LaunchKC winners reflect on ‘massive opportunity’
September 21, 2015 | Ashley Jost
Once the dust settled on the LaunchKC grant recipient announcement, the champagne bottles popped.
Founders from the 10 winning companies — parred down from a list of 500 — had reason to celebrate Friday afternoon between the promise of $50,000 and the chance to land some office space.
Of the 10 recipient companies, six come from the Kansas City metro area, including PopBookings, a company that CEO Erika Klotz affectionately calls “Uber for event staffing.” PopBookings, based in Kansas City, was the People’s Choice Award recipient of the LaunchKC grants.
“My initial reaction is pure shock and awe and thankfulness for the community here in Kansas City rooting for and supporting a hometown company,” Klotz said. She said the team had a social media plan to draw attention from friends, family and supporters to boost their chances of nabbing the people’s choice spot — and it worked.
The grant and office space couldn’t be coming at a better time for PopBookings as the business is about to be booted out of Spark Lab’s accelerator space. But as for the money, Klotz said her team “is putting it to work” toward product development.
Kansas City is familiar with other out-of-town startups that earned LaunchKC grants. HealthID CEO Angelo Pitassi Jr. recently spent March to June expanding his business in the Sprint Accelerator with Techstars’ help. HealthID helps users manage their medical data and share critical medical information with emergency responders.
“One of my first reactions when offered with the chance to be one of the companies in the Accelerator was ‘Kansas City? What am I going to do in Kansas City for three months?’ And then I got here,” said Pitassi Jr., who’s from Cranston, R.I. “Now, it would be crazy for us not to have a presence here in Kansas City.”
Pitassi knows he wants to hire with the money the company garnered from the Techweek competition, and he hopes to bring his Kansas City business presence “back to his second home” in the Crossroads: The Sprint Accelerator. Vert
HealthID isn’t the only Sprint Accelerator company to nab a LaunchKC grant. Vertisense, formerly Alcohoot, also went through the Techstars’ accelerator program and earned the funds on Friday. The company, which creates sensors to measure blood alcohol content and other health metrics, recently made its first hire in the Kansas City area.
Pycno founder Nikita Gulin called his company’s win “a massive opportunity,” as it gave him an outlet to try and bring his business into the United States from Santiago, Chile. The LaunchKC funding will help his company with development as they move further into the manufacturing of their sensor that helps collect data for farmers.
Featured Business
2015 Startups to Watch
stats here
Related Posts on Startland News
KCPS superintendent to city struggling with violence: When do we all come together?
It’s inexcusable for Kansas City to simply accept 130 murders before it’s even December, Mark Bedell said. “Who do you think are committing these crimes?” Bedell, superintendent of Kansas City Public Schools, asked a crowd gathered Thursday for the Lean Lab’s Launch[ED) Day. “Probably people who have been victims of schools that have failed them…
Kauffman Foundation rolls out $1.2M microlending program to help underserved entrepreneurs
Amid a swarm of 160 events as part of Global Entrepreneurship Week, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation announced a new microlending program to spur investment in underserved entrepreneurs. In partnership with four microfinance lenders, the foundation issued a series of grants totaling $1.2 million that a will change the way the nonprofit microlenders capitalize their…
Scared away from networking events? Anti-social introverts can turn to tech
Networking strength comes in numbers — even for anti-social introverts, Jeremy A. Smith told a crowd Tuesday at Global Entrepreneurship Week. “Anti-social people, myself included, hate events,” he said. But like all other entrepreneurs, such introverts still must build and maintain actionable professional networks from which they can request and receive value, Smith said. In-person networking…
Longfellow Farm coworking the soil amid KC’s urban food desert
In a city ripe with coworking office spaces, there’s a hunger for similar environments outdoors, Ami Freeberg said. As with maintaining individual workplaces, traditional urban farming also can be isolating and expensive, the Longfellow Farm manager said. By working together, however, the collaborative process allows for shared resources, greater human expertise and, of course, more…