Sure the latest initiatives from the Teslas, Apple 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 11 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. You can check out last year’s round-up here.
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New York City is no stranger to innovation. As the second-largest tech hub in the world, home to roughly 10,000 startups as of 2021, the Big Apple is actively transforming every sector of tech imaginable.
Last year, $49.5 billion in venture capital was poured into the city’s local startups, and while big funding rounds tend to lead headlines, there are many emerging players in the space who are self-funded or in the early stages of funding.
This quarter, Built In sat down with five local startups who have yet to raise a Series A funding round. These companies are building tech-backed dry cleaning services and NFT vending machines, amongst many other innovative product offerings. Read more about these businesses in this quarter’s Future 5 round-up.
BUILT IN'S FUTURE 5 UP-AND-COMING NYC STARTUPS, Q2 2022
- Archie (Fintech)
- Decipad (Software Development)
- Healthie (Healthtech)
- JULIETTE (Consumer Tech)
- Neon (Web3 and NFTs)
Archie is a fintech platform that aims to cut down the time it takes businesses to pay freelancers and contractors. Most freelancers are paid on a net 30, net 40 and even net 90 basis, meaning payments can be sent months after a project is completed.
This, according to Archie co-founders Yunas Reguero and Cassandra Aaron, causes huge financial setbacks that both freelancers and business owners often face when managing freelance work.
In order to help businesses pick up the pace on paying its freelancers, Archie’s software works to streamline the entire process of onboarding freelancers, issuing contracts, paying freelancers and documenting the appropriate taxes.
Since launching publicly in 2021, Archie has processed $15 million in payments alongside raising a $4.5 million seed round. As the platform continues to grow, Reguero and Aaron plan to add six more people to its current 14-person team.
Despite recent data showing that computer and information technology employment will grow 13 percent between 2020 and 2030, only an estimated 0.5 percent of the world currently knows how to code.
To combat the large gap and lack of code knowledge, Decipad, a no-code, edtech platform, teaches users how to do data modeling without needing to read code.
The London and NYC-based startup has so far raked in a $5 million seed round co-led by Entrée Capital and Target Global. Decipad dedicated its funds to scaling its early-stage, no-code product offerings that are currently used by a “small group of early access users.”
Despite being in beta mode, Decipad has a growing waitlist of users interested in the platform along with a Discord community of 900 members.
The Covid-19 pandemic yielded a 78x increase in telehealth visits in April of 2020 compared to February of 2020, prior to the initial pandemic lockdown. While this boost has fueled a surge in telehealth services, NYC-based Healthie has been providing telehealth services since 2016.
When the company was founded, “tech platforms fundamentally ignored the importance of building relationships between providers of care and receivers of care and didn’t put clients at the center of the healthcare experience,” Erica Jain, co-founder and CEO of Healthie, told Built In via email.
Additional Healthie services include processing insurance payments and building patient backlogs of journals, goal settings and metric loggings that help patients build closer relationships with their providers.
Today, Healthie is profitable and backed by $1.9 million in funding from a friends and family round. The platform serves customers in 25 countries and has processed $350 million in payments.
Having worked in the bustling tech startup scene as a social media marketer, Rechelle Balanzat, CEO and founder of JULIETTE, noticed a huge gap in the delivery services market. Apps like like Uber, DoorDash and Seamless were emerging to provide consumer goods within a days time, but Balanzat wanted more.
Throughout her career, Balanzat sought out dry cleaning services that could deliver. When she realized there wasn’t a reliable, centralized platform, Balanzat created JULIETTE, a tech-backed dry cleaning delivery service.
Founded in 2014, JULIETTE has since scaled with no institutional funding. To get clothes dry cleaned or washed, consumers simply request a pick-up from a JULIETTE courier that then takes the items to get laundered and returns to them in 24 hours. Dry cleaning can be sent back within two to three days.
When Covid-19 hit, 90 percent of JULIETTE’s revenue was gone because customers no longer needed to dry clean their clothes. Today, JULIETTE is making a comeback. The startup operates its services out of two locations and has plans to have six locations by the fall.
Although non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have been around since 2014, last year was pivotal for their popularity. NFTs have traditionally been digital assets that consumers purchase with cryptocurrency. Today, NFT producers are making physical assets that coincide with their digital NFTs.
Neon is one of the growing startups in the space to introduce physically obtainable NFT codes with its NFT vending machine. When users purchase an NFT from the vending machine, it dispenses a box with a unique code inside it for the chosen NFT. This code is used to redeem the token on the Neon platform.
Neon launched its first vending machine in February and has since sold a few thousand NFTs and seen tens of thousands of visitors, according to the company. At launch, Neon also raised a $3 million seed round, which helped the startup hire four additional employees. The company expects to bring on three to four additional engineers by the end of Q3.
