A fast pace of life, iconic historical sites, distinct seasons and Ivy League colleges. The East Coast is known for many things, but until recent years, startup culture was mostly strongly associated with that power player way out West, Silicon Valley. However, the Atlantic tide is turning. As demonstrated by the incredible diversity, tenacity and success of the stellar line up at this year’s SaaStock East Coast 2019, from Florida to Quebec, startup culture has become as much a part of the East Coast identity as lobstah rolls and preppy dressing.
To celebrate the leveling of this coast to coast playing field, and shine a light on some of the exciting ideas starting to take root in this famously driven and determined region, we’ve rounded up some of the hungriest East Coast startups, taking a huge bite out of the Big Apple and beyond.
You can still apply to be part of the Startup Program or join us at SaaStock East Coast attendee. Grab a ticket now. As readers of our Learning Hub, you can avail of the special 30% discount.
The Ambition Enablers // Vitally
Elevator pitch: Vitally is an analytics platform that provides ambitious B2B startups with the metrics and insights need for continued success as they grow. They provide analytics, alerts, automation, and engagement tools within an exceptionally user-friendly interface to provide personalized Customer Success at scale. Supporting companies such as Gorgias and customer.io, they promise to translate raw data into actionable, practical insights that have a tangible impact.
Why we like it: Vitally provides an incredibly slick and thoughtfully designed solution to a perennial growing pain suffered by tech focussed startups. After using Vitally, Gorgias reported being able to identify churn risks five times faster using their software, leading them to double their retained revenue.
Founders: Jamie Davidson, Patrick Vatterott
Founded: 2017
Based in: New York, NY
Funding to Date: $100K
The Calculation Kings // Concert Finance
Elevator pitch: What if there was an easier way to handle sales-based commission calculations? Designed to help scaling businesses automate this time-consuming and often error-prone process, Concert Finance finally provides a polished alternative to the tyranny of Excel spreadsheets.
Why we like it: Their automation based approach sets Concert apart in its field. No matter how many reps or regions you’re dealing with, their software keeps pace, factoring in different currencies and exchange rates. What’s more, by partnering with Concert you’re able to ensure compliance, and that peace of mind is worth its weight in gold.
Founders: Bryan Wilson, Kartik Agarwal, Sanj Sanampudi
Founded: 2017
Based in: Greater New York Area, NY
Funding to Date: No information available
The Ghost Busters // Recapped
Elevator pitch: Recapped bills itself as the world’s first and only Buyer Engagement Platform. The concept; send beautiful sales recaps that close deals, and mark the end of you getting ghosted by formerly keen leads post-pitch. In addition to use by sales teams, there’s also great proposal and client onboarding functionality for agencies and freelancers that are well worth exploring.
Why we like it: With the average B2B deal requiring sign off from six to eight stakeholders, the move from soulless, uninspiring email follow-ups to dynamic, highly engaging proposals really offers the chance to kick things up a gear. We reckon this opportunity to seriously streamline your sales process merits some serious attention.
Founders: Mark Fershteyn
Founded: 2017
Based in: New York, NY
Funding to Date: No information available.
The Masters of Marketplace // Zazosell
Elevator pitch: Shopify, but for Amazon sellers probably comes close. With over a decade of Amazon experience, Zazosell offers a suite of web and promotional tools for those selling on this titan of marketplaces. Its software enables users to create a branded website that integrates seamlessly with their existing Amazon store in minutes, automating their catalog.
Why we like it: A strong focus on usability and slick interface design makes the Zazosell dashboard a joy to use. There’s a commendable sense of efficiency throughout the product (“Build your automated catalog-website in less time than it takes you to create one Amazon listing”) that sets out to empower the entrepreneurial seller from the time/cash suck of development.
Founders: Moshe Paneth
Founded: 2016
Based in: Spring Valley. New York
Funding to Date: No information available
The Workforce Wizards // 1Huddle
Elevator pitch: Gamify the upskilling of your workforce. 1Huddle provides a fun, fluff-free approach to onboarding, training and motivating your employees, via the medium of mobile-based gaming. Quickly convert dull training manuals, certifications, and communications into engaging, playful experiences, which fire up your staff through healthy competition and good-natured rivalry.
Why we like it: Uninspiring training can be a dull drain for everyone involved. Stats for one company using 1Huddle suggested that over 70% of gameplay occurred outside of working hours – a financial win for the business and a strong suggestion that training had become a genuinely enjoyable experience for employees, willing to commit their free time to their professional development.
Founders: Sam Caucci
Founded: 2015
Based in: New York, NY
Funding to Date: $3.6M
The Masters of Messaging // Teckst
Elevator pitch: Teckst enables businesses to connect with their customers via their preferred methods of communication from a single dashboard; text message, Facebook messenger, Whatsapp or Call To Text. Importing messages from various different channels, Teckst pulls everything into a single view, making it easy to respond in real time. A host of features such as conversation transfer between agents, media library of approved images to assist with customer service and a character counter to keep responses short and sweet all help to keep the experience optimized.
Why we like it: With so many ways to message, contact, communicate, praise and complain these days, it makes perfect sense to meet your customers in their preferred app. In addition to a suite of smart oversight tools such as supervisor shadowing and analytics dashboard, Teckst also implements machine learning to provide suggested responses based on past conversations.
