Want to know about Miami startups? A user's guide to this blog

Dear reader, Starting Gate has been providing and archiving South Florida startup and tech community news, views and resources since 2012. New to the Miami area? Thinking about relocating here? Just want to keep up with news, events and opportunities? We're there for you.

How to use Starting Gate: Besides scrolling the blog for the latest entries, you can access news and views by category. The "Funding" category will capture venture capital and angel funding news of individual startups as well as stories about funders. The startup categories chronicle news and my regular "Spotlights," and in Q&As you'll find interviews with CEOs and leaders in the entrepreneurship ecosystem. There are also categories for guest posts, views, accelerators/incubators, resources, events and more.

Have news? Have an idea for a guest post? Send it to me at ndahlbergbiz@gmail.com. (See my Facebook announcement here)

Thank you for your support through the years and please come back often. Follow me on Twitter @ndahlberg. - Sincerely, Nancy Dahlberg

Chatting with Chirrp: Miami company uses AI to engage with customers

 

By Nancy Dahlberg / ndahlbergbiz@gmail.com

Startup Spotlight: CHIRRP.AI

Headquarters: Miami

Concept: Chirrp is a conversational platform that harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to create engaging interactions with customers. Through Chirrp, companies can rapidly offer intelligent conversation that is engaging, personalized and targeted.

Story: Since working together on their first project many years ago, the founders of Chirrp — Mallesh Murugesan and Stephen Yuan — have been passionate about using technology to deliver better experiences for consumers. Over the past three years, their team has explored the capabilities of current Artificial Intelligence technologies, identifying weakness and working on ways to apply AI to enhance user interactions. In 2016, they decided to bring these ideas together to create a platform that would enable richer conversations and better experiences for their users.

Once the platform foundation was created, the Chirrp team focused on making the conversations robust, flexible and accurate. Through their research, they explored linguistics and communications in an effort to make Chirrp’s AI more human-like. The company has now created a patent-pending methodology that uses a unique way to understand the context of human intentions and provide human-like engagement.

Murugesan, CEO and co-founder, has been very involved in the startup community here in South Florida. “The startup community has evolved so much in Miami in the past few years right in front of us. There is a very vibrant startup community here and is growing tremendously,” Murugesan said. Prior to Chirrp, he started Abeyon to bring intuitive design, as well as great user experience design and user interface design (UI/UX) to complex business processes, be it health data, manufacturing or government.

Yuan is COO and has more than 25 years of experience working on technology products. He heads the R&D team of Chirrp’s Washington, D.C., office. Having two locations has allowed the company to work successfully in the healthcare industry, as well as with the federal government.

Chirrp is being implemented at hospitals around South Florida as a patient engagement tool, Murugesan said. Chirrp is also working on a project with the U.S. Department of the Navy to analyze data and find patterns and attributes to enable Navy to make better decisions. The company is having conversations with several other federal agencies as well, he said.

Launched: January 2017

Website: www.chirrp.ai

Management team: Mallesh Murugesan, co-founder and CEO, Stephen Yuan, co-founder and COO.

No. of employees: Five.

Financing: Currently raising seed funding.

Recent milestones: In June, Chirrp.ai won the eMerge Americas Early Stage Startup Showcase, taking home $50,000 in prizes. Since then, the company has brought in business development partners and advisory board members to grow and realize the potential of Chirrp.ai. The company also recently obtained another major healthcare client for which it will deliver customer engagement through digital channels.

Biggest startup challenge: “Our biggest challenge is the timing of the technology. Artificial Intelligence-based solutions are still new, especially in the enterprise space. Finding the right solution for an enterprise has been a challenge and a focus for us at Chirrp.ai. In the upcoming year, we believe AI will take a central role in solution offerings and we see Chirrp at the forefront of that movement,” Murugesan said.

Next step: To continue strengthening the platform and improve its capabilities. The startup is working on several proof-of-concepts for specific industries to showcase the applicability of AI-based conversations.

Strategy for next step: The strategy is to have a well-defined product road map from a technology perspective, continue to develop the capabilities of the platform, and then bring in the right strategic partners to capture the healthcare market using Chirrp.ai.

Mentor’s view: “Chirrp is also very well positioned and in the early stage of utilizing artificial intelligence to improve and streamline processes and customer interaction, specifically within the healthcare industry. Mallesh has a great attitude and is open to ideas and critique and able to executed changes quickly,” said Nathaniel Pool, an angel investor and adviser. “As with any startup, the key to Chirrp’s success will be to solidify their niche, then remain laser-focused.”

Follow @ndahlberg on Twitter. Email Nancy at ndahlbergbiz@gmail.com

READ PAST STARTUP SPOTLIGHTS UNDER THE STARTUP SPOTLIGHT CATEGORY OF THIS BLOG.

Chirrp Co-Founder & CEO Mallesh Murugesan and Maite Nogales, office manager, stand outside their office in Coral Gables on Nov. 21. Chirrp is a tech company that uses artificial intelligence to create engaging chat conversations. AL DIAZ adiaz@miamiherald.com

Streann Media’s bold bet: ‘We are here to rescue the broadcast industry’

 

Startup Spotlight: Streann Media of Miami seeks to reinvent digital content for media customers and brands through distribution, engagement and monetization.

By Nancy Dahlberg / ndahlbergbiz@gmail.com

Company Name: Streann Media

Headquarters: Miami

Concept: Reinventing digital content for media customers and brands through distribution, engagement and monetization.

Story: The beginnings of Streann Media trace back six years, when the paths of Giovanni Punzo and Antonio Calderón crossed during their roles with disruptive technology provider LiveU. Around this time, Netflix’s new media content business model was just emerging, and the pair of innovators discovered firsthand the struggles that other content providers were having making the shift to digital and then to streaming content. Knowing that these other providers would soon be forced to follow the Netflix model to save their businesses, they sought a new solution — and Streann Media was the result.

