Startup Stories

Foundergiant: Hello! Tell us a bit about yourself.

Evan Hallward: My name is Evan Hallward, Co-CEO at Aboard. I have a background in business development for both financial services & tech companies. I've worked for a number of startups in the Toronto ecosystem, helping setup & scale business development and customer service practices.

FG: Introduce your company and the people behind Aboard.

Evan Hallward: Aboard helps small-to-medium sized businesses setup & automate administrative HR tasks. We are currently focused on helping setup onboarding & offboarding processes with our People Operations web platform.

There are 3 Aboard co-founders. Myself (Evan Hallward), Lee MacDonald, and Shawn Price. Lee brings a background in technical recruitment and startup operations, most recently helping the last startup he worked at scale from 7 to 35 employees. Lee simultaneously builds company culture & sensible processes to increase retention and productivity. Shawn brings 10+ years managing and growing development teams and has been involved in the release of 4 full stack web applications.

FG: Tell us about your product.

Evan Hallward: Our web app helps business & people leaders setup People Ops processes quickly, such as onboarding & offboarding. It then supports the delivery of a consistently great employee experience. All this is done while helping leaders & teams save time while staying organized.

FG: How did you come up with the idea for the product? What inspired you?

Foundergiant: Hello! Tell us a bit about yourself.

Jeffrey Ma: Hi, my name is Jeffrey Ma. I am the founder, CEO, and CTO of dcyphr. I am currently a rising junior at Yale University studying computer science and mathematics. I have previously conducted research in molecular biology, computational neuroscience, and clinical diagnostics.

FG: Introduce your company and the creators of dcyphr.

JM: dcyphr is a crowd-sourced platform informed by AI that makes academic research more accessible. We empower users to request, create, and engage with distillations of research articles. Our distillation network extends globally and consists of students and researchers from various university campuses.

FG: Tell us about your product.

JM: There are two core problems that contribute to the inaccessibility of research:

• Paywall. The money charged by journals does not even go back to supporting researchers. dcyphr makes it free for the average person to engage with research discoveries.
• Complexity. Decoding academic research articles requires time and labor. This process of decoding can either happen once on the writer’s side or N times for N readers on the reader’s side. The status quo opts for the latter -- in doing so, choosing an O(N) solution over an O(1) solution. dcyphr takes advantage of the Internet to cultivate a platform for the O(1) solution.

Foundergiant: Hello! Tell us a bit about yourself and Smartcar.

Sahas Katta: I am one of the founders of Smartcar, Sahas Katta. I am the CEO and Sanketh Katta is the CTO and my brother. Both of us grew up in San Jose, California and studied computer science. I actually dropped out to start my first company. While that first company didn’t work out, I ended up pursuing this in the automotive space, specifically in automotive technology. That’s when the idea of Smartcar came about. Sanketh and I were always excited about coding and the technology in cars. We both love the excitement of working on Smartcar every day.

FG: Introduce your company and the creators of Smartcar.

SK: Smartcar is the car API platform for developers made by developers. We understand as creators of Smartcar how important it is to be able to have open access to API references and documentation to ensure a smooth implementation process. We are opening the gate for developers to connect to cars without any hardware and we’re so excited to be a part of this technological shift into the future of mobility companies.

FG: Tell us about your product.

SK: We’re a company based in Mountain View, California. Smartcar is the world’s leading car API platform. We make it really easy for mobility companies to integrate with cars without having to ask customers to plug an expensive hardware device into their vehicle. At the end of the day, we as a company are excited to make mobility more equitable for everyone.

Foundergiant: Hello, tell us about yourself

Patrick Payne: My name is Patrick Payne I am the CEO and Founder of Pitterpattr.com. I am an ex rap-artist, ex semi-professional basketball player turned tech entrepreneur. My technical co-founder is Leng Lim, a brilliant technologist with a history working on military projects.

FG: What is Pitter Pattr and how does it differ from competitors, if any?

PP: Pitterpattr.com is a sound search engine and soon to be mobile application improving the way humans communicate emotions digitally by improving contextual awareness in conversations, (via communicating with sound snippets as opposed to images or text).

The platform allows users to create their own unique profile, connect with other users, search a huge library of user generated sound snippets or even create their own sound snippets direct from their mobile or computer device. Sound Snippets can be shared through all popular messaging platforms with an analytics interface available for creators to track the reach and popularity of their created Snippets.

Foundergiant: Hello! Tell us a bit about yourself and your business...

Matt Tomkin: Hey, I’m Matt Tomkin and I started Tao Digital Marketing 2 years ago now. We’re a digital marketing agency based in Bolton, UK, focused on assisting businesses to generate leads and online sales.

Our services include organic search acquisition (SEO), pay per click (PPC), website design and development, social media and overall strategy across all digital marketing channels.

Most of our clients are B2B with the aim of generating sales enquiries or sell spaces on training courses online etc. With my previous background I can resonate with business owners challenges and understand their requirements for digital marketing support.

We’ve seen some major success with our clients; the agency grew from me initially working with one business as a freelancer and gaining them some really valuable rankings on Google.

We’re now a team of 4 and continue to grow in clients and employees!