This was it – the biggest event of the year, the night that our top hacker teams from around the world had been waiting for. They’d triumphed at an AngelHack hackathon, they’d gone through the HACKcelerator program, and now, they stood in front of an auditorium packed with investors, media, and mentors. It was the moment of truth: Global Demo Day.
AngelHack hosted its third annual Global Demo Day, the culminating event of its hackathon season, on October 30th at the University of San Francisco’s Presentation Theatre. People laughed, people cried, and people were blown away by how far the teams took their ideas in just a few quick months.
A week before taking the stage, teams touched down in San Francisco for Silicon Valley Week, where they worked out of a coworking space in the Financial District to polish and refine their pitches. They got personalized feedback from AngelHack staff, mentors, and each other. The progress they made was incredible – you wouldn’t believe they were the same teams you saw on stage!
The Judges
On Thursday, October 30th, it was game time. The teams knew it was their big break, but when we sold out the auditorium, they knew just how high the stakes were! Not to mention our all-star judging panel, which included managing partners from the top three startup accelerators (Y Combinator, TechStars, and 500 Startups), as well as top-tier investors, VCs and founders:
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Kathrina Manalac; Partner, Y Combinator
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Don Loeb; VP Corporate Development, Techstars
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Bedy Yang; Brazil Innovators, 500 Startups
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Ben Parr; Co-founder & Managing Partner, DominateFund; Advisor, AngelHack
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Falon Fatemi; CEO & Founder, Close.co
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Allan Young; Founder, TopLine Incubator and Runway; Advisor, AngelHack
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Ryan Hoover; Founder, Product Hunt
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Manny J. Fernandez; Co-Founder & CEO, DreamFunded.com
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Joel Yarmon; Seed Venture Capital Investor, Draper Associates
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Jeff Tannenbaum; Investor, BlueRun Ventures
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Leslie Theodore; Director, Women in Leadership and Philanthropy, USF
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Ed Roman; Angel Investor
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Ray Gilstrap; The “IT” Guy
Thanks to all our judges for coming through to this amazing event. Those names… talk about star power!
The Teams
But as bright as the judges shone, they just couldn’t outshine our teams, who gave incredible pitch after incredible pitch from start to finish. Behold, the teams that presented, in their own words:
T-Bio: T-Bio Heartcare is a wearable device, specially designed at a low cost, for people with heart disease. T-Bio works everywhere and is monitoring your heart permanently so people can focus on doing what they love.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B1Pdc6gCYAAU3mN.jpg
SheSays: SheSays is an anonymous forum to rate and review tech companies based on women’s experiences. By focusing on these voices, it provides a service to those entering tech and uses often overlooked stories to make inclusive workspaces the norm.
VERA: Last minute date? Last minute updo? No sweat! Vera brings beauty professionals directly to people’s houses, so that they can relax in their PJs. Vera is currently available in the Seattle and the surrounding metro area, offering blowouts, hair styles, and makeup.
Sparky: Sparky is an anti-bullying app that notifies parents about risks on their kids’ social networks – such as sexual predators, sharing private information, and cyberbullying. Sparky is a global solution for families with kids.
App2Brand: A mobile app to create mobile apps.
Shippter: Shippter is a global shipping marketplace for freight forwarders and shippers who need to hire their services.
Plans: A mobile app to help people find friends to grab dinner with. Plans matches you up with friends, or friends of friends, in the area and helps you pick a place so you can meet new people, or catch up over a meal.
Brthe: Brthe is a personal concierge that pushes the best mix of content and information just when users need them, and shares context across these services. Users can seamlessly enjoy the best experiences without having to hop around multiple browser tabs and single-purpose apps.
AMEO: Ameo is your guardian-angel. It gives users the option to determine who should have an eye on you while you are outdoors. It’s a simple solution to privately share your location with your buddies.
Seemly: Add context to your content. Trigger messages to be unlocked when they are most relevant and meaningful. Don’t get lost in the noise of instant messaging.
Antumbra: Antumbra is developing Glow, an open-source ambient monitor backlight. Highly customizable and extendable software allows users to define their computing experience in a whole new way, all while reducing eye strain.
InfoClot: Info Clot is a growth hacking and content discovery platform for content publishers and news seekers, leveraging data visualisation and interest tracking.
QSmart: QSmart is a next generation queuing solution that provides all the benefits that today’s technology offers while retaining the behavior that people are familiar with.
Typeset.io: Makes typesetting easier than eating a piece of cake! No more spending hours on formatting a document. Now, users can finally focus on content, relax and stop worrying about the looks of a document, because Typeset takes care of all that for you. Compose professional quality documents in seconds with Typeset.
https://angel.co/typeset-technologies
Skyline: Helps SMBs quickly and affordably build their own mobile ERP systems within days. Skyline is a lightly customizable platform aims to become the 3D printing technology for mobile enterprise solutions.
Pepperonio: Pepperonio turns every delivery truck into a mobile pizzeria to get pizza to you faster than ever before. It reduces traditional delivery times by 80%. Welcome to the future of pizza.
HungryBelly: HungryBelly eliminates choice overload by learning what you like and curating only the best food recommendations that you are certain to love. It is your belly’s food matchmaker.
Inclusion Hub: Inclusion Hub is a SaaS platform that simplifies the web in order to welcome the elderly to the digital world.
https://angel.co/inclusion-hub-2
Quotable: Lost in a jungle of bookmarks? Highlight and remember lines that you love across the web with the help of Quotable. Quickly save, curate, and share those quotables by installing our Google Chrome Extension. This way, you won’t ever have to waste time looking for the info you need and love.
Footprint: Footprint is a connected Waste basket for the promotion of the #1 of the Three R’s: Reduction!
https://angel.co/footprint
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/footprint
Ambition Spotlight: Building LinkedIn for “the hood” – enabling people from underprivileged communities to broadcast their story, talents, and dreams to the world. Ambition Spotlight’s platform and services transform these dreamers into doers, mobilizing a whole wave of untapped human capital.
https://angel.co/ambition-spotlight
AND THE WINNER IS:
QSMART! Our AngelHack Malaysia winners, QSmart won Global Demo Day, and will move on to an interview with TechStars. Our two runners up, Typeset and Shippter, will also be interviewed. Congratulations, everyone!
Winding Down…
After Global Demo Day, it was time to unwind and celebrate our teams’ success! We went on to an epic Startup Bash at Roe Nightclub, followed by a relaxing day at the park that weekend. Then it was off to the airport for our teams – but it’s not over yet.
Be sure to keep an eye out on this blog, or follow us on Facebook and Twitter, to stay in the loop about what everyone’s up to (you can also check out the rest of the pics here). If you’re interested in investing in one of these teams, please click here. And don’t forget to come to our 2015 Global Hackathon Series, which will be bigger and better than ever before. Stay tuned for dates!
We’d like to extend a big THANK YOU to all our teams for all their hard work, our amazing judging panel for taking the time to come out here, and of course, our AngelHack Community, all you amazing devs who came out, tweeted at us, or showed us and the teams love this past week. We wouldn’t be who we are without you!
Thank you so much, and we’ll see you next season!
~The AngelHack Team