 “We are here to rescue the broadcast industry,” said Calderón, Streann’s chief technology officer. “Thanks to our technology, our customers are building next-generation digital networks, their own version of Facebook, Netflix, YouTube, etc. With our technology, our customers are finally really engaging with end users and most importantly they are monetizing in digital,” added Punzo, CEO.

How does a TV station or radio station make money? Selling advertising. While traditional advertising spending is down and it’s boring; digital ad spending is up and should be more engaging, said the co-founders, who previously worked in the broadcast industry. “We built a digital advertising technology that can increase digital ads revenue times 10 in live video, audio and video on demand. Our customers create campaigns like Facebook Ads Manager but the ads are in their own digital networks. Content providers are in control and they monetize,” Punzo said.

Game shows and contests are ways a radio or TV station can engage their audiences. So Streann created a new feature in the platform for content providers to create contests on mobile with cash rewards, such as video Selfie-Ads.

“Already customers like TCS Digital in Central America, Actualidad Radio in Florida, Cariflix in the Caribbean, Iriejam in New York and Puravida in Costa Rica are using our new inventions and engaging with their customers,” said Punzo. “The results have been great — new user generated content, real testimonials, real storytelling.”

Streann’s technologies touches millions of people with more than 160 digital entertainment networks deployed for Web, iOS, Android, Roku, AppleTV, Virtual Reality, streaming in 141 countries, Punzo and Calderón said.

“Streann looks at the future of television like no one else is. Its user experience and monetization platforms make companies take a huge leap in technology. They are at the forefront constantly and have a personalized and exceptional relationship with each client,” said Raúl Domínguez, digital and new business director of TCS Digital.

Founded: 2014

Website: www.streann.com

Management team: Giovanni Punzo, CEO and co-founder; Antonio Calderón, chief technology officer and co-founder.

No. of employees: 15

Financing: The company has received investment from Tamiami Angels and Florida Angel Nexus investors.

Recent milestones: Launched Inside-Ads in Q3 2017 and Selfie-Ads user-generated content in November 2017. The Selfie-Ads product attracted regional brands such as Nestle, KFC, Subway, Pizza Hut and Diana. Streann recently launched Vlixers, an influencer platform for its customer TCS-Digital. It’s a unique platform designed for millennials with original content created by millennials available on Web, iOS and Android. The company won at the Early Stage Capital Conference in 2016 and was a finalist in eMerge Americas Startup Showcase.

Biggest startup challenge: Educating content providers to make the digital switch utilizing Streann technologies.

Next step: Launching new engagement and monetization features by NAB 2018, a broadcasting trade show in April. “The soccer World Cup in 2018 will help us grow even more as many of our customers will transmit World Cup content through our platform,” Calderón said.

Advisor’s view: Eric Giler, a Boston-based serial entrepreneur and on the board of Streann, said he worked with Punzo at his previous company, and admires his vision and energy level. “Gio’s partner and co-founder Antonio Calderón is a superb technical complement to Gio’s market and business sense,” Giler said.

“A laser-like focus on the Latin American market has been key to Streann’s early success. No other company is approaching the market like Streann. The challenge will be scaling the business as they continue to expand. Building out the team and attracting capital will be important as they continue to grow.”

Follow @ndahlberg on Twitter. Email ndahlbergbiz@gmail.com

 

Pictured above: Antonio Calderón, CTO, at left, and Giovanni Punzo, CEO, co-founders of Streann Media, in their office in Doral. Jose A. Iglesias jiglesias@elnuevoherald.com

CarePredict tracks seniors’ health for caregivers in a natural way

Startup Spotlight: CarePredict of Plantation, founded by health-technology veteran Satish Movva, provides an AI-driven platform for elder care that uses deep learning to surface insights based on the activities of daily living of seniors.

Company: CarePredict

Headquarters: Plantation; also has an office in Silicon Valley.

Concept: Elder care powered by artificial intelligence.

Story: Health-technology veteran Satish Movva founded CarePredict to help him take care of his now 90- and 80-year-old parents. They live 10 miles away from where he lives in western Broward County, and because of their advancing age, he could not rely on one to keep an eye on the other.

He noticed that changes in activity and behavior patterns showed up well before the underlying issues manifested into medical conditions and sought a system to observe his parents continuously and let him know of these changes early enough to intervene.

Finding the existing technologies inadequate and outdated, Movva set about creating a first-in-the-industry system to observe the daily activity and behavior patterns of each parent individually and with privacy, and alert him to anomalies. Movva has worked in technology for 30 years, 23 of them in healthcare, including being the founding CIO for Sheridan Healthcare and creating its first mobile EMR device on the Palm Pilot. He also created the first web-based home-care platform at Interim Healthcare.

CarePredict is an AI-driven platform for elder care that uses deep learning to provide insights based on the daily activities of seniors. It starts with a wearable — a bracelet — that collects data that is sent to an app.

“We collect our data through lightweight sensors for contextual cues and a wearable,” Movva said. “We detect activities a senior is performing such as eating, drinking, bathing, cooking, sleeping, functional activity, and we couple that with contextual cues to surface insights like self-neglect, for example, due to depression, unusual toileting patterns, for example, due to UTIs, malnutrition and dehydration, all without any self-reporting by the senior or need for any other human observer.”

That includes fall prediction, too: “This whole industry has been fixated on fall detection ... but the issue is when someone falls it is too late. Falls are the single biggest inflexion point in aging, ... if you can prevent those falls you are better off. We are probably the pioneers in figuring out fall prediction rather than fall detection.”

CarePredict has been commercially available to senior group living facilities and home care agencies since March. Four senior living chains are already using the platform. CarePredict, now a team of 17 engineers and data scientists, has hired a sales team to ramp up business development in 2018. The company plans to address the direct-to-consumer market in the future.

