It must’ve been stiff competition for the international startups that applied for entry into the second year of the Techstars accelerator’s Atlanta residency.
About a third of the applications came in from 41 countries around the world, with Israel, India, the United Kingdom and Nigeria leading the non-U.S. pack. That was down from 69 countries last year.
But in the end, only two out of this year’s 10 firms selected were from overseas, and not from the places you might expect.
Riga, Latvia-based TheMonetizr could be looking into tapping the growing video-game sector in Georgia, offering a solution that allow mobile game developers to quickly add merchandise shops within their apps.
Nigeria’s Farmcrowdy, based in the Atlanta sister city of Lagos, has a crowdfunding platform that connects “sponsors” with small farms in need of capital to get their production to market. Their investment is returned with profit at harvest time. The platform’s financial technology component could play well with Atlanta’s leading role in that sector.
Of course, Techstars, which has a global network, picked Atlanta in part because of its own growing promise as a startup hub. That was reflected in the applications, as a full one-fourth came were fielded locally. The city ended up producing four out of the 10 companies selected.
Others firms came from around the South, including two from Chattanooga, Tenn., and one from Charlotte, N.C. Only one selected American firm is from outside the South — Vlipsy, which hails from Ohio.
The solutions offered by this year’s startups span a variety of industries, from date planning to point-of-sale software for gas stations. See the full list below:
- 2ULaundry (Charlotte): On-demand laundry and dry cleaning services
- Bloveit (Atlanta): Curated date night experiences
- Collider Tech (Chattanooga): Stand-alone, end-to-end additive manufacturing technology
- Farmcrowdy (Lagos, Nigeria): Crowdfunding for small-scale agriculture
- Fraudmarc (Atlanta): Cyber security service aimed at protecting corporate identity
- Landing Lion (Atlanta): Landing pages for the modern marketer
- MoQuality (Atlanta): Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform for mobile quality assurance
- Rapid RMS (Chattanooga): A modern day point-of-sale software for the petroleum industry
- TheMonetizr (Riga, Latvia): In-game monetization platform for merchandise purchases
- Vlipsy (Canton, OH): Video clip soundboard
Techstars Atlanta did a roadshow early in the year to promote the Atlanta program. Most dates focused on Southeastern and North American tech hubs in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Toronto and Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. But managing director Michael Cohn said in a blog post that the program’s “wide net” necessitated a few trips across the Atlantic.
We’re crossing oceans to host events in Nigeria and Israel, two countries with longstanding entrepreneurial spirits, global mindsets and histories of inventing technology that knows no borders.
The program, which focuses heavily on mentorship, started July 10 and culminates with a pitch day Oct. 10.
Learn more about the Techstars model and the inaugural “class” from this story: Techstars’ First Atlanta Accelerator Draws Foreign Startups
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