Healthiest and Kangarootime have won Vator Splash LA!

Staffly, Inc.

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on March 20, 2015

Staffly instantly provides retailers with screened, insured and trained Staffers.

Retail employee attrition rates are 67% and workers miss 21 days a year of work. Over half of the absences are last minute. The normal for main street business owners is always to be down a person or two.

Thousands of people looking for part-time work. 80% of college students want to work part-time, 47% of stay at home parents think that working part-time would be ideal, and 54% of baby boomers expect to work part-time in retirement.

Staffly handles the time-consuming responsibilities of interviewing, background checks, training, payroll, workers’ comp, and taxes.   Staffly deploys our Staffer service into retailers by providing a short retailer orientation to our Staffers, enabling them to quickly hit the ground running.  Staffly Staffers are always ready to show up and work.

Sweep Inc.

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on May 12, 2014

Sweep helps you get ahead of your bills, expenses and savings goals so you never have to budget again. Unlike other finance apps, Sweep gives you a complete forward-looking view into your cash flow and makes it easy to take control of your money, grow savings and spend confidently.

Fitly

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on August 13, 2015

More than 2 in 3 adults in America are overweight or obese. This pandemic is growing at a global scale. Traditional weight loss and nutrition programs such as Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, and Nutrisystem are not sustainable and only provide short-term fixes to a long-term problem. Digital health applications and wearables, on the other hand, are rapidly taking market share from these incumbents. These industries are growing at a 43% CAGR on average with a projected market size of $37B by 2020.

SmartPlate by Fitly, is the only intelligent nutrition platform that sits at the intersection of Digital Health, Artificial Intelligence, and Internet of Things. We differentiate through a ‘hardware assisted A.I.’ approach that will yield a unique dataset to create the most accurate, user-friendly, and scalable nutrition tracking app on the market.

Authorea

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on July 20, 2015

Authorea is a platform to write research in collaboration. Described by many as a hybrid between Google Docs and Github for science, Authorea promotes Open Science and enables a new way to read, write and publish data-rich scientific research. How is scientific knowledge disseminated? By the writing and exchange of articles published in scientific journals. What is the problem? Most publishers own the content and sell it to readers at high prices. Most people have no access to scientific articles. And if we do, we realize that they do not include the data, the code, and the raw materials that are at the basis of the published results. Scientific transparency and public trust in science are at stake. Authorea - is at the forefront of the Open Science movement with a mission to accelerate science, to improve collaboration, quality, and transparency of research. 

We have 50,000 users and are growing at a rate of 7% per week. 

Pain point:

The vast majority of the scholarly community (~95%) uses Microsoft Word  to write articles. Some other technical scholars use LaTeX, which is a  programming language for typesetting. Both technologies (Word and LaTeX) were designed and developed in the 1980s and were intended to be used by a single person working offline. Today, most scholarly articles are highly collaborative (on average 3-4 coauthors across all disciplines) and we do most of our work online- yes, even the science work. There's one more problem, science (collecting, crunching, analyzing, processing data) is a lot fun. Writing it up, not so much. Why? The link between the data (science results) and the text which reports these results is lost upon publication. Have you ever tried accessing the data "behind" an image published in a scientific article? It is nowhere to be found because it is not get published. Scientific articles, as we know them today (e.g. PDF) are obsolete.

Solution:

Authorea brings scholarly writing to the web, making authoring of technical articles as easy as writing a blog post. Authorea is built on a robust underlying version control system (Git) allowing authors to write concurrently, locking portions of articles, tracking who is working on other portions, keeping a record of changes and undoing them at any time. Authors can also easily add citations, table, figures and mathematical notation, in addition to data-driven interactive plots. Authorea's infrastructure allows authors to directly submit papers to a journal and publishers can host their peer review and editorial processes on the same platform where the article was written, greatly shortening the number of steps needed to get a paper published.

Our target customers are scholars of all kind: scientists, researchers, graduate students, college students. Besides scholars, who can sign up for a Premium account individually by credit card, there's their host institutions (e.g. universities, research labs, pharma companies). We have sold only 7 institutional licenses so far without doing much marketing or sales effort (our bad). So far, about 1% of our user base is paying users (via personal and institutional subs).

 We are in the process of beefing up our sales effort (we just hired a sales/marketing person last week). Growth and sales will go hand in hand since universities we talk to want to know that there's at least X users at their universities (X is normally 100). Sales cycle is slow unfortunately - it takes 3-4 months to sell to a university. Our total addressable market right now is $1B. The market we are ultimately addressing is the academic publishing market. Right now we are solving an obvious problem for authors (collaborative writing) but by doing so we also gather their content. The next step is do something meanigful with their content. The academic publishing industry (STM) is a $25billion market. For the time being, we are focusing solely on the academic market although it is perfectly possible that we will explore other verticals soon which also need a collaborative space for technical documents (e.g. biotech, pharma, government, legal).

