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Kahoot, a ‘Netflix for education’, launches an accelerator to tap gaming and education startups

Published December 19, 2018

On the back of Disney increasing its shareholding in Oslo-based Kahoot to four percent last week, Kahoot today announced a new initiative that helps to position the popular startup — which already has 60 million games and has seen over 1 billion players engage on its platform over the last year — as the “Netflix for education apps.”

It’s launching Kahoot! Ignite, a new accelerator for like-minded startups that are pushing the boundaries of education through gaming and other means.

In addition to that, Kahoot today also said it would move stock exchanges in its home market of Norway, going from the smaller OTC exchange to the Merkur Market, which CEO and co-founder Åsmund Furuseth explained in an interview is also an exchange for private companies, but one that will be able to provide more transparency to the startup’s bigger investors en route to an eventual full public listing. As of last week’s Disney news, the startup is now valued at $376 million.

Participating in the Ignite accelerator, Furuseth said, will give Kahoot the option to invest in startups in each cohort, and if it makes sense for the startup in question, they will build content that will be usable on the Kahoot platform.

“We have close to $30 million in the bank and are in a financial market where we can get more capital,” he said. “We don’t need to invest, but if we want to, we can.”

The startup today has some 60 million games on its platform, with a good portion of those created by users themselves (making it more like a YouTube than a Netflix). The idea is that bringing in outside developers (in this case, by way of the accelerator) could inject more innovation and interesting takes on the concept of “educational gaming” — not unlike how Netflix and Amazon engage outside studios to develop originals for its platform, alongside what they develop themselves or buy in through deals with rights holders.

In addition to the carrots of investment and distribution on the Kahoot platform — which is likely to hit 100 million monthly active users this month (Furuseth said he was confident of the number today) — Kahoot is offering mentorship to potential cohorts in areas like monetization and product development. Given the fact that educational aides can come in all shapes and sizes, that might not take the form of a piece of content for the Kahoot platform.

“Putting something on Kahoot could be an outcome, but we’re also interested in ‘network products,’ which have the same desire to enable learning,” Furuseth said.

The company today has a double focus, with games for K-12 students as well as for enterprise environments. “Learning is the main topic,” he added. “We like to have the mix.”

Our 3 favorite startups from Morgan Stanley’s 2nd Multicultural Innovation Lab Demo Day

Published November 20, 2018

The Morgan Stanley Multicultural Innovation Lab, Morgan Stanley’s in-house accelerator focused on companies founded by multicultural and female entrepreneurs, hosted its second Annual Showcase and Demo Day. The event also featured companies from accelerators HearstLab, Newark Venture Partner Labs and PS27 Ventures. (Note: I was formerly employed by Morgan Stanley and have no financial ties.)

The showcase represented the culmination of the program’s second year, which followed an initial five company class that has already seen two acquisitions. Through the six-month program, Morgan Stanley provides early-stage companies with a wide range of benefits including an equity investment from Morgan Stanley, office space at Morgan Stanley headquarters, access to Morgan Stanley’s extensive network, and others. Applications are now open for its third cohort of companies with the application window closing on January 4th, 2019.

The 16 presenting startups, all led by a female or multicultural founder, offered solutions to structural inefficiencies across a wide array of categories including fintech, developer tools, and health. Though all of the companies offered impressive presentations and strong value propositions, here are three of the companies that stood out to us.

Hatch Apps

In hopes of democratizing software and app development, Hatch Apps provides a platform that allows users and companies to build iOS, Android and web applications without any code through pre-built templates and custom plug-and-play functions. In essence, Hatch Apps provides a solution for application building similar to what Squarespace or Wix provide for websites.

In the modern economy, every company is in one way or another a tech or tech-enabled company. Now the demand for strong engineers has made the fight for talent increasingly competitive and has made engineering quite costly, even when only needed for simple tasks.

For an implementation and subscription fee, Hatch Apps allows companies with less sophisticated engineering DNA to reduce entering costs by launch native apps on their own, across platforms, and often on faster timelines than those seen through third-party developers. Once an app is launched, Hatch Apps provides customers with detailed analytics and allows them to send targeted push notifications, export data and make in-app changes that can automatically go live in app stores.

The company initially took a bootstrapping approach to financing and raised funds by selling a 2016 election-themed “Cards Against Humanity”-style game created on the platform. Since then, Hatch Apps has already received funding from the Y Combinator Fellowship, Morgan Stanley, and a number of other investors.

FreeWill

While estate planning is a topic many don’t like to think about, it’s a critical issue for managing cross-generational wealth. But will drafting can often be very complex, time-consuming, and costly, requiring hours of legal consultation and coordination between various parties.

Founded by two former classmates at Stanford Business School, FreeWill looks to simplify the estate planning process by providing a free online platform that automates will drafting, in a similar function to what TurboTax does for taxes. Using FreeWill, users can quickly set allocations for their estate and select personal recipients, charitable donations, executor specifications, and other ancillary requests. The platform then creates a finalized legal document that is legally valid in all 50 states, which users can also quickly make changes to and replace without incurring expensive legal costs.

