My Favorites - 500 Startups Demo Day - Batch 12

Last Tuesday’s Batch 12 Demo Day put on by 500 Startups offered a highly compact venue with short, three-minute pitches, with no Q&A. The pitches were preceded and followed by a chance to chat with the friendly, enthusiastic founders at their exhibits.  What an efficient use of time! I learned a lot, and it was a pleasure rather than a chore.

Here’s my list of favorites. This is very idiosyncratic and tilted massively toward business models that I feel comfortable with.

Vango (www.vangoart.com) - Are you tired of those cheap reproductions and posters on your walls?  How about some original art instead? The paintings offered are tiered (debut artists to established artists) with prices from $100 to $2,000.  It’s a great way to add some splash to your abode, and perhaps also to place a bet on up-and-coming talent.  You can easily peruse thousands of paintings in fraction of the time it would take to see them at an art fair. Also, if you find an artist – but not a piece you like – you can commission a painting. This business concept taps in nicely to the growing interest in authenticity and finding a way to express your aesthetic sensibilities.

Agfunder (http://agfunder.com) - A lot is happening and will happen in agriculture. In the developed world, changing lifestyles mean there’s a demand for new approaches to food production and distribution. In the developing world, agriculture is undergoing the transformation that western agriculture went through, albeit faster. With changing tastes and increasing incomes, how food gets produced and sent to market will change. What’s missing is a low-cost, focused, effective way of funding this change, of bringing together entrepreneurs and the money they need. Agfunder stands poised to play the role of an AngelList or Circle Up for this large and somewhat neglected arena for innovation.

BacklotCars (http://backlotcars.com) - Currently, your traded-in car makes its way to another dealer, usually a used car dealer many miles away, through a physical auction, a costly and time-consuming process. The ability to verify the condition of cars based on data and digitally transmitted information makes it feasible to eliminate the middleman, allowing sellers to find buyers much more efficiently.

Gridcure (www.gridcure.com) - Big Data meets an Old Industry. Electric utilities generate and collect much more data than they used to, but they don’t quite know what to do with it.  The industry is also undergoing an ownership transformation, from sleepy publicly owned companies to efficiency-focused entities that are part of private equity portfolios.

Lish (www.lishfood.com) - How about a meal from a top chef delivered to your home?  Lish makes use of spare capacity in kitchens – or spare time on the part of chefs – to prepare meals that are delivered to your home.  They are starting in Seattle, with plans to expand to Portland.

You can get a full list of presenting companies here: http://500demo.co/

For a different take, here is what TechCrunch liked. The only overlap with my list is Gridcure.

http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/12/our-four-favorite-companies-at-the-500-startups-batch-12-demo-day/

Mattermark has its own set of top picks. The only overlap with my list in this case is Agfunder.

http://mattermark.com/top-10-500-startups-batch-12-demo-day-startups-sorted-by-the-growth-score/