Speed Investing & Lessons Learned – Speaking at VentureHacked

Navisocial

Helping companies scale their social presence

Raising: n/a
Closed/Committed: n/a
Type of fundraising (convertible note, etc): convertible note Valuation: n/a
Website: navisocial.com
Twitter: @navisocial
Founder Name: Mike North
Email contact info and name of main contact: [email protected]

Founder(s) Bio:

Mike is the Founder & CEO of Navisocial. He is a Principal Engineer & UI architect for the Yahoo Ads & Data Division. Mike spends his time speaking at tech conferences and working on bringing great ideas to life. Mike enjoys full stack development in Javascript (Ember, Angular, and React), Ruby, Elixir, C++, Java, and Python. He is a Carnegie Mellon alum and received his BS in Physics, BS in Mechanical Engineering, and MS in Mechanical Engineering there. In his free time he enjoys contributing to next generation javascript tooling through open source projects.

wRipple

Social Driven On-Demand Deals

Raising: $500,000-$1,000,000
Closed/Committed: n/a
Type of fundraising (convertible note, etc): Convertible note
Valuation: n/a
Website: www.mywripple.com
Twitter: @wrippleofficial
Founder Names: Michael Brescia & Juan Cafe
Email contact info and name of main contact: Mike Brescia, [email protected]

Founder(s) Bio:
Michael Brescia – CEO & Co-Founder

Over fifteen years in financial technology sales. Last eight years Senior Managing Director and global head of Institutional Sales for FXCM, an NYSE listed company. Group generated over 45% of the firm’s annual revenue; approximately $220 million a year. Built the institutional desk from 2 people to over 50 worldwide. Senior member of firm’s m&a team

Juan Cafe – COO & Co-Founder

Currently, Managing Director of Institutional Operations for FXCM, a retail FX firm, an NYSE listed company. Oversees global operations

Built the ops team from 4 people to over 60 worldwide in over 5 countries

AmbyGear

We gamify kids daily activities while providing parents peace of mind

Raising: $600,000
Closed/Committed: $120,000
Type of fundraising (convertible note, etc): Convertible Note
Valuation: $1.3M
Website: www.ambygear.com
Twitter: @AmbyGear
Founder Names: Patrick Muggler
Email contact info and name of main contact: [email protected]

Founder(s) Bio:

Patrick is a experienced business developer and product manager with 15+ years of experience in the Semiconductor/High- Tech industry. He has created many award winning products while working at companies such as Texas Instruments. From 2001 to 2010, Patrick worked as a design engineer then as a product manager for TI helping grow the audio component business unit from $12M to ~$150M. From 2010 to 2012, Patrick worked at Maxim Integrated, helping Maxim gain a foothold at customers such as Nokia and BlackBerry. After 2012 Patrick help product marketing manager positions at Intersil and ABB. In 2014, Patrick left ABB to pursue his dream full time. Patrick has a MSEE from Arizona State University and a double MBA from Berkeley – Columbia executive program.

Banter

Waze for nightlife.

Raising: $300K
Closed/Committed: $155k
Type of fundraising (convertible note, etc): Equity
Valuation: $1.8M Pre-money, $2M post-money
Website: www.thebanterapp.com
Twitter: @thebanterapp
Founder Names: Diego Villarreal, Sergio Navacerrada
Email contact info and name of main contact: [email protected]

Founder(s) Bio:

I was born and raised in Mexico before moving to the US to get my undergradaute degree at Stanford. After graduation, I spent four years as a marketing consultant at Prophet, helping a set of Fortune 500 companies grow by identifying ways for them to differentiate from the competition through product, marketing & branding. During the last year at Prophet, I developed an app as a side project. Over time, the app evolved to what is now Banter. It begun as a simple app that allowed businesses to post deals in real-time that nearby customers could see through a map. Through that experience, I became very familiar with the space of local social apps, learned a ton from other apps, especially the executional challenges they faced. From those learnings, we’ve been able to evolve Banter and tackle traditional challenges such as chicken & egg problems inherent in social apps. I’ve always been highly social and outgoing. Not only was I fairly involved with the nightclub scenes in Mexico growing up, I also organized social events for our fraternity at Stanford. Now, as an adult, I still go out with friends and experience first-hand the annoyance of not being able to know which places will be good on any given night. Even with all the existing technology, we still have no easy way of knowing where people are, where the buzz is, where there’s good music, etc. That’s why I created Banter.