FreeWill is able to provide the platform to consumers for free due to the proceeds it receives from its non-profit customers, who pay to be featured on the platform as a partner organization. FreeWill offers a compelling value proposition for partnering companies. By acting as a channel to funnel user donations to listed organizations, FreeWill has been able to drive a 600% increase in charitable giving to partner organizations on average. FreeWill also provides partner organizations with backing analytics that allow non-profits to track bequests and donors through monthly reports.

FreeWill currently boasts an impressive roster of 75 paying non-profit partners that include American Red Cross, Amnesty International and many others. In the long-run hopes to be the go-to solution financial and legal end of life planning for investment advisors, life insurance and employee benefits providers.

Shoobs

Shoobs is looking to be the go-to platform for local “urban” events, which the company defined as events centered on local nightlife, comedy and concerts in the hip-hop, R&B, and reggae genres to name a few. But unlike the genre-agnostic, transaction-focused event management platforms that can make the space seem pretty crowded, Shoobs focused on providing genre-specific even discovery. Shoobs matches urban event goers with artists of their choice and related smaller scale events that can be harder to discover, acting as a form of curation, quality control and discovery.

For event organizers, Shoobs helps provide digital ticketing and promotion services, with event recommendation capabilities that target the most promising potential customers. Through its offering to event organizers, Shoobs is able to monetize its services through ticket sale commission, advertising and brand partnerships.

Since its initial launch in London, Shoobs notes it has become one of the top urban events platforms in the city, with an extensive base of recurring registered users and event organizers. After previously working with AEG for its London launch, Shoobs is looking to expand stateside with the help of organizers like Live Nation. Shoobs joins a long list of promising Y Combinator alumni companies with YC also acting as one of Shows initial investors

Other presenting companies included:

Morgan Stanley Multicultural Innovation Lab

BeautyLynk “is an on-demand hair and makeup service provider, specializing in customizable services for women.”
Broadway Roulette “is an events marketplace that pairs consumers with surprise cultural events, beginning with Broadway theater.”
CariClub “is an enterprise software platform to connect young professionals with nonprofit opportunities.”
COI Energy Services “is an integrated platform for electric utilities and business users to optimize and manage energy usage.”
CoSign “is an API and application that allows anyone to create, distribute and monetize visual content.”
Goalsetter “is a goals-based gifting, savings, and investing platform designed for children.”
myLAB Box “offers customizable at home health-test kits and relevant telemedicine consultations / prescription services.”

Hearst Labs

Priori “is a global legal marketplace changing the way in-house teams find, hire, and manage outside counsel.”
TRENCH “is an online fashion marketplace that makes use of the unworn items in every woman’s closet.”

Newark Venture Partners Labs

Floss Bar “is a new type of preventive brand for oral health care. The company offers high-quality, routine dental care across flexible locations at thoughtful prices.”
Upsider “is a software solution allowing recruiters to leverage AI technology to identify a comprehensive set of candidates who align with their business and role requirements, resulting in a more strategic understanding of the best possible talent for the job.”

PS27 Ventures

BlueWave Technologies “is a cleantech company and the creators of the BlueWave Cleaning System — a water free, detergent free, and chemical free plasma device that cleans items that are extremely hard or impossible to clean with a washer and dryer.”
OnPay Solutions “focuses exclusively on business-to-business payments. They create payment software and offer payment web services to enhance efficiency and productivity for Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable.”

Watch biotech startups pitch at IndieBio’s demo day today

Published November 6, 2018

IndieBio, the biotech startup accelerator that’s produced heaps of notable companies (including several that have graced the Startup Battlefield), is holding its twice-annual demo day today at 3PM Pacific Time. An even dozen young companies will be pitching their work, from AI-informed research to artificial meat, and you can watch them present live right here.

The IndieBio program is a four-month one that takes companies at the seed stage, often researchers straight out of graduate programs or university research groups, and gets them into shape for a proper Silicon Valley debut. Right now the companies get $250K in funding to take part, as well as plenty of resources, which parent VC firm SOSV can surely afford these days, what with raising $150 million last year.

Off the top of my head I remember two companies that competed at Disrupt SF 2016, Amaryllis Nucleics and mFluiDx, both very technical and highly talented teams. I’m always rooting for these kinds of wet lab companies, and it sounds like the current batch has plenty.

Watch the live pitches starting at 3PM below, and consult the list below the video for a summary of the companies presenting. We’ll be watching too!

New Age Meats: Pig farms are hell on earth. New Age Meats is a “cell-based meat company” that’s looking to replace animal-based pork sausage with a cleaner, more ethical grown alternative that goes just as well with pancakes.

NovoNutrients: Another non-traditional protein source, NovoNutrients uses industrial CO2 emissions to produce high-protein bacteria, which are harvested and sold as sustainable feed stock for aquaculture animals like fish.

BioRosa: An early detection method for autism spectrum disorders using blood tests that could shift diagnosis time to well before the current four years of age to potentially before the child is born.

Chronus Health: Hospitals need to do blood tests constantly, but often have to send samples to a central lab, which can take hours or days. Chronus has made a portable device they claim can provide complete blood count and metabolic panel tests essentially in real time.

