This week’s startups include farming finance management, a second-generation credit card, and a mysterious, intriguing unknown.
- Adaxial Solutions – Adaxial Solutions provides an analytics platform to guide investment decision-making within agricultural value chains. Its platform connects financial institutions with value chain entities like farmers, input suppliers, aggregators, distributors etc. that need financing or insurance. Adaxial arrives as the U.S. agricultural industry faces upheaval — family farms that hope to survive need to fit into the increasingly efficient supply chains. That means digitization and the financing to keep systems running smoothly.
- Dimes – Dimes is yet another take on an old payment vehicle: the credit card. With the Dimes card, every purchase is automatically tracked. The user can use this to dynamically budget his money, setting artificial spending caps (i.e. much-needed friction) for themselves so that they don’t overspend. There are also challenge which the user can complete for rewards points, called Dimes Points. This use of gamification and increased user controls could make Dimes appealing to that credit-averse generation known as millennials.
- “Beagle Boys” – This startup is shrouded in mystery. Its founders will only disclose information about it if one signs a Non-Disclosure Agreement. A job offering for “founding engineer” is listed as potentially paying more than $100,000. However, the thing that makes Beagle Boys intriguing is its tagline: “Robbing banks (legally).” That’s an ambitious claim to make, and one that would have a lot of people jumping for the chance to patronize the startup. The team appears to have an idea in mind, but not the technology yet — hence that job listing — so it may be some time before this ambitious startup arrives on the scene.