3 Brooklyn startups make semifinals of 43North competition

CoSign, Fentrend and Nanowear have made the semifinals of the prestigious 43North competition.

43North, an accelerator based in Buffalo, N.Y., offers a $1 million top prize each year, with smaller prizes and workspace going to several other finalists. Last year, NYU Digital Future Lab alum WeDidIt scored a finalist prize of $500,000 and relocated to Buffalo for the year.

Fentrend is a member of the NYU ACRE incubator for environmentally friendly startups. It’s a platform on which architects, real estate developers and general contractors could easily look up product specifications and compare prices. As we wrote last year in our profile of the company and its founder, Andy Huh, energy-efficient doors and windows aren’t necessarily more expensive than their conventional counterparts. But because of the lack of transparency, many architects, developers and contractors don’t realize that.

.@fentrend moves 1 step closer to $1M now that it's a #43NorthY4 semifinalist. Congratulations to @huhlistic & team! https://t.co/uomZHiG5hZ pic.twitter.com/ljTO3gsXRM

— ACRE (@nycacre) July 25, 2017

CoSign is an app that “makes photos shoppable,” so that when consumers see photos they like they can buy what’s in them.

Nanowear makes “patented, textile-based nanosensor technology with applications across a broad array of medical conditions and chronic disease states.”