TechStars is a mentorship-driven seed stage investment program. It is a three-month long program in Boston (MA), Boulder (CO), New York City (NY) and Seattle (WA) once each year.
Each year hundreds of companies apply and only about ten companies are selected per city. These companies get up to $18,000 in seed funding, three months of intensive top-notch mentorship, and the chance to pitch to angel investors and venture capitalists at the end of the program. TechStars takes a 6 percent equity stake in each startup in common stock.
TechStars NYC have wide support from the New York venture and angel community which includes AOL Ventures, DFJ Gotham Ventures, FirstMark Capital, First Round Capital, Foundry Group, IA Ventures, Jove Ventures, Lerer Ventures, RRE Ventures, Social Leverage, Village Ventures, Zelkova Ventures, many top NYC area angel investors, and more.
This year Techstars NYC selected 11 most promising startups to demo from a pool of 600 applicants. They are:
Nestio wants to get rid of apartment search headaches with a clean, organized interface. Nestio wants to simplify the process by allowing users to easily mark all of the housing information they find for later viewing on its site.
ThinkNear drives customers to local merchants when business is slow by blasting people nearby with coupons.
Immersive brings Minority Report to life by using facial recognition technology to make OOH ads relevant.
Friendslist wants to remove the middle man from the equation and create a network of social listings/classified ads via friends and friends of friends.
OnSwipe wants to “make it insanely easy for a publisher of any size to make websites look app-like on every mobile device, without actually creating apps.”
CrowdTwist helps companies find their most loyal users and reward them for promoting the brand to social networks.
Migration Box helps people migrate everything, including email messages, contacts, documents and appointments, to the cloud.
ToVieFor wants to close the gap between what a product is actually worth and what it sells for by holding auctions.
Red Rover is a peer-to-peer learning platform that helps businesses eliminate wasted time.
Shelby.tv aggregates all the video links your friends share on social networks and turns them into one, customized channel.
Veri wants to take all the world’s content and turn it into a fun trivia game online, created by users.
