded in 2014 to try to tackle a multimillion-dollar problem: most traditional retailers don't cater to plus-size women. While more than 65% of US women wear a size 14 and up, those sizes are rarely carried in stores.
Women who sign up for Dia take a survey to determine what styles and fits they like, then are assigned a stylist who works with them to curate five selections that are mailed to their home. Dia has clients in all 50 states and says its revenue has grown 35X over the last year.
Founders:
Nadia Boujarwah and Lydia Gilbert
Total funding:
$25.01 million from Sequoia Capital, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, Binary Capital, and more.
Website:
Electric AI
What it is:
As computing modernizes, tech support needs to modernize, too. That's Electric AI's mission: the startup provides automated IT support for small and mid-sized companies.
Electric's interface is a bot that lives entirely inside Slack and other chat apps and is accessbile to individual employees. Rather than hiring an in-house IT team or outsourcing it to a physical office elsewhere, companies can pay $30 per month, per employee, to have Electric handle its technical support needs.
Founded in 2016, Electric has been in stealth mode until December and recently raised $2 million in seed funding.
Founders:
Ryan Denehy
Total funding:
$2 million from Bowery Capital, Primary Venture Partners, and more.
Website:
Remy
What it is:
Remy is trying to tackle a massive — if not particularly sexy — problem: compliance in the insurance space. Founded by healthcare industry veteran Kayla Sanders in early 2015, Remy has created cloud-based software to simplify and streamline the process for health plans to stay compliant.
Remy is entering a complicated market as the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is probably going to be dramatically changed under the new presidential administration, but the company is going at the problem head-on with modern and sophisticated — not to mention beautifully designed — software.
Founders:
Kayla Sanders and Reuben Doetsch
Total funding:
N/A
Website:
Clarifai
What it is:
Clarifai founder Matthew Zeiler began his career as a Google intern, working on machine learning challenges. When Google made him an offer — Zeiler says its the largest they've ever offered a new hire — he turned it down in favor of starting his own company.
Now, three years later, Zeiler has grown Clarifai to one of the foremost artificial intelligence startups out there and says his main competition is tech giants like Microsoft and Google.
Clarifai's image and video recognition technology combs through pictures and identifies what's in each image. The technology can detect everything from different colors, to components like a mountain or river, to descriptors like "scenic." Clarifai is aimed at businesses, and licenses its API for as low as $19 per month, or can create custom plans for bigger companies.
Founder:
Matthew Zeiler
Total funding:
$41.25 million from Menlo Ventures, GV, Lux Capital, Union Square Ventures, and more.
Website:
SevenRooms
What it is:
SevenRooms aims to replace the antiquated systems that restaurants and clubs use to book reservations, track spending, and manage the front of the house. The system is designed to work equally well for family-run restaurants and upscale hotels — basically, anyone who needs a replacement for pen and paper or out-of-date software. The system also creates profiles for regular clients, tracking how often they visit, how much they spend, and some of their favorite products or services.
SevenRooms was founded four years ago and is being used by restaurants, clubs, and hotels in 30 cities worldwide.
Founders:
Joel Montaniel, Alison Page, Kinesh Patel
Total funding:
$4.12 million from BoxGroup, Adam Rothenberg, and more.
Website:
Mark43
What it is:
Mark43 has an ambitious goal: to change policing for the better. Founded about three years ago in Boston, the company creates technology that modernizes and streamlines policing, speeding up processes like data entry and writing tickets and making it easier to keep track of records and case files.
Mark43 is already working with police forces nationwide, including the Washington, D.C., police force and several forces in Los Angeles County. The company is made up of about 100 employees and offices in New York, D.C., and Toronto.
Founders:
Scott Crouch, Florian Mayr, and Matthew Polega
Total funding:
$40.09 million from Jeff Bezos, General Catalyst Partners, Spark Capital, Ashton Kutcher, David Patraeus, and more.
Website:
Uplevel Security
What it is:
Uplevel Security is taking a new approach to cybersecurity: helping companies react quickly to attacks rather than simply trying to prevent an attack. Uplevel's technology aims to help customers connect the dots between individual attacks to find patterns and relationships.
Uplevel was founded two years ago by two experts in the field of cybersecurity: Roselle Safran, a former cybersecurity chief at the White House, and Liz Maida, a former senior director at Akamai Technologies.
