Roadmap Video

Startup: Hydroswarm

Website: www.hydroswarm.com

Founder: Sampriti Bhattacharyya

Pitch: Hydroswarm builds underwater smart drones for ocean exploration and maritime big data.

Andrew’s Commentary: 

Usually, we associate drones with autonomous machines in the sky. Hydroswarm introduces us to an entirely different use of drones, accomplished by deploying small and autonomous machines to the sea. Once deployed, these devices could have wide-ranging applications from discovering energy resources to locating a downed plane to monitoring ecological changes to the oceans.

One of the interesting challenges for companies manufacturing ocean drones will be figuring out how to power them and support the ranges they can travel before they need to return to their base of deployment to recharge their batteries. Hydroswarm hasn’t shared with us yet whether or not they plan to employ solar energy with these drones, allowing them to go from the ocean floor to the surface, recharge and then return to the ocean floor to resume their work.

Video Highlights

Mission:

To map the world’s oceans using swarms of small, autonomous robots carrying a variety of sensors.

Macro Thesis:

We are going to witness a whole new era of ocean exploration similar to what we saw during the space revolution. This is going to be enabled by a huge disruption in maritime technology brought by the next generation of underwater drones. Currently, what we have for ocean exploration are underwater autonomous drones, which are very expensive and mission-specific, and tethered, manually-controlled Remotely Operated Vehicles. These are not suitable for mapping large areas of the ocean because they are not scalable or adaptable. Soon, we are going to see a very similar boom in underwater drones just like what we’ve seen with aerial drones.

Market Sizing:

The Unmanned Underwater Vehicles market is currently at about a $1 billion and is projected to grow to about $5 billion by 2019. The major buyers in this space are the Navy, which has a $160 billion market just for expenditures on underwater vehicle R&D and acquisition, as well as the oil and gas industries, markets that amount to about $6 billion for seismic bed analysis services. Another market that will be heavily disrupted with the rise of cheap, underwater drones is the consumer market.

Product or Service:

We are building the world’s first underwater smart drones for maritime big data and ocean exploration. These football-sized micro drones can be plugged in with any kind of sensor and can be operated either individually, just like your AirDog aerial drone that would follow you around as a diver, or they can be operated in a sensing capacity within a swarm of drones in order to map, inspect and monitor large areas of ocean. Hydroswarm is providing a technology platform that can fundamentally change the way we understand and explore our oceans.

Real and Vaporware:

This product is a spin-off of several years of research at MIT and I’ve been involved with it for the last 4 years. We transformed it into a company in April 2015 and have gained a lot of interest so far, demonstrated by winning the MassChallenge Gold Prize, becoming an MIT 100K top finalist, and so on.

Why Us:

When the Malayasian airline flight #MH370 crashed, I wondered how we still didn’t have the technology to find a massive airplane in the ocean. I was working on underwater robots for a nuclear reactor inspection at the time. I understood that if you broke down the physics of the problem, my robot could be used in multiple scenarios, potentially carrying sensors that could find an airplane located anywhere in that area of the ocean. From there, we developed the concept of Hydroswarm.

Why us? We have the right talent and the right inventions that set us apart. With my background of electrical engineering, aerospace, mechanical engineering and business, in addition to my team of scientists who are experts in their own respective fields, we definitely have a great advantage in terms of our inventions, insights and understanding of the big picture of how to bring this technology to the real world as soon as possible. We look forward to introducing Hydroswarm to the world very soon.

Want to make a Roadmap Video about your startup for the chance to be featured on Forbes? Learn more here.

Startup: Bignay Inc.

Website: www.giflybike.co

Founders: Lucas Toledo, Eric Sevillia, & Agustin Augustinoy

Pitch: Bignay Inc. is an alternative transportation startup aspiring to change urban mobility for the better.

Andrew’s Commentary: 

If you live in NYC like I do, you’re probably familiar with the illegal electric bikes used by some delivery people that can get you killed as you’re crossing a street. These bikes are akin to motorbikes, except they’re largely unregistered and unlawful. But there is another kind of bike that falls into a category called electric-assist where the electric motor only kicks in once you pedal. These bikes generally don’t travel more than 16 to 20 mph. While conflicting federal, state and local laws make them either illegal to use, or at least unclear as to their legality in NYC, this type of bike represents a massive market for use by commuters valued in the billions of dollars.

As Americans become more and more concerned with alternative and eco-friendly forms of transportation, there’s a compelling argument for regulations to be clarified on this type of bicycle. Hopefully it can be done in a way that makes streets safer and not more dangerous. If that happens, we’re likely to see the adoption of electric bikes here in a way that mirrors the massive adoption already seen overseas.

Video Highlights

Mission:

To transform the way millions of people commute around the world.

