Startups Pitch, Hit Gold At MIT GSL

MIT GSL’s Demo Day was held on the 30th of July. Now, in case you missed out, GSL is a startup incubator of sorts – trainers and students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology came down here to work with local startups, nurture and mentor them and brush them up to where they could pitch for investor funding and secure a couple a couple of million.

Phase one began at the Open University in January: 75 participants were selected out of a pool of over 350. The second phase, conducted intermittently in February and the next few months, was conducted mostly on weekends and focus on the process of ideation – of helping these 75 people develop a great idea.

Demo Day was the final phase. We sat in as the judges took their seats and the candidates started their pitches. Seven startups had made it out of the initial rounds. Three startups were cheery-picked by Brandix as the winners – Organic Hug (an organic farming and distribution / retail startup), Eagle Eye (military-grade human recognition and tracking technology), with the winner being Dolawa (a system for summoning and tracking tuk tuks – they’ve already got a successful operation rolling). The majority of the day was spent in pitching: here’s how it turned out.

First up was Top Notch (www.topnotch.club) – a slightly nervous pitch that picks up pace, talking about their customer engagement / retention platform that allows merchants to provide gamified activities to customers based on social media activites – and tying that into rewards and details campaign / customer analytifcs on the merchant back-end. The team stressed the lack of analytics in Sri Lankan retail – especially where loyalty programs are concerned. They had their market segments picked out – SME’s that target high-end customers, especially those with customers that are active on social media.

The project was similar to Crowdtwist, Booshaka, Spoton and Frontflip, all of which are foreign solutions operating in a similar space. They acknowledged these as competitors, smartly using them to prove that this program is viable.

Over to the panel of judges – who began the grilling.  “How much of the product is already developed?” “How’d the success of similar products in the global market?” “How many people are wokring on this fulltime?” “How’re you going to prevent people spamming the system?” “How good is your engine?”

Boarding.lk came next – essentially a clone of airbnb.com tailored towards local uni students. Apparently some 1500 new graduates come to UoM wth each intake, and according to the pitch, 9000+ boarding owners exist. The question is whether people will actually take the trouble to create and maintain their own profiles – especially when most of them barely exist on Facebook. They’s identified their competitors Lankapropertyweb and Hit ads, but their real competitor wass pointed out by one of the judges – notice boards. No cost, no commitments, no startup fee, easy visibility.

Dcare came next – an app that seeks to help children with ADHD. We saw a rather passionate pitch from Barun Paudel, pitching an app which brings together question involving image and symbol identification with learning challenges.

“ADHD is not a disease. It is not an impariment. Just difficulties in reading, recognizing words, spelling, decoding – and because of this, they’re undergoing confusion, harassment. In Sri Lanka, if you say “I took my child to a psychologist?”, do you have any idea of what kind of reaction you’ll get from everyone in the neighborhood?

“So our solution: we came up with a mobile app called Dcare. I do not call it a unique product, but a product with unique features. What does it give you? Low cost, a simple, interactive system that anyone can use, report generation and progress tracking – and fourth, guidance and suggestions.”

Up next was Social Hug, which was perhaps the most financially optimistic pitch we saw that day. The Social Hug team are building a physical and virtual platform to connect organic farmers to their customers. They intend to operate on something called the cluster model, where they group producers and consumers into geographical clusters to better optimize delivery and adding more and more clusters to the platform to expand usage.

It’s an interesting model: not only will consumers be able to shop for packages of stuff using their platform, they’ll also be able to trace each package back to its point of origin to see the farm itself and to look at its history. Social Hug is the mediator. Imagine the Good Market, but with a one up on that. The team also has an extensive background in agriculture. Saraketha is a more direct competitor.The presentation went over well, eliciting friendly humor from both the judges and the audience.

We then saw Eagle Eye, a software running on your PC which can monitor CCTV feeds and detect human movement (as opposed to other types of motion). It’s human detection. That’s actually impressive in a vaguely 24-ish spy-cam way (and they’re apparently patenting the tech). The cool part is that the once human motion is detected, a video clip is generated and automatically pushed to cloud servers for secure storage. Eagle Eye is apparently working on coming up with the world’s first camera to have human-detection built in. It was a fairly impressive pitch, “We have a vision – that if we continue in this field, one day you’ll see machines that can hear, see and understand – and somewhere in that package it’ll say “made in Sri Lanka”.

ShopIn was another impressive pitch. They’re set to provide extensive data analytics for fashion retailers – pairing analytics with human-tracking devices (do we see a potential client for Eagle Eye) and smartphones. The way things are set up, it looks like retailers can track which sections are visited,  conversions, time spent, shopping paths, and that extends to determining the effectiveness of new layouts, even.

All in all, some good stuff, some not so good stuff – and some great stuff. We’re looking forward to seeing all of these young entrepreneurs bring their dreams to life.