“This company has the DNA to be enormously successful — the right team, the right market and the right solution. It’s not going to happen overnight, but they have all the right things going for them,” said Peter Livingston, a CarePredict investor and board member.

Launched: Company formed in May 2013

Website: www.carepredict.com

Management team: Satish Movva, founder and CEO; Greg Zobel, chief growth officer.

No. of employees: 17

Financing: $5.2 million in prior rounds that included South Florida-based Las Olas Venture Capital.

Recent milestones reached: Started commercializing product in 2017; four commercial assisted living and memory care enterprises signed up in the U.S. and Canada in 2017; three U.S. patents granted in 2017; one of two U.S. companies selected by Google for their “Google for Entrepreneurs” mentorship in deep learning and AI in Waterloo/Toronto campus; opened office in Palo Alto, CA in 2017.

Biggest startup challenge: Building the team and funding the mission.

Next step: Scaling the company. CarePredict is raising funds to expand company operations for installations and training and bringing on experienced industry sales leaders to increase outbound sales.

“CarePredict is solving a big problem, in a rapidly growing market, in a novel way,” said Dean Hatton, a founding partner with Las Olas Venture Capital and a CarePredict investor/board member. “The company has built a robust pipeline of interested prospects. Interestingly, this has been accomplished without sales or marketing efforts, principally through word-of-mouth in the assisted living facility ecosystem. Recently, Satish has added sales resources and will soon launch an outbound sales effort. The demand will be immense. Meeting that demand will be the greatest challenge ahead.”

Follow @ndahlberg on Twitter.

READ MORE STARTUP STORIES

LifeWallet helps consumers take control of their health

Is my mole cancerous? Miami-based DermaSensor developing a hand-held device to evaluate risk

BloomsyBox: A startup idea takes root that keeps on giving

How sea-rise ready is your home or business? Coastal Risk offers the lowdown

Need affordable travel in Latin America? Voyhoy has the ticket

Startup Spotlight: LifeWallet helps consumers take control of their health

 

From left: Norberto Menendez, CEO and founder of Life Wallet; Anthony Alviz, software engineer, Scott Johns, design lead, Yaismel Miranda, software engineer; and Kyle Carriedo, engineer manager, at the company offices at 14591 SW 120th St. in Miami-Dade. Roberto Koltun rkoltun@miamiherald.com

 

Company name: LifeWallet

Headquarters: Miami-Dade County (Kendall)

Concept: LifeWallet aims to change the healthcare delivery model, enabling consumers to own their health.

Story: Using the LifeWallet HealthBook app, a 59-year-old locksmith recently lost 17 pounds in three months and his blood glucose reading dropped enough that he was no longer considered pre-"diabetic. “You have to do it for yourself,” he said, adding that the app helped him stay on track because “someone is always looking at your readings and you’re accountable.”

That’s just one example of LifeWallet at work.

LifeWallet, a South Florida-based startup, creates digital health assistants in the form of apps and care programs. “We empower consumers and communities to lead healthier lifestyles and take control of their health,” said Norberto Menendez, LifeWallet’s founder and CEO.

Menendez, 55, was born in Cuba, graduated from South Miami High School and the University of Miami, and then went to Silicon Valley to work for Apple. He returned to Miami in the mid-1990s to take care of his ailing father.

As he continued to work remotely for Apple while caring for his father, frustrations with insurance, the healthcare system, access to medical records, lack of communication between healthcare providers and the high costs of healthcare led him to take the entrepreneurial plunge with LifeWallet.

Menendez believed that technology focused on empowering consumers with control of their health could save lives as well as solve many of the systemic problems of the industry. He recruited several members of his top management team from Apple.

LifeWallet offers a consumer product, its HealthBook app, as well as products for healthcare providers and health insurance plans. Customers have included Baptist, where LifeWallet has done nearly 20,000 health assessments with West Kendall Baptist Hospital, GE, the City of Doral, YMCA, and Indiana Health University. It will be working with Athlete’s Health and the NFL Players Association, where it will be doing assessments for concussions and the health of athletes, Menendez said.

One of LifeWallet’s programs is Sugar Smart for Life, in which the locksmith participated. It is a collaborative effort between the GE HealthyCities Leadership Academy, LifeWallet and West Kendall Baptist Hospital, a one-year pilot program designed to engage consumers diagnosed as pre-diabetic create healthier lifestyles and prevent the onset of Type II diabetes. It recently received a grant from AstraZeneca to continue the program.

Re-imagining the Healthy Hub at West Kendall Baptist Hospital is another program. Consumers go through a simple health screening process at this free one-stop screening and referral-to-care kiosk. Within minutes, consumers receive a Healthsnap, or snapshot of their health, sent to their cellphones.

In August, Doral Mayor Juan Carlos Bermudez challenged his residents to take the StepUp Your Health Doral Challenge. He’s trying to get his citizens to walk a billion steps in the next year. LifeWallet created the app that keeps track of residents’ steps, adds them to the community total and provides individual rankings.

What’s next? LifeWallet is working on strategic initiatives with Florida International University, connecting with Watson Health of IBM and doing work using artificial intelligence and predictive analytics. It aims to create a digital health store where consumers can purchase health assessments they can take from the comfort of their own homes and care plans that can be monitored by health and wellness coaches, Menendez said.

“We’re talking to major healthcare systems throughout the country ... about how the LifeWallet platform can save them, and consumers, billions of dollars a year, particularly in the fight against chronic diseases that account for 86 percent of the costs of healthcare,” Menendez said.

Website: www.lifewallet.com

Launched: 2014

Number of employees: 15

Management team: Norberto Menendez, CEO; Kyle Carriedo, leads engineering team; Ben Sharpe, development; Scott Johns, designer; Edwin Rivera, brand evangelist.

Financing: $6.5 million in private financing from family and friends. Currently seeking Series A financing of $10 million.