Macro Thesis:

We created Gi FlyBike with the macro thesis that metropolitan areas around the world are changing at a rapid pace. Here are some reasons why:

• Growing urbanization and traffic on city streets is pushing people towards alternative forms of transportation;
• Government investment in bicycle infrastructure is making cycling more safe and more accessible;
• Government regulations to curb traffic in city centers is restricting cars’ access to city streets;
• The quality and affordability of lithium ion (Li-ion) batteries have increased significantly over the past five years;
• Cycling makes sense given the increasing trends in healthy lifestyles and environmental sustainability.

Market Sizing:

The global e-bike market generated $9.5 billion in revenue and sold 31.7 million units in 2014 alone. The market is expected to grow to $13.7 billion in revenue and sell 40.3 million units by 2023. China is a significant player in the e-bike market, but the Asian Pacific countries and Eastern European have yet to be fully introduced to the market and they have significant growth expectations. The rest of the market is expected to grow 5.3x in terms of revenue and 4x faster in terms of units.

Product or Service:

Gi FlyBike is an electric, smart, maintenance-free folding bicycle with full size, 26” wheels. It’s electric because it has a battery and a motor. It’s smart because syncs to smartphones. It’s maintenance-free because it has solid anti-puncture tires and a non-grease belt drive. It folds because it folds — in one second and in one motion.

Real and Vaporware:

Zero vaporware. Our Kickstarter campaign that has quintupled its goal is real. The Gi FlyBike mobile app, available for download in the App Store, is real. Our manufacturing partnership with Yadea Technology Group, the third largest e-vehicle manufacturing group in the world, is real. Our distribution partnership in the U.S. with Amazon is real. Our vision for the future is to create a global network of service stores and distributors that represent the Gi FlyBike brand.

Why Us:

Perspective and passion qualify us. We are not cyclists and we never plan to be. This perspective permits us to think critically about traditional bicycle design. We are committed to doing purposeful work. The Gi FlyBike team combines an entrepreneurial spirit with business, design and execution experience.

Want to make a Roadmap Video about your startup for the chance to be featured on Forbes? Learn more here.

Startup: Monarq

Website: www.monarq.co

Founders: Diana Murakhovskaya & Irene Ryabaya

Pitch: Monarq is the first women’s only friendship app with a mission to connect women at every life change.

Andrew’s Commentary: 

Over the past few years, Tinder’s explosive growth has spawned many other entrepreneurs to build non-romantic networking services because they saw that there was a chance to disrupt the existing players in social networking with a completely new kind of user experience. One networking platform that makes a great deal of sense to me is a “friendship network” for women. When I heard about this idea from Monarq, I wondered less about the market need, and more about why a social network exclusively for women had yet to take off.

The women I spoke to about this concept all seemed to feel that excluding men from a social network had the promise of a more supportive environment where making new friends and developing new business relationships might be easier than on Facebook or LinkedIn.

Today, a majority of Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest users are women. Women also use the internet more than men. Perhaps the answer to why a women’s social network hasn’t yet succeeded lies in the number of women who have traditionally been technologists and technology leaders. The early adopters who helped catapult the biggest Internet brand names to success have been leaders in the tech space. Historically, these technology leaders were overwhelmingly men.

While I couldn’t find empirical studies to show that the overall percentage of women in tech is increasing (some studies actually show that the percentage of women in tech overall is decreasing), we’re certainly seeing high numbers of women applying to and attending our educational boot camp for entrepreneurs. Of the 236 entrepreneurs we’ve graduated from the Roadmap Course, 30% have been women, which from my albeit small sampling might be an indicator of the growing role of women in the startup world.

This is significantly higher than the number of women in leadership positions at venture-backed startups (18%). This same study corroborates my experience that the number of startups with at least one woman founder is on the rise. More women in technology leadership positions should translate to women becoming more influential (and determinative) in the success of new startups.

Video Highlights

Mission:

To empower women to forge friendships to lead richer, more fulfilling and connected lives.

Macro Thesis:

The social needs of the modern woman are evolving. More women are becoming increasingly mobile in their careers and personal lives as they take more freelance and startup jobs and remain unmarried or have unconventional romantic relationships. Because of this quiet revolution, many women are losing their social circles and support, finding it a struggle to build new ones.

The current solutions for discovering new friends and building up a social life fail women on several levels. Meetup event and conferences don’t account for increasingly diverse schedules and spread out geographic locations, especially if women are entrepreneurs. The other solution is using a dating network, and while it’s easy to find a date, it’s really hard to make a friend. The great part about what’s happening right now is that the online dating market has destroyed the stigma of connecting people socially online and bringing relationships into the real world.

