Demo Day
8th December 2022
Activated Scale
Prateek Mathur
Founder / CEO
Prateek has spent the last 20 years selling and building sales teams for startups and public companies. For the last 4 years, he was helping startups build their go-to-market strategy and found a large gap in the market especially with startups and small businesses that are built by technical founders. Prateek is now building his fourth startup, Activated Scale, a marketplace that connects startups and small businesses with vetted and experienced fractional sales talent.
"We are looking for introductions to startups and small businesses that we can help grow fast. Please connect us with founders that are hiring salespeople."
Globowl
Erica Bethe Levin
Founder / CEO
Erica was the first female founder at 1871 with CheekyChicago, growing it into the city's number one online resource for women. Following Cheeky, Erica led expansion initiatives for venture-backed start-up Reserve, which sold to Resy in 2018. For the next five years, she served as the Director of Global Sales for a hospitality consulting company where she broke sales records and guided industry titans through their customer experience. In addition to Globowl, she currently serves on the Exec Board of Northwestern University's Council of 100, an invitation-only cohort of top-tier graduates selected to mentor female students and young alums.
"Our goal is to be in every grocery store, every online marketplace, every coffee shop and every diaper bag in America and are looking for introductions to grocers big and small, along with chains like Starbucks."
daedalus
Wenitte Apiou
Founder / CEO
Wenitte Apiou is a trader and a software developer. Previously he studied Electrical Engineering and Math at Vanderbilt University, worked on AI in Meta Reality Labs, and has built multiple consumer software startups, one of which was acquired in 2022. Wenitte turned down a full time role at Jane Street to build Daedalus.
"Would love for you to join our community!"
Leagueswype
Darius Grandberry
Founder / CEO
Darius is a huge sports fan with 20+ years finance and accounting experience. He received an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, served as Managing Director at a Chicago based financial services firm, was formerly the CFO at a private equity asset manager and prior served as a senior auditor. His experience in business and desire to give back encourages his volunteer work as a mentor with the Christian faith Joseph Business School, sitting Treasurer of the Kellogg Alumni Club of Chicago, and his work with the Board of Rebuilding Together Metro Chicago. He is also a proud husband and father of 2.
"If you're a fantasy sports player, download our app!"
clickvoyant
Mia Umanos
Founder / CEO
Mia Umanos, (CEO), is a 15-year veteran of marketing analytics who grew her career from Junior to Director inside digital marketing agencies. Her talent for balancing math and intuition turns her projects into gold. She lifted revenue $4M in 90 days through optimization, created a sustained 40% increase in ad revenue for a major publisher, and won a Google News Initiative Grant for a Nobel Peace Prize winner. She's pouring her expertise into Clickvoyant to provide advanced analytics to companies of all sizes.
"If you know a company who is spending about $20K per month in customer acquisition and would like a 26% increase to their top line, let's connect!"
Dev-Docs
Andrew Van Beek
Co-Founder / CEO
Andrew believes coding is a super power and wants to help enable all folks that want to learn. He has been working in tech his whole career, and has worked with 100s of engineers. He is a technologist that loves to learn, and loves to teach which is why he setting his eyes on enabling every developer in the world through making docs better.
"Lets talks about making docs easy for your developers."
Parkster.ai
Drake Burciaga
Founder / CEO
When Drake was in college, he and his friends were driving to campus looking for a place to park. They spent 20 minutes repeatedly going up and down the streets of Chicago searching for parking. After that, he created Parkster.ai to make parking less painful for operators and drivers through artificial intelligence. Drake started programming at the age of 10 and began studying AI in high school.
"If you're an angel investor with operational expertise and find the parking space interesting, we would love to chat!"
Pay4Me App
Sunday "Paul" Adah
Founder / CEO
Sunday "Paul" Adah almost lost the opportunity to study abroad in the United States as an international student at BYU-Idaho because his local bank in Nigeria couldn't deliver his tuition payment on time due to inefficient cross-border payment infrastructures. He'd later observe that other potential and current international students were facing the same problem en masse. So he eventually started Pay4Me App to solve this problem. Pay4Me App simplifies cross-border payments for international students by converting their local currencies in real-time for instant payouts to colleges, universities, and governments.
"We'd like Introductions to early-stage VCs and angels investing in cross-border payments, remittance, fintech, and edtech."
XpressRun
Sada Wane
Co-Founder / CEO
Sada Wane moved to Louisville from Senegal in 2013. He was Interested in human-computer interaction, Wane studied neuroscience and informatics at the University of Louisville and Indiana University Southeast. That first taste of entrepreneurship lit the spark for XpressRun. The Louisville-based logistics startup offers direct-to-consumer brands more affordable access to same-day delivery, while also giving brands end-to-end ownership of the delivery process.
"We'd love to meet CPG brands, meal kits companies, DTC brands, and more."
SMARTcharts
Corinne Vargas, CCC-SLP
Founder / CEO
Corinne is a former Deloitte actuary turned speech-language pathologist. As the founder and CEO of SMARTCharts, and a clinician, Corinne is uniquely qualified to design a solution that automates therapeutic notes and communicates progress with speech, occupational and physical therapy patients and their care teams. She earned a Master’s degree in Speech-Language Learning from Northwestern University, a Bachelor’s degree in Actuarial Science from the University of Illinois-Champaign, and a Bachelor’s degree in Communicative Disorders and Deaf Education from Utah State University. In 2022, Incino Ventures named Corinne to its list of 100 Rising Latinx Founders to Watch.
"We are seeking visionary investors and introductions to executives in therapeutic rehab who are excited about the opportunity to revolutionize rehabilitation."