Techstars is easily one of the most esteemed startup accelerators in the world. With programs in dozens of international cities and partnerships with hugely influential corporations, Techstars has shown startup founders and entrepreneurs that there is no better place to grow and build their company. And their Techstars Chicago Demo Day was a great place to see what the Windy City’s startup ecosystem is up to.
“I’m proud to be associated with these founders in my first year as Managing Director of Techstars Chicago, and eager to fulfill #TechstarsForLife in continuing to support their journey,” said Logan LaHive, managing director at Techstars Chicago in a Medium post. “In recruiting, we targeted ‘Themes & Teams’ — seeking founders with audacious vision, and teams inspired enough to pull it off.”
If you’re interested in seeing which startups showed off their innovative ideas at Techstars Chicago Demo Day, check them out below:
4Degrees
This company help you manage your most important asset — your relationships. Their product identifies the right people to contact, helps strengthen those relationships, and recommends ways to accomplish goals through your network.
They achieve this by working with your email, calendar, and other data sources — and fusing that with their algorithms and the practices of the world’s best relationship builders. In doing so, they empower you to develop your most powerful source of opportunity — knowing the right people.
Abobe
Abode redefines residential real estate with an all-inclusive home buying experience. Leaving one-dimensional real estate search engines behind, they simplify the home buying headache by packaging all services in one user-friendly location and guiding consumers through the step-by-step process with ease.
Abode uses analytics to match buyers with top real estate professionals, such as realtors and lenders while offering data-driven insights on local housing markets. They also provide client management tools for professionals, making it easier for them to collaborate on transaction details all in one place. Abode is free for consumers and we receive a portion of the broker’s commission on each transaction in addition to other fees.
Allie
Allie helps companies build inclusive culture. They make diversity and inclusion accessible for everyone, integrating with messaging platforms like Slack so employees can provide instant feedback and receive personalized coaching.
Their customers receive aggregated insights to surface hidden bias that they never would have seen before, proactively identifying attrition risks and even potential lawsuits. Companies can see which employees feel included, engaged, and most importantly, belong.
Elemetric
Elemetric is a marketplace for data, powering the future of blockchain applications beyond cryptocurrencies. Sellers in the marketplace are companies with valuable data that can create new revenue streams by plugging into the platform.
Buyers get a simple way to securely access needed data sources, reducing time to market and enabling powerful blockchain applications across a breadth of industries. In addition to facilitating transactions, Elemetric’s technology will be a critical data and infrastructure layer powering the next generation of the web.
Futury
Futury helps engineers to make insightful career decisions.The most influential factor for millennials engineers to accept a job offer is the opportunity for professional development. However, engineers today don’t know which path to follow to better their career.
By combining artificial intelligence and real-time market data, Futury enable engineers to predict what will be the best move for their career, and ultimately, maximize their market value. They charge companies to be in the place where their future employees make decisions.
Harbor
Harbor’s technology makes high-quality retirement planning accessible and free. Today, people are not equipped to make the smart decisions about their retirement planning. The result: over 65 percent of near-retirees risk running out of money in retirement. Harbor is here to fix that.
Harbor breaks down planning into simple building blocks that transform financial complexity into clear, simple decisions anyone can make for themselves, while being confident in doing so. The result is a deeper understanding of their finances, and a plan that they understand and trust, because they built it themselves.
Immersed
Immersed is helping distributed teams maximize productivity by immersing them into a VR workspace. Remote work is on the rise, yet remote collaboration tools have failed to provide an in-person experience, leaving teams disconnected and disengaged.
Immersed uses AI, Computer Vision, and a laptop’s webcam to track users’ joints, enabling them to interact with their virtual workstation and remote co-workers using their own hands and body.
Omelas
Omelas develops tools to understand and undermine online terrorist recruitment. They quantify and automate the labor-intensive, subjective process of understanding radicalization, allowing their clients to understand terrorist recruitment better than the terrorists.
Omelas has foiled an ISIS attack, presented before four national intelligence chiefs, and booked $2.1M in contracts from the State Department and a non-disclosed private contractor.
Paladin
Paladin is building a first-to-market global pro bono platform. Lawyers across Fortune 500s, law firms, law schools, and governments have a professional responsibility to do 50 hours/year of pro bono work, costing employers billions.
Paladin’s global software is the first to allow Fortune 500s, law firms, law schools, and governments to streamline and centralize their pro bono programs, and leverage their workforce to close the justice gap.
Swag.com
Swag.com is the best place for companies to buy promotional swag that people will actually want to keep. 95 percent of the products that they tested didn’t make the cut. Their streamlined ecommerce experience significantly cuts the time it takes for customers to find, design and buy quality swag.
Swag.com works with hundreds of companies including Facebook, Google, WeWork, Bravo, Virgin, Jolly Ranchers, Harry’s and Evernote.
Read more about the Chicago startup ecosystem on TechCo