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500 Startups Announces Batch 12 in San Francisco

2015.01.27

500 Global Team

500 Global Team

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Can you believe we’re already on our 12th accelerator batch? For those of you keeping track, this is our third batch in San Franciscso!

As always, our companies have all types of founders from everywhere on the globe. There are 34 companies in this group, and 29% of our companies have at least one woman on the founding team. Additionally, 41% of our companies have at least one foreign‐born founder.  Countries include: Taiwan, China, Egypt, Bahrain, Poland, Sweden, Canada, India, France, Brazil, South Korea, Australia…..Follow all of our companies on AngelList.

Over the next few months, Batch 12 and Highway1 portfolio companies will be filmed in a SyFy documentary series “The Bazillion Dollar Club”. This series will give us a chance to tell our story and provide national exposure for our companies. Learn more here. #500Famous

BONUS TIP: If you want to join 500 in the future, you’re in luck – Batch 13 (Mountain View) applications are currently open. We’re always on the look out for great companies with traction and awesome founders. APPLY NOW


Without further ado, here are all the companies in our latest accelerator: 

 

AgFunder
AgFunder is AngelList for Agriculture Investing. AgFunder has nearly 1,000 investors with over $1.5 billion in investable capital. Since February 2014, companies listed on AgFunder have raised over $13 million.

AngelList: angel.co/agfunder
Founders: Rob Leclerc, Michael Dean
From: New York, NY
Fun Fact: Rob and Michael came up with the idea for AgFunder in a bar in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

Alfred
Alfred turns smartphones into surveillance cameras so everyone can build their home security system.

AngelList: angel.co/alfred-6
Founders: Alex Song and Renee Yeh
From: Taipei, Taiwan
Fun Fact:  Alex enjoys speed racing and motorbiking. Renee is nocturnal.

Avanoo
Avanoo is the world’s only marketplace for video Programs that support teams and individuals in achieving peak performance in their lives, on their teams, and in their work. We work with only the most renowned experts in the world, and our Programs are all 3 minutes a day for 30 days. Programs categories include leadership, wellness, accountability, productivity, time management, happiness, and more.

AngelList: angel.co/avanoo
Founders: Daniel Jacobs and Prosper Nwankpa
From: San Francisco, CA
Fun Fact: Prosper’s real name is Prosper. Really. That’s his name. Daniel still trips over his own feet, but he’s a 3x wrestling National Champion.

BacklotCars
BacklotCars is a SaaS Marketplace for the wholesale automotive industry. Through BacklotCars, auto dealers, auto finance and rental car companies can liquidate unwanted inventory direct to their end-market.

AngelList: angel.co/backlotcars
Founders: Justin Davis and Ryan Davis
From: Kansas City, MO
Fun Fact: The average height of a BacklotCars’ founder is 6’3″, though we’re always chosen last in pick up b-ball games…

 

 

Blueboard
The Blueboard rewards platform allows companies to reward their employees to curated experiences and activities with just one click – things like skydiving, wine tasting, massage and shark diving. Companies like Box, Eventbrite, and Optimizely use Blueboard for sales spiffs, tenure rewards, and spot bonuses.

AngelList: angel.co/blueboard
Founders: Taylor Smith, Kevin Yip, and Cyrille Labesse
From: San Francisco, CA
Fun Fact: Taylor & Kevin have been friends since 3rd grade, when they played on the same Asian league basketball team. They went to high school together in San Francisco and studied abroad in Hong Kong during college.

 

 

CareerDean
CareerDean is a Q&A website for career advice/content.

AngelList: angel.co/careerdean
Founders: Kyu Lee, David Oliveros, and Darius Salehipour
From: San Mateo, CA
Fun Fact: Kyu Lee had dreams that NSYNC had a sixth member and that it was him. Darius Salehipour can spin books/pillows/stuff. David Oliveros used to have hair longer than 3 feet.

Cheddar Up
Cheddar Up is the simplest way to collect and track online payments from a group. Its initial laser focus is on schools and moms who are still primarily handling these type of group transactions with checks and paper forms. Its wildly simple user interface makes collecting online payments accessible to anyone. Think band uniforms, teacher gifts, fun runs, PTA dues and the like – the evite of online payments.

