Startup Hunter

GrowSquares is a plant startup, Paint by numbers for growing plants at home. Order pre packaged seeds and nutrients for optimal results.

http://growsquares.com

Zachary Witman has been taking entrepreneurial trusts since he was in second grade through selling potato chips, to selling merch at football games to running a fantasy sports league. After a stint in strategy in DC, he moved into finance for a career. Quitting after a few years, he became obsessed with gardening in Brooklyn and he sough to create a product to make gardening easier for people with zero knowledge or wisdom of how to grow plants and vegetables. 

Growsquares is both a tech company innovating new solutions for how to grow, and a consumer packaged goods product in producing ready to go squares of nutrients, soil and seeds to yield the best results for your local environment.

Video: http://startuphunter.co

Helixworks is a biotechnology startup that uses secure DNA storage to verify food and 

pharmaceuticals for the blockchain. Other applications include storing digital information on DNA

https://helix.works/

Nimesh Pinnamaneni started as a researcher, but lab life was not for him as the entrepreneurial bug bit. Helixworks is bringing to market DNA biotech that works in the supply chain to verify items to prevent fraud and improve quality. 

Audio: https://anchor.fm/startuphunter

Sales and Marketing at big business can be inefficient. If you send a team of 40 to a conference at a cost of $100k what is your ROI? SummitSync automates meeting scheduling with deep integration with Salesforce, Microsoft, Google. We're talking big savings, big efficiencies. https://www.summitsync.com/  After working in the corporate world straight out of college, Al Torres knew that big company life was not for him. So he quit and started an executive coaching lifestyle business. He got sucked into the corporate world again, but this time at much smaller companies in the advertising technology space. Him and his business partner had a bunch of ideas, but the huge inefficiencies in the conference space kept coming back to them. So they created a prototype, started giving away the product for free at first, and landed their first large client. Since then, SummitSync has served fortune 100 companies with its product, and is doubling its team. 

Video: http://startuphunter.co

Hailify is startup saving Uber & Lyft drivers time and money. This is one app to rule them all. Possibly expanding to Uber Eats & Grubhub. 

https://www.drivehailify.com/

Nick Bhashyam raised millions of dollars as a college student for the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation. Then he went to medical school, but driving for Uber and Lyft to make side money, he got annoyed there was no easy way to take full advantage of all the services at the same time. Thus Hailify, which makes it as easy as possible for drivers to look for rides on all the services. 

Video: http://startuphunter.co

Press a button, and your bag can follow you to the airport while you get important things done hassle free. My Bag Check is an on demand bag and coat check, last mile delivery service.   Micah Lewis began as a lawn mower boss with a crew of of guys when he was 10 years old. Then he started a profitable advertising network in Tampa with screens he bought on ebay. Finally, after 15 years in b2b sales, he had an ah hah moment when he was wasting hours bringing his bags home only to miss important occasions. Starting lean he taught himself how to code and just put the app on the store....18 months later My Bag Check has delivered over 1000 bags safely in the NYC area and has just expanded to its second city in San Francisco and rolled out an Android app in addition to the original iOS. https://www.mybagcheck.com/  

Video: http://startuphunter.co

Jason Tissera began mowing lawns, shoveling snow and DJ'ing, but quickly started a career in Business Development with SAP. After a few years he joined a few startups and gained confidence in coding by teaching himself ios and fullstack. His thesis is that businesses want to educate customers or employees on blockchain, and thus, the crafty startup https://www.getherd.app/ was born

Video:http://startuphunter.co

Gesture https://www.yourgesture.com/ is a thoughtful gift delivery service only in NYC for now. You can order Flowers, Wine and most importantly attach a thoughtful, handwritten message to it. Deliveries under 30 minutes typically. Ben Labra hustled his way to NYC after owning two KFC's and then launching a linked-in for highschool students. Now he has a large team of developers and couriers and is building an on-demand service from the ground up in NYC. 

Audio: https://anchor.fm/startuphunter

John H. Snyder began farming sheep and performing the highwire act in a circus before working his way into Harvard law school and running his own practice. Now he is starting an Artificial Intelligence company named Agnes Intelligence. The focus is on legal document discovery: making sense of 20,000 emails for relevant topics. And Agnes is also targeting the media space providing more relevant searches for podcasts and video transcription. https://www.agnesintel.com

Video: http://startuphunter.co

Wethos started as an upwork for non-profits: a two sided marketplace connecting people with skills like graphic design, coding or marketing to non-profits. Rachel Renock started selling hot dogs on her front yard, and then landed a career in NYC advertising on the Covergirl campaign. She is a problem solver, and in freelancing for non-profits on the side, she saw an overwhelming demand for skills that she did not have like coding. So she and her cofounders saved up 6 months of rent.....and hustled their way to the launch of Wethos. They have raised over 1 million dollars in seed capital and today are assembling teams of skilled freelancers. Wethos is planning on providing a safety net for its freelancers in areas like health insurance.