Povi.me (by AntWish Inc)

Povi Family Connect app is your daily source of inspiration to stimulate thought-provoking communications with your children for their EQ development

Raising: $500k
Closed/Committed: $100k
Type of fundraising (convertible note, etc): Convertible note Valuation: n/a
Website: http://www.povi.me
Twitter: @povi_me
Founder Names: Seow Lim
Email contact info and name of main contact: [email protected]

Founder(s) Bio:

15 year high tech exec. Track records include driving strategy and product definition that grew portfolio from $250M to $1B, market share growth from 0% to 70% within 4 years, grew team from 250 to 800 and revenue from $35 to $200 via 5 acquisitions within 1 1/2 year. https://www.linkedin.com/in/seowyinlim

Mom of 2 boys. Went through a personal transformation from a Tiger Mom to Emotional Intelligence Advocate that drove Povi.Me

http://povime.blogspot.com/2015/06/from-tiger-mom-to-emotional.html. Currently admin for a vibrant Facebook community called Moms for Emotional Intelligence to increase awareness among parents about role that parents can play to help children develop their EQ skills. https://www.facebook.com/groups/MomsForEmotionalIntelligence/

Parknav

We provide real-time predictions for free, metered and permit on-street parking.

Raising: $2.5M
Closed/Committed: $550,000
Type of fundraising (convertible note, etc): Convertible note
Valuation: $20M
Website: http://parknav.com
Twitter: @Parknav
Founder Names: Eyal Amir and Sergei Kozyrenko
Email contact info and name of main contact: Eyal [email protected]

Founder(s) Bio:

PROFESSOR DR. EYAL AMIR is the co-Founding CEO and CDO of Parknav, a data-scientist and an Adjunct Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). At Parknav, Dr. Amir leads the machine learning effort and the business efforts. His academic research focuses on AI, specifically computational reasoning, learning, and decision making. Dr. Amir received tenure and Associate Professor at UIUC in 2009, after joining UIUC in 2004. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University, and also received B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in mathematics and computer science from Bar-Ilan University, Israel in 1992 and 1994, respectively. Dr. Amir is a recipient of a number of awards for his academic research. Among those, he was chosen by IEEE as one of the “10 to watch in AI” (2006), received the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, and was awarded the Arthur L. Samuel award for best Computer Science Ph.D. thesis (2001-2002) at Stanford University. He is the proud father of a 6-years old, and lives in San Francisco.

tagMap

Connecting people through reputation

Raising: $500,000
Closed/Committed: n/a
Type of fundraising (convertible note, etc): Convertible Note Valuation: $4M
Website: www.tagmap.me
Twitter: @tagMapme
Founder Names: Igor Grinkin
Email contact info and name of main contact: [email protected]

Founder(s) Bio:

Ex-Googler, strong computer technical background. Studied Medicine back in Russia, fascinated by human psychology and behavior. Studied at Founder Institute, Adeo Ressi class.

Glimpsee

We will unlock the latent value in the millions of photos taken everyday.

Raising: $500,000
Closed/Committed: n/a
Type of fundraising (convertible note, etc): Convertible note Valuation: n/a
Website: n/a
Twitter: n/a
Founder Names: Ragy Eleish
Email contact info and name of main contact: [email protected]

Founder(s) Bio:

Ragy founded Glimpsee in 2011 to solving the consumer media management and search problem. He has been consulting, at Tile, Remedy Informatics and CSRware, in parallel to pay the bills. Prior to Glimpsee Ragy was an architect for BI Publisher at Oracle. Where he took the product from a library to a full fledged enterprise reporting and light analytics product. He lead the integration of BI Publisher with the numerous products Oracle acquired. Prior to Oracle Ragy was a core team lead at Comergent Tech (acquired by IBM) where he built a state of the art enterprise Java platform. Ragy was a Ph.D. student at University of Southern California working distributed systems. He has a Masters in Computer Sciences from University of Southern California and a Masters and Bachelor in Systems Engineering from Ain Shams University.

Trineba Technologies

Privacy through anonymity.

Raising: $1.8M
Closed/Committed: $625k
Type of fundraising (convertible note, etc): Convertible note or equity Valuation: $9M Pre-money
Website: www.trineba.com
Twitter: @TrinebaTech
Founder Names: Gabe Goldhirsh and Aleksandar Mancic
Email contact info and name of main contact: [email protected]

Founder(s) Bio:

Mr. Goldhirsh serves as CEO of Trineba Technologies where he is responsible for day-to-day operations, product development, revenue generation, and corporate growth.

Prior, Mr. Goldhirsh served as the CEO and Founding Member of Synerjent Ventures, LLC. Synerjent Ventures provided executive leadership and technical advice as well as product lifecycle, market development, and investment strategies to start-up and U.S. Government-centric companies focused on cyber security and big data.

In November 2012, The KEYW Corporation, a publicly traded U.S. Government Defense and Intelligence Community contractor, acquired Mr. Goldhirsh’s company, Dilijent Solutions, LLC. While at KEYW, he was responsible for the corporate transition of organization and staff from The KEYW Corporation to its sister company Hexis Cyber Solutions, Inc., a commercial cyber security products company.

