SXSW Startups: Acciyo
The Forrest Four-Cast: March 3, 2019
Fifty diverse startups will aim to impress a panel of judges and a live audience with their skills, creativity and innovation at SXSW Pitch Presented by Cyndx. Winners in 10 categories will be announced at the Pitch Award Ceremony at 6:30 pm Sunday, March 10, at the Hilton Austin.
A finalist in Entertainment and Content, which will pitch at 3:30 pm Sunday, March 10, Acciyo has a mission to transform reading the news from a survivalist exercise into a rich, motivating experience. Their debut product is a tool that populates a timeline of previous articles published on the subject you’re reading. No matter what you read, you get the context you need to understand it with ease.
Co-founder Anum Hussain talked about her company’s mission.
What is your competitive advantage?
We’re not competing in the world of breaking news or content creation. We believe there are plenty of apps for getting alerts and more content sources than we can manage. What we need are systems for actually consuming all that information, and we believe our advantage is operating in this space.
What are your goals for Acciyo in 2019?
After launching on the SXSW stage, we plan to cap our product to 5,000 users. This will give us the audience we need to test features, build engagement, and collect data that will help us propel forward in 2020.
How will Acciyo transform the way people read news online.
There are over 1,000 unique articles published online per day across just three major U.S. news publications. Even for the most active news readers, investing hours a day to staying up-to-date, it’s impossible to keep up. We’ve watched these readers open tab after tab, heading down a rabbit hole of endless content trying to fill in their missing context gaps.
With Acciyo, such hunting is eliminated. As you’re reading an article in Google Chrome, Acciyo appears to the right of your screen like a bookmark sleeve. We populate a timeline of articles published in the subject you’re currently reading, so you can go as far back as two years to understand an evolving news story.
What features do the interactive timeline tool provide?
The timeline allows users to understand what has been said historically about the topic in order to understand what is presently being said. We do all the work for you, using natural language processing to determine what to surface.
We also automatically detect key people, places, and things mentioned in an article and provide Wikipedia summaries. That way, if there’s a key person, bill, or agreement mentioned in the article you haven’t heard of, you have the information you need right there and then.
Tell us about the startup ecosystem in Los Angeles, where Acciyo is based.
We are new to Los Angeles and are ecstatic about the opportunity to grow here. I grew with the Boston tech ecosystem during five years at HubSpot. We sense a similar community feel in L.A. where the tech scene is starting to rise and hope we can create more opportunities for tech to thrive here,
How and when did your team come together?
Co-founder Vivian Diep and I met in Los Angeles in summer 2017. We began working together that fall. The company officially incorporated in January 2018 and after I graduated from MIT in June 2018, we began working full-time on Acciyo.
If you weren’t involved in building Acciyo, what would they be doing?
Likely still working together to figure out how we can help news thrive. I formerly worked as a journalist and Vivian was the co-founder at a startup focusing on contextualizing video news.
What tech trend is your team most excited about?
We are most excited about the rise in diverse voices and representation in tech. The growth is happening far too slow, but being a fully female-founded team has already allowed us to see how many incredible women of all backgrounds exist in the space and just aren’t being tapped on to reach their full potential.
What do you enjoy most and least about the startup experience?
We love what we do. We love talking to people about the space, we love building our product and testing how it resonates, we love working together as a team.
The harder parts have been financial security. Neither of us come from a privileged background of resources we can easily get access to. Sometimes it’s hard for an investor to understand how long every day can be for an entrepreneur on no income when investors respond requesting to get in touch in a few weeks. Those weeks can be painful, but we continue to push forward because we believe in what we’re doing.
What has the startup experience taught you about life?
Things don’t always go as planned or are fully in our control. Nobody will make your startup succeed but you, and being a founder is by no means as glorious as any article may make it sound.
Look for more interviews with other SXSW Pitch finalists in this space between now and March.
Click here to see all 50 finalists for SXSW Pitch 2019, along with the links to their interviews on Medium.
Also, if you are an entrepreneur, check out all the cool panels and presentations in the Entrepreneurship and Startups Track, which runs March 8–12 at SXSW.
Hugh Forrest serves as Chief Programming Officer at SXSW, the world’s most unique gathering of creative professionals. He also tries to write at least four paragraphs per day on Medium. These posts often cover tech-related trends; other times they focus on books, pop culture, sports and other current events.
