Parenting startup Joylet was selected for Techstars NYC

After starting life as a class project at Georgetown, startup Joylet was just picked for the 2023 winter class of the prestigious Techstars NYC.

Joylet, a 2022 RealLIST Startups honoree, offers a baby gear rental service for parents of newborns and young children. Founders Natalie Poston and Alli Cavasino will take part in the three-month accelerator with 11 other startups, culminating in a demo day on Feb. 15. Joylet was the only startup selected from the DMV area.

“Techstars NYC has a proud tradition among the very top and highest regarded accelerators in the world since the launch of the program in 2011, and we’re thrilled to continue that tradition with this exciting group of talented founders,” Managing Director of Techstars NYC Jordan Fliegel said in a statement. “This NYC class will benefit from those who have come before — the existing community of mentors, alumni founders and investors who will be eager to meet and support them.”

Joylet is also currently participating in the Techstars Founder Catalyst program, which Poston said prepares companies to apply for Techstars accelerators. The startup’s Newborn Bundle of Joy product, which supplies parents with all the gear they’ll need for a newborn and swaps it out as children age, was named an honorable mention in FastCompany’s 2023 World Changing Ideas Awards in May.

Parents are faced with so many choices on products that it’s overwhelming, Poston said, and Joylet wants to be the authority in that space.

“We’ve really, in the last year, found our voice and have been able to be a big resource to parents,” she told Technical.ly. “So that’s been a cool evolution in the process.”

Over the past year, Poston and Cavasino said that they’ve really discovered the value in their Newborn Bundle — especially with Cavasino having her first baby and getting to use the service for the first time. Parents are often overwhelmed with micro-decisions, Cavasino said, and taking some of those decisions off the table has been a real value for customers.

In 2023, Poston and Cavasino also added their first full-time hire and revamped their website. Following Techstars, they said, they’ll likely explore opening a funding round, and they will be expanding the team in the new year. Joylet currently serves the DC area and has started to move into Baltimore, but the founders especially want to double down on the mid-Atlantic region and become the place to go for parents in that region.

“It’s really reimagining the product to position ourselves as the guide that is bringing parents through this journey of their child’s development and being more of a resource,” Cavasino said.