Clinicai: Colorectal cancer, like other cancers, is best treated when detected early — and collecting and analyzing stool samples is a big part of that. These guys made a (prototype) device that attaches to ordinary toilets and non-invasively does what it needs to do, which could help people worldwide get proactive diagnosis and care.

Convalesce: Parkinson’s is a stubborn and tragic disease, but Convalesce is working on a treatment method involving injecting stem cells directly into areas affected by neurodegeneration.

Oralta: You can floss, brush, and rinse, but bad news bacteria are still going to take up residence in your mouth. Oralta hopes to combat them with good bacteria, reinforced by probiotic supplements. Fight fire with fire!

Ember: If someone is having a heart attack and it’ll take the EMTs 8-12 minutes to arrive, but your neighbor is a nurse trained in CPR, wouldn’t it be nice if they could stop by and help? That’s the idea with Ember, which hopes to improve outcomes by connecting patients with health professionals nearby.

Filtricine: The cancer treatment method being pursued by this company, instead of adding something lethal to cancer cells into the bloodstream, subtracts what they need to live while leaving normal cells unharmed. It could combine effectiveness with a blessed lack of side effects to become another tool in oncologists’ arsenals.

Serenity Bioworks: Gene therapy is another important therapeutic tool for a variety of problems, but some viral delivery methods can be fought by the body as if it’s fighting infection. Serenity is working on a system that suppresses that immune response and allows the friendly virus to deliver its payload.

Quartolio: So much scientific literature is published every year that there’s no way doctors and researchers can keep up. Quartolio aims to apply national language processing to journal articles to find connections and research opportunities that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.

Stämm: Bioreactors are used in practically every branch of biotech, whether for testing or drug manufacturing. Stämm is advancing the art with a modular, scalable microfluidic platform with highly tunable physical and chemical parameters.

A look at all the companies participating in 500 Startups’ 24th accelerator program

Published October 31, 2018

TechCrunch has an exclusive look at the companies participating in 500 Startups‘ 24th startup accelerator batch, which kicked off last week.

Through its four-month seed program, the Silicon Valley seed fund invests $150,000 in exchange for 6 percent equity. The companies below include a mix of industries from cryptocurrency to digital health to e-commerce. 500 Startups says 40 percent of the companies have a female founder, 50 percent have a black, mixed-race or Latinx founder and 31 percent are headquartered outside the U.S.

Here’s a closer look at the 22 companies, which will demo their tech to investors on February 28:

Alba: A Santiago, Chile-based mobile marketplace for babysitters in emerging markets.
Assemble: A Los Angeles-based digital platform for automating video content production.
Back Office: A Palm Beach, Florida-based financial software provider focused on streamlining personal bookkeeping.
BlockVigil: A San Francisco-based platform for building and scaling blockchain applications.
Cambridgene: A Cambridge-based developer of clinical-genomic software for personalizing cancer therapy in hospitals.
Celer Network: A platform for building and scaling decentralized applications.
Crowdz: Headquartered in Sunnyvale, the blockchain-based B2B marketplace builds digitized supply chains.
HAMAMA: A San Francisco-based provider of microgreen kits for growing healthy food at home.
IOTW: A Hong Kong-based IoT-connected cryptocurrency mining platform.
Kura Tech: A San Francisco-based developer of augmented reality glasses with micro-display and variable focus.
Memoir Health: A Boston-based behavioral health startup providing physical and virtual mental wellness and substance use services.
MessageCube: Headquartered in Sunnyvale, the company is building an integration for people to discuss and purchase shared experiences over chat.
Ovation: A Provo, Utah-based online portal for restaurant reviews meant to help businesses measure customer experience.
PantyProp: A New York-based seller of underwear and swimwear for women to wear while menstruating.
Pilleve: A Winston-Salem, North Carolina-based startup using data to help care providers lower the costs associated with opioid addiction.
Savion: A Livermore-based aviation company bringing green, long-range private jets to the middle class.
SnapShyft: Headquartered in Indianapolis, the startup provides an on-demand labor marketplace focused on the food and beverage industry.
Thrive Agric: An Abuja, Nigeria-based crowdfunding platform for farms and farmers in Africa.
TripAfrique: Headquartered in Paris, the online booking platform helps travelers arrange trips to Africa.
UTRUST: A Zurich-based cryptocurrency payments platform that offers buyers protection, instant transactions and more.
Zeuss Tech: Headquartered in Palo Alto, the blockchain-based anti-money-laundering platform targets cash-intensive industries.
No information is available on the final company, which is in stealth mode.

Here’s a look at 500 Startups batch 23, 22 and 21.

These are the most successful companies to emerge from Y Combinator

DLab is a new East Coast accelerator for crypto

Published October 23, 2018

SOSV, a 20-year-old fund with $500 million in assets under management, has been running accelerators for years. Their oldest one, HAX, is the premier hardware accelerator in San Francisco and Shenzhen, and they’ve recently launched a food accelerator in New York and a pair of biology accelerators. Now, however, they’ve just announced DLab, a crypto accelerator that is paired with Cardano to build out distributed apps and solutions.

