The Accelerator with Michael Conniff

Michelle Katics is the Co-Founder and CEO of BankersLab. BankersLab was started in Thailand by former bankers who decided to come up with solutions to the pain points they encountered in the Industry. The company has been around for ten years and is in 30 countries! Being in the business for this amount of time has seen the company go through a lot of pivotal moments. The most recent change was brought about by COVID which opened up new ways of doing business. The company has developed an improved digital lending process through its core product, The Simulator which is an award-winning simulation-based online training workshop for banking and finance professionals.

Lev Chneider is the CEO of Happiness As A Service (HAAS). According to Lev, HAAS is a mindset. They take data on customer satisfaction and curate it to give customers a 9/10 and even 10/10 satisfaction index. They focus on smaller/silent voices that may otherwise be overlooked or drowned by popular voices. Lev believes that companies and corporations who do not listen to their customers will disappear over time. HAAS does not only apply to customer service but also to job satisfaction. The tool is versatile and adaptable to different markets and use cases. Lev is passionate about the business of happiness.

Aditya Sharma is the Co-founder and CEO of HiCounselor. This is a career accelerator for recent grads and early stage professionals. The company has been in existence for two years, 8 months and has a success rate of 100%. Candidates who go through HiCounselor get ten times more interviews, they get jobs within five to six weeks instead of waiting for six months or more.

Aditya was prompted to start the company from a personal experience. He sent out numerous applications for a job after clearing grad school at Duke University without any success. The few interviews he got, he wasn’t ready for them. This went on for six months and out of frustration, he came up with a solution to help people like him secure jobs. Aditya believes the two key problems that recent graduates face is lack of interview preparedness and lack of strong professional networks that can help them secure jobs. This is the key solution that HiCounselor offers.

Alex Porter, Founder & CEO of Mod Tech Labs Inc talks to Michael Conniff about their revolutionary technology. MOD is a mobile + cloud-based software that makes 3D in minutes! The way this works is, you take images using your mobile phone or any camera and upload it to the MOD processing portal. The automated portal outputs 3D digital content. The technology uses the data from the photos and scans to create a real and true 3D object. The goal is to make 3D data much more accessible. The company is always evolving and adding features to make 3D imagery more accessible. They are on track to add 3D to NFT capability to their technology.

The company has had a successful first round which was a venture round. They managed to raise $770,000 in venture funding. They have an app on the Apple App Store and Android Playstore where anyone can go download and explore the basics of the technology.

Andre Facote is from Lisbon, Portugal. He is the co-founder of Skizo. Skizo is a company dedicated to making an impact on the environment by cleaning up plastic in the ocean. They do this in collaboration with fishermen. The idea came to Andre when he and his one-and-a-half-year-old son were out having fun on the beach and his son picked up plastic waste and started to eat. He was greatly disgusted by this and was prompted to do something about the menace of plastic. This is how Skizo was born. Andre runs the company together with his wife.

The company produces high-quality items from beach waste including sneakers.

Andre Facote is from Lisbon, Portugal. He is the co-founder of Skizo. Skizo is a company dedicated to making an impact on the environment by cleaning up plastic in the ocean. They do this in collaboration with fishermen. The idea came to Andre when he and his one and a half-year-old son were out having fun on the beach and his son picked up plastic waste and started to eat. He was greatly disgusted by this and was prompted to do something about the menace of plastic. This is how Skizo was born. Andre runs the company together with his wife.

The company produces high-quality items from beach waste including sneakers.

Daniel Sarquis from Brazil. He is a managing partner at Mergus Ventures. At Mergus Ventures, they believe in investment through a transparent, balanced, and prosperous environment. They are made of founders who dive into problem-solving opportunities. They operate in markets that have a lot of potential.

He has an engineering background but was introduced to the world of investment by his dad.

Jeremy believes that the best investors are former founders. It takes being a founder to know a founder.

Jeremy is both an investor and an entrepreneur at heart. He believes that the best investors are former founders. He comes from a family of entrepreneurs. His dad instilled in him the value of caring for the people around you, whether family, colleagues, or the society at large. According to Jeremy, the true mark of an investor is not someone you avoid, it is someone you seek help from not only when things go well but also when things don’t go well.

Blue Lake is a venture capital firm with a focus on the UK to Ukraine companies. They are keen on helping founders from under-represented places such as Ukraine, India Greece, and France

Ligo Partners co-invests with their discrete and invitation-only consortium of like-minded investors into disruptive tech-focused deal flow sourced directly from family offices and top venture capital firms worldwide.

Travis believes that the best companies are the ones that solve smaller problems. When you solve smaller problems, you stumble into billion-dollar solutions. He believes that the pursuit of trillion-dollar ideas usually comes in the way of the small steps along the way which are very fundamental.