AngelList: angel.co/cheddar-up
Founders: Molly DiCarlo and Nichole Montoya
From: Denver, CO
Fun Fact:  Nichole tap danced at the Iowa State Fair and Molly is a card-carrying member of “Friends of the Alphabet”.

 

 

Contentools
Contentools provides a one-stop content marketing software for businesses that look for website traffic, leads and clients conversion. From strategy to content creation and analytics tracking, with Contentools you set and manage your own workflows to worry less and get more results from inbound marketing.

AngelList: angel.co/contentools
Founders: Elton Miranda and Emilia Chagas
From: Florianopolis, Brazil
Fun Fact: Emília is on her way to cook 1,000 risottos, without repeating any recipe. Elton is proud of his ping pong skills and challenges other entrepreneurs on 500’s table. How about a match? 🙂

Edfa3ly.com

Edfa3ly (translates to_ Pay For Me _ in English). This service provides a shopping bridge to customers in the Middle East who want to shop the world! An End-To-End service, providing payments to merchants abroad, international shipping, customs clearance and last-mile delivery.

AngelList: https://angel.co/edfa3ly
Founders: Mohamed Attia, Ahmed Mohamed, Mohamed Hesham, Mohamed Tantawy
From: Cairo, Egypt
Fun Facts: The first time Mohamed thought of having a business was at school where he created a logistic hub to sell candies and treats to his peers in a faster way than his school’s cafeteria. He hustled hard made some fast cash.

DCHQ is a cloud-based, collaborative developer platform that accelerates container-based application development for large-scale enterprises. The solution provides on-demand, self-service access to Docker-based application environments running on the DCHQ cloud, or on any registered data-center using an agent-based architecture for orchestration. It also facilitates all aspects of collaboration for large-scale enterprises allowing teams to customize access to data-centers, images and running containers in support of continuous integration processes within or across different development teams.

AngelList: https://angel.co/dchq-1
Founder: Amjad Afanah
From: San Francisco, CA
Fun Facts: Development Cloud Headquarters was supposed to be our company name — but we’re glad that we stuck with DCHQ for now.

 

 

Fiberead
Fiberead helps foreign authors self-publish their books from English to Chinese, and offer services from publishing all the way to distribution. In Fiberead, tons of qualified translators from all over the world will translate the books for the authors and then work together with the author to complete the whole process, including translation, editing and marketing.

AngelList: angel.co/fiberead
Founders: Runa Jiang
From: Beijing, China
Fun Fact: Runa loves camping, hiking and mountaineering.

 

 

Flashratings
FlashRatings unlocks institutional investment research for the retail investor.

AngelList: angel.co/flashratings
Founders: Justus Ohlhaver and Puja Ahluwalia
From: Palo Alto, CA
Fun Fact: Justus continues to watch reruns of Germany’s World Cup Championship game. Puja can pretend to play the harmonica.

 

 

Gogohire
Gogohire is a hiring marketplace that connects world-class sales talent with top tech companies.

AngelList: angel.co/gogohire
Founders: Pete Ryan and Adarsh Uppula
From: San Francisco, CA
Fun Fact: Pete plays the bongos. Adarsh is a hacklete (“hacker athlete”) and wins hackathons for fun and profit.

GridCure
GridCure brings Big Data to the power grid, helping utility companies identify millions of dollars of losses on their electrical network each year using a SAAS analytics platform.

AngelList: angel.co/gridcure
Founders: Tagg Jefferson
From: Toronto, Canada
Fun Fact: Tagg had a magnet surgically implanted in his hand to be able to feel electric fields.

Growbots
Growbots outbound sales software automatically generates warm leads for B2B companies.

AngelList: angel.co/growbots
Founders: Greg Pietruszynski , Lukasz Deka, and Tom Roda
From: Warsaw, Poland
Fun Fact: You probably can’t spell our real full names (especially: Grzegorz Pietruszyński).