Market Sizing:

In building Monarq, we are creating a market that doesn’t yet exist by disrupting the social networking, dating and online media enterprises that target women. Based on the market for dating and social media comparables, we value the potential of this new “friendship market” to be $4 billion. There are approximately 45-50 million women aged 25-45 (our target demographic) who are active on social networks and comparable media companies such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and Refinery29. On average, these various networks value their users at $100 each, which adds up to a potential women’s social connection market of over $4 billion.

Product or Service:

Imagine you move to a new city — most people can relate to this, since they move at least once — this is both exciting and terrifying because your friends are most likely in the city you just left behind. So what do you do now?

You download Monarq and log in with Facebook, which lets us pull in some information about you. We never post to your Facebook. Then, we ask you 3 questions about your interests, your location and a tagline and then we can immediately show you 3 new women who are potential introductions for you. The best part is it’s a double-blind friend intro, so the only time we will actually connect you is if you both say yes.

We also help you with an icebreaker that’s a fun and engaging question, like “What is your favorite vacation spot?” It’s really easy to answer a question and get started. The more information you give us, the more intelligent matches we can start showing you and figure out what you want in a potential friend.

Real and Vaporware:

The Monarq app is live in the App Store. Because we’re in a private beta, we’re going to have a soft launch in Phoenix in the fall. While we do that, we have a robust feature pipeline that we’re going to be working on over the next few months based on the experience of our beta users.

Why Us:

We have the combined experience and backgrounds in tech, business and sales along with the drive to build a successful startup. Ego is never an issue and together we make decisions and iterate quickly. We quickly recognize what we don’t know and have been able to inspire and rally creative, design and social media experts to believe in our vision and join the team to complement our skills.

Want to make a Roadmap Video about your startup for the chance to be featured on Forbes? Learn more here.

Startup: SproutUp

Website: www.sproutup.co

Founders: Nitin Jain & Tao Ni

Pitch: SproutUp is building a large community of product enthusiasts that help emerging products grow.

Andrew’s Commentary: 

I’ve always found it interesting to think about the process by which products are presented to the consumer. Historically, it’s been less than democratic. Buyers at Macy’s or Best Buy determined what to put on the shelf, and then based on what sold off the shelf, they repositioned products and focused their marketing efforts on accelerating sales of the more popular products. Consumers have played a role in determining the success or failure of a product, but only after the initial validation from the powerful store buyers who act as gatekeepers to whether or not anyone sees the product in the first place.

That’s why was Quirky was so interesting when it launched. Notwithstanding Quirky’s bankruptcy, the concept of allowing contributors to propose products and allowing the community to decide whether there is sufficient demand to develop the product is visionary when it comes to democratizing what products should be developed and ultimately promoted.

In a similar vein, SproutUp aims to democratize the product sales and promotional process. Once a product is produced, they try to put it in the hands of influencers, largely measured by their social media presence and audience engagement. By getting influencers to taste the product first, they’re also trying to democratize the distribution trajectory based on what the influencers think rather than leaving that decision up to a single buyer at a big-box store.

Similar to how the collective voice of blogs is shaping public opinion in lieu of all-powerful newspapers, it appears a safe bet that community-based platforms will determine the visibility and ultimate popularity of newly-developed products. Ultimately, this trend is predicated on the notion that consumers are better able to curate the products that they want to purchase than big-box store buyers.

Video Highlights

Mission:

To build a large community of product enthusiasts that help emerging products grow.

Macro Thesis:

The innovation around consumer products is turning, and 3 factors that are key to their acceleration are: first, the availability of open technology; second, accessibility to capital through crowdfunding; and third, intense collaboration between product creators and consumers.

Believing in this trend, I’m going to make one very specific forecast: within 5 years, small and niche brands will overtake big brands in bringing innovative consumer products to the market. We’re going to see more and more emerging products in technology, fashion, home and toys coming from young entrepreneurs. Consumers are going to make buying decisions on these emerging products based on bite-sized content, visual storytelling and short videos produced by the people they trust. This means there will be less of a focus on commercial marketing and PR agencies that many brands use now.

So, why is this going to happen? There are two main reasons. The first is that mobile apps such as Vine, Periscope, Instagram and YouTube have made content creation more accessible for common people to unleash their creativity. The second is that millennials are far more influenced by real-time conversations with their 1st and 2nd-degree network of friends.

Market Sizing:

At SproutUp, we are directly targeting the digital content marketing and advertising vertical for emerging products. The total media market size in 2014 was approximately $180 billion, of which digital content comprised of approximately $50 billion. Within digital content marketing, our primary focus is video marketing on social channels that is poised to become 80-90% of internet traffic by 2018 and that currently accounts for roughly $8 billion.

