May 2020 Gap Fund Recipients
During these challenging times, IDEA ventures kept working hard to develop their products, proving their resilience and adaptability now more than ever.
IDEA has recently granted four ventures that pitched to our Advisory Board: Foodspace, Hatchtrack, The Oyster Common, and Treehoppr. Gap Fund is a grant reserved for Go Stage ventures. They can receive funds up to $10,000 per round with no communal equity.
Foodspace is a B2B venture that allows retailers to accurately display product information in the increasingly important digital commerce environment, using AI and computer vision. The venture is planning on using their Gap Funding to build a more sophisticated website in order to accelerate the sales process. The new website will include demo capabilities that showcase the company’s machine vision technology applications, which will help Foodspace find new potential partners.
Hatchtrack has created a real-time egg incubator monitoring system that reduces egg mortality. The product consists of two parts, an IoT enabled hardware component that sits in the incubator itself and transmits data from one place to another over the Internet, and an app that relays real time egg incubation data to the egg hatchers. This data includes things such as temperature, humidity, and alerts with next steps in the egg incubation process. Hatchback will use its Gap Funding for product development, which involves both developing the app and improving the backend software.
The Oyster Common is a web application enabling oyster farms to sell directly to consumers. Their current focus is on oysters from the Northeast with a long-term vision to tackle the whole US seafood business. Since receiving Gap Funding in November 2019, the Oyster Common added two new farms and ten restaurant leads, which have not been converted partly due to COVID-19 and missing features, such as 2-day shipping logistics integration and construction of a chatbot API integration. The funding will be used to develop their product through the implementation of those features. Once those features will be in place, committed parties will demo the product.
Treehoppr is building a predictive people analytics platform to help companies better assess the health, engagement, and productivity levels of their teams. Its first product, PTO Ninja, helps companies manage time off. The venture has been granted Gap Fund in order to support the launch of Referral Booster, a new product used to enhance employee referrals programs. In order to launch the new product, Treehoppr is collaborating with GitLab, a software development company, and Toptal, a networking platform that connects companies to freelancers, on a new marketing campaign to promote co-branded content on LinkedIn.
Congratulations to all these ventures, we can’t wait to see the next amazing accomplishments they’ll achieve!
IDEA Gap Funding is a non-equity educational grant available to ventures in the GO stage of IDEA’s process. Applicants may apply on a bi-monthly basis where their business plans are reviewed by IDEA’s student Investment Committee upon being selected to pitch plans to IDEA’s Advisory Board. Applicants may receive up to $10,000 in funding.
