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Earlier this summer, the New Jersey Economic Development Authority held its first founders and funders event since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. NJEDA organizes these events so that startup founders can find as many investors as possible to fund New Jersey companies. This year, some 35 participants met with 27 investors who volunteered their time during the five-hour event at the New Jersey Institute of Technology Campus Center.
NJTechWeekly.com interviewed many of the founders involved. Below are brief reports on a few startups and how their investor meetings went. This is the first part of the series.
Ted Mann is a serial entrepreneur who has led several technology companies based on computer image recognition technologies. His newest venture is Hadonfield-based CollX, which is actually inspired by his children.
“The whole idea for the app came from my kids having a hard time figuring out what the Pokemon cards and sports cards they collected were worth,” Mann said. “And that was a problem when I was a kid. My son Charlie came to me and said, ‘Can you help me figure out a way to do this?’ And, after beating our heads against the wall for a while, I finally said, ‘Well, I think this technology that I’ve done for most of my work, image recognition, might be a way to make this a little bit easier.’
“CollX is an app that allows any card collector to instantly scan, identify and find market value for their cards. We started in sports cards, so, football, baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer, wrestling. We have about 17 million unique cards in our database. You can take a picture of any of them, it will identify the card and tell you what it’s worth.
We asked how the company updates all this information and he replied: “It’s a huge project. There’s a lot to keep track of! We’re constantly pulling card images, finding new card details, and looking at other marketplaces like eBay for sales information. And then we go back to cards.
The company launched in January 2022 and has grown to 225,000 users, each scanning an average of 100 cards.
We asked Mann how his meeting with investors went. When we spoke to him, he said he had only had two meetings but that they had gone “very well”. He reintroduced himself to investors he had met in past ventures.
“It was fun to hear the latest from them and fill in on the latest from CollX,” he said. “It was especially nice to be able to find active investors in New Jersey because it sometimes takes a lot of effort to find interested investors in this area.”
Montclair-based CatapultX is a New Jersey tech startup since 2019. During our interview at the Founders & Funders event, Zach Rosenberg, co-founder and CEO, gave us a brief elevator pitch.
We developed an advertising product called ‘On-Stream’ that creates smart overlays for CTV (Connected TV) and web video. It uses (artificial intelligence) to understand what is happening in the content and match the advertiser accordingly.
We asked about the meetings.
“It’s great to be in front of people again, talking and having context around what people are saying! I’d say the meetings are both more informative, and more in-depth, than zooming or over email.
“We’re not looking for our next round yet, but we’re thinking about it. And I think some of the things I heard here today will shape that decision.”
We asked for an example, and Rosenberg obliged.
All the investors I talk to ask, ‘What’s the most important metric to you? Is it gross income? Or net income and number of customers? Or something else?’ And each of them gave me a measure that I hadn’t thought of, or maybe didn’t make much sense to me. When I think about the next round, we have to decide, do we want to take a small amount now or do we want to go for the whole thing? There may be some work before you grow up, and that’s what I learned.”
We’ve been following Eventdex, a Morganville-based event management company, to see how it’s been able to recover during the pandemic. We asked John Bisset, Vice President of Partnerships, to give us the elevator pitch.
“We’re here today to help us in the continued growth of our event-management platform. We believe we have a competitive advantage over most people in our business. Business Matchmaking is a key part of our business, unmatched by competitors in our space.”
He admits that the event management platform has a lot of competition.
But fortunately, they are not as efficient as us in that area. “We believe there is a huge benefit to companies continuing to use us and people not having to start using us,” he said. “Part of being here is helping us find a way to continue that growth. And that means raising some additional capital to help us achieve our goal of tripling revenue every year.”
By the time we spoke with him, Bissette had held four meetings. Two of the investors said their company was not good enough to attract them, but the other two asked for follow-up discussions. The investors gave him good advice to focus on the business. They thought that Eventdex is a good business, and the founders should continue to go together.
“I want to say that we are happy to be here. And we think it’s a great platform for us to continue our business and also for people to get to know us,” concluded Biskit.
Conversation starters
Access CollX at: collx.app.
Access CatapultX at: catapultx.com.
Call Eventdex at: eventdex.com or 732-333-1901.
Technology partners
ROI-NJ has partnered with Esther Sarden, creator of njtechweekly.com, to provide insight into the world of technology.
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