Product or Service:

SproutUp is a platform for influencers to discover, try and evangelize the best innovative and new products. Content creators such as social influencers request product trials, capture their experience in the form of short videos, photos and blogs, and then share content within their large network of followers. The fun part for content creators is to get early access to new, innovative products of their choice. For product creators, they can promote their brand genuinely to a very large consumer base and save tons of marketing money. Putting these pieces together, imagine us to be a community of innovators and early adopters that further innovation.

Real and Vaporware:

We’ve successfully brought our idea from napkin sketch to an MVP in four months. Our MVP was launched on June 29th, 2015 and is focused on promoting emerging tech products that successfully raised funding on crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. When using our platform, emerging products such as a 3D mouse that you can wear, or a smart device that helps improve your indoor air quality, or a bike light that greatly enhances your visibility at night can all amplify their marketing efforts.

Since our beta launch, we have received over 300 product trial requests from 100+ social influencers on 30 emerging products. Our total influencer network outreach as of now is over 5 million followers.

Our future vision is to expand our service beyond emerging hardware tech products to other sectors such as mobile apps, home utilities, fashion and cosmetics brands. We also see ourselves providing personal-touch shopping experiences using virtual reality or even partnering with retail stores.

Why Us:

The SproutUp team is committed towards its mission and customer success. Our team of five are all generalists and entrepreneurial-minded – all of us have done startups and want to own companies of our own at some point. We all can code, manage customer service and operationalize business processes. I have every confidence that my team is well positioned in meeting the challenges that it takes to successfully build SproutUp.

Want to make a Roadmap Video about your startup for the chance to be featured on Forbes? Learn more here.

Startup: Savile Row Society

Website: www.savilerowsociety.com

Founder: Lisa Dolan

Pitch: Savile Row Society is a premier men’s personal styling service and e-commerce platform.

Andrew’s Commentary: 

Intelligent e-commerce sites have long tried to recommend fashions for me to purchase based on my prior purchases. While clever emails with purchase suggestions have certainly reduced my browsing time, I’m rarely accused of dressing smarter.

I’ve often thought about getting a stylist at one of the major department stores, but the process always seemed too complicated. I’m a big fan of e-commerce subscription services that have combined algorithmic suggestions with personal stylists. I’m waiting for a Warby Parker-type service for apparel, where instead of seeing what the glasses look like on my face, I can see what the clothing will look like on my body — maybe even with pieces from my existing wardrobe.

What I think will determine the winners in this niche space is the ability of a company to focus not only on making individual purchases feel personalized for me, but to use data from my prior purchases to help me build outfits instead of always purchasing individual pieces that have no connection to clothing that I already own.

Video Highlights

Mission:

To provide the most efficient and enjoyable personalized shopping experience for men.

Macro Thesis:

Our macro thesis is around professional men’s purchasing behavior and the technology evolving around retail. Professional men, who are time-starved but want to look awesome, just want shopping solved – efficient, enjoyable and personalized. Today, traditional retailers fall short with overwhelming inventory and lack of styling expertise.

With the ever-expanding on-demand economy, busy male professionals expect and deserve better curated styling. Propelled by data-driven technology, user-generated suggestions will drastically improve and scale to anyone with access to the internet. Herein lies the future of retail – democratization of personal styling via a hybrid model of virtual and real stylists to fulfill the need of every online consumer.

Market Sizing:

Our target market is busy, urban professional men who don’t want to put a lot of time or thought into shopping, but still want to look polished. The shift from self-selection shopping to a personalized curated experience with a stylist could alone disrupt the US luxury menswear and men’s accessories markets which are estimated at $60 billion and $14 billion, respectively.

There is no better time to enter and disrupt the menswear market. From 2010 to 2015, online menswear sales grew 17% annually, outpacing all e-commerce retail categories. In 2015 to 2020, IBISWorld predicts further expansion of 14% annual growth. In its projections through the end of the decade, online menswear stands to grow more than the other e-commerce categories. The high growth rate in men’s retail sales is likely due to the fact that the menswear market isn’t yet saturated.

Product or Service:

We plan to transform men’s shopping through an omni-channel personalized shopping portal. Using a mixture of proprietary and public technologies, our stylists are able to work with busy professionals anywhere, providing a seamless wardrobe-building experience via cutting-edge virtual styling and communication platforms.

Real and Vaporware:

We are expanding and in late 2016 we will launch Savil.me. Savil.me will be the first go-to e-commerce destination for men. The portal will provide a human touch to forward-thinking technology such as augmented reality fittings and algorithm-selected looks that are paired with men’s lifestyle activities: travel, dating, work, sports, etc.

Why Us:

To meet the demands of busy men who seek and expect high-quality, personalized shopping, we have built a team of seasoned professionals. Our team hails from fashion, tech, data, digital marketing, design, investing and entrepreneurship. Additionally, we work with top-notch stylists (rather than salespeople) with both fashion and corporate expertise to not only develop customer rapport but to also help SRS scale strategically.

