BYU Rollins Center Investors Day: Student Entrepreneurs Showcase New Products and Technologies

BYU Rollins Center For Entrepreneurship and Technology convened its annual Investors Day on October 4, 2024 to showcase eight BYU startups. Student founders from eight BYU startups gathered at The Garage, John Pestana's personal office located in the Provo's Riverwoods office park. The eight startups presented to a room full of investors, students, faculty, media, and other interested parties. The teams' pitches included details about their products, market fit, traction with customers, revenue projections, and more.

Mike Hendron, Director of the Rollins Center, described the eight startups as having “great potential to grow, to scale, and perhaps take some help from investors along the way.”

Focus AI

Focus AI helps call sales reps to stay on script. “Script adherence is the top metric for 80% of sales teams.” said Jackson Vanderwerken, CEO and founder of Focus AI. Focus AI follows the sales call, highlighting the exact sentence that the rep is on and pulling up relevant rebuttals to customer objections. According to Vanderwerken “Companies suffer a 26% loss in sales when sales reps deviate from the script. That's an average of $10,000 per rep per month.” Focus AI helps companies to avoid those lost sales. 

Girlyish Skincare

Girlyish Skincare sister co-founders Macy Schmitt and Madison Heiner seek to create a teen safe skin care brand. Schmitt describes many of the commercially available skin care products as “jam packed full of anti-aging ingredients, harmful hormone disruptors and other harsh ingredients.” With social media creating a growing interest in skincare for young girls Girlyish Skincare looks to provide the mature branding that young girls desire with a product that is more appropriate for their needs. 

Interval

Interval is an AI powered collections agent. Interval automates the costly collections process for companies so that they can focus their resources on their service rather than getting their customers to pay for services rendered. Companies simply upload a list of customers who have yet to pay and Interval handles the rest with a combination of texts, emails, and phone calls. Interval founders Brandon Davis and Connor Ashton seek to increase efficiency while decreasing employee churn and collection costs for their customers. 

Kiba Outdoors

Kiba Outdoors helps groups to stay connected in areas that lack cell service. By pairing their smartphones to the Kiba Atlas via bluetooth Users can access the Kiba mobile app to share their locations and communicate using instant messaging and two way radio functionality. “The Kiba atlas is the all in one communication device that’s reliable, affordable, and convenient,” said Tanner Davis, outdoor enthusiast and CEO & Founder of Kiba. “At Kiba we want everyone to feel safe and connected in the outdoors.”

Madder Games

Madder Games is a face to face gaming system that allows groups of up to 12 players to join group games via a web browser using their phones as controllers. Co-founders Easton Allred and TJ Maxwell seek to provide an engaging gaming experience for gamers of all skill levels capturing the biggest part of the $230 billion dollar gaming market. “We're seeing a new resurgence for multiplayer gaming that brings people together, people want to bond with one another, rather than just have that solitary gaming experience.” said Allred. 

Outifi

Outifi is a mobile based AI driven communication platform that helps small cities and utilities to communicate with their residents during incidents such as power outages. Outifi filters phone traffic from concerned citizens and allows one person to manage an incident and alleviate resident concerns without answering a single phone call. “Our platform allows these small cities to diagnose issues and outages within the city to keep the residents more informed about what's going on,” said Justin Johnson, Co-founder of Outifi.

Along with his partners, Ryan Ward and Joel Eves, Johnson seeks to provide small cities (92% of Outify’s addressable market) with an affordable communications platform. In one recent use of Outifi’s software, the founders claim to have reduced call volume during a power outage that affected 3,600 households by 97%.

Spot Parking

Spot Parking seeks to make detecting parking violations easier and more efficient. They intend to focus initially on college campuses across the country. Spot Parking leverages machine learning and security cameras to instantly and easily recognize vehicles that are parked illegally. “Our patent pending system uses object detection and tracking; it follows cars as they move through the lot and proceed to a spot, said Cooper Young, CRO of Spot Parking.

He continued, "it reads vehicle license plates and cross references them against university databases to determine who is parked legally and who is parked illegally, removing the requirement to have parking enforcement officers physically present in the lot.” Spot Parking is currently onboarding several parking lots at Brigham Young University and has letters of intent from other major universities. 

WorldSmith

WorldSmith uses AI to simplify preparation for Tabletop Role-playing Games (TTRPGs). Dungeons and Dragons, one of the most popular TTRPGs, has a community of “over 68 million players, 12 and a half million Game Masters, all of whom spend over a billion dollars on this game every year, and people want more,” said Mathew Thompson, CEO of WorldSmith.

One of the most frustrating problems that players face is the difficult and complicated process of game creation. Thompson described how WorldSmith fixes that problem. “You can create anything that you can imagine, whether it's maps, monsters, NPCs, magic items, spells, quests, stories or so much more.”

BYU Rollins Center seed launchpad program has supported 80 startups recently. Focus AI, Girlyish Skincare, Interval, Kiba Outdoors, Madder Games, Outifi, Spot Parking, and World Smith are among the most notable and investor- ready companies in the program. 

To review executive summaries of the eight participating startups at Investors Day 2024, click here.

For more general information about entrepreneurship at BYU, visit the Rollins Center Website.