Founders: Ji Young Choi, Matthew Tumbleson
Founded: 2014
Based in: Greater New York Area, NY
Funding to Date: $5M
The Dons Of The Demo // Omedym
Elevator pitch: In today’s culture of instant gratification, Omedym aims to empower your potential customers to get immersive, interactive software demos on demand. No more reaching out to schedule a walk through, with Omedym interested parties can enjoy searchable, digital product demos at their own convenience.
Why we like it: Omedym offers a really interesting option for those selling software products that future users think they want, but need to experience to fully understand. By being able to hone the demo they’re shown, to answer specific questions they have about the product, visitors can explore at their leisure, without having to wait for contact from a sales team or the worry of a hard sell.
Founders: Gregory Dickinson
Founded: 2017
Based in: Liberty, SC
Funding to Date: No information available.
The Deck Deities // Slidebean
Elevator pitch: Slidebean uses AI to produce polished, powerful presentations online, for free. Their patent-pending algorithm analyses optimizes and organizes the content the user provides to design slides without the need for any human input. Over 100+ professionally designed decks can be selected from, with themes suitable for a range of industries from consulting to academia.
Why we like it: Who can honestly say they haven’t left it to the last minute to throw a hasty slide deck together, then realized it’s actually harder than it seems to produce something that looks half decent as the minutes to your meeting tick away. Slidebean promises to take away the hassle and pressure of producing a quality, well-designed presentation which truly does your content justice. Instantly. For free.
Founders: Jose Cayasso (Caya), Jose Enrique Bolanos, Vinicio Chanto
Founded: 2014
Based in: New York, NY
Funding to Date: $1.4M
The Chaos Conquerors // Blissfully
Elevator pitch: Your one stop shop for SaaS management. A single platform to help you track usage, spending, optimize your software licenses, manage various vendors, and effortlessly onboard or securely offboard your staff. Save a bunch of time and money on your subscriptions and software management, by giving by giving everyone access to the information and tools they need.
Why we like it: We all love the functionality, insight, and ability that SaaS products bring to our businesses, but the arrival of Blissfully helps stop our heart running away with our head. Offering a clear, honest overview of spending and usage helps give much needed context and clarity to be able to make informed decisions on what’s actually working for your business.
Founders: Aaron White, Ariel Diaz
Founded: 2016
Based in: New York, NY
Funding to Date: $5M
The Insightful Informers // Frame.ai
Elevator pitch: Frame offers a data-framed window to the soul of your customer conversations. By utilizing smart tag management recommendations, users are able to swiftly re-organize and export cleaned up data, giving deeper insight into understanding feedback and performance, and enabling best in class customer service that’s based on informed, data-driven findings.
Why we like it: Frame connects to multiple data inputs – Salesforce, ZenDesk, HelpScout and more. By giving a bigger picture, teams can make easier decisions about prioritizing, and rest easy knowing that their VIP customers are getting the gold star treatment.
Founders: Brandon Reiss, George Davis, John Gu
Founded: 2016
Based in: New York, NY
Funding to Date: $4.9M
The Performance Perfector // Onecloud Inc
Elevator pitch: OneCloud is a leading and revolutionary new platform that offers almost endless opportunities to automate and connect performance management and enterprise applications. Code-free “point and click: integrations connect your applications, and from that point on, all of your BI and EPM automation lives happily together in one place – auditable, scalable and manageable.
Why we like it: The ability to centrally and securely manage your applications and processes should help to bring down costs, bump up return on investment and generally boost productivity company-wide. To be able to pull that off with one sleek, simple solution counts as an epic win in our book.
Founders: Brian Meyers, Quinlan Eddy, Ryan Curtin
Founded: 2017
Based in: Great New York Area, NY
Funding to Date: No information available
The Marketing Minglers // PushSend
Elevator pitch: PushSend promises an all-in-one marketing solution that empowers you to create stunning email campaigns, build high converting landing pages and market sell-out events. A well thought through interface brings everything together, enabling centralized list management, analytics across all channels and easily set up email automation.
Why we like it: The ability to learn from analytics across multichannel marketing campaigns, coupled with A/B testing capacities, sounds really promising. In addition, the drag and drop form builder enables really flexible lead gen forms to be created, entirely code free.
Founders: Eric Diamond
Founded: 2019
Based in: New York, NY
Funding to Date: No information available
The Security Specialists // Apomatix
Elevator pitch: Promising to bring simplicity to your security and compliance requirements via improved workflow and automation. All risks are captured on a single dashboard, which offers a clear overview at the macro and micro level. The platform runs on patent-pending risk pre-emption and predictive modeling technology, helping to head problems off at the pass before they’ve started to get close to becoming an issue.
Why we like it: Apomatix promises a jargon-free experience, and having been founded by an entrepreneur with two exits and a team of cybersecurity industry experts with 40+ years of accumulated experience, offers a sense of security in every sense of the word.
Founders: Cam Keogh-Ly, Vartan Sarkissian
Founded: 2017
Based in: New York, NY
Funding to Date: No information available
The Good Bankers // Cognito
Elevator pitch: Cognito unlock the potential of conversational banking by delivering transparent, meaningful experiences through 1-on-1 conversations with customers enabling them to do an instant transaction and bringing human touch into digital banking services.
Why we like it: Who of us hasn’t had a lousy experience dealing with a bank directly or online. If they can fix that frustration since the dawn of time well, we are impressed.
Founders: Milos Zikic
Founded: 2018
Based in: New York, NY
Funding to Date: Undisclosed
You can still apply to be part of the Startup Program or join us at SaaStock East Coast attendee. Grab a ticket now. As readers of our Learning Hub, you can avail of the special 30% discount.
