Let’s hear it for these entrepreneurs who made their big ideas a reality in 2014.
By Betsy Mikel (Editor, Women 2.0)
You’re a big ideas person. You love innovation. So at some point in the recent past, you’ve likely thought one of the following at least once:
- There’s got to be an easier way to …
- It’d be awesome if I could find…
- If only there were an app I could use to…
- I can’t believe no one’s solved that problem yet…
But thinking of that revolutionary new idea is the easy part. Executing is the hard part.
Before we call it a wrap on 2014, join us in taking a moment to celebrate entrepreneurs who not only thought of that the big idea, but who actually made it happen this year!
Here’s just a sampling of the problems their startups are solving:
- There’s got to be an easier way to recruit new employees.
- It’d be awesome if I could find a personal chef for a special event.
- If only there were an app I could use to find the best airport restaurants.
- I can’t believe no one’s using big data to combat domestic violence.
From California to Chile and North Carolina to Mexico, these founders have embraced risks and jumped into one of the most competitive industries on the planet to bring their startups to life.
Let’s hear it for these founders who launched in 2014! If you’re a founder, introduce yourself to us. If you launched in 2014 we’ll do our best to add you to the list and if you didn’t launch this year – fill out our form anyway, we may use you for upcoming articles. You can check out last year’s list of founders who launched in 2013.
Isabella Luthje (Founder & CEO, OA Kids)
OA Kids is the leading supplier of exclusive baby products from Denmark, Norway and Sweden. It will include the danish handmade baby prams “Odder – bed on wheels” representing Denmark in the top class of the world. The prams are better for baby, easy for parents and is today a product of 89 years of great danish design and engineering.
Jennifer Cain (Founder & CEO, omghow)
Omghow is the real girl’s sharespace. Real girls request and share how-tos. What do you want to know how to do?
Tatyana Kanzaveli (Founder & CEO, Open Health Network)
Open Health is a 100 percent configurable and customizable platform that provides you your very own health mobile application in less than a week.
Elena Lucas (Co-founder & CEO, UtilityAPI.com)
UtilityAPI is a service that automatically collects utility bill and usage data from utility web portals. You provide customer authorization and credentials, and we instantly download, parse, and format all the bill, interval, and service data we can find. We make all the data we collect available to you instantly through both our website and our secure API. We believe you should never have to experience the pain of manually collecting utility data again!
Jennifer Rana (Founder & CEO, Come Trippin’)
Planning a trip with friends and family should be fun, not stressful. It’s hard to keep track of travel plans, suggestions and other decisions. With Come Trippin’ all this is made simple, and accessible from any computer, smartphone or tablet.
Leisl Schrader (Founder & CEO, Remix Design)
At Remix Design, we’re experts at Web and mobile design, development, branding, and online marketing for entrepreneurs, startups, and small, growing businesses. Our specialty is developing and refining your brand’s online presence. Our methods are agile, flexible and deliver maximum value.
Karin Meyer (Co-Founder & CEO, Indiforce)
Indiforce connects you to the best of the Bay Area’s independent workforce.
Audrey Chaing (Co-founder, Lifesavory)
We’re on a mission to bring high-quality food into your life! Use Lifesavory to discover and hire personal chefs for daily eating or for dinner parties.
Tracy Clark (Founder & CEO, Reportory)
Reportory is a free online service that dynamically creates a customized newspaper based on news sources, topics and/or keywords indicated by you!
Jodi Chall (Co-founder, COO, SongLily Inc.)
SongLily revolutionizes the way record labels and publishers and game and app developers to work together. SongLily is the only company to offer major label songs with a flat fee, online sync license agreement.
Chandra Jacobs (Founder and CEO, tripchi)
tripchi is a mobile app that improves the overall experience a traveler has when spending time at the airport.
Molly Hegarty (Founder, rdnote)
rdnote is an app for nutritionists to quickly calculate macro and micronutrient needs for patients. They can store, email and manage patients easily and efficiently.