HelloBit
HelloBit helps people and companies send money globally, at half the cost by leveraging digital currency technology.

AngelList: angel.co/hellobit
Founders: Brian Woods and Ali Goss
From: San Francisco, CA
Fun Fact: Ali’s favorite weekend activity is looking for and identifying mushrooms.

InnovAcer
At InnovAccer, we are simplifying access to structured data and analytics through platforms that learn. We crawl, parse, structure, integrate, and standardize public and private data to make it ready for analysis, and help organizations deploy predictive, and learning models on top of it. InnovAccer works with 18 of the top 20 research institutions in the world.

AngelList: angel.co/innovaccer
Founders: Abhinav Shashank, Kanav Hasija, Sandeep Gupta, and Sachin Jaiswal
From: New Delhi, India
Fun Fact: Abhinav loves whistling and can whistle on any song in the world. Kanav likes to make breakfast and loves to try various combinations of alcohol in food. Sandeep loves dance and has a copyrighted headshake dance to his credit.

ivee
We’re building a voice interface for the connected home by utilizing hardware, speech recognition, and artificial intelligence to create a seamless way of controlling connected devices like Nest, WeMo, Iris, Connect etc. and services.

AngelList: angel.co/ivee
Founders: Jonathon Nostrant
From: Los Angeles, CA
Fun Fact: Used to be a DJ. Onst onst onst…..

KidzJet
KidzJet is a platform for children transportation. We serve schools, after school programs and parent groups.

AngelList: angel.co/kidzjet
Founders: Benazir Shaikh and Ashish Chhaparwal
From: San Mateo, CA
Fun Fact: Benazir grew up with fear of swimming considering scuba this summer. Ashish loves to travel, cook, and play soccer. Avid bollywood movie watcher, and sings desi songs all day long.

Linte
Linte cuts the red tape in Brazilian legal industry. It increases the efficiency of companies, making their lawyers more productive and their lawsuits less expensive.

AngelList: angel.co/linte
Founders: Gabriel Senra, Paulo Hecht, Carlos Pereira
From: Sao Paolo, Brazil
Fun Fact: Paulo entered the Guinness Book after playing sitar in a concert in India.

Lish
Wholesome meal delivery from top local chefs

AngelList: angel.co/Lish
Founders: Aakhil Fardeen, Mark Piper, Jorgen Johnson, and Evan McCormack
From: Seattle, WA
Fun Fact: Mark once played trumpet on stage with Wynton Marsalis. Aakhil can fluently read Arabic but doesn’t understand a word. Jorgen once survived a 3-week sailing trip with a wife, a toddler and 2 large dogs.

Misterbnb
With 100,000 registered users and 15,000 listings in over 130 countries, misterbnb is the largest gay-friendly hotelier in the world. We help create a travel experience that is safe and full of gay insiders tips. We offer promotions to the best local hotspots and the ability to make new friends.

AngelList: angel.co/misterbnb
Founders: Matthieu Jost, Marc Dedonder, Francois De Landes, and Chris Sinton
From: San Francisco, CA
Fun Fact: Matthieu founded his first company at the age of 18 to escape the small french village where he was born.

Ntensify
Ntensify enables mobile game and app developers to increase revenue and engagement by selling branded merchandise directly to their fans through a full-service in-app merchandise platform.

AngelList: angel.co/ntensify
Founders: Daven Johnson and Sangram Pradhan
From: San Francisco, CA
Fun Fact: Daven is the world’s greatest Ms. Pac-man fan. Sangram once wrote a screenplay for an academy award-winning producer.

Plugger
Dead battery happens to everyone. Plugger gets you back online, fast. We provide information about nearby places to get your smartphone charged up.

AngelList: angel.co/plugger-1
Founders: Choi Hyuk-jun, Neil Hyukjae Choi, and Hee-jae Lee
From: Seoul, South Korea
Fun Fact: Neil is workaholic, eating and sleeping at his office rather than going home.

Proleads.io
ProLeads is an automated lead research and qualification platform for B2B Sales and we help sales teams write highly personalised cold emails at scale with over 66% in response rate.

