With Disrupt happening last month I fell behind on watching accelerator demo days. It’s time to correct that oversight.
In September the Techstars network of startup accelerators held demo days for various classes of startups, grouped by either geographic location or focus. Kansas City, for example, or space.
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With October now upon us, there’s another crop of Techstars demo days around the corner. To prevent falling further behind, let’s take a look at a few startups from Techstars’ September cohorts (and two from August) this morning to get primed for what the accelerator collective and venture fund will get up to this month.
To find five favorites to share today, I dug through startups from Techstars’ Kansas City Accelerator (full class here), its SportsTech Melbourne Accelerator (full class here), its Toronto Accelerator (full class here), and its Tel Aviv Accelerator (full class here). You can find TechCrunch coverage of Techstars’ two space accelerators here, and their full classes here and here.
Before we jump in, this month Techstars has classes graduating from another five accelerators, including groups from LA, NYC, Atlanta, and more. So, there will be no shortage of startups to look at in short order. With that, let’s get into some favorites from the the groups.
Favorites, standoutsWe’ll start with the Kansas City accelerator. Kansas City, where my parents are from, incidentally, is a locale best known for its culinary magic and local musicians, not to mention a famous sports team or two. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Techstars also had a foothold in the city.
Techstars claims that it has “proven companies can scale big and in the process, raise more than $100M while located in the heart of America.” Well, then. What did the accelerator have on offer? A number of cool startups, happily. Oja Express is specialty grocery delivery, which was neat. It’s perhaps comparable to a Chowbus, but for groceries. MuukTest also stood out, as anything developer-tools related seems to be doing well these days.
But my favorite from the batch was YearOne, a startup that aims to provide companies access to diverse candidates from code schools. For any company looking to hire a more diverse engineering team, YearOne could prove incredibly useful.
Via the YearOne Techstars pitch
According to YearOne, 33,000 new code-school graduates will hit the market in 2020, a group that is around 150% as diverse as computer science graduates, or the current developer labor pool. The startup works with coding schools, vets candidates and supports them during their early time on the job. This makes their candidates “strong contributors on their way to mid-level engineering roles,” it claimed in its demo day pitch.
More diverse candidates for more companies? I dig it. YearOne charges $20,000 to companies for access to its developers which is nothing compared to most hiring budgets.
Turning to the Techstars SportsTech Melbourne Accelerator, what sort of startups were on offer during its demo day? A varied group, really. Some focus on helping you or I get better at our favorite activity (A-Champs), or focus on our mental well-being (Arete) or cognitive ability (