Musicians Guild

AirBnB for Musicians

Raising: $500k
Closed/Committed: $60k
Type of fundraising (convertible note, etc): Convertible note
Valuation: n/a
Website: www.musiciansguild.com
Twitter: n/a
Founder Names: David Brooks
Email contact info and name of main contact: [email protected]

Founder(s) Bio:

9 Years VP Product Management at Salesforce.com where he built AppExchange and Force.com. 6 time entrepreneur with 2 successful exits. 25 Years of executive management Experience in Silicon Valley. Avid composer and musician.

BizApp

WhatsApp for Business

Raising: $300k
Closed/Committed: n/a
Type of fundraising (convertible note, etc): Convertible note
Valuation: 1M
Website: http://www.b2bizapp.com/
Twitter: n/a
Founder Names: Ashish Batwara
Email contact info and name of main contact: [email protected]

Founder(s) Bio:

Ashish has 17+ years of software industry experience where he has led development of many successful software products for the Enterprise storage, data communication and networking industry. Ashish has played both technical and management leadership role and worked all the way from a Developer, an Architect to a Director-level for companies such as Samsung, NetApp, Sandisk, LSI, MindTree etc. Ashish has 4 granted patents and 10+ in the pending state. Ashish has completed Masters in Technology from IIT, Delhi (India) and MBA from San Jose State University. Ashish has directly or indirectly worked with customers/teams in Belgium, Japan, India, S. Korea, China and USA.

Namafit

Uber for Fitness

Raising: $500k
Closed/Committed: n/a
Type of fundraising (convertible note, etc): convertible note Valuation: $3M
Website: www.namafit.com
Twitter: @namafit
Founder Names: Bill Petrin and Craig Rueda
Email contact info and name of main contact: [email protected]

Founder(s) Bio:

Bill Petrin opened a yoga, fitness and dance studio in 2010. He is a veteran User Interface Engineer with 16+ years of startup and corporate experience. His studio is a thriving business in Menlo Park, and as a native Peninsula resident, he enjoys being connected to the community through his small business. As an engineer he worked for Zappos in it’s first year, and later was on the FiveAcross/Cisco team that built social networks for Nascar, the NHL and Televisa. Most recently, Bill built Adara.com’s travel industry ad platform product.

Craig Rueda is an experienced full-stack application architect with over 12 years at various startups in the Bay Area. He’s built several consumer-facing as well as B2B applications from the gound up. At Wellsphere, he designed and built a scalable search solution that aggregated search data from millions of health related documents which was then used to serve results to over 10M users per month. At Tidemark, he built a custom graph-based datastore that’s currently used to store financial modeling metadata for Tidemark’s analysis engine. Most recently, Craig designed and built Chartcube’s server infrastructure on Amazon’s EC2. His design allows for compute resources to be dynamically added and removed based on user load.

HearNotes Inc.

The Spirit of Music

Raising: $10M
Closed/Committed: $500,000
Type of fundraising (convertible note, etc): Equity
Valuation: $40,000,000
Website: www.hearnotes.com
Twitter: @gethearnotes
Founder Names: Patrick Donohue
Email contact info and name of main contact: [email protected]

Founder(s) Bio:

Patrick Donohue is the Founder and CEO of HearNotes, Inc., a San Francisco-based startup pioneering the evolution of portable audio technology to permanently advance the music industry. HearNotes’ debut generation product – The Universal Edition – are the only earbuds that deliver truly WireFree stereo music by utilizing KLEER, a technology which delivers 100% lossless audio with 10x the efficiency and quality relative to Bluetooth.

Prior to founding HearNotes, Patrick worked in finance and banking for more than a decade, holding an executive position with JPMorgan Chase. In addition to his experience successfully building and leading large teams, Patrick is a classic trained, professional pianist and composer, a published author and a two-time Kentucky state tennis champion. He holds a bachelors degree in Finance from Miami University.

PepperSlice

Uber for enterprise decision makers

Raising: $500,000
Closed/Committed: $40,000
Type of fundraising (convertible note, etc): Convertible note Valuation: $1.5M
Website: www.pepperslice.com
Twitter: @PepperSlice
Founder Names: Tracy Altman
Email contact info and name of main contact: [email protected]

Founder(s) Bio:

Tracy is a decision scientist with extensive knowledge of enterprise-level, evidence-based decision making. As an executive, she found the available tools inadequate – so she created PepperSlice, providing easy-to-use tools for data-driven decisions. Tracy has managed software dev teams, content dev teams, and analysts in enterprise software, sports statistics, science publishing, and oil & gas investing. She loves baseball, analytics, and the Oakland A’s.