Want to make a Roadmap Video about your startup for the chance to be featured on Forbes? Learn more here.

Startup: Record360

Website: www.record360.com

Founders: Shane Skinner & Damon Haber

Pitch: Record360 is the digital documentation and asset management reporting app taking the asset-condition guesswork out of the property exchange process.

Andrew’s Commentary: 

Twice in the past year, I dropped my car off at my parking garage in Brooklyn only to get it back the following day with a scratch. Both times led to an argument with the garage attendant who assured me the scratch was there when I dropped the car off.

I love the idea behind Record360. I can use their app on my smartphone to record a video of my car each time I drop it off. A time-stamped video stored by a third party would have been a great arbiter of my past disputes and would have convinced the garage to pay for the repairs done to my car.

This type of service becomes more important for companies operating in the growing “shared economy,” as more people look to monetize their homes on Airbnb and cars on Getaround. Services like Record360 will likely enable even more activity to take place in the shared economy space as people become more confident that their valuables will be protected and they can avoid unnecessary disputes.

Video Highlights

Mission:

To take asset-condition guesswork out of the property exchange process by documenting property condition quickly and easily, for both businesses and consumers.

Macro Thesis:

The “sharing economy” is a disruptive force driving significant economic growth. There are 2 things at play: societal and attitudinal changes around property ownership, as well as technology that is giving rise to new business opportunities, from small entrepreneurs to larger organizations such as Airbnb and Zipcar.

One of the realities of this new sector is the need to document property condition at the time of exchange. Damage disputes create anxiety, impact relationships and customer satisfaction and cause negative press and reviews. In the future, all asset documentation will be done digitally and become integrated into every major property rental service.

Market Sizing:

Record360 is targeting both businesses and consumers with our app. On the business side, according to trade organizations in our core verticals, there’s over a billion transactions done annually in verticals such as car rental, equipment rental, car share programs, dealership exchanges, body shops, moving, towing, transport companies and so on. On the consumer side, for those participating in the sharing economy, well… the sky’s the limit.

Product Or Service:

We’re doing away with damage disputes! Record360 is the digital documentation, asset management and recording app. Whether you are renting, sharing or simply documenting, Record360 provides high quality, time-stamped, geo-tagged records of property at the time of exchange. The app lets you use your phone or tablet’s built-in camera, highlighting and notating areas of interest and damage on your rental car, vacation property or anything. Companies can also customize the app to suit their workflow and integrate into their existing processes.

As an example, here we’ve used a toy car. They can take video or photos of the asset and capture specific points of interest by touching the screen. These captured images can then be tagged with default notations based on industry, or customized by the customer to provide a detailed reference. Then, the transaction is uploaded, time-stamped and geo-tagged to our secure repository. Email summaries and reports can also be customized and generated.

There are two use cases that could follow: first, from a renter who uses the consumer version of Record360 to document existing damage. If he or she returns the rental car and the company notes damage and tries to pin it on the renter, the renter has evidence that the damage was already there by referring to the Record360 upload.

The second use case is a business using the enterprise version of Record360. If new damage is documented after a renter returns the vehicle and the renter disputes this, the rental car company can easily show documented condition of the car at check-out and prove that the damage happened during that rental period.

Real and Vaporware:

The Record360 app was launched in June 2015 and we have over 75,000 transactions recorded. Our vision includes not just constant optimization of the app and its functionality, but greater degrees of fidelity around asset management and data analytics to give companies a complete view on all their assets and condition by location, manager and other customizable filters.

Why Us:

The company’s two founders, myself and Damon Haber, have over 35 years of experience in the rental car industry with Enterprise Holdings. Over the course of our careers there, we were losing a ton of money through missed damage, dispute write-offs and we were upsetting a lot of our customers in the process. So we set out to change this and use technology to solve an age-old problem. As the app development evolved, it became apparent that many other industries had similar issues where asset conditions mattered, and where documenting property condition or having indisputable evidence were required. We have the team and experience to ensure that Record360 becomes an essential tool of the sharing economy.

Want to make a Roadmap Video about your startup for the chance to be featured on Forbes? Learn more here.

Startup: PsyInnovations

Website: www.wayForward.io

Founders: Ritvik Singh, Navya Singh, & Stan Miroshnikov

Pitch: PsyInnovations bring mental healthcare to your fingertips, using psychology to improve emotional wellness and enhance your performance.

Andrew’s Commentary: 

Investments in healthcare startups increased from $4.1 billion in 2014 to a projected $12 billion in 2015. One of the most exciting areas of focus in healthcare relates to diagnostic capabilities that are delivered from smartphones, whether it’s tracking skin lesions that can turn cancerous or hardware plugins that can upload your blood work to a doctor for analysis. In the future, smartphones will be used as health hubs where people will be able to easily track their health, communicate with doctors and improve their wellbeing.

