It’s been difficult lately to avoid hearing about NFTs, or non-fungible tokens. It sounds like science fiction. Two people, without even knowing each other or their identities, could sell things to each other, including intangible items such as music or computer-generated art, safely and reliably, without having to worry about proving authenticity, currency conversion, or having any banks or governments involved with it at all.So what’s the problem?
READ MOREEvery company knows stuff about its customers. Too much stuff. There’s so much material that it can’t be summarized into anything actionable.That’s where SturdyAI comes in.“We take all of the communications that a business has with its customer – support tickets, email, chats -- organize them in one spot, and use artificial intelligence or natural language processing to extract relevant relationship triggers,” explained Steve Hazelton, founder of SturdyAI. The software “de-noises” the message stream and then uses robotic process automation to route information to the right people, such as sending happy customers to marketing to act as references, and looking for unhappy customers to help them out. “Someone who reports three bugs in 90 days is four times more likely than someone else to cancel, so we identify and triage that,” he explained. “There’s a huge amount of lift a business can get when they use data they never thought of using,” Hazelton said. “All this information and they have no data at all.”
READ MOREYou may remember, early last year, when stock in several companies – notably GameStop, but also AMC – suddenly boomed due to discussions on social media. A Boise startup, ChatterQuant, is working to capture such movements as they happen.The company already has 12,000 customers and won the Idaho Entrepreneur Challenge pitch competition and at Hackfort. “We collect data on different social media platforms in real time to identify social sentiment around stock, positive or negative, then we extract price targets, what price people are buying or selling, and entry and exit prices,” said Christian Perry, founder and CEO. The company also can make other insights, such as whether people are converging on certain topics – which stocks are most closely associated with Russia, for example.
READ MOREDeal flow in Idaho’s startup industry shows signs of recovering from the COVID-19 slump, with the number of deals slightly increasing from 2020, though the amount was down by almost a third compared with last year. Overall, investment deals were $3.5 billion in 2021, compared with $5.2 billion in 2020, according to the Idaho Deal Flow 2021 report, released April 26 by Alturas and the Idaho Technology Council (ITC) at the ITC’s Capital Connect conference. Overall, the number of deals was 155 compared with 151 in 2020. Of the $3.5 billion, $2.5 billion were merger and acquisition (M&A) deals.
READ MOREThe focus during next week’s eighth annual Capital Connect conference, produced by the Idaho Technology Council (ITC), is going to be on Idaho companies – not just the ones looking for early rounds of funding, but what ITC founder and CEO Jay Larsen calls “boomerangs”: companies that appeared as early-stage startups several years ago and are now returning after major investments or exits. “Boomerang” companies scheduled to present include StuKent, VisitPay, LiveFree Emergency Response, Lovevery, and House of Design. VisitPay CEO and cofounder Kent Ivanoff spoke at a Capital Connect conference five or six years ago when it was in its infancy, Larsen said. “Now they’ve had an extraordinary capital event, so there’s a place for us to ring the bell and say, ‘Look at these guys.’”
READ MOREIf you’ve been reading about startups investments in Idaho during the last couple of years, a new name has started popping up a lot. It’s Capital Eleven, a Meridian-based seed stage investment company with a portfolio of more than 30 companies, mostly Boise-based startups.“We’re nontraditional when it comes to venture investment, and we took a nontraditional path to get here,” said Travis Hawkes, managing partner.
READ MOREAnyone who wears makeup knows how important it is to get the foundation tone right. Too light, and you look like a ghost. Too dark, and you look like you’re trying to fake a tan.That’s the problem BoldHue Inc. is trying to solve. The pre-revenue startup, now with a minimum viable product prototype, is currently at $350,000 of a $500,000 pre-seed round that will bring develop five new prototypes and bring the product from the alpha to the beta stage, said Rachel Wilson, CEO and cofounder.
READ MOREIn case it’s been keeping anybody up nights, yes, plans are underway for Boise Entrepreneur Week 2022. In fact, the current plan – after two years of virtual events – is for it to be a live, in-person event.That’s according to organizers Nick Crabbs and Tiam Rastegar at the kickoff Boise Entrepreneur Week (BEW) 2022 Ecosystem Summit, itself a live event held at Boise State University (BSU). The conference’s return to in-person was the impetus for the summit, Crabbs said. “We wanted to remind people what being together in a room felt like,” and a number of speakers noted how nice it was to be in a room with people again.
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