Recent milestones: Grant from AstraZeneca to continue its Sugar Smart for Life program with West Kendall Baptist Hospital. Pilot with KeepLivin, Jessie Trice Community Health Center and Health Choice Networks for diabetes prevention and management to help manage patients affected with diabetes. Collaboration with Athlete’s Health to assess and track the course of concussions and overall health in former NFL players and young athletes and to promote health screenings in the community with local organizations, hospitals, schools and companies in 32 cities throughout the U.S. Partnership with AgaMatrix to facilitate preventative care and remote monitoring in populations at risk of developing diabetes.

Biggest startup challenge: Funding in South Florida. “We’re talking to various funding sources in the Northeast and in Silicon Valley, but South Florida still remains a challenge,” Menendez said.

Next step: Continuing to enhance the LifeWallet platform and getting the word out to healthcare providers and insurers.

Mentor’s view: “I always look first at the opportunity and then the team. LifeWallet is at the forefront of the change from traditional healthcare to patient-centered wellness management, one of the biggest possible opportunities. A team of ex-Apple programmers was a very attractive plus,” said Bob Hacker, director of StartUP FIU, startup advisor and professor. “The challenge is picking the early commercial partner — whether it be an insurer, hospital group, large local employer or government organization — to leverage the SAAS platform to scale LifeWallet. I like the insurers as the first customer segment.”

Follow @ndahlberg on Twitter.

READ MORE STARTUP STORIES

Is my mole cancerous? Miami-based Dermasensor developing a hand-held device to evaluate risk

BloomsyBox: A startup idea takes root that keeps on giving

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Need affordable travel in Latin America? Voyhoy has the ticket

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Bloomsybox.com: A Miami startup idea that keeps on giving

Company name: BloomsyBox.com

Headquarters: Miami

Concept: BloomsyBox.com is a subscription service that sends its customers fresh flowers weekly, biweekly and monthly from fair-trade sustainable farms around the globe.

Story: Juan Palacio’s interest in agriculture sprouted from his grandfather, who worked on an arabica farm in Colombia not far from where Palacio grew up. Palacio worked on the farm and learned the value of hard work and dedication.

“Once I got old enough, I channeled my viejo’s drive and sense of adventure and moved to Miami,” Palacio said. “I had a heavy accent and was not fluent in English but worked hard to learn while selling flowers door to door to hotels in Miami Beach. I’m sure it’s no surprise to you that I was yelled at and had doors slammed in my face.”

But Palacio eventually established a clientele. He taught himself online marketing and SEO, which led to the creation of an e-commerce site that sold flowers in bulk to do-it-yourselfer brides-to-be and event planners called theflowerexchange.com, which he sold in 2009. “I then worked in more corporate roles, such as a consultant for Hotels.com, but the lasting memories I had of the farms of my youth had me longing to return to growing.”

Palacio then came up with the concept of a monthly flower subscription model, and launched BloomsyBox.com in 2015. He went back to the same farms in Colombia and Ecuador he had worked with for years and he negotiated a great rate by cutting out the flower distributor and working directly with them.

“We only work with farms that are Rainforest Alliance and Veriflora certified, meaning they follow a specific set of rules that makes them ethically and environmentally friendly. These rules cover all aspects of the business from the treatment of workers on the farm to the disposal of the flowers,” he said.

Each stem is hand-picked, arranged into a hand-tied bouquet, and delivered to the customer in less than four days. Most of its blooms arrive in bud form, so they’re guaranteed to last longer than typical store-bought bouquets, he said. Monthly subscriptions start at $39.99 with shipping included.

The secret sauce is the discovery factor. Customers will be surprised by what they are getting, and it won’t be typical. BloomsyBox works mainly with growers in the flower capitals of Latin America and also buys from Holland and Thailand. “We also wanted to walk away from the typical bouquet you can buy everywhere, so we only do single-variety bouquets.”

For instance, customers recently received about 15 stems of oriental lilies of various colors, each stem with several buds on them, in the smallest subscription box. In August, BloomsyBox shipped out 30-35 stems of lisianthus. It also offers a roses-only subscription, but they too will be unusual, maybe even multicolored, including the Free Spirit and Magic Times varieties or the deep purple Ascot.

Customers buy them for their homes or offices, but many of them gift them, often as corporate gifts. Realtors buy them as closing gifts for their home-buying customers, for instance. “We also ship to a lot of retirement homes nationwide,” he said.

BloomsyBox.com now has about 7,000 subscribers and recently inked a branded deal with Costco.com. It also plans to run a campaign and contest this fall called #MyForeverBloom. Participants will be asked to submit stories about inspirational figures in their lives, and the author of the most compelling, heartwarming story will win the opportunity to permanently name a rose variety after that individual, Palacio said. “We are very excited about this campaign and hope it will spark conversation about the family, friends, and mentors who make a difference in our lives.”

Launched: September 2015

Website: www.BloomsyBox.com

Management team: Juan Palacio (CEO); Nelson Sanchez (logistics); David Salazar (customer service); Alejandra Velandia (creative)

No. of employees: Eight.

Financing: Seed round of $380,000 from a private angel investor and currently setting up a Series A.

Recent milestones: BloomsyBox has 7,000 active subscribers. The company developed a unique floral subscription plan for Costco.com, which will be available soon with the BloomsyBox brand.

Biggest startup challenge: Finding quality talent, specifically in customer service.

Next steps: “We understand that our product is a great gift, and every day we get more and more subscribers sending flowers to someone else, so we’re exploring new ways to improve the user ‘gift-giver experience’ as well as the way we communicate with the gift recipient,” Palacio said. “We’re planning on rolling out a loyalty points system in which users will be able to receive free boxes and upgrades. Customers will be able to redeem points for any occasion and will receive surprise boxes with premium flowers such as cymbidium orchids or long-stem roses.”