Mental health is certain to be one of the most exciting areas in healthcare that will be disrupted by the smartphone. It’s one of the few areas where diagnosis and treatment can be delivered virtually.

I imagine a future where health professionals will focus more on integrating smartphones into their practices as both an extension of existing patient therapy and communication. As a first step in this direction, therapeutic routines practiced on a smartphone may be helpful in addressing certain disorders.

Video Highlights

Mission:

To make mental healthcare more accessible to all.

Macro Thesis:

In the future, no one will have to wait to receive mental healthcare. People will access care through their smartphones at affordable prices without waiting for appointments. Online self-based learning is growing rapidly, and people will want self-based mental healthcare as well. Therapists will have virtual offices where they can see many more patients.

Market Sizing:

Mental healthcare costs over $100 billion each year in the U.S., but less than 40% of the population receives treatment. There’s a potential to reach over $200 billion annually.

Product Or Service:

We’re providing evidence-based psychotherapy through our mobile platform, wayForward. For example, someone who feels that anxiety has been holding them back in life during things like interviews, presentations and dating can come to wayForward and select a goal that they want to achieve, such as getting better at interviews. A session plan is created for this user and they can go through 5-10 minute sessions at their own pace.

The science behind this is called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, CBT, which deems that changing your thoughts can change your behavior and your experience of anxiety. As the user goes through the program, they learn how to identify thoughts related to presentation anxiety, like “They might think I’m stupid.” Then, we systematically teach them how to replace these negative thoughts with something more positive, like, “Maybe 10% of people will think I’m stupid, but most won’t.” As this user makes progress, they’re asked to go out in real life and present in front of a large group.

Our algorithms customize the program so that the content starts based on the skills that the individual has achieved so far. For someone who wants more help or is struggling, they can get a personal licensed therapist to coach them through the program and ask them specific questions. From a therapist’s perspective, they can manage a huge number of patients through our interface as our algorithms identify users who need extra support, users who need motivation and users who are progressing well. Our analytics and machine learning algorithms will allow them to respond to users’ needs very efficiently.

Real And Vaporware:

We’ve already developed self-based, structured therapy sessions for anxiety, and the app is being beta-tested right now. We’ve started building the therapist platform.

Why Us:

We’ve gathered a very strong team with a variety of skill-sets and experience. My co-founder Navya is a psychologist who has worked closely with a number of underserved populations, from Rwandan genocide survivors to severely mentally ill patients in the South Bronx. She saw the gap of mental healthcare delivery due to the lack of clinicians, the stigma and the cost, and made it her mission to change the situation. This is how PsyInnovations was born. Our other co-founder, Stan, brings his technology expertise in as a CTO. And I bring my business and finance expertise as CEO. We also believe it’s essential to have a strong core of psychology for our space and we have a Board of Advisors with years of clinical and research experience in this domain.

Want to make a Roadmap Video about your startup for the chance to be featured on Forbes? Learn more here.

Startup: Croissant

Website: www.getcroissant.com

Founders: Zoltan Szalas, Adam Chew, Nisha Garigarn, & David Idell

Pitch: Work anywhere in NYC from our partner workspaces with a single membership.

Andrew’s Commentary: 

I sold sixdegrees in 1999 and that was the last time I had a company with a primary lease. In the early 1990’s, tech companies were signing leases in Soho for less than $20 per square foot. Today, leases in Soho and Union Square can be in excess of $60 per square foot with expectations from landlords about long-term contracts and significant deposits. These large financial commitments have quite literally priced startups out of the direct leasing market and have moved virtually all of them into shared workspaces.

It’s not just startups that have come to focus on shared spaces, but building owners have also recognized that they can increase the cashflow from their buildings by converting to shared office setups. With a shared office, the actual square footage allocated per desk is considerably less than what used to be allocated just 10 years ago.

The big question is how startups in the future will interact with these shared spaces. Will they be content to engage in month-to-month leases within a coworking space, or will they look to engage in more unusual usage patterns? Could there be a network of coworking spaces where different individuals from the same company can work in different locations, or will a network of coworking spaces allow individuals to rotate among different locations based on their meetings?

One thing seems clear, and that is that more shared workspace inventory is coming online. The company we’re profiling today is betting that they can fill excess capacity by offering a rotating coworking membership experience for startups.

Video Highlights

Mission:

To enable people to work from anywhere.

Macro Thesis:

The way people work is changing. People are transitioning from a 9-to-5-er economy to a 1099-er economy, the latter group also known as freelancers. Currently, there are 53 million people in the US who are considered to be freelancers, making up about 34% of the entire workforce. This number is expected to balloon up to 50% by 2020.

