LA-area hardware incubator MAKE IN LA presented their first round of portfolio companies at LA Clean Tech Incubator on Tuesday January 13.
FITGUARD began the day by presenting their color light-coded mouthguard, which detects head injuries, and can track impacts over time — a smart solution to injury detection initially targeted towards the nation’s 38 million youth athletes, and addressable to a worldwide market of over 400 million athletes.
FEEL‘s emotional wellness monitoring wristband helps the user track and manage stress, visualizes results, and offers recommendations to improve emotional health.
PLOBOT is a programmable robot that helps children develop logical thinking by promoting fun away from the screen, all while helping kids develop their psychomotor skills.
RIDEBLOCK‘s smart riser technology allows skaters to track tricks and fitness, and compete with other skaters.
In addition to their portfolio companies, hardware firms Simpli Press, Spinn Coffee (which makes coffee via centrifugal force), mobile video editing platform Gnarbox, and InSpirit also showcased their wares via lightning rounds.
MAKE IN LA went from concept to launch in a matter of months, when MIT graduate and former Boeing employee Noramay Cedena and NEO Technologies head of marketing Shaun Aurora realized that LA needed a space to foster quick growth in what is normally a slow-buildout industry.
In addition to investment dollars and a deep bench of mentors, Make in LA’s program offers access to the Hexlab Makerspace for protoyping, as well as supply chain expertise and distribution through NeoTech.
From those initial conversations in April 2015, Make in LA launched that summer, and has already started mentoring their second batch of companies. Applications for the next batch of companies begins April 2016.
