buffalo-startup
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The $50 Banana That Outlived Its Own Punchline
It began as a joke on a Buffalo desk - a guy holding a banana to his ear so nobody would bug him. Six years and $1.6 million in sales later, the joke has a battery, a Bluetooth chip, and a cause.
FavorDrop
FavorDrop is a Buffalo, New York software company that turns customer appreciation into a measurable marketing channel. Businesses send time-bound digital gifts - loaded onto a FavorDrop Discover Network prepaid card that works anywhere Discover is accepted - to customers by text or email, then track when each gift is opened and redeemed. Founded by father-and-son team Tim and Jack Sardinia in 2021, the platform started as a way to remotely buy a friend a drink and grew into a customer-engagement and rewards tool used by car dealerships, insurers, home-services firms, restaurants and staffing agencies. A patented 'bounce back' feature returns any unredeemed gift to the sender at expiration, so unclaimed budget is reused rather than lost.
Jack Sardinia
Jack Sardinia is the co-founder and CEO of FavorDrop, a Buffalo-based platform for sending time-bound digital gifts and promotions. He launched it in 2021 with his father, longtime Buffalo restaurateur Tim Sardinia, around a simple idea: buy a friend a drink at their favorite bar even when you cannot be there. What began as a consumer app for sending restaurant gift cards grew into a B2B customer-engagement tool used by car dealerships, marketing agencies, and home-services companies, with more than a million FavorDrops sent and a patent on the 'bounce back' that returns unredeemed gifts to the sender.
Francisco Aguilar
Francisco Aguilar is the founder and CEO of Bounce Imaging, the company behind a softball-sized, throwable 360-degree camera that lets police, firefighters and soldiers see inside dangerous spaces before stepping into them. He conceived the idea as a graduate student at MIT and Harvard after watching rescuers struggle to find survivors in the rubble of the 2010 Haiti earthquake. The original Explorer earned a spot on TIME's Best Inventions of 2012; the thermal-equipped Pit Viper 360 repeated the honor in 2024. Today his cameras are used by 300-plus police and fire departments and by defense customers including U.S. Special Operations Command.