Kanga Technology

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on August 31, 2015

Hundreds of existing and novel Gig-Economy companies exist to offer same-day delivery of products ranging from ice cream to designer wedding gowns. These companies face dual challenges of growing a fleet of drivers and a customer base, while also developing their software.

Kanga Technology's white-labeled software platform helps both emerging startups and Enterprises manage their same-day delivery needs and hire needed drivers without a huge capital investment.

Kanga's platform includes:

• Shipper-driver-recipient geotargeting, text, and voice communications
• Dispatch abilities in one geography or across multiple geographies
• Driver onboarding
• Data dashboard and analytics
• Dynamic load balancing APIs that allow companies to share overflow deliveries with other providers, and backfill availability in down-time

Our turnkey solution is helping clients ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies to better serve their customers' growing demands for same-day local delivery. From the United States to Southeast Asia to South Africa, Kanga Technology users are benefitting from our powerful suite of tools.

Current pilots include a major Airline (mishandled baggage and lost & found), a Fortune 500 pulp and paper company (replenishment of paper products and dispensers), a global hotelier, and many more.

Kanga Technology (kangatechnology.com) is currently directly serving customers via our subsidiary Kanga Delivery Inc (getkanga.com), and through 3rd party startups via our Kanga4X.com brand.

Our new GigPool SaaS tool allows gig economy employees to search for the gig jobs that work best for them, and apply automatically in one interface. This helps maximize earnings for contractors by giving them multiple gig economy contracts, and helps gig economy companies by reducing their costs of partner acquisition while simultaneously ensuringthat state governments view their contractors not as employees.

Drivers can joing the Kanga Delivery Network via our iOS, Android, and web onboarding process, and can be checked for vehicle history, criminal background, and more depending on specific client requirements. We can also onboard other gig-economy company providers through our dynamic load balancing API. Current drivers range from individual contractors to existing courier and 3PL providers, to other crowd economy partners.

8/omakase

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on July 14, 2015

The Story:  

Men hate to shop.  When they do have to shop they are plagued with the burden of choice.  Which patterns are in style?  Which colors are on trend?  Which fit is best for me?  Straight leg, boot cut, tapered leg, skinny fit, extra trim fit, slim fit, trim fit, modern fit, regular fit, classic fit, traditional fit? 

To make things worse, standard sizing rarely offers the ideal fit.  Off-the-rack sizing is inconsistent from one brand to the next leading to a frustrating shopping experience. Let's not even go into the parking, crowds, and commute associated with shopping malls.

The only current alternative, when it comes to high fashion, is to go the tailored or bespoke route which the average Joe can't afford.

The Benefits:

8/Omakase members receive a gift experience consisting of 8 curated packages of custom tailored and on trend styles a year.  A $2500 value for $300 in quarterly dues.  

We delivers powerful first impressions when entering a boardroom and seductive winks when walking across a bar.  The proven benefits of tailored clothing ranges from increased self confidence to higher salaries.  We make accessible to the masses, what was formerly available to the upper class.  

Custom tailored styles, no hassle service, to your door.

The Concept:

8 - 8 curated, custom tailored packages per year

O·ma·ka·se - is a term often used in sushi restaurants where the customer entrusts the chef to serve as he sees best. It's an incredible experience that allows for the customer to explore new tastes, gives the chef creative license to be brilliant, and relieves the burden of choice away from the novice and onto the expert.

It's for the man who says - "You know what's on trend, you know my tailored measurements, I trust you, make it easy on me, go ahead and dress me."

Kangarootime

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on August 13, 2015

Kangarootime helps Childcare professionals with a cloud-based mobile application that collects payments, automates 'check-in' and 'check-out' and streamlines communication. There are over 1 Million Daycare Centers, Family Childcare Homes & Early Childhood Education programs in the US and most lack technology infrastructure and business intelligence tools. Our platform leverages automation to manage collections, revenue cycle, center utilization, and regulatory adherence.

Childcare professionals struggle with collections, communication, regulatory reporting and attendance management. Our platform addresses each of these. The mobile ecosystem connects parents with the centers & establishes connectivity. Our revenue engine automates every payment from day 1, and issues statements to the parent with alerts. Our 'sign-in' and 'sign-out' functionality authenticates the demanding chain of custody standards in each state. Finally, we automate reporting & analytics.

Healthiest, Inc.

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on July 6, 2015

We all need that friend. You know the one, who always gives great advice, suggests the healthiest products and freshest trends. Don't you wish they were around when you needed them? Like when you're shopping online? Well, now they are. Healthiest Helper is your Amazon friend. Sharing the healthiest options with you while you shop.