Advisor’s view: Roland Schambach, vice president of Elite Flower, has been a vendor for, and advisor to, the BloomsyBox team since its launch. “When I first learned about their idea of offering flowers on a subscription basis to the end consumer by working directly with farms like us, I knew it was going to be successful. I truly believe in what they call the ‘discovery’ process in which the subscription can serve as the vehicle to introduce new flowers varieties and educate the users on how to care for flowers,” he said. “They spend a lot of time and resources listening to what their users have to say about their flowers, the way boxes are delivered, the varieties they send, etc. ... As they continue to grow, their biggest challenge, I believe, is to keep that level of personalization that they've given so far to their customer service.”

Read more Startup Spotlights

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Nancy Dahlberg on Twitter: @ndahlberg

How sea-rise ready is your home or business? Startup offers the lowdown

Company name: Coastal Risk Consulting

Headquarters: Plantation

Concept: Coastal Risk Consulting creates cloud-based technologies to help a billion coastal residents in the U.S. and around the world get climate-ready and storm-safe.

ADVERTISING

Story: It’s easy to see a need for this South Florida tech startup’s service, especially when last Tuesday’s torrential deluge flooded dozens of homes and businesses in the Miami area. Coastal Risk Consulting identifies an individual property’s vulnerability to flooding from extreme weather and tides, storm surge, ground water inundation and rising sea levels.

In late 2014, Dr. Leonard Berry, former provost of Florida Atlantic University and director of its Center for Environmental Studies, and Albert Slap, a nationally recognized environmental lawyer and adjunct law professor at Florida International University, teamed up. Given increasing risks to coastal populations from storms, flooding and sea-level rise, they formed Coastal Risk Consulting to provide actionable intelligence about flood risks to homeowners, businesses and governments worldwide and make it fast, accurate and affordable. Both men had recently retired.

With seed capital provided by Slap (pictured here), they brought together scientists, including a Nobel Prize winner, and software engineers to create a cloud-based system for flood- and climate-risk modeling. By the end of 2015, they launched floodscores.com.

Today, the company also offers fee-for-service flood and climate-risk consulting using its proprietary technology. Clients include the cities of Miami and Miami Beach, the villages of Key Biscayne and Pinecrest, the Cleveland Clinic, TetraTech, Battelle, Atlantic Broadband, Grey Door Luxury Homes and others. The startup is raising capital for expansion.

Stanley Young, president of Grey Door Luxury Homes in Fort Lauderdale, hired Coastal Risk Consulting to undertake a study of a home his company was building on a street prone to flooding. Coastal Risk provided him with a report that demonstrated through its flood models that the new elevation of the home meant that it would not be affected by potential/predicted sea-level rises in the next 50 years, Young said.

“They are riding on the wave of current media attention to the risks of climate change. They have a very practical tool that can be used to assess the economic and socioeconomic risk of climate change,” Young said. “I think the work they do is critical for us all to gain a true understanding of the risks of climate change.”

Website: coastalriskconsulting.com; floodscores.com

Management team: President and co-founder Albert Slap; CFO Rajiv Krishnan; Vice President of Government Consulting and co-founder Leonard Berry; Vice President of Science Brian Soden; Chief Technology Officer John Waddell.

No. of employees: 15

Financing: Initial seed funding of $150,000. Closed on two $500,000 angel rounds; the second closed in March. Seeking to raise $5 million this year.

Recent milestones: Adding the City of Miami Beach as a customer; adding a $7.5 billion California real-estate investment trust as a customer; successfully completing the sea level rise vulnerability assessment and adaption alternatives study for the Village of Key Biscayne.

Biggest startup challenge: Coastal Risk Consulting’s innovative technology fulfills a critical need for the banking, insurance and real estate markets, but all three markets have been slow to adopt property-specific flood risk modeling for differing reasons, Slap said. “It has been a challenge for our startup to bring to these markets a fuller understanding of the benefits of property specific, flood and climate risk modeling.”

Next step: Coastal Risk is making strong progress in all of its revenue areas. “Our next step is to close on Round A funding later this year, so that we can hire a robust sales team to complement our world-class science team,” Slap said. “Our strategy is to continue to make recurring revenue progress by integrating our technology in the banking, insurance and real estate sectors.”

Two of the principles of Coastal Risk Consulting in their Plantation office, from left: Vice President of Science Brian Soden and co-founder Leonard Berry. The company’s recent achievements include adding the City of Miami Beach as a customer.

Follow @ndahlberg on Twitter.

Read more Startup Spotlights in the Startup Spotlights category of this blog or here: 

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Miami startup reinvents shopping for emergency insurance

Two of the principles of Coastal Risk Consulting in their Plantation office, from left: Vice President of Science Brian Soden and co-founder Leonard Berry. The company’s recent achievements include adding the City of Miami Beach as a customer. Bryan Cereijo BCereijo@MiamiHerald.com

 

Startup Spotlight: Voyhoy

From left: Ignacio Vial, Mateus Rocha, Jake Moskowitz (seated) CEO, Juan Arredondo, and Roger Robinson at the offices of Voyhoy on June 22. Voyhoy, which recently won the big prize at eMerge Americas, has a travel app where people can buy tickets for Latin American travel on bus, flight, ferry and train — sometimes all in the same trip in one place online. Roberto Kolton/Miami Herald.

 

Company name: Voyhoy

Headquarters: Miami, with operations office in Santiago, Chile.

Concept: Voyhoy is a multimodal travel platform in Latin America, helping people compare and buy tickets on buses, planes, ferries and trains. The startup focuses on the most affordable tickets for the most price-sensitive travelers in the region.

Story: Despite diverse backgrounds, Voyhoy co-founders Jake Moskowitz, Roger Robinson and Ignacio Vial can thank coincidence and Santiago’s tightly-knit expat community for bringing them together. To affordably book trips for his clients at his former tourism company while working in Chile, Moskowitz, from Atlanta, would visit multiple bus terminals with wads of cash and sit in line for hours to buy seats on passenger buses rather than pay for an expensive charter bus. For personal travel, he and Robinson, an expat from Washington, D.C., struggled to find transportation information online and constantly encountered problems with disorganized ticket offices.

