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Entering its second year, the Disney Accelerator announced its new class yesterday. The 10 participants will all be working in LA for the fifteen-week program powered by Techstars. The companies will benefit from the executive level mentorship, access to Disney’s vast resources, and up to $120,000 in investment capital.
“The Disney Accelerator was born of Disney’s long term commitment to innovation and its position at the intersection of technology and entertainment,” said Kevin Mayer, Disney’s Executive Vice President, Corporate Strategy and Business Development in a statement. “The 2014 Disney Accelerator demonstrated that pairing Disney’s creative and business talent with entrepreneurs can produce an energizing and valuable exchange of ideas and promote tremendous innovation. We look forward to working with a new group of start-ups in the months to come. ”
Here are the 10 companies selected to participate:
Bio: A Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that uses real time data to enable advertisers to optimize mobile ad creative and targeting based on user engagement.
Cofounders: David Dundas and Ryan Witt
Location: New York
Bio: A bioinformatics company that uses electroencephalography (EEG) to track mental performance, monitor emotions, and control virtual and physical objects with thoughts.
Cofounders: Geoffrey Mackellar and Tan Le
Location: San Francisco
Bio: FEM Inc. has developed a personalized video engagement platform based on neuroscience and psychology that maps the emotional dimensions of how and why content resonates.
Cofounders: Rachel Payne, Natasha Mohanty, and Meghana Bhatt
Location: Los Angeles
Bio: HYP3R enables businesses and brands to identify influential customers at their locations and engage them in real time, when it matters most.
Cofounders: Juan Carlos Hernandez, Jorge Suarez, Omar Ramos, Carlos Garcia
Location: New York
Bio: imperson provides an artificial intelligence platform enabling fans to have conversations with their favorite movie and TV characters.
Cofounders: Erez Baum, Seth Greenfield, Eyal Pfeifel
Location: Israel
Bio: Littlstar aggregates industry leading virtual reality content with its device agnostic discovery and distribution platform.
Cofounders: Tony Mugavero, Ben Nunez, Matthew Collado
Location: New York
Bio: MakieLab lets kids bring toys to life by building their own customizable 3D-printed toys through creative games and apps.
Cofounders: Alice Taylor and Matthew Wiggins
Location: London
Bio: Open Bionics is a robotics company creating affordable 3D-printed bionic hands for amputees, researchers and makers.
Cofounders: Joel Gibbard and Samantha Payne
Location: Bristol, UK
Bio: Pundit lets creators host audio Ask Me Anything (AMA’s) with their Twitter network, transforming the talk radio experience for the social media age.
Cofounders: Billy Shaw Susanto, Chris Aston Chen, Jason Ji
Location: New York
Bio: StatMuse is developing an artificial intelligence platform to help sports fans explore data using simple, natural language.
Cofounders: Eli Dawson and Adam Elmore
Location: San Francisco
The program will start with a high-caliber lineup of meetings including executives from Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, ABC, ESPN, and Disney CEO and Chairman Robert A. Iger. The accelerator culminates in a Demo Day in October in which each team will present their companies to industry leaders, Disney executives, and select members of the entrepreneurial community.
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