The Startup Showcase at Data Tech 2023 featured passionate pitches from eight promising startups focused in a range of markets — specifically, ecommerce, process & manufacturing automation, medtech, stock market news, healthcare, marketing & growth analytics, employment recruiting, and video advertising. The stages of these startups ranged from one that just completed a $17M Series A, another now raising a $10M Series B, one making great progress toward a $4M seed round later this year, to five newer ventures now raising between $100K and $500K in angel rounds.

What differed from our last Data Tech, in 2019, when we had seven startups present? This year’s crop is making much more advanced use of AI and machine learning – and raising more money. (In 2019, the top three startups that presented have since raised $3.2M, $1.8M, and $500K.) Another highlight of this year’s showcase was a panel of founders from MinneAnalytics’ “Startup Honor Roll,” who told their stories of how they got started and ultimately went on to success. The panel included:

• Jeremy Neren, Founder of GrocerKey (acquired 2021), now VP of Platform & Entrepreneur-in-Residence at gener8tor;
• Susan Sorensen Langer, Founder of LiveGiveSave (acquired 2021), now CEO at the acquiring company Spave, LLC;
• Al Berning, CEO of Ambient Clinical Analytics, which has raised more than $9M to date and is now raising a Series B round;
• Tyrre Burks, CEO and Founder of Player’s Health, which has raised a total of $34M to date.

MinneAnalytics Board Member and Startup Showcase Organizer Graeme Thickins served as moderator.

Meet the startups

Babbl provides AI stock market news and social media monitoring tools to help investors find market-moving news 100x faster. Its goal is to improve how investors research stocks and cryptocurrencies. It aggregates and runs sentiment analysis on thousands of finance articles to distill high-impact information, and ultimately help investors supplement their current research to save time, reduce bias, and gain insight.

Boon Logic has invented a breakthrough technology in unsupervised machine learning that accelerates AI development and deployment. The Boon Nano algorithm performs model training and clustering 1000X faster than traditional modeling methods, which are complex and involve lengthy model training that can take several weeks to several months. What’s more, Boon Nano reduces the need for highly-skilled, hard-to-find AI talent and allows organizations to leverage the value of AI with their existing subject-matter experts.

Faceless Pro is a pre-seed, minority-founded startup that has developed a blind recruitment job board to level the playing field for all by taking name, age, gender, and race out of the equation.

GenerAI has two tools that help direct-to-consumer brands with video advertising. The first is “generGrade,” an AI-based tool that grades the effectiveness of video advertising content. Brands create an account, upload their video, and receive a score indicating the likelihood of increased sales. The data generated by generGrade is used to build “generX,” a platform that generates video ads with the highest probability of success. GenerAI analyzed more than 40,000 video ads to develop the effectiveness score used by both tools.

HealthVisit.ai is developing a platform to revolutionize the way people access medical care. It simplifies the medical visit process by enabling users to search for their condition, select their symptoms, and choose a provider. It offers affordable, easy-to-use lab kits with clear instructions, connecting users with healthcare professionals, making it easier to manage their health conditions from home.

NXgenPort has designed an innovative and transformative technology to maximize remote care in cancer patients requiring an implantable chemo-port catheter. Combining proven chemo-port efficacy with microchip and sensor technology, its technology measures, monitors, and reports physiological body functions in vivo over the course of disease and treatment. NXgenPort is a startup in the Mayo Clinic Platform cohort.

Rebuy Engine provides AI-powered personalization for modern retail. The world’s top ecommerce brands use Rebuy’s platform for data-driven, personalized shopping experiences for every customer using the store’s historical shopping data — boosting average order volume, conversions, and lifetime value. Brands can effortlessly unlock AI-backed product recommendations out of the box — no coding or technical expertise required.

Sunsett is a simple platform solution for business growth. It provides personalized Insights with quick tips and metric suggestions based on your connected platforms and project goals. Manageable reports display business growth, project timelines, and areas of needed improvement. It helps you measure success with marketing analytics and data visualizations. Multi-collaborator access, in-platform notifications, and shareable email performance updates keep your team on track.