It is led by Nick Plante, a programmer integral in drafting the JOBS Act and who co-founded Wefunder, a successful crowdfunding platform.

“We can only make this sort of commitment to ecosystems we feel are incredibly compelling; it takes a substantial amount of dedication, education, staffing, and of course the long-term financial commitment to support the space and the companies,” said Plante. “We invest in ecosystems that we identify as ‘macro trends’ like disruptive food, life sciences and synthetic biology, Chinese market entry, IoT and robotics… things that will fundamentally alter the way that we live in the next 100 years.”

“Decentralization is clearly a macro trend, in the macro sense. What’s happening with blockchain and digital ledger technologies has the potential to upend some of the most basic economic incentives that lie beneath the things we do every day; to affect the ways that humans collaborate, identify, trust, govern, and bring new ideas to life… it underlies all of it,” he said.

DLab supplies up to $200,000 in pre-seed funding as well as perks from the SOSV global network of accelerators. They are also offering fellowships in partnership with Cardano to work with projects that would further blockchain research.

“Through last year and the start of this year we kept watching the blockchain ecosystem do some amazing things — along with some criminal things. The surveys and reports about the fraud rates of ICOs and other unpleasantness kept underlining our concerns report after report. The potential for the big economic shifts I mentioned earlier were clearly here but there were so, so many problems; there was a real need for education, for curation, and for proper governance and incentive structures to be put in place,” said Plante.

The group is accepting applications now for a January cohort. The group invests in 150 startups per year, a heady number in these cash-poor times.

Y Combinator is changing up the way it invests

Published September 28, 2018

To keep up with the growing sizes of early-stage funding rounds, Y Combinator announced this morning that it will increase the size of its investments to $150,000 for 7 percent equity starting with its winter 2019 batch.

Based in Mountain View, Calif., YC funds and mentors hundreds of startups per year through its 12-week program that culminates in a demo day, where founders pitch their companies to an audience of Silicon Valley’s top investors. Airbnb, Dropbox and Instacart are among its greatest successes.

Since 2014, YC has invested $120,000 for 7 percent equity in its companies. It has increased the size of its investment before — in 2007, a YC “standard deal” was just $20,000 — but the amount of equity the accelerator takes in exchange for the capital has been consistent.

“We thought a $30K increase was necessary to help companies stay focused on building their product without worrying about fundraising too soon,” Y Combinator chief executive officer Michael Seibel wrote in a blog post this morning. “Capital for startups has never been more abundant, and we’ll continue to focus on the things that remain hard to come by — community, simplicity, advice that’s systematic and personal, and above all, a great founder experience.”

Seibel was named CEO in 2016. Co-founder Sam Altman serves as YC’s president.

YC is also changing the way it crafts its investments. It will now invest in startups on a post-money safe basis rather than on a pre-money safe. YC invented the fundraising mechanism, safe, in 2013. A safe, or a simple agreement for future equity, means an investor makes an investment in a company and receives the company stock at a later date — an alternative to a convertible note. A safe is a quicker and simpler way to get early money into a company and the idea was, according to YC, that holders of those safes would be early investors in the startup’s Series A or later priced equity rounds.

In recent years, YC noticed that startups were raising much larger seed rounds than before and those safes were “really better considered as wholly separate financings, rather than ‘bridges’ into later priced rounds.” Founders, in the meantime, were struggling to determine how much they were being diluted.

YC’s latest change, in short, will make it easier for founders to know exactly how much of their company they are selling off and will make capitalization table math, which can be extremely grueling for founders, a whole lot easier.

Why SAFE notes are not safe for entrepreneurs

The pre-money safe has been criticized by founders and investors alike.

Last year, a pair of venture capitalists who’d worked with YC companies, Dolby Family Partners’ Pascal Levensohn and Andrew Krowne, wrote that the safe method was screwing over founders.

“Entrepreneurs who don’t do the capitalization table math end up owning less of their company’s equity than they thought they did. And when an equity round is inevitably priced, entrepreneurs don’t like the founder dilution numbers at all. But they can’t blame the VC, they can’t blame the angels, so that means they can only blame… oops!”

A transition to a post-money safe will eliminate that cap table math headache while still being simple and efficient. The trade-off, YC says, “is that each incremental dollar raised on post-money safes dilutes just the current stockholders, which is often the founders and early employees.” So it’s not perfect, but it’s an improvement.

Recent YC grad Deepak Chhugani, the founder of The Lobby, which announced a $1.2 million investment this week, had a positive response to the changes and said either way, most of the resources provided by YC are priceless to a first-time founder, like himself.

“I think given rising costs in the Bay Area and most startup hubs, the new YC deal is going to be great for founders, regardless of whether they stay in the Bay Area afterward or not,” Chhugani told TechCrunch.

YC is also tweaking its policy around pro-rata follow-ons. You can read about that here.

YC grad The Lobby raises $1.2M to help job seekers break into Wall Street

Our 3 favorite startups from Urban-X’s 4th demo day

Published September 28, 2018

Urban-X, the urban-tech startup accelerator backed by BMW MINI and early-stage urban-tech fund Urban.Us, hosted a demo day today for its fourth cohort of companies at its Brooklyn HQ. The seven presenting companies offered solutions to issues plaguing modern cities, including toll-road pricing, energy and construction management, and even the inefficiencies of modern cycling helmets.

