Congo takes 1st in Esprit Venture Challenge

Congo Ltd., a Boulder startup aiming to launch its legal-service-on-demand platform by the end of the year, took home top honors in the Boulder Chamber’s inaugural Esprit Venture Challenge on Thursday.

The company, started by a pair of former University of Colorado marketing majors takes home a suite of business services ranging from financial to legal to co-working space.

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Wuf, a company developing a smart dog collar, took second in the venture challenge. Superior Ecotech, which converts carbon dioxide from fermentation at breweries into algae-derived omega-3 oils, took third.

For Congo’s founders, winning the contest voted on by several of Boulder’s well-known entrepreneurs was a bit of validation that the company made the right decision in recent months to narrow its focus on the legal industry, specifically in the criminal and landlord/tenant realms.
Congo – short for consultation on the go – allows a consumer to log onto the website and answers a few questions about the issue he needs answers for. The website then matches that person with an available lawyer who is also logged on and whose expertise fits the customer’s problem. Through the website, the customer then pays the expert a per-minute fee for the video chat.

Experts sign up with Congo and can make themselves available on the site when it is convenient for them. The experts set the per-minute rate for their services, and then pay Congo a percentage of their revenue generated from the site.

Congo co-founders Willy Ogorzaly and Tyler Cox had originally planned to go after the medical industry as well, figuring that people often have situations that don’t necessarily warrant a doctor’s office visit but can’t be answered by Google. But they said advisors had warned them that the medical aspect might be too much to juggle initially. Plus there were other players already seeping into the digital health market.

“We took the feedback and it ended up being the best decision we made,” Ogorzaly said, noting that fundraising for the company has gone more smoothly since.

Congo will launch first at the University of Colorado, but Ogorzaly and Cox have plans to branch out to other campuses in Colorado and then go state by state after that, with California next in the lineup.

If legal works out, Congo could also branch out to other expert areas like doctors, veterinarians and accountants, not to mention market segments beyond college students.

 
“We’ll see where it takes us,” Ogorzaly said.