On this Unfiltered Startup Idea Review episode, Rachel Sheppard (FI Global Marketing Manager), Mike Suprovici (FI Head of Portfolio Success), Ryan Micheletti (FI Head of Global Operations) and Dustin Betz (FI Content Editor) review startup ideas, and pull no punches. Together, they bring decades of startup experience, advising hundreds of early-stage companies. In the Unfiltered series, FI HQ team expertise comes through as raw and #unfiltered feedback on YOUR startup ideas at all stages of development.

A full transcript of this podcast episode is available on our blog: https://fndri.com/Unfiltered9 

Here is an overview of this #Unfiltered episode’s startup ideas: 

1. Savo (Cape Town): My company 'Dappleshades' wants to make paper-based sculptures as functional décor to help students and young couples enhance their living & working spaces, by bringing in patterns inspired by nature at affordable prices. We use waterjet cutting to mass-produce existing hand-cut designs at low cost.
2. Henry (Fort Lauderdale): My company ‘Bye-thon’ is crowdsourcing and gamifying the tagging and removal of invasive species. We’re making a remotely controlled quadcopter tagging service that approved users can pilot from a desktop computer (just like playing a video game) to tag invasive animals with RFID trackers. 
3. Cecilie (Oslo): My company Lingal is disrupting language-learning with an AI chatbot for beginner to intermediate language-learners. Our chatbot fills a gap left open by apps that focus too heavily on rote memorization, thanks to our bot’s conversationality and its ability to easily shift between multiple languages when the user is stuck.
4. John (St. Louis): My company Air Refueling Tanker Transport (“ART2”) fills a gap in the DoD's Air-to-Air Refueling (AAR) tanker fleet. Sought after by global militaries, our commercial AAR supports military tankers and crews during peacetime. As the nation’s only commercial AAR outlet, we deliver a civilian-to-military capability, support, and training needs in excess of ~200K hours annually. Our secret sauce is our 9 aircraft, 90K hours and 250 years of AAR knowhow.
5. Clement (Montreal): My company (Tester) is building an online marketplace to help clinical researchers find test-subjects for trials. Currently, test subjects struggle to find research projects, which are too often listed on isolated university websites or even Craigslist, while researchers don’t attract enough applicants to actually be selective. We give researchers a central hub to list their trial opportunities, and a test subjects a central place to find them.
6. Rhoda (St. Paul): My company (Piqued) is launching a geofencing app for young tech-savvy shoppers that solves the issue of lost purchasing opportunities via our sales alert system. For example, when an app user walks by a Target store, a notification would pop up on their phone, informing them about any ongoing sales.

Are you launching your own startup? Submit your startup idea to be featured on our next Unfiltered episode: https://fi.co/ideas

If you're looking to join a pre-seed accelerator, apply at https://fi.co/join/unfiltered