There is over 10 million square feet of office space available in New York City, as well as over 100 coworking spaces with hundreds of vacant seats. The coworking and real estate industry generates billions of dollars a year. To give you an idea, WeWork just got a valuation of $10 billion.

The shared economy and the on-demand model offer an opportunity to provide a solution that benefits the 1099-ers and the coworking spaces themselves. If you take a look at the discrepancies of the vacancies available — the unused office space in Manhattan, the vacant seats in coworking spaces — you can see that this market is going unfulfilled.

Market Sizing:

Our market is composed of underserved freelancers. Right now, there are 2 solutions for a freelancer: you can work from a coffee shop or from home, or you can get a full-time office or work from a coworking space. We realized that there were no options in between.

After doing a plethora of user interviews and surveys, we realized that a lot of people want certain pre-made features. One feature is the ability to move around from space to space. Another feature is that they don’t necessarily want to commit to a full day of working — they want to pop in for a few hours at a time. And the third feature is affordability, which means people paying for a solution that makes sense for them.

Product Or Service:

Croissant is a simple monthly membership that allows our users to work from any of the spaces that we have on the platform for $99 per month. It’s as simple as taking out your phone, going on our app, browsing the spaces we have available, choosing the space you want to work at and then simply checking in. When you leave, you just check out.

Real And Vaporware:

We launched on July 1st. We have over $3,000 in revenue and over 20 users. In the future, we will be using iBeacons to make our check-in and check-out processes simpler.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be rolling out our email, photo and website translation services and our goal for 2016 is to get everyone using real-time human translation, from businesses that need to target new customers around the world through to students or expats who just need a little help to cross the language barrier in their everyday lives.

Why Us:

We have Nisha, an amazing designer, who did performance marketing. We have Dave, who comes from a fintech software engineering background. We have Adam, a mobile developer that Google almost snagged up. And then we have me, Zoltan. I specialize in corporate accounts and did corporate sales for many years, in addition to managing sales teams. As you can see, we have quite the diverse team and we work well together, which is why we’re the perfect team for the job.

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Startup: Setlr

Website: www.setlr.com

Founders: Greg Hamilton & Philippe de Chabot

Pitch: Setlr is connecting the world through real-time human translation.

Andrew’s Commentary: 

When I think about translation services, I think about how translation relates to my prior businesses, and how important it will be to my future businesses. For my prior startups, I first considered foreign expansion opportunistically in response to foreign partners who became aware of my company and contacted me via email in English. At the time, I knew it didn’t constitute a systematic approach for international expansion if I only communicated with inbound offers for partnerships. It would have been better if I considered an outbound campaign that communicated exclusively in English, although it still probably would not have been as comprehensive or thorough as it should have been.

Foreign expansion is too important to startups operating today for founders not to consider far-reaching outbound email campaigns in the native language of their target audiences. Computer-generated translations don’t currently satisfy this need. It will be interesting to see what platform wins the massive opportunity associated with matching translators located anywhere in the world with companies in need of translation. Equal in importance to the quality of the translation, I expect that the dominant company in translation services will develop a workflow that makes translation seamless, rather than something that you associate with a significant amount of work and management time.

Video Highlights

Mission:

To connect the world through real-time human translation.

Macro Thesis:

Today, you really only have two choices when it comes to translation: free, machine translation services and paid, agency-based services that make up the outsourceable language services market. Agency translation is relatively expensive and it’s just not practical enough for the everyday needs of most people. Machine translation services really let us down in terms of quality because services like Google Translate don’t really translate anything! Google Translate just uses its search power to find translations that have already been done in the past by real people and mashes them together using a best guess at your context. It’s why machine translation doesn’t really sound fluent and often makes people laugh.

We think the translation industry can forever be changed when people discover a third option: connecting directly to the millions of people all over the world who can deliver high quality, culturally-relevant translation at a much lower cost than the translation agencies, and they can do it in real-time as people need it, thanks to modern technology.

Market Sizing:

Back in 2005, the outsourceable language services market was valued at $5 billion dollars. This year, it’s been valued at $38 billion and growing strong. But what about all the people who don’t use paid language services and just make do with the low-quality free ones? Back in 2012, CNET reported that Google served more than 200 million people with its Google Translate service. We don’t want to disrupt the market — we want to grow the market by turning all those current non-users of the industry into the industry for the first time by making it cheaper, faster, much more relevant and reliable for everyday use.

The boutique fitness studio trend has been fueled in part by Soul Cycle’s recent IPO announcement, CrossFit’s 13,000 and counting locations and two new reality show series, Hollywood Cycle and Work Out New York, both following owners and trainers from boutique fitness studios from both coasts.

