The i/o Ventures Demo Day starts in a little under a half an hour, and I am about to head over to Valencia Street to watch the startups present. i/o Ventures is the SF-based incubator that offers five or six startups a 4-6 month long spot in its 7,000 square foor loft/coffee shop space as well as $25,000 in seed money, in exchange for around 8% of the company.
We’ve covered some of the companies before, put I am publishing a preliminary list here (to be updated as I watch their presentations).
CodeEval (our coverage) – A platform for interviewing and testing programmers, CodeEval lets companies automate the process of filtering job candidates.
Pieceable (our coverage) — Pieceable, which just released Pieceable Viewer, is a platform that attempts to make mobile development easier by offering customers ready-made components for iOS apps.
Prepay — A mobile loyalty program that offers customers prepaid store credit, allowing them to save up to 10-20% on purchases.
Cortex — A browser extension that allows you to rapidly share web content like images and links.
Mobbles — “Pokemon meets Tamagotchi,” a mobile game that lets you raise and fight whimsical creatures called Mobbles.
i/o Ventures co-founder Paul Bragiel tells me that the over-arching theme in this spring’s class is consumer internet gaming and mobile, and that the incubator prefers startups with at least one technical co-founder.
When asked about the relatively small size of the class, he said, “We are not interested in being a factory and we are super selective.” i/o picked five out of a pool of 500 applicants for this spring’s group. When asked what it took to be an i/o Ventures company, he replied, “At the end of the day we ask ourselves ‘would we have started a company with these guys when we were younger.’” Rad.
Out of the six companies in the last batch of i/o startups, two were acquired and the rest all raised financing of between $500,000 – $1 million to execute on their ideas. See you at the meetup.
You can read more about the last i/o Ventures demo day here and watch a video of Bragiel describing the program, below.
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