Salt Lake City – Summer 2018
With over a hundred teams applying to our inaugural Salt Lake City cohort, deciding on the top five teams was incredibly difficult. Applicants came from around the United States and the globe with 22% of teams from Utah, 46% from other states, and 32% from abroad. More importantly the applicant pool was very diverse with almost 60% teams with at least one minority founder, and 27% teams with a female founder.
After a long process of reviewing many inspiring applications and speaking with around fifteen teams in the interview process, we assembled a cohort that we are confident will have tremendous impact through their innovations. In the end, the applicant pool was so strong that we took a sixth team. The final cohort has a great mix of founders focusing on varied challenges. In addition our founders come from diverse backgrounds and bring rich perspectives, which we believe will be a huge asset for our teams. Half of the teams are based in Utah, two-thirds have a woman founder, and two-thirds have a founder of color.
Fiveable
Fiveable aims to make education for accessible for all high school and college students with a platform that provides online instruction by accredited teachers in Advanced Placement (AP), college orientation and preparation, and other subjects. Amanda DoAmaral and Nichole Morales, both former high school teachers, started Fiveable when they saw that many schools are limited in the number of Advanced Placement (AP) courses that they can offer and that many students are ill-prepared for success at the university-level.
WishYourPrice
In the age of personalization, why are all customers paying the same price? Led by Geetha Natarajan, an economist and Harvard management student, WishYourPrice has developed an AI-backed software that captures consumers’ willingness to pay and creates perfectly continuous pricing segmentation. Retailers win because they greatly improve customer loyalty and lifetime value, and shoppers win because they pay the price that makes sense to them. With WishYourPrice, one-size-fits-all pricing will cease to exist, and customers will be paying the price that makes sense to them.
Pyramid Security
(formerly WiWaves)
Pyramid is making cybersecurity accessible for small and medium-sized businesses. Knowing the importance of having content up and preventing attacks for small businesses, Halston van der Sluys and Cameron Stuart created an easy platform to help business owners monitor and prevent these costly attacks. Serial entrepreneurs from a young age, these two are taking their know-how and applying it to tackling this critical issue.
Kalyan
Most parents of kids with food allergies encounter significant stress while trying to keep their children safe and managing meal planning, which can sometimes be a matter of life or death. Kaylan provides a place for individuals and families with severe food allergies to learn about managing their allergies, discover recipes and plan weekly menus, get groceries and supplies, and find support from others. Kalyan is led by a team of parents, Alma and Evelyn Ohene-Opare and Aaron and Celeste Janssen, who have children with severe food allergies.
Venulist
In the age of self-driving cars, people still spend days emailing and calling event spaces in order to book them. At the same time venue owners spend hours shifting through dead-end leads and waste hours more waiting for no-show venue tours. Venulist is revolutionizing this $30 billion industry by providing true AirBnb-like booking, which is enabled by the latest 3D technology. Led by Bryan Miller and Aaron Anderson from Houston, Texas, the Venulist team has the savviness, skills, and timing to disrupt the venue booking market.
Good Glucos
Good Glucos is on a mission to make diabetes management accessible and affordable for all. Right now, diabetics get their testing supplies, insulin, and other key supplies from disparate sources and often at inflated prices. Good Glucos delivers high-quality diabetes testing supplies at affordable prices on a monthly subscription basis.Plus, they give away a 12-month subscription to someone in need for every twelve new subscriptions. Beyond providing reliable access to diabetes test strips, customers have access to an expanding selection of the most innovative diabetes management products on the market. Good Glucos is led by Elliot Gatt, who is a type 1 diabetic, and his co-founder Pierrick Gelinas.