The cohort, featuring eight startups, includes Sencity and Citiesense. Sencity is an urban street furniture company that’s developed an interactive trash receptable called TetraBIN. Citiesense is a real estate-focused data company that offers clients — including municipalities — dashboards, maps and other information tools.
As part of the cohort, all companies will get $60,000 in seed capital plus hosting, legal services and other perks. In exchange, URBAN-X takes a 7 percent stake. The program lasts 14 weeks.
The other companies in the second cohort are:
- O2-O2, which is creating an air-filtering mask for people living and working in polluted cities.
- Buildsense, which is developing room occupancy tracking programs to improve building efficiency without adding new hardware.
- Contextere, which is working on an employee-serving digital personal agent using machine learning.
- Revmax, which is setting up software to manage ride-hailing fleets more efficiently.
- Upcycles, which is building electric tricycles for delivering cargo.
- WearWorks, which is constructing sensory feedback tools to help visually impaired people navigate.
URBAN-X’s first cohort, which debuted in March 2016, also included several government-serving startups. Among the lot was CTY and Stae, both of which worked on data analytics for cities.
The accelerator’s leadership includes people with experience in New York state government, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Senseable City Lab and the venture capital firm SOSV.
