My company Whit.li attended TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco last week. There were, as always, some pretty amazing ideas and technologies. One of the cooler companies I met was Evol8tion.
Evol8tion believes every viable startup has a brand soul mate, and they want to create that connection through partnerships such as acceleration, proof of concept (pilot programs), and/or investment. To that end, they are building an “unprecedented”, proprietary database of early stage startups, which will be used to help identify and vet potential "matches" for their clients - ultimately solving business needs with technology solutions.
Founded by Joseph Jaffe, who previously founded Crayon, Evol8tion believes that upstream collaboration (i.e. Early stage, prototype, etc.) provides exponential benefits to both brands and startups- such as first mover advantage, custom brand experiences, and strategic differentiation.
They have a newly published case study highlighting one of their clients; Anheuser-Busch InBev and SF based startup, Switchcam. Read more here. The match making results were a huge win for both Skol and Switchcam, including 925% increase in time spent on the website, a share rate 133x the industry average, and more than 350 user generated videos using Switchcam.
If you are a startup and want to get into their (free!) database sign up at http://www.startupsforbrands.com/signup/ to find your brand soul mate.