In a day that offered an impressive display of entrepreneurial talent, here are a few of the companies that really stood out to us:

Rentlogic

In hopes of improving landlord transparency, Rentlogic uses years of city government data to create objective algorithmic letter ratings for apartment buildings. As CEO Yale Fox pointed out, despite city-dwellers spending half our paychecks on rent, urban housing hasn’t seen the same rating systems that we use to guide decisions on where we eat, what car we buy, or what shows we binge. Rentlogic allows apartment hunters to screen buildings before signing a lease and avoid committing to unhealthy conditions or an absentee landlord.

Rentlogic partners with landlords looking to obtain a stamp of quality for potential renters, offering an added inspection feature that allows them to hang a letter rating outside their building. The company’s roster of customers already includes Blackstone and Phipps Houses, the largest for-profit and non-profit landlords in the world, respectively.

What stands out with Rentlogic is its ability to scale. Though currently only in New York City, the same data used in New York presumably exists across all major US markets and Rentlogic has minimized the cost of entering new cities by building out the back-end infrastructure required to ingest and analyze the data. From a demand perspective, as renters defer to Rentlogic for quality assurance and more competitors hang “A” ratings outside their buildings, landlords will face more pressure to maintain the same offering.

The idea hit home for a born-and-bred New Yorker with my own set of landlord horror stories, and the first thing I did when I left was look up my building on Rentlogic.

Campsyte

Most companies wish they had mega-campuses or “motherships” where they could offer employees access to sprawling outdoor working areas. For companies based in urban areas, offering outdoor space can be tough, with many parks often privatized, far from city centers, or void of the amenities needed to be productive.

Campsyte transforms underutilized urban outdoor spaces into productive and fun spaces that customers can book for co-working purposes, corporate off-sites, or events. Similar to WeWork’s approach with buildings, Campsyte takes a parking lot, and adds value by filling it with greenery, furniture, electricity, WiFi, and other services. With its services driving nearly 10x the annual revenue per square foot seen by traditional parking lots, the value proposition for lot owners is convincing.

Given the competition companies are facing when it comes to attracting and retaining talent, providing the same amenities as competitors based outside city centers seems invaluable, with Campsyte boasting an extremely impressive roster of partner companies, including LinkedIn, PayPal, Salesforce, and Airbnb.

ODN (Open Data Nation)

As anyone who has driven in a city knows, car crashes or accidents can often be caused by the built environment around you. Yet insurers, who focus on personal characteristics like credit scores when underwriting a policy, lack the measurement tools to assess the risk of someone’s external environment.

Founded by an MIT-trained city planner, ODN builds risk models using machine learning and public data records to help insurers evaluate risk and mitigate accidents. The resulting analytics eases the selection process for insurers, allowing them to drive more sales with less cost and risk. ODN is already partnered up with some of the world’s largest insurers including Zurich, Travelers, and Hanover insurance.

The potential use cases for ODN’s technology go far beyond the massive existing insurance market, with the eventual rollout of autonomous cars forcing insurers to ask how they construct policies when human behavior plays no role in accidents. ODN is working with carriers to help answer this question while helping create a more efficient and fair underwriting process today.

Other members of Urban-X Cohort 4 included:

Avvir: “Avvir automates quality assurance for the construction industry, providing real-time insights into the progress and potential defects on a project.”

ClearRoad: “ClearRoad helps government agencies automate toll road pricing for any section of road without the need for traditional proprietary hardware infrastructure.”

Park & Diamond: “Park & Diamond makes biking better by reinventing the bike helmet, using next-generation materials to build a safer, more portable helmet that can roll up into the shape of a water bottle for easier carrying, while looking like a regular hat, cap, or beanie.”

Sapient Industries: “Sapient Industries has developed an autonomous energy management system that senses and learns human behavior in order to eliminate wasted energy in buildings.”

Meet 13 startups launching out of the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator

Published September 26, 2018

Today, a new crop of startups is launching out of the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator. This marks the 15th ERA class, with the past 14 classes comprising 165 startups with a combined market capitalization of more than $2 billion.

Thirteen companies in total are participating in the demo day today, spanning a variety of industries, including e-commerce, real estate and voice collaboration.

Here are the new startups:

Agilis is a B2B commerce platform for chemical distributors. The supply chain for chemical distribution is often complex, but Agilis aggregates supply and demand and facilitates transactions on behalf of all parties involved, from producers to distributors to buyers.

As voice interfaces continue to grow in prominence, Airbud is looking to offer developers and companies a way to add voice capabilities to their websites and apps. Airbud’s technology quickly ingests the information on a website or app to allow users to interact with that information with their voice.

Bikky looks to give restaurant owners more insight into their customers, aggregating data across online ordering channels and using SMS to get real-time feedback on orders. The customer analytics platform for restaurants hopes to help businesses increase their customer retention and better understand what is and isn’t working with their business.