Founders:
Roselle Safran and Liz Maida
Total funding:
$2.5 million from First Round Capital, Aspect Venture Partners, and more.
Website:
Good Uncle
What it is:
Good Uncle has a simple mission: make some of the best food in the world available in places that wouldn't normally get to try it. Founded by Seamless and SinglePlatform alum Wiley Cerilli, Good Uncle is partnering with popular restaurants like Joe's Pizza and No. 7 Sub to make their legendary dishes in dedicated commercial kitchens nationwide.
Users can order food through Good Uncle's app and get it delivered in places like Syracuse, NY, although for now, there are fewer options than other food delivery sites like GrubHub. Cerilli says the goal is to "bring the cool insider story of Williamsburg to new markets, to show you the West Village restaurant you’d never heard of."
Founders:
Wiley Cerilli and Matt Doumar
Total funding:
$4.37 million from BoxGroup, First Round Capital, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, and more.
Website:
Kit
What it is:
Kit is a platform for product recommendations. But instead of coming from editors, the recommendations come from users on the platform, who can set up "kits" based around hobbies and interests ranging from photography to festival fashion.
Kit partners with sites like Amazon and B&H Photo so users can add affiliate codes on product recommendations, letting them make money off the service. CEO Camille Hearst says there's no limit on what types of kits users can make, which leads to some creative ideas like a ghost and alien hunting kit and one for those dealing with the effects of Huntington's disease.
Kit says it has grown 12x since March and recently closed on a $2.5 million seed funding round.
Founders:
Camille Hearst and Naveen Selvadurai
Total funding:
$2.5 million from Slow Ventures, Social Capital, Ellen Pao, Expa, and more.
Website:
TheSquareFoot
What it is:
TheSquareFoot aims to become the go-to destination for leasing commercial real estate. The company's Zillow-like platform lets you enter the location you're looking for and the size of your company, then it shows you a list of available spaces, including the square footage and an estimated cost per month. You can then filter the results by neighborhood and the type of space you're looking for.
TheSquareFoot has already worked with other startups like Instacart, Ollie, and Casper to find office space and is available in about 100 cities around the US.
Founders:
Jonathan Wasserstrum, Aron Susman, and Justin Lee
Total funding:
$2.89 million from Primary Venture Partners, RRE Ventures, Triangle Peak Ventures, and more.
Website:
Capsule
What it is:
Capsule never wants you to visit a physical pharmacy again. The six-month-old startup delivers prescriptions to your home or office via couriers through an app, much like hailing an Uber. Within the app, you can look up your medications and read up on them, submit an order for delivery, choose a dropoff location and a two-hour time window, and enter your payment method. The medication will then be delivered by courier.
Capsule has one brick-and-mortar location per city and only sells medications there, hoping to eliminate the distractions and complications of visiting a more traditional pharmacy like CVS or Walgreens. The startup raised $12 million from Thrive Capital in October.
Founders:
Sonia Patel and Eric Kinariwala
Total funding:
$12 million from Thrive Capital
Website:
Climb Credit
What it is:
Climb Credit supplies loans to students attending vocational programs across the country. The 2-year-old startup partners with more than 60 campuses like New York Code + Design Academy, General Assembly, and Coding Dojo, working only with schools that will improve students' earning potential and justify tuition costs.
Climb lets students start paying off their loans at low rates while they're still in school and offers low monthly payments afterward. The company's goal, it says, is to break the mold from traditional college funding and to help students "transform and improve their lives" without going deeply into debt.
Founders:
Zander Rafael and Amit Sinha
Total funding:
$403.10 million from 1/0 Capital
Website:
Frame.io
What it is:
Frame.io is a video review and collaboration platform. The company launched in April 2015 and stemmed from a problem founder Emery Wells had experienced over and over while running his own video production company: sharing and editing projects with everyone on a team.
Frame allows users to create a project, upload all the materials, and share it with all the participants in the project. Users can then leave time-stamped comments on the video, add annotations, and even draw directly on the video frame.
The company has clients ranging from Facebook to Nike and counts Jared Leto and Kevin Spacey among its investors.
Founders:
John Traver and Emery Wells
Total funding:
$14.02 million from FirstMark Capital, Kevin Spacey, Accel Partners, Jared Leto, and more.
Website: