Longhorn Startup Lab Spring 2023

The Longhorn Startup Lab is an intensive project-based course in the Spring semester that identifies student entrepreneurs who are building scalable technology companies and gets them real course credit for working on their startups while still in school. These students receive weekly one-on-one mentoring sessions with successful entrepreneurs and free coworking memberships at Capital Factory. The semester culminates in a Demo Day where the students present their companies to the Austin community. Learn more at longhornstartup.com

Bookwheel

Austin, Texas

Description

Bookwheel is a web platform designed to help students become lifelong readers using a simple three step process: incentivize, monitor, and grow. We give kids a reason to read through digital and real-world incentives, enable teachers to monitor th...

Traction

Have worked with 500 plus students and teachers.
Have an AI powered quiz generator through the use of OpenAI.

Profile last updated 7 months ago

Clips AI, Inc.

Austin, Texas

Description

Clips AI helps businesses automatically find the best clips from their long-form content (i.e., podcasts, speaking events, webinars, lectures, etc.)

Traction

We are currently in alpha testing with 1034 people on our waitlist and got our first paying customer on February 6, 2023, just two months after we launched.

Customer Feedback: https://www.loom.com/share/834fb23c326b41f3a748beabfad757a7

Product Demo: https://www.loom.com/share/17004835462b49fa9a9a767fda4c81fa

Profile last updated 6 months ago

Cove Events Inc.

Austin, TX

Description

For each college, we consolidate all the public events made for students that are hosted by community members. Namely, parties, socials, free food events, and anything else a student might want to go to. Students want to go to events that their cl...

Traction

4000 UT Students on the app in the first 8 weeks after launch, $0 spent on marketing. Consistent 500-800 Daily Active Users on the app on weekdays, 1000+ on the weekends. Consistently populated event page.

Profile last updated 7 months ago

Edith

Description

We’re working on Edith which is the primary destination where people can stay on top of everything happening within their org. The key business insight is that teams are now de novo remote, and companies are adopting more software tools than ever....

Traction

- Working prototype + working on onboarding our first production customers!

Profile last updated 7 months ago

FreeWater

Austin, Texas
AdvertisingConsumer Packaged Goods (CPG)Food & Beverage GoodsSocial Media AdvertisingSocial Media Marketing

Description

FreeWater is the world's first free beverage company. Our aluminum bottles and paper cartons of natural spring water are always free because we place ads on the packaging that pay for everything, including a ten-cent per beverage donation to build...

Traction

FreeWater has over 1 million followers across our social media platforms, with over 100 million organic impressions over the past year alone. We're more than just a company--we're a movement to make saving lives as easy as saving money and drinking FreeWater!

Profile last updated 5 months ago

Gazelle Ecosolutions

Austin, TX & Maun, Botswana

Description

Gazelle works with ranchers to restore ecologically vulnerable grasslands while accelerating nature-based carbon capture.

Traction

To date we offset over 216,000 metric tons of CO2, developed Botswana's 1st nature-based carbon offset project, and are one of two companies funded by UT Austin's 2022 Call for Energy Innovation backed by Shell & Chevron.

Profile last updated 7 months ago

Grackle

Austin

Description

Grackle is reshaping how investors can own physical assets, starting with physical art. Users can frictionlessly transfer ownership of the artpiece without insurance and logistics challenges by trading digital representations of the art piece on t...

Traction

We have onboarded 2 artists that are excited to sell their pieces on Grackle once we have finished development.

Profile last updated 7 months ago

Maven Surgical

Austin
Medical DevicesArtificial IntelligenceRobotics & Drones

Description

According to our surgeon interview, 83% of the surgeons reported that technical skill is a major challenge during robotic surgery and training. To solve the problem, we aim to create intelligent and reliable partners during robotic surgery for aug...

Traction

Spin-out from Human-Enabled Robotic Technology (HERo) Lab in Department of Mechanical Engineering at UT, PI: Dr. Ann Majewicz-Fey.
Texas Innovation Center Faculty Innovation Grants Awardee, 2022.
Texas Health Catalyst Phase 1 Awardee, 2022.

Profile last updated 7 months ago

PicTag

Austin, TX

Description

PicTag helps uses search, sort, and share their pictures more effectively. We allow users to add tags to photos which can be filtered and queried, and share pictures with those tags attached. Additionally, we use novel machine learning algorithms ...

Traction

As college students, we are in a massive hub with tens of thousands of potential users, many of whom have stated they would love an application like this. College kids take a lot of photos - in fact, on average, kids our age take around 6 selfies per day, so *a lot* is an understatement! If we can get an MVP on the App Store quickly, we believe that through word-of-mouth, on-the-ground advertising, and aggressive online advertising, we can gain quick popularity with the student base. Additionally, we are developing in Flutter, so our app is inherently cross platform and can be deployed to both iPhones and Androids.

Profile last updated 7 months ago

Populus

Austin, Texas
Gaming & eSportsSports

Description

A platform where sports fans can buy and sell shares of professional athletes using virtual currency. A much faster and more competitive way to engage with your favorite sports.

Unlike traditional fantasy sports or sports betting, Populus is co...

Traction

500+ users in open beta
1 million+ views on social media with zero marketing spend
Gone through 3 accelerators including Rice University Owlspark, UT Austin Momentum, and Capital Factory Longhorn Startup Lab
Released 2 key software updates and launched on the App Store and Play Store

Profile last updated 7 months ago

Sprout Food Solutions

Austin, Texas

Description

We are a SaaS, ML-based portal for restaurant owners to prevent food loss, which is food that is thrown away before it ever ‘leaves the kitchen’, primarily due to expiration of perishable ingredients. We integrate with the restaurant’s existing Po...

Profile last updated 7 months ago

Tuktuk

Austin, Texas
Ridesharing & CarsharingMobile ApplicationTransportation & Mobility

Description

The Tuktuk app provides affordable and convenient transportation with high volume, structured carpooling in Austin.

Tuktuk has host carpool rides between “Hubs”, i.e. Austin hotspots. Given that a rider is inside a Hub, they can travel in a ca...

Traction

- Amassed a 300+ rider app waitlist for UT students in 3 months.

- Signed 16 LOIs with Student organizations ranging from 50-500 students

- Conducted 100+ paid rides on the app since Summer 2022, launching to the public Q2 2023

- Created fully functioning rider and driver beta apps (demo: www.youtube.com/shorts/wWOw6JquIzc)
- Completely bootstrapped and developed in-house

- Raised $12.5K in non-dilutive funding from UT competitions and grants
- Equity fully held by team

- Carried out extensive market research on UT Austin population:
- Completed 35 in-depth one-on-one rider interviews and 20 in-depth driver interviews
- 340 cumulative student online survey responses

Check us out here in UT's official newspaper!
https://thedailytexan.com/2022/09/11/ut-student-startup-tuktuk-provides-budget-friendly-rideshare/

Also check out our insta to see what we've been up to: https://www.instagram.com/drivetuktuk/

Profile last updated 7 months ago