Startups to watch: Our favorite pitches from Techstars Seattle Demo Day 2016
Summary
The former Microsoft engineer delivered a laser-focused presentation that clearly demonstrated the early success and ambitious potential of Polly.ai, which utilizes chatbots to help managers assess employee happiness. “Polly can be trained to deliver actionable insights to help companies understand their two biggest investments: their people and the tools they use to be productive,” he said at the beginning of his pitch. Polly.ai integrates its software into the popular enterprise communication app, allowing managers to automatically ping employees on their thoughts about the quality of internal tools, meetings, and other related processes directly within Slack. The Shyft CEO ended the evening with a strong pitch for his startup that is helping retail and service employees quickly swap work shifts, giving them a way to increase flexibility and also keep businesses from losing money. Reflect CEO Alex Bilmes did this effectively and concisely, explaining how his startup gives developers an easy way to add data visualization, like charts and graphs, to their web and mobile applications.