Jake Moskowitz, CEO of Voyhoy, at the company offices in Miami.

Roberto Koltun rkoltun@miamiherald.com

They found that travelers in Latin America are faced with ever-increasing options to get from point A to point B. But limited connectivity and route coverage, disproportionate trip prices, and a lack of transparent information, the best route is rarely apparent. Also, most travel sites that cater to Latin America only sell flights — the most expensive mode of transportation — whereas most travelers prefer more affordable options like buses and low-cost airlines, most of which are not even listed on travel sites in the region. This fragmentation forced travelers to buy their tickets in person or on the individual sites of each operator without comparing multiple companies at once.

The co-founders, including Vial, a Chilean native, created a free version of Voyhoy as a proof of concept. “After traffic grew quickly and more and more travelers were using Voyhoy to find the best trip, we decided to make this our lives’ mission,” Moskowitz said.

Voyhoy received initial funding from local Chilean investors to hire developers and build a monetized version of Voyhoy: “We then simply followed the demand, partnering with the companies that offered the routes with the highest search volumes in Voyhoy. Each time we added a new company, our revenue increased.” Voyhoy was then accepted into a highly competitive Techstars accelerator program focused on mobility.

As it was Santiago’s community that brought the team together, it was a leader in Miami’s tech community that brought the startup to Miami. “A charismatic” Kairos CEO Brian Brackeen met the co-founders by chance at a pitch event in Detroit and immediately began to pitch them on relocating to Miami. A subsequent 30-minute call with Brackeen turned into two hours; Brackeen made introductions; and soon, they were flying down for a tour by Brackeen and meetings with tech community leadors and entrepreneurs. The Voyhoy team relocated in January, believing Miami to be the ideal location for an international headquarters for its growing customer base in Latin America.

“I’m glad they chose Miami as their headquarters after TechStars. The entrepreneurs have a lot of passion, are hard workers and are good listeners,” said mentor Laura Maydon, managing director of Endeavor Miami. “Importantly, they are solving an important problem.”

Today, travelers can use Voyhoy to buy tickets from over 1,000 providers across transport modes for over 100,000 routes in Chile, Argentina, Peru, Brazil and Colombia, with other markets on the way. For transport operators, Voyhoy increases their ticket sales by modernizing their technology capabilities and diversifying their passenger base.

Voyhoy also helps some partners increase their ticket inventory by combining their existing trips with other providers to sell interlined tickets to new destinations both on Voyhoy.com and on their own sites.

“We realized that providing a simple tool to find the best tickets wasn’t enough,” Moskowitz said. “We developed virtual interlining technology that allows travelers to buy multiple travel legs in single transactional tickets. We call them smart tickets. (Bus + flight, train + ferry, etc.). Our smart tickets help travelers find new ways to get to their destinations, save money against overpriced direct options, and save time for inefficient overland journeys.”

Launched: September 2015

Website: voyhoy.com

Management team: Jake Moskowitz, CEO; Roger Robinson, CTO; Ignacio Vial, COO; Mateus Rocha, marketing director; Juan Arredondo, project manager.

No. of employees: 16

Financing: $500,00 pre-seed from angel investors, Techstars and CORFO (Chilean government); undisclosed seed round from Fontinalis Partners, 1776, Outbound Ventures and Autonebula. Currently look to raise additional $500,000.

Recent milestones: Finalized partnership agreements and technical integrations to launch Voyhoy in four new markets. Recently relocated headquarters to Miami. After closing a round of funding, made strategic hires in Miami and in Chile. In June, won the eMerge Americas Startup Showcase, taking home $100,000 in prizes.

Biggest startup challenge: “Our biggest challenge is trying to accomplish too much too quickly and the opportunity cost that comes with being forced to prioritize one thing over another,” Moskowitz said.

Next step: Implementing marketing campaigns across all Voyhoy’s markets, releasing smart tickets for the routes with the largest price discrepancies or most limited trip options, and providing a more personalized and targeted customer experience. “We’re also developing new technologies, making new hires, and signing new strategic partners to diversify our product, add more tickets, and open up new revenue channels,” Moskowitz said. “We’re currently hiring a full-stack developer and a commercial director.”

Investor’s view: “Voyhoy has done a great job of quickly establishing numerous partnerships, which signals to us that its approach is validated by others in the market,” said investor and advisor Christopher T. Stallman, partner of Fontinalis. “Each market has its own nuances — both opportunities and challenges — and it’s important that they execute well in each country they operate within. As we’ve advised the company, this means leaning on in-country experts, whether they’re advisors or strategic partners, and growing deliberately and effectively versus quick but haphazardly.”

Follow Nancy Dahlberg on Twitter @ndahlberg

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Startup Spotlight: PartyTap is at your service

PartyTap CEO Jordan Hamilton of Miami shows off his PartyTap app on Thursday. On the app, hosts can order bartenders, waitstaff, photographers, videographers and other staff needed for an event. Bryan Cereijo bcereijo@miamiherald.com

Startup Spotlight: PartyTap

Headquarters: Miami

Concept: A party and event staffing app that allows anyone to order staff with a few taps on a smartphone.

Story: After graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in upstate New York, Jordan Hamilton moved to sunny Miami to attend Florida International University’s hospitality/tourism management program and worked as a private chef for extra cash. “I would very often get requests to bring bartenders, waitstaff and photographers with me for larger events and was surprised my clients didn’t have a good place to get these services. That’s when I would search Google to call each company, compare reviews, compare pricing, and it would take days or sometimes weeks to confirm,” Hamilton said. “It was that ‘apple on the head’ moment I thought of a platform where people could open their smartphone and order party staff like they would order an Uber.”

