We came, we saw, and we’re conquering! Forum Ventures wraps Cohort 1 in New York City.

In March, Forum Ventures kicked off our first program outside of San Francisco, here in New York City. We backed 6 companies in our inaugural cohort who span a wide range of industries including cryptocurrency mining, sales intelligence tools, AI enabled surveying software, executive coaching as a service, student lending, and corporate real estate portfolio intelligence and management. We searched far and wide for exceptional founders building valuable and often, disruptive businesses. We planned to make noise in the concrete jungle and we did just that.

There were a total of 10 companies who pitched, 5 from NYC and 5 from SF. Why 5? Because one company, Paytronage, was swiftly acquired by international ISA provider, Lumni in the midst of the program. Get in touch with them here.

Our growth as an organization has been intense. Between launching NYC and Melbourne, we also managed to grow our team a little bit by adding Akul Penugonda, a Carnegie Mellon CS graduate and Product Manager at Yext. Read more about his decision to transition from operating at one company to operating on behalf of over 80.

tl;dr the companies who pitched at Forum Ventures NYC 1 Demo Day:

RefineRE– Portfolio management and optimization for real estate professionals.

Mergeable – Automate and deliver successful customer outcomes. No code required.

Sayge – Enables access to professional development coaching at scale.

Groundwork – Automate one-on-one customer interviews for brands.

ZenSports – Create and accept bets for live sporting events with anyone in the world.

Adistry –Reshaping and automating how media is bought and sold.

Hopthru – Mobile ticketing for transit agencies.

Agora – Automatically extract actionable insights from customer support conversations.

Bid Ops – Optimized e-procurement for enterprise.

Mineful – B2B crypto-mining framework.

Ready for a deeper look?

Want even more? Reach out to us to ask for more intros hello@forumvc.com

Refine(RE) is a cloud-based platform for corporate real estate occupiers. They empower large enterprises to make smarter, better faster real estate decisions by delivering actionable analytics, real-time market intelligence, and a holistic portfolio view that incorporates traditionally siloed data. Watch their pitch!

founders@refinere.co

Mergeable‘s Customer Evolution Platform accelerates the sales process and reduces churn for companies by enabling non-technical teams with API-level tracking to better manage and analyze their customer’s journey. Easily automate, measure, and deliver successful customer outcomes. Watch their pitch!

About the team: CTO and founder, Sean Walter has helped grow eight technology startups from inception and very early stage through multiple rounds of venture funding and multiple successful exits over past 20 years. CEO and founder, Edward Czech spent the last decade at the forefront of business development, sales, product management, and customer success for leading enterprise startups.

founders@mergeable.io

Sayge’s platform enables companies to attract, grow and retain more of the best employees by democratizing access to premium professional development coaching. Sayge has already worked with hundreds of employees at more than a dozen companies, inspiring them to maximize their potential. 93% of employees say that they’re better able to tackle their professional goals after just three months of working with Sayge. Watch their pitch!

founders@hellosayge.com

Groundwork automates one-on-one customer interviews for brands. Companies can use Groundwork to deploy chatbots to collect customer insights faster than traditional research agencies. Watch their pitch!

About the team: Ethan Head and Julian De Ocampo met in middle school and stayed friends because of their shared passion for technology. Julian studied Computer Science and worked at Amazon as a software engineer, and Ethan studied Electrical Engineering and worked in robotics research labs before starting Groundwork.

founders@groundworkai.com

ZenSports is a mobile app for recreational sports. With ZenSports, you can find others nearby you to meet up with and play sports, live stream yourself playing, register and pay for leagues/tournaments, and even book membership passes and reservations at local sports facilities. Over 10,000 people use ZenSports to stay active and meet new people that are into the same sports/activities that they are. Watch their pitch!

founders@zensports.com

Adistry is the platform for media organizations and events to directly sell sponsorships and advertising. We help internal sales teams automate time consuming tasks and focus on expanding their advertiser base. Our new subscription planning tool allows publishers to convert one-time customers to more lucrative ongoing relationships. Watch their pitch!

About the team: Co-founders, Daniel Cox and Meghan Larson have worked with each other for over 8 years. Meghan has 10 years of experience marketing SMB’s and monetizing media organizations. She is a startup veteran who has helped scale the marketing divisions for seven startups and has managed teams of 30+. Daniel is a full-stack developer with ten years of experience. He has been a senior software engineer for Fortune 500’s and marketing agencies. He specializes in marketing automation tech and machine learning.

founders@adistry.com

Hopthru is a mobile application that allows transit providers to easily sell and validate tickets at scale without developing an app of their own. Hopthru also provides ridership data to its clients to enable them to make better decisions. Watch their pitch!

About the team: The Hopthru team combines engineering and product design backgrounds from Salesforce and Google. Collectively, they bring extensive experience shipping world class mobile first products at scale.

founders@hopthru.com

Agora is using AI to turn customer conversations into actions that are critical for product success. We are here to give customers a voice they’ve never had before. Watch their pitch!

