AngelPad's Third Demo Day: Fifteen Startups Take Flight

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Six months after the second cohort launched, the ex-Googler fueled AngelPad is ready to have at it again with a third brood of 11 business Internet-focused, technology driven companies. A little over a year into its existence, AngelPad has launched 22 companies, 19 of which have raised money and one of which was acquired. "At AngelPad we deliberately work with a highly selected small number of companies," says founder Thomas Korte. "Last session, we selected 15 out of 2000 applications. That allows us to give them a lot of attention and intensively mentor them on all aspects of early stage startup: the idea, the product and product-market-fit. Through the process we put a bit of Google DNA in every company and the result is a dramatically shorter cycle from idea to product market fit and even to revenue." In addition to "Google DNA" pedigreed mentorship and support, being an AngelPad startup means that you have access to an initial $20,000 in funding, and an additional $100,000 from two mystery VC firms who have StartFund-level faith in Korte and crew's startup taste. You can find a brief description of each of the presenters today, below. SourceNinja In the same space as Sonatype, SourceNinja goes beyond Java as a language agnostic open-source management platform. In addition, SourceNinja also tells you what a software update contains, on top of alerting customers that a new version exists. "We provide all of the information necessary that a developer or manager would need when deciding whether or not to upgrade," founder Matthew Stump tells me. "[We want] to establish ourselves as the company organizations go to for help using open source across the enterprise," Stump says. SimpleReach SimpleReach offers site tools for online publishers. Their current product The Slide offers up content recommendations for site visitors a la SailThru. Founder Edward Kim tells me that what sets his product apart from SailThrough is the breadth of SimpleReach's network and its performance. In addition, Kim is working on a SimpleReach Intelligence product, a social analytics dashboard that gives publishers and bloggers in-depth insight into story performance across social media (like tracking recurring patterns in stories that received the most "Likes," for example). Kim is keeping the details it reveals about Intelligence sparse for now, but I interacted with it briefly and it looks like nothing else out there currently. LendFriend Making it easier for people to borrow money from their friends and family, LendFriend is targeting the younger and pre-credit market as well as people who have below prime credit scores. The company provides all the loan accoutrements for its customers, including legal, e-signature, payments, tax, and regulatory guidance. "LendFriend compartmentalizes the emotional aspect that people have when money is involved with relationships," founder Geno Moscetti says. Thus far the company has managed between $2-$3 million in loans, with the average loan starting at $15,000.  "Typically friends and family are the lender of last resort, but we envision a world where people look first to their friends and family to reach their financial goals, as the lender of first resort." PipeDrive PipeDrive wants to simplify business software, by creating a simple way for a company to manage its sales pipeline. Founder Timo Rein sees the company's closest competitors as Excel spreadsheets, analog pen and paper and Post-It Notes, "It's very hard to scale these across organization," he says "So, we are building the post-it note and spreadsheet level experience into a software that scales."  Already boasting 330 paying customers in over 24 countries, Rein eventually sees every business using PipeDrive to manage its dealmaking process. Frugalo Frugalo is a daily deals aggregation platform that uses Facebook and inbox integration to unearth the most relevant deals for its users, importing deals from both channels as well as notifying you when they expire.  Right now the social commerce network is focused on the daily deals space, CEO Mike Cieri tells me, but the company plans on expanding to flash sales sites, member only sites and brand retail offers post-launch. IDoneThis  IDoneThis is a motivational email service that asks you, via email, “What’d you get done today?” and expects an email response in list form, every day. IDoneThis CEO Walter Chen holds that his product is in the same space as productivity tools Rypple and Yammer, and that users are loving it. He tells me that 25% of their active users use it every day -- one member used it to propose to his fiance, and his co-founder used it to lose 15 pounds. Prizzm Prizzm is built on the premise that CRM doesn't work for social media, because Twitter and Facebook mean that customers can say whatever they want when they want about your brand. By rewarding customers with exchangeable loyalty points for interacting with and giving feedback to a brand, Prizzm wants to shift the CRM power balance. "If customers own their data instead of companies, it is much more powerful," says CEO Charles Oppenheimer. Buffer In the same space as Time.ly, Buffer allows users to optimally time their social media(namely Twitter) updates. Built upon the belief that one day social traffic will trump search traffic, Buffer has just hit 50K users with almost 2 million tweets so far. Co-founder Leonhard Widrich says that already the app is offering users results, increasing clicks on tweeted links by 200%, doubling retweets and increasing user followership by 100 in two weeks. Wishery Wishery wants to improve customer service with its Gmail add-on, by crawling and including relevant information from a user's various SaaS apps in customer service related emails -- like how long a given user has been a customer, preferences, etc. "The problem isn't that businesses don't want to know and care - the problem is that the information they need to show they know and care is stuck in their various software silos," says CEO Cooper Marcus. Wishery wants to get that data out of silos, and make it useful for both customers and companies. Shoplogic In the same space as Runa, promotions management platform Shoplogic uses customer interaction and purchase data in order to help merchants be smarter about their promotions. "There is a shift in consumer mentality where shoppers expect to see promotions and discounts," says CTO Dennis Maskevitch, who holds that shift means increased pressure for merchants. He hopes that by using Shoplogic to target those promotions, merchants will be able to alleviate some of that pressure. LikeAndy A "Dropbox for videos" LikeAndy is a mobile app video that lets people distribute their videos across multiple devices. Taking its name inspiration from Andy Warhol's "fifteen minutes of fame" concept, LikeAndy's target market is people who want their own fifteen minutes, and express that desire by sharing personal videos. What the company does differently from competitors (eh, hem YouTube) is that it contains a unique heat/interest mapping technology that lets people find the most interesting moments in their videos. Storie Storie goes beyond photosharing apps and attempts to tell a story with photos, using a novel UI to create an experience similar to a photo scrapbook. Stories created in Storie can be shared through various social networks, as well as embedded on a website. "Using Storie should be like browsing a lifestyle magazine or a local newspaper," says founder Kuan Yong, "Full of engaging human interest stories with the occasional how-to article." Yong tells me that one of the community's most popular users is a man in his late 70s who has created a Storie about his experience in the Navy in the 50s. The Storie community determines popularity and visibility of items. Tapviva Tapviva wants to disrupt traditional restaurant Point of Sale systems by letting users pay via their iPhone and Android smartphones. Competing with Snapfinger, Tapviva is trying to stand out by working with smaller merchants like food trucks and cafes. "Our long-term vision is to change restaurant POS, to bring it out of the dark ages, co-founder Stephen Conn tells me. The app will be launching with merchant Contraband Coffee this week. Kout Kout is link-based selling app in the same space as Gumroad. By using Kout a seller can reach customers through Twitter and Facebook, their own blogs, and wherever one can use links, directing them to a personalized payment platform. Kout also provides merchants with social analytics, enabling them to gather data on where a potential customer comes in from. "Most platforms don't combine eCommerce and payments. We do," says Kout founder Hany Rashwan. Vungle One of the biggest problems with app stores is that it is difficult to know what's in (and for that matter return) a given app. Mobile marketing app Vungle tries to somewhat solves this problem, by letting apps market themselves through its 15 second videos and advertising network. Vungle's 15 second "trailers for apps" let users explore an apps features before buying, resulting in four times as many installs, according to the Vungle founders.
Alexia Tsotsis

Alexia Tsotsis is a Writer at Gigabuzz, focused on covering early-stage startups, especially those with a technology focus and great perks.

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