Daivergent was founded by Byran Dai. Inspired by his brother, who has autism, he created Daivergent to allow businesses to hire individuals with autism who are particularly well-suited to perform complex data tasks. The platform provides training, management and workflow functions alongside making the initial connection between these highly skilled workers and companies.

Ettitude is a D2C bedding and homewares brand looking to compete with the likes of Brooklinen. Unlike most competitors, however, Ettitude uses a proprietary supply of organic bamboo lyocell fabric to make soft, cooling, hypoallergenic sheets, pillowcases, etc.

LVRG is a vendor relationship management platform for the enterprise, allowing decision-makers within organizations to make collaborative, informed purchasing decisions with the help of an AI algorithm.

Maivino reinvents the idea of boxed wine by letting users subscribe to receive premium wine in a pouch. Unlike a box or a bottle, Maivino’s pouch keeps wine fresh for 32 days after opening, letting users have control of their own pace.

ProdPerfect wants to make quality assurance regression tests for web applications easier and more effective. By analyzing live user traffic to build test cases from behavior patterns, the company gives engineering teams QA testing coverage that continuously and automatically updates as they add new features.

Rocket Cloud is looking to be the Angie’s List for industrial suppliers. The company has created a marketplace that connects electrical, plumbing and HVAC equipment manufacturers and suppliers to online customers.

Rubik is a data platform for real estate investors, providing up-to-date financial data on 70 million single family homes in the U.S., letting investors search based on their own investment criteria.

Threshing Floor Security collects, aggregates and analyzes internet background noise, network scans, web scrapers and authentication attempts to let security teams find alerts that matter to them. The company integrates its technology with the most popular enterprise security products out there.

Triyo is a secure project collaboration platform for highly regulated industries, particularly financial services. As teams work together on a project, they can use Triyo to collaborate on documents, presentations and spreadsheets efficiently without duplicating work, all within the bounds of internal compliance and regulatory rules.

Woveon is a CRM tool that aggregates data from all channels, including phone calls, email, social media and CRM, so that companies can get a bird’s-eye view of their customer relations. The platform is powered by AI, allowing Woveon to point out the most relevant information for resolving customer inquiries.

Meet SelfieCircus and 8 more in Snapchat’s new startup accelerator

Published September 10, 2018

Snapchat is hedging its bets as its social network shrinks. Today Snap Inc. revealed the first class of its startup accelerator called Yellow that offers $150,000 in funding and creativity-centric business education in exchange for what a source says is a seven to 10 percent equity stake — in line with other accelerators like Y Combinator. The nine companies will take up a three-month residency in one of Snap’s buildings in Venice, Calif., near Los Angeles.

The accelerator class ranges from augmented reality and journalism studios to lifestyle brands around weddings and fashion to aesthetic-focused marketplaces like ConBody that pairs you with a muscular ex-convict for workouts.

Yellow calls itself “A launchpad for creative minds and entrepreneurs who are looking to build the next generation of great media companies.” Yellow could become a content provider and potential acquisition feeder for the company. ANRK and Space Oddity Films could boost Snapchat’s AR gaming effort, Hashtag Our Stories could fill Snap Map with citizen news broadcasts, Toonstar could bring animation to Discover, and SelfieCircus could power marketing pop-ups like the Snapbots that sold the company’s Spectacles.

But at the same time, it’s hard not to see Yellow as a potential escape route for Snap’s business if Instagram’s competition ends up stealing all its users. Snapchat lost three million last quarter, contributing to a massive share price downslide. Following today’s departure of COO Imran Khan, it’s trading at $9.66, just a few cents above its all-time low.

If a few of Yellow’s investments blow up and Snap makes capital available for follow-on rounds, the returns could supplement its ad revenue. But none of this first batch of startups looks poised to be gamechangers the way Snap’s acquisitions of Bitmoji and Looksery’s early AR filters were.

Yellow’s inaugural class

Here’s a look at the first nine companies in Snapchat Yellow, courtesy of write-ups provided by Snap.

ANRK (London, UK) – a new realities studio, exploring immersive storytelling through AR, VR, games and beyond.

We are passionate about human-centered narratives, and use playful interaction and new technologies to create powerful experiences that connect the digital and physical.

ConBody (New York, NY) – a prison-style fitness bootcamp that hires formerly incarcerated individuals to teach fitness classes.

ConBody is facilitating an opportunity-filled lifestyle by empowering our community to realize success lies within. We hire formerly incarcerated individuals to build personal discipline through a unique blend of cardiovascular training and bodyweight exercises that take advantage of the resistance properties of everyday objects. We apply military techniques to space constraints intimately familiar to city-dwellers and individuals who reside in small, constrained spaces. In addition, we’re changing the views of formerly incarcerated individuals to be changed by allowing professionals to interact with formerly incarcerated individuals, which gives professionals a different perspective on them.

ConBody

Hashtag Our Stories (Durban, South Africa) – an international mobile journalism (MOJO) network, publishing vertical video stories on social media. Created by citizens, curated by journalists.

Since September 2017, we’ve empowered 200 citizen storytellers in over 40 countries to produce videos with their phones. We focus on constructive, solutions-based stories and provide more diverse news coverage. Because more cameras and more perspectives means more truth.

Hashtag Our Stories

IDK (Los Angeles, CA) – the ID for Korean music. We are a digital media company expanding in-depth on the music of Korea and K-Pop as a globally recognized genre; showcasing the identity of the artists that shape the culture. We provide insightful and rich coverage and content for the global Korean Pop audience.

We are creating a Global Brand and Destination for an English-Speaking Korean Pop Audience. Our mission is to create rich and stylized content about the Korean Music Genre; less gossip, more news and features. We want to provide a legitimate outlet for Korean Pop Culture; to create emotive, aspirational stories that are visually chic to a young, hyper-aware and digitally engaged audience.
As the company begins we will focus on publishing the best in engaging social video content. We will translate this content across platforms, ultimately building brands, shows and stories that feed the insatiable audience appetite for Korean Pop. From there we will build toward live events, merchandise and much more.

Love Stories TV (New York, NY) – a video platform for wedding planning and inspiration, bringing engaged couples and event professionals together in a uniquely visual community. Think of us like “Houzz” for weddings: We connect brides and grooms with the ideas, inspiration, products and services they need for their weddings. [Note: Snap tells me Love Stories TV did not give up a seven to ten percent equity stake as it had previously raised a $1.7 million seed round, but wouldn’t disclose more details about its equity stakes in the other startups.]

On lovestoriestv.com filmmakers and newlyweds from all over the world share their professionally produced videos along with the data and details about the wedding. Brides and grooms watch the videos to find ideas, inspiration, products and services for their wedding. We also have an active community of pre-engaged-brides under the age of 24 who watch the videos on our site, social and Amazon Prime channel for entertainment. We partner with brands and wedding pros to help them reach brides and grooms on our site and channels via the real wedding films that feature them and original content.

Love Stories TV

Premme (Los Angeles, CA) – a fashion-first, body-positive lifestyle brand for the plus-size It-Girl.

Today, 67 percent of women in America wear plus-sizes — yet plus-size fashion only accounts for 17 percent of the women’s apparel market. When it comes to media representation, plus-sizes are similarly lacking in positive, aspirational visibility. Premme empowers women who have been historically marginalized through fashion-forward, statement-making clothing and visionary, contemporary editorial content and imagery. By creating a relatable, yet aspirational brand that centers on plus-size women, we aim to flip the script on what it means to look and be stylish, while leading the conversation and movement toward truly diverse and inclusive fashion.

Premme

SelfieCircus (Los Angeles, CA) – a new kind of circus.

SelfieCircus creates pop-up experiences designed to be documented and shared on social media. The company is building a platform to connect artists, brands and consumers. The first SelfieCircus will open in Los Angeles in late 2018.

SelfieCircus

Space Oddity Films (Los Angeles, CA) – a content studio exploring tech and culture that creates innovative content for every platform: mobile, digital, AR/VR, video games, feature film and television.

We tell stories about the convergence of humanity and technology. Our original viral tech horror thriller shorts are the foundation of our brand. Our goal is to make the future now.

Space Oddity Films

Toonstar (Los Angeles, CA) – a digital animation network that creates and distributes daily pop culture cartoons for an “always on” world. Powered by proprietary animation tech, we produce daily, snackable, interactive animated content at unprecedented speed and cost.

We have a large and highly engaged audience of teens and young adults generating millions of views per week because our content is sticky, shareable, relatable and engineered specifically for social. We’re a team of studio alumni and media tech innovators who have produced hit digital animated series, built groundbreaking interactive media technologies and launched mega entertainment franchises. Now we’re on a mission to build a next-gen animation network that delivers greater reach + engagement at a fraction of the operating cost.

Toonstar

The top 10 startups from Y Combinator’s Demo Day S18 Day 2

Published August 22, 2018

Fifty-nine startups took the stage at Y Combinator’s Demo Day 2, and among the highlights were a company that helps developers manage in-app subscriptions; a service that lets you create animojis from real photos; and a surplus medical equipment-reselling platform. Oh… and there was also a company that’s developed an entirely new kind of life form using e coli bacteria. So yeah, that’s happening.

Based on some investor buzz and what caught TechCrunch’s eye, these are our top picks from the second day of Y Combinator’s presentations.

You can find the full list of companies that presented on Day 1 here, and our top picks from Day 1 here.

64-x

With a founding team including some of the leading luminaries in the field of biologically inspired engineering (including George Church, Pamela Silver and Jeffrey Way from Harvard’s Wyss Institute), 64-x is engineering organisms to function in otherwise inaccessible environments. Chief executive Alexis Rovner, herself a post-doctoral fellow at the Wyss Institute, and chief operating officer Ryan Gallagher, a former BCG Consultant, are looking to commercialize research from the Institute around accelerating and expanding the ability to produce functionalized proteins and sequence-defined polymers with diverse chemistries. Basically they’ve engineered a new life form that they want to use for novel kinds of bio-manufacturing.

Why we liked it: These geniuses invented a new life form.

