A student entrepreneur team at Chapman University’s Launch Labs—an incubator in the Argyros School’s Leatherby Center for Entrepreneurship and Business Ethics—recently launched its app and has been admitted to the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale.
Plug and Play is one of the largest incubators in the country; its graduates include San Jose-based Paypal.
The team from Chapman is based in Irvine and is called VYRL. Its app allows Instagram users with 5,000 or more followers—known as “influencers”—to collaborate with and cross-promote each other. That, in turn, enables the users to create original social media content and increase their fan bases to help make them more enticing to brands, said company founder Jason Goldberg. VYRL has determined that gaining 5,000 followers is a benchmark for users that take social marketing seriously, according to its website.
The app also is designed for brand and company advertising to use the influencers to drive traffic to their social media pages and websites, and as a result, increase sales or drive brand awareness, Goldberg said. The brands and companies would pay for a subscription to access influencers, along with other premium features, he said.
Goldberg is a business major with an emphasis in entrepreneurship. He started the company last year while a sophomore at Chapman.
About 10,000 people had signed up for the app as of Aug. 29, giving it a reach of more than 360 million people, based on the users’ followers. The company has raised $350,000 from angel investors in Orange County, Los Angles and the San Francisco Bay Area, he said. It’s in the process of raising a $1 million seed round. The company plans to expand by offering its service to social media networks such as Snapchat, Twitter and YouTube.
Campaign Adjustment
A Huntington Beach company finishing development of a product tried a fundraising route more typical of startups—reward crowdfunding, with an Indiegogo campaign. Quantum Dimension Inc. fell far short of its goal, though it learned some lessons and will use the money to do required testing of the product before bringing it to market.
The company was founded in 2006 and posted revenue of $917,000 last year, its biggest year ever, said co-founder and Vice President Julie Isenberger. It provides high-tech products to the U.S. Department of Defense and communications devices for business and personal use.
Quantum’s technology powers the HawQ-i Sense & Avoid device to alert drivers to the presence of bicyclists, motorcyclists and pedestrians within close proximity. It’s part of the Internet of Things, in which everyday objects are connected through a network, allowing them to send and receive data, and is meant mainly for low-visibility or high-traffic areas.
The company set out to raise $100,000 and then lowered its goal to $10,000, but took in just $4,000, which will be used to pay for testing required by the Federal Communications Commission.
“The Department of Defense is a very different animal than crowdfunding,” Isenberger said. “That was an eye-opening experience. We felt like it was a good opportunity to get out there and promote the product and get feedback.”
The feedback was valuable, and it showed that a lot of people didn’t really understand how the product worked, she said.
“The challenge is making something that’s conceptually easy but not technologically easy to understand,” she said. “When you start talking to people about the Internet of Things or sensors or some of the technical aspects of GPS or tracking, people don’t really understand it.”
Just shy of 4% of technology products meet their goal on Indiegogo. On Kickstarter, it’s 34%
Isenberger said that she and co-founder Michael Enright already have put more than $150,000 of their own money into the company and expect that to increase to $200,000 by year-end.
HawQ-i is being designed to detect people wearing a device enabled by ANT+ or Bluetooth Low Energy, such as a Fitbit or Polar heart rate monitor. Many outdoor enthusiasts who already wear the devices can be detected. Those who aren’t but who want to be detected by motorists could buy the smaller Pulse model, which can be attached to a small child, pet or stroller.
Isenberger and Enright, both cyclists, wanted to develop technology to prevent collisions, Isenberger said.
The company is talking to automobile manufacturers to try to get the HawQ-i integrated into vehicles, she said. It’s also trying to get the devices into warehouses to avoid collisions between forklifts and people.
HawQ-i devices are low-powered and rechargeable. The Sense & Avoid can detect pedestrians, bicyclists, joggers and the like within 7 to 30 feet of a car.
The company plans to release the HawQ-i and the Pulse by year-end, Isenberger said.
Investor Summit Set
OCTANe is scheduled to co-host its first StartUpOC Investor Summit on Sept. 20 at The Cove at the University of California-Irvine. The other co-hosts are the Irvine Chamber of Commerce and Applied Innovation, UCI’s innovation institute, which is housed at The Cove. OCTANe has invited venture capital investors from Los Angeles and Silicon Valley and will make it possible for investors from Boston and New York to watch it via live stream, Chief Executive Bill Carpou said.
