Wednesday, January 25, 2012

New TechStars Boston class includes teams from all over

By Kyle Alspach, Boston Business Journal

Along with a half dozen Boston area startups, prestigious accelerator TechStars Boston this year will include two companies currently based in France, one from Canada and four others from around the U.S. The program announced the 13 companies chosen for this year’s class on Tuesday night.

The group of Boston area startups chosen for the program includes private equity marketplace site BISON (currently located across the hall from TechStars, at Dogpatch Labs) and two startups that took part in last year’s MassChallenge accelerator, sports training app maker UberSense and social publishing site Libboo.

Libboo CEO and co-founder Chris Howard said in an e-mail that TechStars “will help us rock!”

“Our ideas will now be pushed along at lightening speed, and our mission to fundamentally transform the publishing industry is ever closer,” he wrote.

Libboo, which this week received $40,000 in funding from the Massachusetts Technology Development Corp., currently has three full-time staff members and plans to expand to five full-timers within two weeks, Howard said.

UberSense, for its part, was one of the finalists in the 2011 MassChallenge field to land one of the 14 $50,000 prizes.

TechStars participants this year will receive $100,000 each, along with an operating stipend, space at the TechStars accelerator in Cambridge, mentorship and other assistance.

From what I’ve been told, all of the participants from last year’s TechStars Boston program went on to raise outside financing. In addition, several of the companies that weren’t originally from Boston ended up keeping some or all of their operation here after the program. Those included GrabCAD (founded in Estonia), Help Scout (Nashville) and Kinvey (the founders met in Texas).

Here’s what I’ve learned about the geographies the teams are originating from this year, which is the fourth year for TechStars Boston:

• BISON (platform to fundraise for alternative investments) — Cambridge
• Libboo (social publishing) — Boston
• GymPact (mobile app that incentivizes regular exercise) — Boston
• Psykosoft (online creative software factory) — France
• Zagster (makes renting bicycles easy and affordable) — Philadelphia (formerly known as CityRyde)
• Testive (adaptive educational testing) — Cambridge
• Simply Good Technologies (makes mobile couponing simple) — Toronto
• docTrackr (document tracking and metrics) — France
• Murfie (the friendly music market) — Madison, Wisc.
• Mortar (easy Hadoop in the cloud) — New York City
• UberSense (mobile app for helping athletes and amateurs improve) — Boston
• ShopSuey/Shopsy (the retail graph) — Wheaton, Md.
• LessonSmith (crafting lessons through collaboration) — Boston

Among the financial backers of TechStars are Foundry Group, IA Ventures, Avalon Ventures, DFJ Mercury and SoftBank Capital.