Lucky Kidz

Yelp for Children’s Events and Businesses

Raising: $100,000
Closed/Committed: n/a
Type of fundraising (convertible note, etc): loan
Valuation: $100,000
Website: http://www.lucky-kidz.com/
Twitter: n/a
Founder Names: Tsegereda Mulugeta
Email contact info and name of main contact: Tseg [email protected]

Founder(s) Bio:

Neurobiology BS from UC Davis. Drupal, Front-End Web Developer. Currently works for Visalus as a Drupal Developer in Beverly Hills.

Wiz Maps

Wiz Maps has developed unique data-mapping technology, to help real estate investors and professionals, access critical local growth patterns through our real-time, data visualization platform.

Raising: $500,000
Closed/Committed: $450,000 self-funded
Type of fundraising (convertible note, etc): convertible note Valuation: n/a
Website: www.WizMaps.com
Twitter: @Wiz_Maps
Founder Names: Eddie Godshalk
Email contact info and name of main contact: [email protected]

Founder(s) Bio:

www.linkedin.com/in/eddiegodshalk

Creator of Wiz Maps patent-pending data visualization technology Built AVMs and accurate block group 24-month forecasting models Seasoned real estate developer

Kid Carpool

A private parent to parent network for initiating, organizing and tracking their kids’ carpool.

Raising: $100,000
Closed/Committed: n/a
Type of fundraising (convertible note, etc): convertible note
Valuation: N/A
Website: Coming Soon (www.kidcarpool.com)
Twitter: @KidCarpool
Founder Names: Danielle Patton
Email contact info and name of main contact: [email protected]

Founder(s) Bio:

Talented entrepreneur and business strategist adapt at implementing and executing creative solutions to solve consumer problems. Solid leader who is highly analytical and strong at developing and maintaining strict budgets with measurable results.

Over 7 years of proven business success; closed 600k of 2m in seed funding for a 10m post-money valuation, hired C-level executives, built team of 40, managed 10+ employees within the San Francisco startup community.

Adept at planning and leading comprehensive strategies in support of business goals and objectives. Expertise in collaborating with cross-functional teams and outside organizations to plan and execute user-centric products, productive marketing, business development programs and increase sales in existing and new markets.

TaDa Labs

Worksheet to Web

Raising: $600,000
Closed/Committed: $50,000
Type of fundraising (convertible note, etc): equity
Valuation: $3M
Website: www.tadalabs.com
Twitter: @TadaLabs
Founder Names: Leslie Pound
Email contact info and name of main contact: [email protected]

Founder(s) Bio:

Leslie has worked on and with search engines and product design though-out her career at Nokia, Ipsilon, Marketfirst, Cadence, SRI and several startups. In the AI group at SRI, she worked on the design and technology for “Siri” Her technology and designs were part of package bought by Apple when it acquired Siri. She has contributed to 5 patents and has consistently been years ahead of the curve in technology trends.

MavJay

We are in the field of Customer Experience Management and help restaurants handle their online presence through a simplified iPad mechanism.

Raising: $1.5M
Closed/Committed: $500,000
Type of fundraising (convertible note, etc): equity
Valuation: $6M
Website: n/a
Twitter: n/a
Founder Names: Manoj Vijayaseka
Email contact info and name of main contact: [email protected]

Founder(s) Bio:

Manoj graduated with a Bachelor of Honours Software Engineering degree from the University of Waterloo, Canada. He also received a Minor in Cognitive Science with his interest centred around psychology and artificial intelligence.

Through the University of Waterloo’s cooperative education (internship) program, Manoj worked on several live projects within reputable companies, such as PricewaterhouseCoopers, Qualcomm, and NexJ Systems, in different fields of software engineering. His experiences range from building mobile applications, to professional services consultancy, and to architecting application frameworks. During his degree, Manoj also travelled to Sweden on an exchange term to study and work alongside leading software designers and architects.

Paymention

We bring crowdfunding and micro-donations to Twitter where they turn become a lot more social, convenient and impactful.

Raising: TBD
Closed/Committed: n/a
Type of fundraising (convertible note, etc): n/a
Valuation: n/a
Website: www.paymention.co
Twitter: n/a
Founder Names: Emrah Seker
Email contact info and name of main contact: [email protected]

Founder(s) Bio:

Emrah has 10 years of software engineering background at Siemens (~3 yrs), Microsoft (~7yrs) and currently at Box as a Senior Software Engineer. He worked on various challenging software projects, such as storage virtualization in Windows Kernel and data retention management at Box. After successfully contributing to multiple multi-billion dollar projects, he recently completed 2-month long iOS and Android bootcamps and finally started working on bringing his Paymention project to life.

More information on Emrah’s academic and professional achievements can be found on his LinkedIn profile available at the following address: