This type of belt is popular overseas, not so much in the U.S. But for the past few years, Brig Taylor and his wife, Michelle, have been on a mission to make hole-less ratchet belts the go-to accessory for American waistlines.

If you’ve ever wasted hours of free time searching for something to do with your free time, Oleg Kaganovich feels your pain. In 2012, he found himself in that exact situation during a business trip in the Big Apple. Rather than wait in a hotel room between meetings, he wanted to explore New York, but didn’t know where to begin. So he took his question to the web.

When car accident totaled Pedro Avila’s beloved ‘87 Volkswagen Cabriolet, he found himself desperate for money to repair the damage. A transportation industry veteran, Avila came up with Road Finch: eco-friendly and interactive marketing — by bicycle.

If you want to eat out but can’t decide which restaurant to go to, try asking yourself a different question: How much do I want to pay? That’s the idea behind Requested, a name-your-price app that’s been turning Sacramento’s dining arena into a digital bidding zone.

HomeZada is more than digital storage for insurance purposes. The comprehensive solution helps long-time homeowners and new buyers maintain and manage their budgets, plans and possessions online. 

With SynGen, co-founder Philip Coelho hopes to play a critical role in this breakthrough by supplying tools that harvest stem cells and immune cells from umbilical cord blood, bone marrow and other sources. 

NannyMe is a business and mobile application created by a few Sacramento high schoolers. Similar to the rideshare app Uber, NannyMe receives babysitting requests, then pings nannies (local high school students), who can accept or decline the job. Since NannyMe launched in December, about 75 families have signed up with the service.

Daniel Morash doesn’t like to see spoiled food go to waste. In 2012, Morash and his brother, Dave, spent millions to launch California Safe Soil with one goal in mind: convert leftover organic material from supermarkets into a nutrient-rich soil amendment farmers could use to grow crops.

In 2011, Jon Coss was on the hunt for funding. He had an idea for a system that could leverage Google Analytics to detect and prevent fraud and abuse in government programs. But this infrastructure-as-a-service model was new back then, untested and hard to explain to venture capitalists.