Rubi Sanchez (Co-founder, Cocoon Cam)
Cocoon Cam is helping parents feel confident that their baby is safe and sound by building next gen context-aware baby monitors.
Martina Segerer (Co-founder, JobRunners)
Job-Runners is an online marketplace that lets users find individuals or small businesses in their local community to help with odd jobs, errands and small projects. At the same time, Job-Runners provides a flexible alternative to traditional employment for anyone who is looking to make some extra money – when they want, how they want and doing whatever they want!
Brandon Kelly (CEO, NYCVanity)
NYCV is a collective which seeks to impart new themes and custom design into everyday functional products. NYCV emerged from experiences sourced primarily within the concrete desert of NYC for over 10 years. Our first product, the Palit, is a beauty workspace that creates a new realm in the spaces where we adorn and refine ourselves. It is this transformation that we seek: from functional to fashionable. All medium are our domain. It’s in a line, a curve, a single splash of color that changes everything.
Nadine Rose Carole (Co-Founder, TryGalley)
Galley is a platform for booking kitchens for people who want to sell their food commercially.
Orquidea Licona (Co-Founder, Lickos)
Lickos is an online service that connects pet parents with pet walkers, sitters and caregivers when they are at work or on vacation.
Sian Morson (CEO, Cast)
Cast is a weather-based beauty product platform and a community of like-minded individuals who are passionate about skin and hair.
June Grant (Founder, Blink-lab Architecture)
blink!LAB is an architecture, design and research practice. Our desire is a greater understanding of the transformative potential of space, buildings and the urban landscape – results are unpredictable, socially innovative and culturally stimulating.
Dori Howard (Co-founder, Wade & Belle)
@wadeandbelle | @dorianhoward1
Wade & Belle is dedicated to bringing the most comfortable tights to women everywhere. Haters of tight elastic and muffin tops!
Nahid Alam (Founder & CEO, Litehouse)
Litehouse is a platform for a voice-controlled home. It’s HomeKit ready and Arduino compatible.
Susan Scrupski (Founder, Big Mountain Data)
Big Mountain Data develops data science solutions to help in the fight against family abuse and violence. They bring together data scientists, domestic violence experts, and law enforcement to crack the code on the societal issue of domestic violence and family abuse.
Valentina Vitols Bello (Founder & CEO, Gratitude Interactive – Love to Thank)
@lovetothank | @valentinavitols
Love to Thank is a fun way to put a smile on someone’s face, get them noticed by their boss or put an extra pep in their step as they go about their day. It was created as a way to share gratitude on-the-go. The app makes it easy to digitally send a thank you note or a compliment to your favorite barista, your helpful coworker or a terrific server.
Helen Cammack (Founder, Interests.me)
Interests is a web platform, iOS app and Android app that provides a simple way to start a discussion about something that interests you — among friends or beyond your social circle.
Androniki Pavlidou (Founder, Fansinator)
Fascinator is a platform for sports fans to share and connect their pregame, game and postgame experiences.
Tenecia Brown (Founder & CEO, Gradeness)
Gradeness is a Houston-based technology and business institute that inspires parents, students and teachers to be builders and creators, rather than patrons of the city’s technology scene.
Breanna Anderson (Co-founder, Mirrim3D)
Mirrim 3D presents the exciting new product of 3D portraiture. You can have a 6″ amazingly life-like Mirrim of loved ones or give one of yourself to those you love. You can capture special life moments such as weddings, graduations, birthdays or that amazing steampunk outfit or cosplay costume you laboured over for months or your baby bubble or bodacious gym body. The precision and realism of these 3 dimensional images are truly amazing and evocative.
Carolina Rossi (Founder & CEO, Yeba.me)
Yeba.me is a startup based in Santiago, Chile that allows you to hail a car from your phone. Just open the app, enter your destination and one of the drivers of our community will get you.
Siejen Yin-Stevenson (Founder, Event Alpaca)
Event Alpaca is a responsive real-time conference management solution that enables conference attendees to send their questions to event moderators through a text messaging system. Users are then redirected to a dashboard where they can review and upvote all questions submitted by the audience. No user login is required.
Vivy Chao (Founder, Yang Camp)
Yang Camp helps cultivate young minds with the characteristics that make the Finnish school system successful: collaboration, experiential learning, and equality. Our entrepreneurship foundation is taken from Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup, Steve Blank’s The Startup Owner’s Manual, Stanford’s Institute of Design, and the Summit Public Schools.
Stephanie Rozen (Co-founder & CEO, Closet with Benefits)
Closet With Benefits is like a Netflix for dresses: borrow, wear and exchange. You don’t have to buy it to own it!
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Julia Tan (Co-founder & CFO, Peg)
Julia Tan (Co-founder & CFO, Peg is an online platform that makes it quicker, easier and safer for brands to work with YouTube influencers. Peg helps brands identify the most relevant influencers for their brand or campaign, connect directly to their identified influencers, pay influencers in a secure manner and measure a campaign’s return on investment.
Morgan Steffy (Co-Founder & CTO, Pickle)
Pickle is an app you can use to challenge others with your selfies. The world chooses the winner.
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Christine Martin (Founder & CEO, Style & Entertaining)
Style & Entertaining makes DIY Dinner Party “toolkits,” which provide fun, creative hands-on learning experiences that turn your kitchen into a classroom. Pull off the perfect soirée by making entertaining at home not only easy and enjoyable, but also fun!
Vicki Zhou (Co-founder & COO, PITCH Winner WiseBanyan)
WiseBanyan is the world’s first free financial advisor. We recommend, invest, and manage your money for free and with no minimum to start.
Liat Zakay (Founder & CEO, Donde)
Currently focused on the fashion vertical targeting women, Donde helps its users find any product they have in mind in less than 15 seconds and through a contextual, seamless and delightful process.
The sophisticated technology is based on AI and contextual search with already tens of thousand of fashion items from most popular brands analyzed on the platform.
Susan Danziger (Founder & CEO, Ziggeo)
Ziggeo is the “Twilio for video recording/playback” — an API that lets any site or platform easily record and integrate video profiles, video messages, video reviews and video comments. No more uploading or downloading videos from Youtube — videos can be recorded from any mobile or other device.
Angie Kramer (Founder & CEO, JobBliss)
JobBliss is a SaaS platform that connects top freelance advertising, development and design talent with local employers. Our frictionless combination of talent search and job scheduling allows employers to efficiently manage their need for flexible staffing by building and maintaining a network of freelancers, eliminating the middleman and connecting them in real time, directly with ready-to-brief, ready-to-book, pre-vetted professionals.
Nicole Randall (CEO & Co-founder) & Daphne Hargrove (CMO & Co-founder, Yuru)
Yuru is the modern-day spin on the advice column that’s all about you! Totally personal and available any time, anywhere, Yuru is a fun, lighthearted platform that allows you to access and share helpful advice on any topic through the power of crowdsourcing.
Alicia Rouault (Co-founder & CEO, LocalData)
LocalData is a cloud-based mapping platform that helps cities and communities make data-driven decisions by capturing and visualizing street-level information in real-time. By combining a rapid mobile data collection tool with an intuitive data dashboard, public and private-sector analysts can make data-driven decisions on the future of urban development.
Jeannie Jarnot (Founder & CEO, SpaHeroes)
Dedicated to 100% healthy beauty products, Spa Heroes’ monthly delivery provides a fast, easy and cost-saving way to dial in to high-performance, natural face, body and hair products. Vetted by spa pro and company founder, Jeannie Jarnot, each product – sourced from a variety of mostly independent beauty labels – meets her strict criteria for clean ingredients, visible results and a sense-enlivening experience.
