Meet the 10 startups in Techstars NYC’s summer 2018 class

Published October 2, 2018

Not even Techstars NYC can avoid the end of summer, where 10 startups are wrapping up their participation in the accelerator’s summer program.

This also marks the end of Alex Iskold’s tenure as managing director of the program. He’s certainly going out with a varied groups of startups — these entrepreneurs are working on everything from tampons to spices to skin care, plus more traditional tech categories like finance and security.

Here’s a quick rundown of each company.

- Aunt Flow helps businesses and schools stock free tampons. Founder and CEO Claire Coder argues that if businesses are providing toilet paper for free, they should do the same with menstrual products. Current customers include Viacom, Twitter, and Brown University. (And it’s also selling products directly to customers.)

aunt flow

- Burlap and Barrel finds spices from farmers all over the world, selling them to consumers and restaurants (including Dig Inn). The startup emphasizes the stories behind the spices, and it says it currently offers organic black peppercorns from Zanzibar, wild mountain cumin from Afghanistan, smoked pimenton paprika from Spain, plus 40 other spices.
- Clever Girl Finance offers financial education content and tools for women of color. Founder and CEO Bola Sokunbi is an immigrant, computer science major and a certified financial educator. The startup currently offers more than 20 different courses, covering topics like getting out of debt and managing your wedding on the budget, all accessible for $10 per month.
- Concert Finance automates financial reporting, starting with sales commissions. This allows sales reps to get real-time updates on the commissions that they’re earning. It works on top of Salesforce with no developer integration work required.
- FlyThere connects customers with drone operators, allowing those customers to fly drones remotely. The company is pitching this as a way for people to experience locations around the world without actually traveling there. It’s available for visits to eight locations already, including the Big Buddha temple in Thailand and the pirate ship in Cancun.
- With Le CultureClub, customers can test the “microbiome” of their skin by swabbing their skin and sending a sample to the startup. Le CultureClub can then give them access to a dashboard with personalized skincard recommendations.
- Pandium aims to make it easier for B2B software companies to support integrations. The platform handles authentication, scheduling and other basic issues. That doesn’t eliminate the work for developers, but it’s supposed to allow them on the core integration logic, and supposedly reduces engineering time by 80 percent.
- Perch aims to improve physical training and coaching by installing a camera and tablet, which is mounted on gym equipment to track and display data like number of reps and velocity. It’s currently targeting college and professional teams, and plans to expand to commercial and home gyms.

Perch

SeekWell co-founder Mike Ritchie spent 15 years leading analytics teams at Bank of America and at startups. His goal is to change the way analytics teams share code by offering them an analytics platform and common code repository, allowing them to share and reuse SQL queries.
SIEmonster is focused on security information and event management, using deep learning to detect and defend against attacks. Its partners include HP, which is distributing the platform to financial institutions.