Hamilton shared his app idea with one of his private chef clients, Sarah Lacharlotte, one evening after an event, and she became his first investor and co-founder. So he hung up his chef’s hat, and it took him about a year to design and develop the PartyTap app, with the help of WorkN, a tech company from Atlanta, and teams in India and Hungary.

PartyTap essentially democratizes party staffing by pairing up private party planners and small companies with bartenders, waitstaff and other service providers so that individuals and smaller organizations can easily put together the same type of events large corporations with big budgets can. The app saves time and money by offering bartenders, servers, photographers, DJs and cleanup services in one place, with preset pricing so you know what you are paying before booking, whether it’s months in advance or even just six hours. Coming later this month to the app: catering and valet services. All PartyTap’s staff are vetted and hand-selected to ensure they are the best fit for the job. After the event, they are rated 1-5 stars so PartyTap can monitor how each staff member is performing.

“With this app you simply open it, select the staff you need, add your credit card and send the request. You are updated in real time with staff who accept your request and that’s it. What would have taken multiple phone calls and days of planning now takes less than five minutes and a couple taps on our app,” Hamilton said.

The free app is available on the Apple App and Google Play stores. PartyTap makes a percentage of each transaction booked on the app. PartyTap is servicing Miami Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties, and Hamilton is launching in Aspen and Las Vegas — two big party markets — in the next couple of months as he begins a national expansion. “Expansion into key markets like Las Vegas, New York City, Atlanta, Aspen, Los Angeles and San Francisco will really help us do some damage in the party/event staffing space,” Hamilton said.

Launched: Jan. 15, 2017, on Apple App Store and Google Play

Website: www.partytap.com

Management team: Jordan Hamilton, founder and CEO; Sarah Lacharlotte, co-founder.

No. of employees: 2 employees and 400-plus contractors who work for the app (DJs, bartenders, photographers, valet, catering and waiters).

Financing: $85,000 raised from friends and family last year. Currently raising a seed round, aiming for $250,000 to $500,000.

Recent milestones reached: In South Florida, more than 400 service providers have joined the app, which has been downloaded more than 2,100 times. Revenue spiked 550 percent from March to April on services booked through the app and that momentum continued through May, Hamilton said.

Biggest startup challenge: Driving awareness about the app.

Next step: Expanding into key markets. Hamilton is raising seed funding to help fuel existing growth, increase marketing, hire city managers and recruit staff for expansion cities.

NANCY DAHLBERG

Follow  @ndahlberg on Twitter

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Startup Spotlight: Visual Blasters' FlipaClip app can make anyone an animator

Jonathan Meson, who heads up the team behind Visual Blasters, at his downtown Miami office. The team’s app FlipaClip is a hit on Android devices and is now available on iOS. AL DIAZ adiaz@miamiherald.com

 

 

Company name: Visual Blasters (creators of FlipaClip)

Headquarters: Downtown Miami

Concept: Visual Blasters develops gaming, multimedia and animation mobile apps. “We provide high quality, intuitive apps with an eye toward making the world a better place by helping people express their creativity, discover music and have fun while doing it,” said CEO Jonathan Meson.

Story: In 2010, brothers Jonathan Meson, 33, then a software engineer for Motorola, and Marcos Meson, 38, a senior motion graphics designer at HairDirect.com, founded Visual Blasters, with the mission of designing apps that create “communities” around people’s passions and creative pursuits such as music, animation and games.

​The brothers combined their programming and design skills to create their first product, “XiiaLive,” an internet radio app that offers an uninterrupted Internet radio experience. The app has been downloaded more than 5 million times and has about 100,000 active users. “Xiialive was a success, but was more a product of opportunity, not long-term strategic planning,” said Jonathan. That changed with its next release.

Youngest brother Tim Meson, 26, a software engineer at Oracle, joined the startup to launch a free animation app for Android users in 2012 called FlipaClip. This flip-book style drawing and animation app for Android grew faster than anyone expected, quickly earning a 4.3/5.0 star rating, and over 4.5 million downloads. In less than a year, FlipaClip doubled monthly active users from 250,000 to more than 550,000.

The app, now also available for iOS, allows people to make their own animations by drawing a series of pages through the app to achieve the motion. “People are using it on social media to express their artistic side,” Jonathan said. Here’s a tip: “You don’t have to be a really good artist. We give them all the basics they need to get started.”

The company’s competitive advantage is a combined laser-focus on ease of use and simplicity, a robust set of features, and a platform that ensures products scale effortlessly. The startup makes money through in-app purchases that unlock additional animation tools and ads within the app. Plans for FlipaClip include adding audio as an animation tool.

A key milestone came in 2014, when Visual Blasters entered into a licensing agreement with Fuhu Holdings, a company that makes children’s tablets for Target and Walmart and was recently acquired by Mattel. The agreement resulted in more than 400,000 devices with FlipaClip tech pre-installed.

FlipaClip has attracted all age groups, but the brothers are seeing lots of traction among the 13- to 18-year-olds. “They are spending hours animating instead of watching video games,” said Jonathan, who created stop-motion animation with Legos when he was a kid and made movies with his brothers. “A sense of creation was embedded in us and this app was born out of that.”

In March, FlipaClip launched on iOS with the help of the Animate ‘Unravel’ Contest – a partnership with Miami-based indie band “Tell Her I Love Her” to promote its first single. The contest, underway through May 12, seeks animation entries inspired by the band’s “Unravel” song; entrants are vying for $2,000 in cash prizes. The FlipaClip team learned that the contest can be a powerful vehicle to introduce people to the FlipaClip app, earning some 72,000 views of more than 180 contestant animated videos so far.

Launched: Flipaclip (Cartoon Animation) launched 2012

Website and social: www.visualblasters.com, www.instagram.com/flipaclip and flipaclip.tumblr.com.

Management team: Jonathan Meson (CEO and co-founder), Tim Meson (co-founder and software engineer); Marcos Meson (co-founder and lead designer), Jeremiah Meccage (head of business development).