AngelList: angel.co/Proleads
Founders: Anders Fredriksson and Marcus Sandberg
From: Gothenburg, Sweden
Fun Fact: Anders likes to DJ, but can never shut up about CrossFit. You can ask Marcus how it feels to jump out of a plane in the middle of the night into the deepest forrest of Sweden, or ask him if you can touch his hair.

Qimple
Qimple helps great companies make better hires in less time by creating a hub for all your hiring needs. Create a job ad, distribute to multiple boards for maximum exposure with just one click, track and compare applicants with the built-in infographic generator and make the best hire – all in one place.

AngelList: angel.co/qimple
Founders: Yves Boudreau and Benoit Bourque
From: Moncton, Canada
Fun Fact: Yves is a huge metalhead and used to sing in a cover band / Benoit is a die-hard Colorado Avalanche fan… even though his cousin is the CEO of the Arizona Coyotes.

Roost
Roost is a peer-to-peer marketplace for self-storage.

AngelList: angel.co/Roost
Founders: Jonathan Gillon and Aaron Blumenthal
From: San Francisco, CA
Fun Fact: Jonathan Gillon is an avid freestyle rapper. Bon grew up in Lagos, Nigeria.

ShareON
Spika’s ShareON is a P2P photo & video sharing service that allows users to connect their devices directly. Through ShareON, you can send or stream hundreds of photos or a few gigabytes of videos to your friends or your other devices (whether it’s your iPhone, Android phone, iPad, PC, or Mac) with just a few touches.

AngelList: angel.co/spika-inc
Founders: Hongmin Park, Evan Heungju Kim, and Nicole Hosun Kim
From: Seoul, South Korea
Fun Fact: Nicole never went through surgery (even when doctors advised her to) because she was worried that would prevent her from going to space someday. Kevin likes bass fishing (best record: 15lb sea bass) and he’s planning to build a wooden boat by himself. Hongmin can take you to all the good clubs in Seoul, from 10pm to 7am.

Speedlancer
Speedlancer is the world’s fastest freelance marketplace, delivering top-notch design, writing, and data-entry work in just 4 hours.

AngelList: angel.co/stoneadam
Founders: Adam Stone
From: Melbourne, Australia
Fun Fact: Adam has founded various companies since the age of 12, and was also a full time finance & law student before joining 500 Startups.

Trance
Trance is a social video entertainment platform empowering dancers to record, promote and share their originally-created music videos.

AngelList: angel.co/trance-1
Founders: Harper LaFave, Julien Altieri, and Marwa Muhammad
From: Mountain View, CA
Fun Fact: Harper eats extremely spicy, has yet to find his competition. Marwa takes jumping pictures in every place that she visits. Julien enjoys singing in the shower, he harmonizes with the fan’s humming sound.

uTrack
Dynamic Portable Live Streaming and Live Video Production Solutions specialized in Motorsports Events in the Middle East and others, under a competitive price tag than traditional TV.

AngelList: angel.co/utracktv
Founders: Hassan AlDoy and Ali Mahmood
From: Bahrain
Fun Fact: Hasan is half Penguin! Born inside of a PC case and lived his life talking to machines. Ali is a 12-year professional racer on Track and off it!

Vango
Vango is a marketplace that connects independent artists and buyers focusing on original paintings from $100-$1500.

AngelList: angel.co/vango
Founders: Ethan James Appleby, Win Raguini, and Brandon Flayler
From: San Francisco, CA
Fun Fact: Brandon rides a motorcycle to work. Ethan has a skydiving license and over 60 jumps. Win has climbed Kilimanjaro.

Yellowdig
Yellowdig is a social learning platform for higher Ed. Yellowdig helps to increase classroom engagement by including students in the process of curating and sharing course-relevant content with one another. It’s like Pinterest for the classroom.

AngelList: angel.co/yellowdig
Founders: Shaunak Roy
From: Philidelphia, PA
Fun Fact: Shaunak likes to sketch, paint or write as an amateur blogger.

 

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