On April 14, OnSwipe co-founder Jason Baptiste marched onto the stage at TechStars’ first New York Demo Day and told the audience of venture capitalists, “We’re not raising a Series A, we’re raising a Series Awesome.” In fact, his company was on the verge of locking up a funding round—one he felt so secure about he didn’t really bother to schmooze with the VCs at lunch during Demo Day, he says.
Baptiste says he’ll “have something to announce soon” about that Series A. In the meantime, he and his startup team of seven engineers, backed by a seed round of $1 million, are working around the clock to perfect OnSwipe, which is a platform that allows publishers to instantly transform any website into something that looks like it was made specifically for a touch-enabled tablet computer such as an iPad.
Two weeks after Demo Day, Baptiste was swigging Red Bull in his workstation at TechStars’ Greenwich Village incubator and reflecting on the company’s quick evolution. Baptiste graduated from the University of Miami with a degree in computer systems in 2006, and ventured almost immediately into entrepreneurship, co-founding two tech companies prior to launching OnSwipe in 2010. He thought about moving OnSwipe to California, but then decided to apply for TechStars’ inaugural New York program, which started in January 2011.
OnSwipe was accepted, but turned out to be an odd duck at TechStars. “In one 24-hour period, we received a term sheet for our seed funding round and we were accepted into TechStars,” he recalls. TechStars is really designed for companies in the pre-funding stage. Startups in the program receive up to $18,000 in seed funding and are put through three months of mentorship, culminating in Demo Day. Baptiste says that even though he didn’t need the seed funding, the program was a blast. “It was theater entrepreneurship,” he says. “We went into it to have fun.”
But now that he’s preparing to move out of TechStars to make room for the incoming class, Baptiste is all business. Even when he’s talking to a journalist, he’s a master salesman, seemingly determined to convince anyone that they shouldn’t allow a website that was designed to be viewed on a full-sized computer to appear that way on an iPad. “When you open those pages on a tablet browser, they just don’t look good,” he says.
Transforming standard Web pages into OnSwipe-enabled sites is a simple, three-minute process, Baptiste says. Publishers can simply sign up on OnSwipe’s site, pick among thousands of designs, and the platform will do everything else for them. The result is a neatly laid-out set of touch-friendly Web pages that tablet users can
