miami-startup
(22)
Opción YO Thought Spanish Was the Product. Culture Built the $4.5 Million Business.
The Miami platform began as a marketplace for Spanish-speaking therapists. Its sharper insight - that migration, family and identity shape care - turned cultural fluency into a five-stage subscription business.
Longevity Science Left the Clinic. Lifespanning Put It in a Shopping Cart.
A Miami media company spent two decades inside biohacking's inner circle. Now it grades 1,000+ longevity products against a 72-point rubric - and only sells the ones that survive.
The Deals App That Grew Up and Became a Marketing Department
Shooger began as a mobile coupon network backed by $10 million and a cast that included an Emmy-winning Simpsons writer. When daily deals collapsed, it quietly became something more useful: a single marketing department that small businesses rent by the month.
The Caracas Startup That Turned English Into a Subscription
It started with $700, a sofa in San Francisco, and a bet that people learning English still want a human on the other end of the line. Two million students later, Open English is the accent Latin America practices in.
Grip
Grip is a Miami-based cold-chain fulfillment and logistics company that helps direct-to-consumer brands ship frozen and refrigerated goods without them arriving as soup. Founded by former ButcherBox logistics leaders, its software picks carriers, packaging, and refrigerant levels in real time based on weather and network conditions, and its warehouses across six states handle the physical fulfillment. The company says it has shipped more than two billion dollars of perishable goods on time for brands like HelloFresh, ButcherBox, and Open Farm.
JourneyTrack
JourneyTrack is a Miami-based enterprise SaaS platform for customer journey management. It gives CX, UX, product and leadership teams one governed place to build personas, map end-to-end customer journeys, score opportunities, and measure business impact - with a layer of AI (Journey AI, Insights AI, Persona AI, Storytelling AI) that turns qualitative research into board-ready decisions. Founded in 2021 by CX veteran Ania Rodriguez, the woman-founded company says more than 100 top brands, including Google, use it to find and recapture revenue lost to bad experiences.
Mascotte | Client & Operations Support for Vets
Mascotte is a Miami-based, tech-enabled operations company that gives veterinary clinics dedicated remote staff - CSRs, receptionists and vet techs - trained to each practice's own workflows and assigned exclusively to it. Branded internally as 'Mascotteers', these full-time team members handle phones, scheduling, prescription coordination, lab follow-ups and client communication inside the clinic's existing systems, promising up to 50% cost savings versus a local hire while reducing staff burnout. Founded in 2023 by former CarHopper CEO Bora Hamamcioglu and backed by a $1.2M pre-seed led by Nuwa Capital, Mascotte positions itself as the virtual front desk and back office for modern, high-growth veterinary practices.
OrderOut
OrderOut is a Miami-based restaurant integration company that pipes orders from third-party delivery apps - Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub, ChowNow and more - directly into a restaurant's point-of-sale system. Instead of a countertop crowded with buzzing tablets and mismatched printers, OrderOut gives operators a single queue and one dashboard, plus a developer API and an AI operations layer that POS companies and aggregators can resell under their own brand.
Pana
Pana is a Miami-based, Y Combinator-backed neobank building a stablecoin-native dollar account for Latinos and immigrants in the United States and their families across Latin America. It powers a closed-loop remittance network - borderless USD balances that move money instantly between users with zero fees, backed by USDC and settling to more than 5,000 banks across 27 countries. Founded in 2021 by Piero Nunez del Risco and Luis Pena, Pana pairs a consumer app (US checking-style accounts opened with a passport, a Mastercard debit card, direct deposit, and free peer transfers) with an emerging embedded-finance layer that lets banks and platforms serve the US diaspora.
Guillermo Garcia
Guillermo Garcia is the co-founder and CEO of SmartHop, a Miami-based platform that acts as an autonomous dispatcher and 'business-in-a-box' for small trucking companies and owner-operators. A Venezuelan industrial engineer who started out delivering pet food, he built a bootstrapped ~500-employee logistics company back home before political and economic instability pushed him to the U.S. After studying at Columbia and running an over-the-road fleet in Miami, he founded SmartHop in 2017-2018 to give independent truckers the software, load recommendations, and financial tools that big carriers take for granted. SmartHop has raised over $56M, including a $30M+ Series B in 2022.
Jean Pierre Azañedo
Jean Pierre Azañedo is the CEO and co-founder of Zero Waste Co. (ZWC) and CoreZero, a Miami-based climate-tech venture that turns food waste and other discarded material into tradable carbon credits. A second-time founder from Peru, he previously built Kanay into that country's leading waste-management company before it was acquired by France's Séché Group. In 2023 CoreZero serialized the world's first carbon credits generated from food-waste diversion, working with the Mexican food-banking network. Azañedo's thesis is simple and stubborn: waste has boundless value, and nobody makes something just to throw it away.
Juan Camilo Meisel
Juan Camilo Meisel is the founder and CEO of Grip, a Miami-based cold-chain logistics platform built to keep perishables cold and on-time from warehouse to doorstep. Before Grip, he spent six years running logistics at ButcherBox, helping scale frozen-meat delivery from zero to roughly $600 million in annual revenue. Colombian-born, Boston-trained, Miami-based, he now runs a network of refrigerated fulfillment hubs across the U.S. and was recognized on Forbes 30 Under 30 Miami in 2023.
