To meet the upcoming founders for Demo Day, we took a tour of the ballroom. Some students, like Nadia Moore with HOM3D, are confronting issues they encountered as college students in the real world. She is on a mission to create focus-promoting furniture, and she is beginning with a better sort of fidget spinner that can be connected directly to a desk and aid in improving student concentration. She revealed to Hypepotamus that one of the things that drew her to the Create-X programme earlier this summer was the chance to find a solution to a real-world issue.
At Atlanta’s Fox Theater, a full house typically indicated the arrival of a big band or a Broadway tour. The theatre off Peachtree, however, was crowded on Thursday night with people eager to see the newest founders to emerge from Georgia Tech’s Create-X programme, a summer-long intensive aimed to aid student-run businesses in taking off. Over 100 teams with entrepreneurs who are creating consumer goods, healthcare firms, AR/VR platforms, and other things made up this year’s class. The current Create-X cohort is the biggest one yet.
Highlights
Syfted, a platform that connects those in the beauty business with more clients, and FRAMED, an app on a goal to make dating more social with a platform that lets your friends create your profiles, put a priority on connecting people. Other firms are addressing the difficulties of homeownership. Georgia State law students Kierra Powell, Rebecca Rhym, and Joe Griswell spent the summer working on their AI insurance startup that speeds up the processing of insurance claims for homeowners through the use of a photo-taking app.
A major trend of this cohort was establishing contacts in the real world. The Gigsurf team is creating a peer-to-peer marketplace for college students wishing to offer or hire a service since, according to co-founder Ford Coleman, there was a significant need for such a platform while he attended Georgia Tech. To start the marketplace, he has teamed up with a group of present pupils.
Some firms, like ModuWear, are uniting Georgia Tech and Illinois University students to create a sustainable, modular clothing line. In the air, Pattent is developing a “Google Maps for drones” to aid unmanned aircraft in navigating around crowded cities and riskier regions.
According to Powell, the idea for Kythe, Inc. was developed in a law class. She told Hypepotamus, “We are used to sitting in class and learning about these concerns” related to insurance claims. Even though the majority of Create-X teams are software businesses, a growing dessert business was undoubtedly a crowd favourite on Demo Day. Esco Hill’s dessert line, Esco Eats, is marketed as a pie and a cobbler-in-one dessert. The team has already secured some significant clients, including Georgia Tech athletic facilities and Amazon.com.
Startups in the health technology sector took centre stage as well, with companies including WalkThru Virtual Reality, Andson Biotech, and DroptRx all joining the most recent batch. The startups that spoke at Create-Demo X’s Day this week are following in some very significant footsteps. For VC-backed businesses including Stord, Grubbly Farms, Gimme Vending, and Insight Optics, the programme served as a springboard.