Demo Day 2011: The five startups of i/o ventures

CodeEval, Pieceable, PrePay, Cortex and Mobbles unveiled at their Mission SF home

Not to disparage the downtown San Francisco digs for AngelPad or the glamorous high-rise office space for 500 Startups, but the startups mentored by i/o ventures sure do have a sweet setup. If you can get past the random rain that hit the city today, there's little to dislike about this café/workspace hybrid situated in the heart of the Mission district of SF.

Investors, entrepreneurs and friends in the startup space rolled in here Tuesday evening to see the following five startups show off what they've been working on. It's only the second class of companies to emerge from under the wing of i/o ventures, an early stage startup program, and they're looking good.

(Editor's note: If you're a fan of mingling with investors and entrepreneurs, be sure to register for Venture Shift, going down in San Francisco the evening of Wednesday, July 20th. Go to the registration page to reserve your tickets and see the agenda.)

Without further ado:

CodeEval is a candidate evaluation and discovery platform for the recruiting industry. Specifically tailored to help employers find developers and engineers, CodeEval submits applicants to coding challenges, which are supplied either by the startup or the hiring company.

Before founding CodeEval, Jimmy John served as lead developer for enterprise IT company Splunk. The company is seeking a seed round between $750,000 and $1 million.

Pieceable is a mobile development platform for the non-programmer. Without writing a lick of code, developers can piece together the desired style and content of their app all from a library of pre-built components.

The company also offers Pieceable Viewer, a service that lets developers run their iOS apps in-browser.

Before founding Pieceable, Fred Potter worked on mobile development at Loopt.

PrePay is a mobile marketplace that lets consumers prepay for store credit, in exchange receiving 10 to 20 percent more than what they paid. The credit, redeemable with a smartphone, never expires. The idea is that, while consumers save money, merchants increase customer retention and loyalty, with cash already in pocket.

The startup was founded by brothers Brian Schwartz and Eric Schwartz, previously of AppMakr and Castle Harlan, respectively. They're looking to raise around $750,000.

Cortex wants to be the fastest way to share articles, links, videos, images, music--anything that can be found on the Web--with friends, family and followers on social networks. The free app, currently available in the Chrome App Store, has 16,305 users and sees 2,350 installs weekly.

The startup, founded by ex-Googlers and other engineers and designers, is looking for a $750,000 seed.

Mobbles is a casual smartphone game (coming soon!) where you find, collect, train and fight small creatures called "Mobbles." Sound familiar? Yup. "Think pokemon meets tamagotchi on geolocalized smartphones," says the company.

Mobbles was founded by two CS grads with mobile and design experience.

photo source: scobleizer.