More than 600 investors, entrepreneurs and tech industry geeks packed the Showbox Sodo Thursday morning to hear from the latest crop of entrepreneurs emerging from Seattle-based B2B startup accelerator 9Mile Labs.
The latest cohort — the 4th to emerge from 9Mile — spanned a wide variety of industries, from health care to lawn care to a new way to reserve camp sites online. Each had six minutes to present their concept on stage, attempting to grab attention of investors or partners.
Here’s a look at the opening pitches and a little background on the eight companies that presented.
Fasterbids
Opening pitch: “In my 25 years experience in the home remodel industry, I have found one thing to be consistently true: remodeling your home sucks! It sucks for the remodel home sales professional as well. People spend as much as four hours of everyday preparing quotes for … customers. Fasterbids reduces this time from hours to minutes.”
CEO: Jason Lindquist
Startup Spotlight: Fasterbids crunches price quote data to streamline home improvement sales
Kodu Care
Opening pitch: “We bring health care to your door. We all hate going to the doctor, but what people hate most about going to the doctor is precisely that: going to the doctor. We hate going to the doctor when we are sick because we feel horrible. But we also hate going to the doctor when we need to skip school or work for physicals… So, why is it that the doctor can’t come see the patient?”
CEO: Mauricio Gonzalez de la Fuente
Mowdo
Opening pitch: “We are essentially Uber for lawn care. According to Consumer Reports, there are three things that Americans wish they didn’t have to do. Those top three things are: visiting the inlaws, going to the dentist, and you guessed it, mowing your lawn. I can’t promise you that there is an app to avoid your inlaws or the dentist, but today I am excited to say you can now reach in your pocket and order, on-demand recurring lawn care.”
CEO: Mike Fingado
Startup Spotlight: Mowdo digitizes lawn care with on-demand pricing and service
Qalendra
Opening pitch: “We develop contextual technologies for the travel industry of tomorrow, because there is a problem in the travel industry of today. Take, airlines, for example. They don’t care if you fly for skiing to a tropical forest: They will sell you the ticket anyways, right? And they will even charge you for the oversized luggage. Travel agents, they sell skiing packages with 40 percent of … to resorts that are off season. Practically, they send skiers to where there is no snow. Travel insurance companies, they cover the risk of missing the flight or having your luggage stolen or lost, but not the risk of missing the snow during your ski trip. They care about your laundry. They don’t care about your trip experience. The solution to all of this is contextual data processing…. At Qalendra, we mine, fuse and structure data related to all of the factors that have an impact on the final travel experience, like weather, terrain, facilities, traffic, prices. And then we put all of these pieces together and create amazing insights that make people happier and companies more profitable.”
CEO: Cristian Munteanu
Startup Spotlight: Qalendra uses real-time data to help adventure travelers plan vacations
Pingle
Opening pitch: “Training matters…. After all, credentials show the world what you can do. This allows businesses to hire the right people, schools to get the right students and workers can get the job they are ready for. You see, here is what is wrong. We have a 100-year old process. Resumes have been updated. People have their resumes on LinkedIn now, and they email resumes when they are looking for a job. But verification is still a 100-year-old process. In fact, the last time resume verification was updated was when the telephone was invented. Until now. Pingle has created the world’s first fully-automated verification engine.”
CEO: Redwolf Pope
Camp Native
Opening Pitch: “We help people list, discover and reserve the perfect camp site online. A great way to think about Camp Native is that we are like Hotels.com for camping.”
CEO (and Chief Camper): David Woodbury
Startup Spotlight: Camp Native makes it easy to find and reserve campsites around the world
SalesPrepper
Opening pitch: “SalesPrepper is revolutionizing the way that salespeople sell into large organizations. We provide crowdsourced organizational charts so that they can navigate to the right people in a large company. Enterprise sales today is broken. Too much time is wasted talking to the wrong people.”
CEO: Niraj Zaveri
Variat
Opening pitch: “U.S. manufacturers waste $109 billion every single year on poor quality, and while we were working at John Deere, we couldn’t believe the effort required to effectively reduce that expense. We set out to build something better….
CEO: Andrew Crowell
Startup Spotlight: Variat helps manufacturers with cloud-based process control software
A ninth company was also part of the 9Mile Labs cohort, but it did not present on Thursday. That company, Unoceros, is developing technologies that “turn mobile phones into datacenter-like-instances.”
