Welcome, Catalyst NYC 2019 cohort!
We‘re incredibly excited to introduce the new companies joining our 6-month program at the Data Future Lab
Last year we launched the Future Labs Catalyst NYC program for structured mentorship and resources dedicated to prepping pre-seed/seed-stage companies for their first round of institutional funding. Six months, no cost, 2 free desks, pro-bono billable office hours Orrick, credits from our stellar partners (AWS, GCP, the like), access to NYU Faculty in Residence, and so much more.
We’re humbled by the strong interest in the program. Whittling down all the extraordinary applications — a big thank-you to all the dedicated, hungry entrepreneurs who took the time to apply — to just a handful of companies was an incredibly difficult task, and one that involved careful evaluation of how we can best serve New York’s entrepreneurs.
After a successful first run, we’re excited to do it again. Here’s our new Catalyst NYC cohort — and why our team is so pleased about each startup.
Blue Marble
Blue Marble is an AI-based beauty product development company leveraging deep learning to create truly innovative products with novel formulations. It’s focused on using its technology to launch skincare brands with highly differentiated value propositions, starting with a sustainable skincare brand that offers ‘no-compromise’ products with a minimal number of ingredients—the excess of ingredients used in most beauty products today produces up to 80% of a product’s total carbon footprint.
Founders: Yahya Syed, Alexander Stec, and Jonathan He
“Beauty is a rapidly growing space with little innovation other than differentiated brands. Blue Marble’s application of AI and Machine Learning to beauty products has the opportunity to greatly disrupt this legacy industry at its core — the actual product and not its brand and distribution.” —Craig Wilson, General Manager, Future Labs
ClearOPS
ClearOPS is tackling the massive challenges that all software vendors have in responding to data privacy and cybersecurity questionnaires and audits. The ClearOPS Customer Relationship Management application enables its customers to respond, organize, and manage security audits which in turn reduces cost, time, and red tape.
Founders: Caroline McCaffery and George Rosamond
“Enterprise procurement is extraordinarily tedious and repetitive. The process usually creates barriers to solving internal problems quickly and efficiently, especially if the vendor is an early-stage company. There are no winners with the current ecosystem and we’re very excited to support ClearOPS as they aim to automate the process, at scale, to finally make the procurement process something to look forward to.” — Steven Kuyan, Managing Director, Future Labs
Edquity
The majority of students who drop out of college report doing so because of financial challenges. Edquity is the first emergency financial aid technology platform for college students, offering automated assistance for higher education financial planning and management. Edquity also offers easy and accessible college financial matching and financial aid award evaluation tools to help students navigate financial decisions on the road to college.
Founder: David Helene
“Technologies, especially artificial intelligence and machine learning, can be leveraged to offer immense societal benefits, a belief we’ve always followed at the NYU Tandon Future Labs. We are very excited to be able to support Equity in their mission to prevent millions of students dropping out of college each year because of financial reasons.” —Steven Kuyan, Managing Director, Future Labs
FyleHub
FyleHub is a data aggregation and distribution platform that focuses on how financial institutions collect and distribute the massive amounts of data they must process every day. FyleHub helps financial institutions automatically consolidating the data into client-specific data formats, leading to substantial savings in time, money, and people resources.
Founder: Soumitra Bajpai
“Financial institutions deal with massive amounts of data everyday. None of it is standardized. FyleHub will help financial institutions and regulators communicate with each other effectively, saving them both time and money.” — Craig Wilson, General Manager, Future Labs
Guild
Guild is a financial investment platform that offers free trading, collective intelligence, and the ability to buy whole shares or fractions of shares. The platform lets users create customizable and accessible portfolios, enabling them to invest in companies in which they believe.
Founder: Sean Bonner
“Through the purchase of fractional shares, Guild Financial enables individuals with less disposable income to develop robust portfolios and take positions with high price stocks, all at no cost! Add in the ability to see and trade top performers’ entire portfolios with a few clicks, and you get a powerful platform that every retail investor will benefit from using.” — Steven Kuyan, Managing Director, Future Labs
Livepin, Inc.
Livepin is a SaaS company dedicated to PR, marketing, and brand activation that enables live streamcasting to all a company’s channels and websites. With content syndication, multi-party hosting, custom branding, and an analytics suite, companies can easily broadcast live videos to audiences across platforms.
Founders: Nick Evans and Yang Cheung
“The majority of content consumed online is video, a format set to grow exponentially in the near term as more and more companies turn to streaming models. Livepin’s team has deep domain expertise in livestreaming and networks, and is building software that will help power brands’ transitions to the new streaming economy.” —Teal Willingham, General Manager, Future Labs
Synergy
Synergy is building an Enterprise Content Management solution based on Git for office workers and academics. They launched the first product of the solution, Research.app, that allows users to save and organize websites, PDFs, and notes, which are automatically indexed for easy searchability and can be shared across teams and organizations. Research.app is available to users as a free trial, as well as a subscription-based service for businesses and enterprises, and comes with 24/7 support.
Founder: Jaime Rivas
“Synergy addresses the pain points of writing or doing research by indexing reference materials so that you or anyone on your team can instantly find those references when you need them. We’re excited for the end of struggling through our inboxes, Google Drive, Sharepoint Server, and other file storage providers for that 1 document we referenced on page 47 of the 5th iteration of our shared presentation from 7 months ago.” — Teal Willingham, General Manager, Future Labs
If you’d like to know more about our programs and events, email us at hello@futurelabs.nyc and sign up for our newsletter.
Edited and photo by Annie Brinich (anniebrinich@nyu.edu)
