Sure the latest initiatives from the Teslas, Apples and Googles of the industry tend to dominate the tech news space — and with good reason. Still, the tech titans aren’t the only ones bringing innovation to the sector.
In an effort to highlight up-and-coming startups, Built In has launched The Future 5 across eight major U.S. tech hubs. Each quarter, we will feature five tech startups, nonprofits or entrepreneurs in each of these hubs who just might be working on the next big thing. Read our round-up of NYC’s rising startups from last quarter here.
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As Q4 draws to a close, Built In NYC is taking a look back at the five up-and-coming startups we highlighted in our quarterly Future 5 series. We uncovered several hidden gems this quarter, ranging from an app that empowers retail investors to vote in shareholder meetings to a dating app that verifies users’ identities and allows them to mingle organically in video sessions about health and wellness. Keep reading to learn about these companies and others.
Built in’s Future 5 up-and-Coming NYC Startups, Q4 2022
- Cedara (Greentech)
- Fennel (Fintech)
- Guaranteed (Healthtech)
- La Vette Social Club (Dating App)
- Swerve Fitness (Fitness Tech)
Companies who want to go carbon neutral or reach net-zero emissions need to know the emissions data of companies throughout their value chain, including advertising and marketing firms.
Cedara has developed a carbon accounting platform to help advertising and marketing firms track their total emissions and break down that data by scope, media category, revenue and other factors. The platform also allows agencies to monitor the emissions data of participating vendors, including publishers like websites, magazines and TV stations.
Cedara also features a marketplace where companies can buy carbon offsets and schedule recurring offset purchases to ensure they remain carbon neutral.
Fennel is an investing app that educates retail investors about a company’s environmental, social and governance priorities — like renewable energy, workforce diversity and executive compensation — so they know to invest and show their support or use their shareholder vote to push them to do better.
Many retail investors aren’t able to vote in shareholder elections, though. Most brokerage firms lend out their user’s securities, and their shareholder voting privileges follow that share. Fennel pledges not to lend out its customers’ securities.
Fennel also does not accept payment-for-order flow, a practice in which consumer-facing brokerage firms hand off stock trade orders to third-party market makers that pay them for the volume of business they bring in.
After seeing firsthand how hospice workers are stretched thin, Jessica McGlory launched Guaranteed to provide care, education and support to terminally-ill patients and their families.
The startup currently employs 12 caregivers who provide unlimited in-person visits to a patient’s house, assisted living facility or skilled nursing facility. The platform also offers on-demand video telehealth sessions to help families with issues or questions that pop up outside of in-person visits. Guaranteed also provides educational materials and grief management to families.
Guaranteed is headquartered in NYC and has an office in Midtown but launched its hospice care services in July 2022 in Los Angeles. The startup hopes to scale to New York and other markets in the near future.
La Vette Social Club is a video-based dating app that allows users to mix and mingle organically through classes and group discussions that tend to focus on wellness and self-development. The startup also prevents catfishing by running a background check on its users.
La Vette users can message each other through text conversations, but they are encouraged to get to know each other in video chats, where the discussion is guided by automatically-generated conversation prompts. At the end of the video chat, the platform will ask both parties if they would like to talk to the other person again, which helps prevent the uncertainty of ghosting.
The app launched in October and is working to build a critical mass of users in NYC, Chicago and LA.
After years of operating boutique indoor cycling studios across NYC, the pandemic inspired Swerve Fitness co-founders Eric Posner and John Henry McNierney to sell all but one of their fitness studios to livestream cycling classes to big-box gyms around the country.
By partnering with Swerve, these gyms can put up a large screen in a room full of exercise bikes and instantly offer up to 10 classes per day. Swerve’s technology is able to pull data from the bikes and display a leaderboard showing the team’s cumulative pace. The instructor in NYC can see how fast each team is pedaling, allowing them to motivate cyclists at the Crunch Fitness in LA to catch up to their colleagues at the New York Social Club.
Swerve’s monthly licensing fee costs about 12 times less than what gyms would typically pay to put on their own classes, Posner said.
