Are you excited? This year’s Y Combinator Summer Demo Day is finally coming to an end, which brings us to the best part of the day — that is, the part that includes beer and networking. And, for some of the startups here, getting checks from investors (or at least handshake agreements to invest).
But before we go, here’s the last group of companies to be unveiled as part of the program, in what will be the final session of the day:
Product Hunt: Product Hunt, a daily list of up-and-coming tech products, garnered the attention of the Silicon Valley investor community as a way to find new startups to back. It has received 1.8 million visits to products featured on the site in the last 30 days and attracted 53,000 e-mail subscribers. “What makes ProductHunt so special even though it looks like a list of links is that there is a community of investors, founders and creators behind it,” said CEO Ryan Hoover. “And they’re geeking out about products. Founders are answering questions and directly interacting with our community.” He said that readers have created Chrome extensions and mobile apps around ProductHunt. But the vision is much bigger than just tech. Hoover wants to expand ProductHunt to books, films and beyond. “ProductHunt will be a place where creators can directly interact with their audiences.”
Aptible: This company helps companies building cloud products for health care comply with HIPAA regulations on privacy and security. Aptible’s cloud platform can host entire products, providing servers, security, encryption, and backup while “compliance engines” generate documentation and audit logs that demonstrate policies, risk analysis, incident response, APP security, and training are sufficient under HIPAA. Since launching on August 5, Aptible has booked $300,000 in contracted revenue, and in the long term the company plans to broaden its deployment and compliance platforms to other broadly-regulated industries.
One Codex: One Codex built a genomic platform for search and is reportedly indexing 10x’s more data than any others. It is making inroads into biotech, human health and food safety. Co-founder Nik Krumm says it will be the search platform for pathogen identification, particularly in food safety. This means detecting things like e-coli in restaurants. Beta users include the FDA, CDC, the NIH and a plethora of others. One Codex is currently in open beta and can search over 30,000 bacteria, viruses and fungi and identify data sets in minutes what takes days for other searches. It plans to take this technology to the clinical infectious disease market.
Traction: Traction is an on-demand marketplace for digital marketers. The company already has a $3.1 million run rate and is growing 80 percent every month servicing a number of large Fortune 100 brands, including names like Disney and Unilever. The company uses software to cut out agency middlemen and replace them with software and automation. It sees a potential addressable market of existing clients of $15 billion, and that goes up to $57 billion if it goes after the small and medium-sized business market.
Shout: Purporting to “handle the entire lifecycle of an exchange between two people,” Shout has built a real-time classified service that lets individuals exchange anything with other people. Essentially a type of modernized Craigslist meets TaskRabbit with an added real-time twist, Shout has an app for iOS and Android that lets people offer up something for sale, or make a request for a task such as a delivery. Each Shout is linked to a location, a price, and a short description — and has the option to be either free or for a specific price. At the moment, Shout is only available in New York City. Read more about Shout here.
Zenamins: Zenamins is sort of like the online equivalent of GNC. But it goes beyond just a place to order supplements. It provides a platform that plans to let professionals brand their own health and beauty vitamins and products. Kim Kardashian could have her own vitamin brand or Tim Ferris could have the Four Hour Body subscription supplements delivery, for instance. The startup comes with a guidebook and recommended daily doses. It also takes data about you, blood, genetics and other things to suggest how to improve your health.
BlockSpring: If Github is a platform that allows anyone to share code, BlockSpring lets anyone run code. Instead of a web developer having to put up a server and build an API before running code, users can now go to BlockSpring, take code and build an interface without having to interact with it.
Nightingale: Nightingale provides a mobile app for tracking electronic medical records for behavioral therapy in the cloud. The app helps behavioral therapists to track and report data related to sessions with their clients. There are currently about 1.5 million patients receiving behavioral therapy for autism in the US, which is a $2.4 billion market that Nightingale hopes to tap into. The company launched 8 weeks ago and says it is seeing a 40% week-over-week growth so far, with the primary driver of growth being word-of-mouth between therapists. Customers can create calendars, manage how data is collected, and monitor behavior in real time. It can also be used for speech and occupational therapy.
Women.com: Women are responsible for the bulk of activity on many of the most popular social sites on the Internet, from Facebook to Pinterest. But according to Women.com co-founder Susan Johnson, most women are still holding back when it comes to sharing the bulk of their ideas and opinions online — perhaps, she says, because they feel less comfortable in the co-ed environment. So she created Women.com, a Reddit-like online discussion hub for women only (men are filtered out from using the service) in hopes of welcoming women to feel free to share all the things that they are not yet sharing on the existing social platforms — from relationship advice, to diet and health tips, to political beliefs, and more. At the moment Women.com is invite only, and in the future plans to use Facebook Connect to ensure that its community is women only.
Sarah Buhr, Kim-Mai Cutler, Ryan Lawler, Kyle Russell, and Colleen Taylor all contributed reporting.
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