Beyond fintech: Next generation of startups explore travel, education and beyond
The H2 Accelerator has produced its latest round of startup graduates.
The Sydney-based startup accelerator program run by H2 Ventures has turned out its last round of startups for 2017, with 17 companies presenting at the H2 Expo at an event in Sydney this week. While previous cohorts have had a strong fintech focus, this group of startups presented a varied focus. Startups had developed platforms, products and services in industries such as education, insurance, coding, travel, aged care and disaster response.
Here's a rundown of what the latest graduates are looking into:
Alfie
The team behind Alfie are trying to help hotels innovate and improve the guest experience. Alfie is a mobile allow that allows guests to order and pay for food, drinks and services through the hotel while allowing hotels to utilise that customer's data to provide tailored deals and experiences. By providing one app across a range of hotels, Alfie hopes to provide a seamless and premium experience.
Aloki
Aloki is essentially a platform that gives everyone access to local tutors. On the other side, it allows people to list themselves as a tutor, list their qualifications and set their own rates. The platform stays true to its "empowering people to learn" mission by allowing tutors to track the progress of their student, and in the future, the team hopes to use predictive analytics to predict how students will perform.
Bsociable
Trying to organise events with family and friends often involves switching between your calendar and messenger, and the process is messy. Bsociable hopes to fix this by being the event coordination platform that brings those two needs, availability and communication, together. Groups can sign up, see when people are available through the calendar integration and send instant messages to organise events.
Cody
While the importance of teaching kids to code isn't lost on anyone, the team behind Cody believe there is still a fundamental gap between learning to code and finding work as a developer. Cody's platform bridges this gap with its mesh of a tech education and recruitment platform. Students are able to learn to code and then companies can hire from the verified cohort. Companies will only be charged when a successful hire is made.
dotd
Life as a startup founder was never meant to be easy, but dotd is trying to make it just a little bit less complicated. The dotd platform automates equity management, investor communication and legal administration. It provides a way to streamline the workflow of founders, employees and investors through features such as automatic communication and paperwork and making ownership records accessible.
DueToday
The founder of DueToday, Lyndon Buckley, told the audience at Sydney's event how customer payments often fell by the wayside for startups. His platform, an integrated accounts receivable and payments service, automates a business' merchant facility by connecting to and leveraging existing payment gateways. The product is also white-labelled and can handle collections.
Inspitrip
This travel platform connects travellers with locals for personalised tours. Inspitrip allows the tourist to set their preferences for the tour and also offers a secure booking system which pays the local tour guide directly. Its mission is to help travellers experience cities like a local while empowering local communities.
Mosaic
The team behind Mosaic is trying to make investing more approachable to the everyday person. The platform allows you to search for stocks around the world, view their performance and then invest fractionally in those stocks commission-free. You can also passively invest across your stock portfolio at a recurrence and an amount based on your preference.
mPhyt
mPhyt is essentially data-powered home care. It connects older people with their families in a whole new way when they require aged care. You create a profile for whoever needs care and fill out information according to a wellbeing index. Based on this, the platform will make care suggestions. It offers a check-in system to provide communication to families as to how the care receiver is progressing and tracks their health status.
MyClaimMate
There is a lot of room to innovate in insurance, and MyClaimMate hopes to be a part of it. CEO Gilberto Spencer is an ex-claims manager and has seen firsthand the clunkiness of the claims process. The MyClaimMate platform is designed for insurance companies and service providers to allow them to better engage with customers through automated notifications, claim updates and for the customer to be able to review their claim to see what is wrong or missing. There is also a messenger service to talk directly to the claim manager.
PayNinja
Paying freelancers is an issue for many companies – including the team behind it. So they created a platform that automated freelancer payments using smart contracts. The platform allows global payments to freelancers and is the world's first payments platform to utilise smart contracts and machine learning to verify work and automate payments. It also allows payments in cryptocurrencies.
RetroAnalytics
Businesses spend a lot of time trying to improve conversion and use various platforms to analyse metrics in order to optimise their conversion rates. RetroAnalytics plans to automate this process by using artificial intelligence to collect customer transaction data, classify what the business is trying to achieve, learn what converts and then produce insights for the business.
Sempo
Sempo has taken on a huge task: fixing the complex, opaque and inefficient problem of global donations for disasters. Sempo allows people to donate directly to people that have been affected by disasters, putting the donated funds into a pool which are then distributed evenly among verified victims. Donors are also able to receive updates through the platform.
Seneca
The team at Seneca are lifelong learners and are trying to give others who crave knowledge a way to organise and share content. To solve "digital fatigue", the Seneca platform allows you to save any content, from podcasts to articles, in your own personal library, which is then automatically categorised. The virtual library is smart and the interface is beautifully designed. You can also see other users' libraries to find content that matters to you.
Squad Finder
Squad Finder is a platform that lets teams book venues for sport. The team behind it, co-founders Jessica Anderson and Andrew Leang, surveyed 200 sports participants and 80% of them said finding a venue was difficult and time-consuming. On the other side, councils are under mandates to increase community use of venues but struggle to do so. This platform allows councils and sporting venues to create a profile and list their facilities and availabilities. People looking for a place for their team to play can then book through the platform.
Timeweave
Knowing when your friends are free can be tricky, even if you're attending the same university. Instead of messaging your friends during every break you have to see who's free, Timeweave allows you to load your own timetable and view your friends'. When you load your timetable and add friends it automatically finds common breaks. Since launching, 80,000 timetables have been uploaded.
Triggr
Many businesses rely on their sales teams to consistently find new business, but according to Triggr's founder Tom Rielly, salespeople don't have access to the data and the insights they need to sell effectively. Triggr is the platform trying to solve this by crawling Internet data sources and collecting business, employee and tech data. Salespeople can filter and get contact information as well as receive notifications according to predefined sequences.