Bora Hamamcioglu
Bora Hamamcioglu is the Co-Founder and CEO of Mascotte Health, a Miami-based, tech-enabled support company that gives veterinary practices virtual triage, client communications, front-desk help, after-hours care and scribing so vets can focus on medicine instead of phones. A Turkish-American entrepreneur, he previously built and ran CarHopper, a luxury and exotic car-rental marketplace acquired by Turo in 2020, and worked as a Principal at Dubai's BECO Capital. Mascotte emerged from stealth in 2023 with an oversubscribed $1.2M pre-seed round led by Nuwa Capital, with angels from Uber, Turo and Airbnb.
Paul Benigeri
Paul Benigeri is the co-founder and CEO of Archive, an AI-powered influencer and user-generated-content marketing platform he launched with Geoffrey Woo in 2021. A Stanford computer-science graduate raised in Paris, he spent his early career writing code at First Round Capital and RockMelt before scaling growth and engineering at the nutrition company HVMN. Archive grew from a Shopify app that auto-captured Instagram Stories into a platform used by brands like Quest, Allbirds and Hexclad, raising roughly $12M-plus and reaching a reported $100M valuation in about 18 months while staying lean and remote-first.
Thibault Le Conte
Thibault Le Conte is the founder, CEO and CTO of OrderOut, a Miami-based software company that funnels orders from UberEats, DoorDash, Grubhub and other delivery apps straight into a restaurant's existing point-of-sale system, killing the tablet pileup that clutters kitchen counters. A computer-science engineer trained at EPITECH and UC Berkeley, he built roughly eight or nine companies before OrderOut, reusing the same core technology each time. OrderOut is deliberately bootstrapped, grown on a single $250,000 partner investment made during COVID and organic revenue since, and now runs a lean distributed team across Miami, Brazil, India, China, Ecuador and Mexico. His latest push moves OrderOut beyond integrations into restaurant finance, with same-day UberEats payouts and a delivery API that lets any business shop for the cheapest or fastest courier.
Bungalow
Bungalow is a tech-enabled residential rental platform that turns single-family homes into furnished, flexible, community-driven housing. It matches renters with rooms and whole homes across major U.S. markets, handles roommate matching, tours, payments and maintenance through its app, and offers homeowners and institutional investors full-service property management for single-family-rental and build-to-rent portfolios via its Radar platform.
DermaSensor, Inc.
DermaSensor is a Miami-based medical device company that makes the first FDA-cleared, AI-powered handheld device for detecting all three common skin cancers - melanoma, basal cell carcinoma, and squamous cell carcinoma - at the point of care. Using elastic scattering spectroscopy and a machine learning algorithm trained on thousands of biopsy-confirmed lesions, the device gives primary care physicians a real-time, non-invasive read on whether a suspicious skin lesion warrants further evaluation, helping close the gap created by a shortage of dermatologists.
Alexander Kates
Alexander Kates is the cofounder and CEO of Vetcove, the free ordering platform that lets veterinary practices, zoos, aquariums and animal welfare groups shop every supplier at once - think Kayak, but for the stuff that keeps animals healthy. He built it with his brother Mitch after watching the inventory manager at their father's equine veterinary practice juggle 30-40 vendor tabs by hand. Before veterinary supply chains, Kates was a digital strategist who advised Fortune 500 companies, taught executives on four continents, and co-wrote a bestselling marketing textbook. Vetcove now employs hundreds and serves a large slice of US veterinary hospitals.
Andrew Kassian
Andrew Kassian is the CEO of Scalify, an AI-powered advertising platform that helps e-commerce brands plan, launch, optimize, and scale paid campaigns across Meta and TikTok from a single dashboard. Scalify's pitch is blunt: you should not need to become a media buyer to run profitable ads. Its tooling generates ad creative from product images, builds lookalike and interest audiences automatically, applies rule-based optimization that pauses losers and scales winners around the clock, and consolidates cross-platform performance data so founders can make spending decisions without exporting spreadsheets. Based in Miami with company operations tied to London, Kassian sits at the intersection of small e-commerce operators and the increasingly automated, AI-driven future of digital advertising.
SportsManias
SportsManias is a Miami-based digital media company and the self-described leader in animated sports emojis, GIFs, and augmented reality effects. It builds officially licensed emojis and AR filters of pro athletes and their signature celebrations, distributing them across messaging keyboards and platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Google, and GIPHY, while also running a real-time sports news app powered by patent-pending AI. Through partnerships with leagues, players associations, and major brands, the company turns fan passion into shareable, monetizable digital content.
Teal
Teal is a Miami-based AI-powered career platform built for job seekers rather than recruiters. Founded in 2019 by former WeWork executive David Fano, Teal bundles an AI Resume Builder, Job Tracker, job board, Chrome extension, AI Interview Coach, and offer/salary tools into one workspace that helps professionals find, apply for, and land jobs they actually want. The company has grown to roughly 4 million members, has helped facilitate hundreds of thousands of interviews, and has raised about $19 million in venture funding, capped by a $7.5M Series A in January 2025.
SmartHop
SmartHop is a Miami-based trucking technology company that gives small fleets and owner-operators a business-in-a-box platform. It pairs AI-driven load recommendations and full-service dispatch with fintech tools - fuel cards, payments, and insurance - so independent truckers can compete with large carriers without drowning in paperwork.