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| Photo: Grand Central Tech |
BRILLIANT! JUMBO ENTREPRENEURS AND THEIR BIG IDEAS
Grand Central Tech
BIG IDEA: A startup incubator to revitalize New York City’s tech scene. “We want the best companies working to solve big problems and tackle significant challenges,” Bonello and his cofounder, Matt Harrigan, say on the Grand Central Tech website. A new cohort of fledgling businesses is accepted each year, and all get free office space (in Facebook’s former New York office—15,000 square feet overlooking Grand Central Terminal). They also get free services like legal work and accounting, free mentoring from entrepreneur experts, and interns from a mix of public and private high schools. The effort is backed by the Milsteins, the family of New York real estate magnates that owns the office space, and when a company’s year at GCT is over, it is expected to move to another Milstein-owned space in the same building and pay rent.
STATUS: GCT welcomed its first startups in 2014. Among them were Augmate, which makes customizable smart eyewear for people who need to work away from a desk; Cohero Health, which develops technology that helps patients with respiratory ailments like asthma manage their condition; and SpokenLayer, whose app turns text into high-quality, natural-sounding speech within minutes. grandcentraltech.com
Foxtrot Systems
BIG IDEA: An app that helps product distributors optimize their routes. “We use traffic and weather information, in-house route-optimization algorithms, and machine learning to boost our customers’ fleet efficiency and delivery success,” Coughran, a computer science major, and his cofounder brother Doug, a mechanical engineering major at MIT, told Inc. magazine.
STATUS: Named one of Inc.’s Coolest College Startups of 2015, Boston-based Foxtrot has attracted $500,000 in seed funding. It is currently in beta testing, working with customers in the United States, Brazil, and India to deliver products such as ice, lumber, beer, and laundry. foxtrot.io
SpotLight Parking
BIG IDEA: Stress-free parking in the big city. You enter the address of your destination into the SpotLight app and the service dispatches a valet who will be waiting when you arrive to park your car at one of SpotLight’s privately owned parking spaces. Later, you use the app to tell the service to bring the car back. An alert lets you know when to head outside and pick it up.
STATUS: Miele’s inspiration came to him in 2013 when he and his mom were hunting for a parking space so they could go to a Red Sox game. “My mother said, ‘I wish I could just pull over, throw someone my keys, and be done with it!’ ” he told Tufts’ News from A&S. That September, he pitched the idea for SpotLight Parking to his peers in an entrepreneurship course and ended up with two valuable team members—Karan Singhal, E15, and Joseph Price, A00. Singhal is now SpotLight’s chief technology officer, while Price is its chief operating officer. The company, which will be launching in Boston, snagged first place in the Tufts $100K New Ventures Competition this April. spotlight-parking.com