Seed Sumo Demo Day takes place today at Bryan/College Station, near Texas A&M University.
The inaugural class of eight companies will pitch their ventures before an audience of more than 100 investors and others. But if you can’t make it there in person, the event will be livestreamed.
Seed Sumo selected the teams from more than 600 applicants. They’ve spent the past three months working on their products and business models and getting advice from more than 70 mentors. The program kicked off in May and ends with Demo Day.
Seed Sumo is a three month long accelerator program aimed at turning early-stage companies into successful businesses. The accelerator invests between $20,000 to $50,000 in each venture in exchange for 6 percent to 10 percent equity stake. The companies also get other perks like free hosting, marketing and branding services, legal and financial counseling, offices and access to mentors and their connections.
The co-founders include Doss Cunningham, Bryan Bulte and Manish Patel.
Company descriptions provided by Seed Sumo
AskU – provides a centralized platform for students to ask and answer questions about their university. Already having over half of the population at Texas A&M using AskAgs, AskU is additionally gaining amazing traction at UT with its AskTexas brand.
Fanout is a real-time infrastructure company that makes it easier to build and scale things like chat, multiplayer games, streaming data, or anything that needs to update without manually refreshing a page. The Fanout team has been focusing on fine tuning this service for almost 2 years and have finally started to scale.
Gazoo is a cloud computing company that envisions a future where students’ daily lives no longer revolve around a few select devices, each with their own limits, maintenance, and limited life spans. Instead, imagine a future where your computer is instantly available anywhere on any device. Devices become mere displays on which you interact with your very own personal cloud computer, and viruses become mere nuisances easily erased. Gazoo is the last computer a student will ever need.
Prepify, provides free SAT prep for students from low income communities and gives them the opportunity to have full access to SAT prep and enhance their chances of a college experience. Their first product was launched July 18, 2014 and includes full diagnostic tests, full lessons, and a robust analytics suite to measure students’ progress.
reQwip is creating a trusted mobile and web marketplace for buying and selling new and used sports gear listed by individuals and shops. reQwip is making sports affordable and accessible, so that more aspiring and serious athletes can discover and excel in sports they love. They have created key partnerships with almost every key player in the Austin triathlon scene and launch next week in Austin. Have old sports equipment in your garage? “reQwip it.”
Sportwip is best understood as a mileage program for your health. By aggregating data from fitness devices like Fitbit and Jawbone, Sportwip has built a corporate wellness program unlike any other. Employees now have an opportunity to compete against each other and win prizes for achieving certain fitness goals.
Two Cents is a web/mobile application focused on helping organizations leverage the full potential of their expertise networks. A network of 100 experts has a rolodex of 50,000 people or more. Two Cents puts that at their fingertips while cutting down the number of introduction emails to zero.
Unseen provides university students with a platform to anonymously share photos. They provide students with a fun new way to share and connect with others on campus. Unseen currently receives 3,500 downloads per day, and has over 70,000 total downloads.
The latest rage is to create messages that disappear into the ether – never to be seen again – at least that what the person generating the message hopes.