Product Or Service:

Here’s how our solution works: you send us a translation project of any size and we make it really easy to connect via email, through your smartphone or via our website. We’ll translate it for you and we’ll deliver a much more relevant translation because we’ll go beyond just looking at language pair to finding a translator based on geographic location, cultural experience and even those skills or specializations that are important to deliver a really meaningful translation: something like the ability to write a formal French letter or the ability to write creative copy for a website. It’s everything that a machine can’t deliver.

Real And Vaporware:

We’ve just launched our MVP and moved from private into open beta. Our social media following is growing steadily and our customer discovery is showing really great enthusiasm for the product. We’ve were selected to be on BetaList, where we quickly became one of the week’s most trending startups, and KillerStartups.com just featured us as the week’s “best in beta.”

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be rolling out our email, photo and website translation services and our goal for 2016 is to get everyone using real-time human translation, from businesses that need to target new customers around the world through to students or expats who just need a little help to cross the language barrier in their everyday lives.

Why Us:

I’m an entrepreneur and I’m passionate about solving problems but I’m especially passionate about solving this problem: I have firsthand experience of it and it’s been around for far too long. As a team we’ve spent a lot of time studying how people solve this problem in the real world and we’ve discovered that the answer is in the real people who live all around us. We have the technology to tap into this vast ocean of human ability and solve this problem once and for all, and that’s how we’re going to connect the world through real-time human translation.

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Startup: Forte

Website: www.forte.fit

Founder: Lauren Foundos

Pitch: Forte is developing a social and interactive platform that allows users to stream live and on-demand fitness classes from coveted boutique fitness studios featuring top trainers coaching a myriad of workouts while tracking their performance in real time so users can compare and compete.

Andrew’s Commentary: 

Instructional fitness videos, on DVD and YouTube, have long been a mainstream alternative to in-person exercise classes. Now we’re seeing another alternative emerge – live streaming of fitness studio classes into the home. What makes this dynamic so much more interesting than the recorded streamed videos is that viewers now have the opportunity to participate in classes with real-time metrics reporting their workout and their physical exertion back to the instructor or the group.

Peloton has done a great job in extending the spin cycling experience to a broader audience outside the studio. It’s likely that a new class of companies will pioneer an inclusive and interactive experience for other types of workouts — including yoga and pilates. These companies may even grow the fitness market as they eliminate the excuse of people having insufficient time to visit the gym.

Video Highlights

Mission:

To transform the fitness industry by streaming live and on-demand fitness classes from well-known boutique fitness studios.

Macro Thesis:

In the future, people are going to use their mobile devices to stream boutique fitness classes from anywhere with anyone.

Fitness studios are garnering loyal patrons by developing structured routines that transcend that of a typical workout. But not everyone lives close to a fitness studio or has the time or money to find out why they’ve become so popular.

Mobile devices will serve as the nexus for one’s personal health ecosystem as consumer habits evolve driven by burgeoning interests in fitness studios, wearable technology and overall wellness.

Market Sizing:

Boutique fitness studios are growing rapidly, popping up in cities all over the country. It’s the fastest growing sector in the gym industry. In 2014, U.S. fitness health club revenues were $23 billion, over 21% of which coming from boutique fitness studios, according to the Health Club Consumer Report. Yoga studio revenues generated $7 billion dollars alone.

The boutique fitness studio trend has been fueled in part by Soul Cycle’s recent IPO announcement, CrossFit’s 13,000 and counting locations and two new reality show series, Hollywood Cycle and Work Out New York, both following owners and trainers from boutique fitness studios from both coasts.

Product Or Service:

We are going to offer a platform that allows users to stream live and on-demand boutique fitness classes featuring today’s top trainers coaching a myriad of workouts. We will allow users to track their performance in real time by curating all participants’ fitness trackers so users can compare and compete amongst class participants in the studio and remotely, as well as monitor personal achievements on our social and interactive platform.

Real And Vaporware:

So far, we have been testing our streaming platform and getting user feedback. By the end of the year, we plan to launch our website and iOS app with live and on-demand classes, multi-directional streaming and real-time fitness tracking. Then we will build our Android app, as well as develop our platform so we can sell studio clothing and relevant workout equipment.

Why Us:

If you know me, then you know I am building my dream. I have always been physically fit. I excelled in sports growing up because I never viewed practice or working out as a chore. I aspire to make our users feel the same way. I have spent the past ten years working in finance, as well as religiously attending fitness studios.

I have built my management team rich with experience in finance, technology, startups, customer service and corporate law. But fitness is our game. Together, we are five athletes, three all-Americans and one ex-professional athlete. Collectively, we desire to disrupt the fitness industry with our lower cost, more convenient, community-based and results-driven streaming platform.

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