AngelPad, the startup accelerator program started two years ago by ex-Googler and tech investor Thomas Korte, held Demo Day for its Spring 2012 class in San Francisco this week. The event was a very buzzy one, with ten solid startups pitching to a standing-room-only room packed with investors.
AngelPad’s program runs for 10 weeks, during which each startup founder receives “extensive mentorship” from the program’s founders and associates. Each company gets $20,000 from AngelPad as part of the program as well as the option to take on a full $100,000 in funding from two of the program’s affiliated venture capital firms. This means that by time the startups get to Demo Day, they are not necessarily desperate for more money — so there is a real dance between founders and funders, with each side wanting to be especially sure that it finds a good fit.
TechCrunch TV was on hand to check it all out. In the video embedded above, you can watch some footage of the whole Demo Day scene, as well as our interview with Korte, in which he tells us about what sets AngelPad apart from the other incubators out there, why AngelPad founders root for each other like family, why he sees other angel investors such as Dave McClure as friends and not competitors, and lots more.
We were also able to pull aside each startup founder after the on-stage presentations (no easy feat in a room full of deep-pocketed investors) to give us a one-on-one pitch. You can watch those in the video embedded below.
Here is the list of the AngelPad Spring 2012 Demo Day startups, in the order in which they appear in the above video:
Piggybackr, CEO Andrea Lo: A fundraising platform aimed at helping young people to more effectively raise money for their schools, sports teams, and extracurricular projects.
Dropt, CEO Brent Locks: Software that embeds smart watermarks into images so that retail companies can share, track, and manage them for e-commerce purposes.
RolePoint, CEO Chris Le Breton: An enterprise-level social recruitment platform for companies that are looking to aggressively scale up their staff numbers.
Spotsetter, CEO Johnny Lee: A search engine with big data muscle that lets you quickly search for content through a variety of social apps such as Facebook, Instagram, and Foursquare.
Academize, CEO Isaac Moshe: A social learning platform aimed at letting teachers and professors create and share video lessons.
Spotivate, CEO Anthony Lee: A mobile app that pulls in data from a variety of sources to help people discovery and plan new things to do locally.
Hall.com, CEO Brett Hellman: A software program that rolls all the software programs teams use to communicate at work into one real-time application.
Mobile Captain, CEO Michael Keaton: A platform to allow local businesses to easily market their products, events and deals through a variety of the leading social and mobile apps.
ElasticBox, CEO Alberto Arias Maestro: A software platform that aims to make it easier for enterprise IT teams to develop and deploy complex cloud applications.
Embark Anywhere, CEO Bill Ferrell: A mobile app that aims to function as your personal assistant for booking and organizing all things travel-related.
