“Startups” became a buzzword somewhere around the time of the dot-com bubble, but despite their popularity, few startups ever actually make it to market. Miami’s Venture Hive accelerator is working to reverse that trend.
Venture Hive opened up shop in Downtown Miami last year with the intention of attracting early stage companies and the entrepreneurs who run them to the city’s urban core. A partnership between the Miami Downtown Development Authority and Miami-Dade County, the program focuses on sectors that align with the city’s future, including hospitality and tourism, trade and logistics, healthcare, and creative industries such as design, music, art and fashion. In addition to providing ten startups with $250,000 in grant funding annually, Venture Hive also provides 13 weeks of training from world-class mentors, and free office space for a year.
The latest class, entering the program this month, includes companies from as far away as India and as close as Downtown. They include APREFIS, a big data pricing algorithm; CHANCE, a social media platform, The Fan Machine, a social marketing company; Micarga, an applied tech company for logistics; mSto, an in-store processing app; Pick/Eat, which allows you to search for food based on your mood; Predictiva, an analytical tool to determine the future actions of a consumers; Properati, a market place for Latin American real estate; Waleteros, a virtual check casher; and ZaZom, which allows renters to have landlords find them based on their needs.
As the second class begins its tenure at Venture Hive, the first is already beginning to experience success. GetMyRx, an app that allows you to scan a prescription and have it delivered it within a few hours free of charge, has just hit the market and is about to take its service nationally. GetMyRx is setting out to solve the problem of “prescription leakage,” the 30% of prescriptions that go unfilled every year. You can try it for yourself by downloading the app on your iPhone.
The service is currently available in Miami-Dade — covering 100% of the population from Aventura to South Dade and everywhere in between — with plans to expand nationally in the coming months.
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