MyCityWay, which creates location-based city apps, became the first company to get seed money from an official Silicon Alley investment fund.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg dropped by the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in Manhattan yesterday to reveal that MyCityWay became the first recipient and will get $300,000 in initial funding from the newly established NYC Entrepreneurial Fund.
The New York City Economic Development Corp. contributed $3 million to the fund and FirstMark Capital, which will manage the fund, will contribute up to $19 million to provide New York City-based startups with early stage capital. The City says the fund is the first of its kind outside Silicon Valley.
Using GPS technology, MyCityWay creates free mobile apps providing information on city restaurants, nightlife, public restrooms, transit systems, tourist attractions and other destination services.
These individual city guides -- available on the iPhone and coming to Android -- currently are offered for New York City, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Las Vegas, Boston and London.
The NYC Way app, which has an airport module to track amenities and services at the three major area airports, has been downloaded around 250,000 times, says co-founder Puneet Mehta, who was staffing an exhibit at the conference. NYC Way is available on the iPhone and iPad.
Mehta says the company was slated to introduce its Chicago Way app this week.
MyCityWay plans to use the funding to relocate its Jersey City, N.J., office to Manhattan, to hire two additional staff members and to extend its apps to new markets and mobile devices.
MyCityWay was one of the winners at the inaugural NYC BigApps competition in February.