No. of employees: 8, including contractors in Argentina and the Philippines.

Financing: Self-funded. Considering seeking an angel round of financing.

Recent milestones: In February, reached 5.5 million downloads and 550,000 active monthly users with FlipaClip for Android. in March, FlipaClip went live in Apple’s App store. Also in March, launched the Animate ‘Unravel’ Contest with Miami-based indie-band “Tell Her I Love Her” to announce iOS version of FlipaClip.

Biggest startup challenge: Working with a remote workforce and communicating with developers and customer service team members in different countries and time-zones.

Next steps: “Our plan is to grow FlipaClip and slowly release new applications that fit within our product portfolio and that makes sense with our company focus,” Jonathon said. “New products experience greater growth when they have the power of an existing user base and known brand to leverage. ... In the coming years, we’re going to devote more attention to honing our marketing and brand message and activating our user community in ways that are both fulfilling to them and beneficial to us.”

Follow @ndahlberg on Twitter

The Meson brothers, of Miami-based Visual Blasters, and one of their company advisors, at eMerge Americas in 2015. From left: Tim Meson, Marcos Meson, Jeremy Meccage. Jonathan Meson. Visual Blasters

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Startup Spotlight: Emerge.me reinvents shopping for emergency insurance

Wes Thompson, far left and pictured below, founder and CEO of Emerge.me, a tech startup simplifying shopping and buying insurance for medical emergencies. He has assembled a management team, from left, consisting of Whitney Romanchuk, head of user experience; Mike Rolfe, head of product; and Marc Howard, head of growth marketing and analytics. They are seen in their Wynwood office, inside of Rokk3r Labs, on March 8. Carl Juste cjuste@miamiherald.com

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/biz-monday/article142123609.html#storylink=cpy

By Nancy Dahlberg / ndahlberg@miamiherald.com

 

Startup Spotlight: Emerge.me, a Miami startup, has reinvented the customer experience of shopping for and purchasing an emergency insurance policy. Traditionally, buying a gap policy would require you to spend days corresponding back and forth with an agent or broker about your coverage needs, the available policies and the application process. That’s all changing.

Company name: Emerge.me

Headquarters: Rokk3r Labs in Miami

Concept: Emerge.me makes insurance for medical emergencies accessible, simple and easy to purchase.

Story: Wes Thompson was inspired to create Emerge after hearing the story of a former employee who was struggling to pay medical bills for his wife’s illness. Even though they had health insurance, they could not afford the out-of-pocket costs of deductibles, special treatments, travel costs for care and lost wages. The burden of paying these costs ended up putting the family into serious medical debt.

“This isn’t just an isolated story — in fact millions of Americans are not equipped to deal with the financial reality of these emergencies even if they have health insurance,” Thompson said.

Thompson should know: He has 30 years experience in the insurance industry and most recently was president of Sun Life Financial U.S. What’s more, as an intrapreneur, he helped pave the way for a restructure of a major Philadelphia-based insurance company in the early 2000s that resulted in a new business model. This is Thompson’s first startup.

Emergency insurance solutions — supplemental or gap policies — exist to protect individuals from the risk of unexpected medical emergencies not covered by health insurance. Emergency insurance is designed to complement health insurance by providing a cash benefit that can be used for any out-of-pocket costs related to a covered illness or accident.

But here’s the problem, according to Emerge: They are neither straightforward nor easily accessible to most consumers. These products are sold essentially as an afterthought or add-on to health insurance exclusively through brokers and agents, there is no digital marketplace for customers to compare pricing for policies, get educated, get advice and apply online.

The big picture: Rising healthcare premiums are causing consumers to take on more and more risk, and medical costs are now the leading form of consumer debt in the U.S. today.

Emerge.me has reinvented the customer experience of shopping for and purchasing a policy. Traditionally, buying an emergency insurance policy would require you to spend anywhere from two days to a few weeks corresponding back and forth with a broker or agent about your coverage needs, the available policies and the application process.

That’s all changing. Before launching Emerge late last year, the company spent a year building an in-house algorithm. Now, a customer can come to emerge.me, and engage with tools, get coverage advice, compare personalized quotes, and apply online — all within 15 minutes or less, the company said. Emerge primarily markets to the consumer but sees significant opportunities in the B2B arena.

Emerge has launched with two products, critical illness insurance for financial protection against cancer, heart attack, stroke and more and physical injury insurance, which provides benefits for falls, injuries, broken bones, etc. Emerge is already planning to add other supplemental insurance products in the near future such as hospital indemnity and short-term disability.

“We have a great team and great partners,” Thompson said. “The space is ripe for disruption.”

Launched: December 2016

Website and social: emerge.me, blog.emerge.me, www.facebook.com/tryemerge/

Management team: Wes Thompson, founder and CEO; Mike Rolfe, head of strategy and product development; Whitney Romanchuk, head of product design and UX; Marc Howard, head of growth and data analytics; Cheryl Egazarian, project manager.

No. of employees: 13

Financing: Raised $1.8 million in seed funding via Thompson’s self-funding and private investors; seeking an additional $400,000 via convertible notes prior to Series A funding targeted for June.

Recent milestones reached: Emerge is now licensed in all 50 US states as an insurance broker. Digital insurance carrier partners include trusted companies such as United Health One/Golden Rule, Mutual of Omaha, Assurity, Manhattan Life and SureBridge. Secured $1.8 million in seed funding. Won second place in TechCrunch Miami Pitchoff event. Recognized by Plug&Play as a finalist for its InsurTech accelerator program.

Biggest startup challenge and why: Convincing insurance companies to innovate and participate on emerge.me, as emergency insurance products have traditionally been distributed exclusively through traditional agents and brokers.

Next steps: Seeking Series A funding in order to expand the product offerings, continue to improve the user experience and invest in customer acquisition and talent acquisition.

Follow @ndahlbergon Twitter.

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