About the team: With experiences solving intractable business problems at McKinsey, Harvard Business School, Goldman Sachs, as well as pushing the boundaries of applied artificial intelligence at UC Berkeley, the Agora team is relentlessly passionate about their mission to reimagine human conversations in the age of AI.

founders@agora.co

Bid Ops automates negotiations for enterprise procurement. Used by Fortune 100 strategic sourcing teams to drive an average 23% savings on $4M+ contract negotiations. Bid Ops enables contract teams to source, request, compare and negotiate with 10x the vendors 100x faster than legacy workflows. Trusted today by companies and public agencies that spend $54.5B on procurement of goods & services. Watch their pitch!

founders@bid-ops.com

The Mineful Payment framework is an alternative monetization platform that gives software developers the ability to offer users an option to pay with their computer’s idle CPU & GPU HashPower by solving cryptographic algorithms that generate digital currency. Mineful allows developers to implement a re-engagement strategy that decreases churn & improves conversion, in some cases at a discount to the end user, however, this strategy is especially powerful when a publisher CPA is high. Watch their pitch!

founders@mineful.co

Now for a well deserved and forever grateful shout out to our partners!

Here’s to your support for this event, many before it and hopefully many after! We were lucky to work with 7 incredible service providers and vendors to make both Demo Day and the After Party a raving success.

Work-Bench, for the space to run our program and showcase our founders day in and day out. You are incredible partners and we’re proud to share the halls with you and your founders.

Work-Bench backs the next-generation of enterprise technology entrepreneurs. They support early go-to-market enterprise startups and help scale customer acquisition with community, workspace, and corporate engagement.

Silicon Valley Bank, for being consistent and ongoing supporters of the startup ecosystem and particularly our founders. You’ve supported our founders and our own team for years and we look forward to continuing our growth alongside you.

For more than 30 years, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) has helped innovative companies and their investors move bold ideas forward, fast. SVB provides targeted financial services and expertise through its offices in innovation centers around the world. With commercial, international and private banking services, SVB helps address the unique needs of innovators. Forbes named SVB one of America’s best banks (2015) and one of America’s best-managed companies (2014).

FirstCut, for partnering with us in the growth of your business and for capturing the best side of our founders. Ps – they’re currently raising! Reach out to Jorge to chat.

FirstCut is the first global on-demand professional video production platform that enables quality control and production at scale in-realtime using both on-site and remote desktop, mobile, and computer vision applications. FirstCut features a private network of vetted professional videographers around the globe, and offers production templates that work as prepackaged video recipes allowing the customer to know exactly what the deliverables will look like at the time of purchase.

Amazon Web Services, for just being you and providing not only the infrastructure for our founders to grow but for spending quality time with our teams to support them in so many ways on and off the cloud.

For 10 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 50 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, analytics, mobile, Internet of Things (IoT) and enterprise applications from 32 Availability Zones (AZs) across 12 geographic regions. AWS services are trusted by more than a million active customers around the world — including the fastest growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies — to power their infrastructure, make them more agile, and lower costs.

Nomad Financial, for being a newer supporter in NYC and for jumping at the opportunity to back our program. We’re grateful for your support and hopeful for what’s to come.

Nomad delivers a complete tailored finance solution for leading VC-backed and PE-owned companies across accounting, tax, interim CFO, and advisory services.

Flagship Brewery, for taking a chance on an accelerator and for sharing your incredible array of beers with our community. They’re currently raising! Reach out to Jay.

The Flagship Brewing Company is one of NYC’s hottest up and coming micro breweries. Based in Staten Island, this four year old business has revived a long gone industry in it’s home borough and is quickly expanding as a household name in the city. Founded by a seasoned group of native Staten Islanders, the Flagship team has over 30 years of industry experience helping to propel sales and exposure. In the short history of this company the Brewery has already brought home three beer medals in recognition of it’s quality and consistency. The Flagship IPA took home the gold medal for best IPA in New York State in 2017. Look for Flagship in all major supermarket chain shelves, local bars and at the brewery’s taproom located within walking distance of the Staten Island Ferry Terminal. #BEEREARNED

minigrow by honeygrow, for providing a healthy and delicious alternative to the usual. We’re grateful for your positive attitude, brand mission, and individually packaged food that our attendees were raving about. Minigrow is growing in NYC, reach out to them for your events!

honeygrow is a fast-casual restaurant concept born in Philadelphia in 2012, specializing in wholesome, fully customizable stir-fries, salads, honeybars + cold pressed juices made from fresh ingredients sourced as locally as possible. Through their proprietary kiosk-based ordering system, honeygrow guests can take full control of their meal, adding or removing items with ease to fit any dietary need or preference. honeygrow’s mission is to connect with each community it calls “home,” offering up amazing experiences through the lens of nourishing foods. honeygrow recently opened an urban, sister concept, minigrow. minigrow specializes in wholesome, fully customizable dishes featuring elevated ingredients atop a bed of freshly made noodles + high quality, organic greens. now open in new york city, chicago + boston!

Forum Ventures is a SaaS focused accelerator based in San Francisco and operating in New York City and Melbourne. We work with passionate founders solving real problems and have been lucky to work with 60+ companies to date that have gone on to raise from funds like NEA, 8VC, Salesforce Ventures, Susa Ventures and many more.

Want to be a part of the SaaS accelerator backed by leading operators and receive hands on help with go to market, sales and product execution?

Applications for NYC Cohort 2 are now open.

Interested in connecting with any of these companies or getting involved with Forum Ventures as an investor or mentor?

Drop us a line at hello@forumvc.com