CB Therapeutics

Sher Butt, a former lab directory at Steep Hill, saw that cannabinoids were as close to a miracle cure for pain, epilepsy and other chronic conditions as medicine was going to get. But plant-based cannabinoids were costly and produced inconsistent results. Alongside Jacob Vogan, Butt realized that biosynthesizing cannabinoids would reduce production costs by a factor of 10 and boost production 24 times current yields. With a deep experience commercializing drugs for Novartis and as the founder of the cannabis testing company SB Labs, Butt and his technical co-founder are uniquely positioned to bring this new therapy to market.

Why we liked it: Using manufacturing processes to make industrial quantities of what looks like nature’s best painkiller at scale is not a bad idea.

RevenueCat

RevenueCat helps developers manage their in-app subscriptions. It offers an API that developers can use to support in-app subscriptions on iOS and Android, which means they don’t have to worry about all the nuances, bugs and updates on each platform.

The API also allows developers to bring all the data about their subscription business together in one place. It might be on to something, though it isn’t clear how big that something is quite yet. The nine-month-old company says it’s currently seeing $350,000 in transaction volume every month; it’s making some undisclosed percentage of money off that amount.

Ajaib

Indonesia is a country in transition, with a growing class of individuals with assets to invest yet who, financially, don’t meet the bar set by many wealth managers. Enter Ajaib, a newly minted startup with the very bold ambition of becoming the “Ant Financial of wealth management for Indonesia.” Why the comparison? Because China was in the same boat not long ago — a country whose middle class had little access to wealth management advice. With the founding of Ant Financial nearly four years ago, that changed. In fact, Ant now boasts more than 400 million users.

China is home to nearly 1.4 billion, compared with Indonesia, whose population of 261 million is tiny in comparison. Still, if its plans work out to charge 1.4 percent for every dollar managed, with an estimated $370 billion in savings in the country to chase after, it could be facing a meaningful opportunity in its backyard if it gains some momentum.

Why we liked it: If Ajaib’s wealth management plans (to charge 1.4 percent for every dollar it manages) work out — and with a total market of $370 billion in savings in Indonesia — the company could be facing a meaningful opportunity in its backyard.

Grin

The scooter craze is hitting Latin America and Grin is greasing the wheels. The Mexico City-based company was launched by co-founder Sergio Romo after he and his partner realized they weren’t going to be able to get a cut of the big “birds” on the scooter block in the U.S. (as Axios reported). Romo and his co-founder have already lined up a slew of investors for what may be the hottest new deal in Latin America. Backers include Sinai Ventures, Liquid2 Ventures, 500 Startups, Monashees and Base10 Partners.

Why we liked it: Scooters are so 2018. But there’s a lot of money to be made in mobility, and as the challenge from Bird and Lime to Uber and Lyft in hyperlocal transit has revealed, there’s no dominant player that’s taken over the market… yet.

Emojer

Creating animated emojis made from real photos, Emojer just might be the most fun you can have with a camera. The company’s software uses deep learning algorithms to detect body parts and guides users in creating their own avatars with just a simple photo take from a mobile phone. It’s replacing deep Photoshop expertise and animation skills with a super simple interface. The avatars look very similar to Elf Yourself, a popular site that let you paste your friends’ faces on dancing Christmas elves goes viral every year at Christmastime. Founders have PhDs in machine learning and computer vision.

Why we liked it: As the company’s chief executive said, Snap was for sexting, and Facebook was hot or not, so who says the next big consumer platform couldn’t be the Trojan horse of easily generated selfiemojis (akin to Elf Yourself)?

Osh’s Affordable Pharmaceuticals

Osh’s Affordable Pharmaceuticals is a public benefit corporation connecting doctors and patients with sources of low-cost, compounded pharmaceuticals. The company is looking to decrease barriers to entry for drugs for rare diseases. Three weeks ago the company introduced a drug to treat Wilson’s Disease. There was no access to the drug that treats the disease before in Brazil, India or Canada. It slashes the cost of drugs from $30,000 a month to $120 per month. The company estimates it has a total addressable market of $17 billion. “Generic drug pricing is a crisis, people are dying because they can’t get access to the medicine they need,” says chief executive Alex Oshmyansky. Osh’s might have a solution.

Why we liked it: Selling lower-cost medications for rare diseases in countries that previously hadn’t had access to them is a good business that’s good for the world.

Medinas Health

Tackling a $75 billion problem of healthcare waste, Medinas Health is giving hospitals an easy way to resell their used supplies. The company has already raised $1 million for its marketplace to help healthcare organizations buy and sell equipment. With a seed round led by Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s Sound Ventures, and General Catalyst’s Rough Draft Ventures fund, the company is also working to lower costs for cash-strapped rural healthcare centers.

Why we liked it: Finding uses for hospital equipment that’s been lying fallow in corners is a big business. A $75 billion business if Medinas’ estimates are correct. Add helping cut costs for rural medical facilities and Medinas is a business we can get behind.

And Comfort

Plus-size women have limited clothing options even at the largest retailers like Nordstrom and Macy’s. While a majority of American women fall into the plus-size clothing category, 100 million women are constrained to shopping for a very small percentage of options. And Comfort wants to solve the supply problem. To do this, the founders, two former Harvard classmates, are building a direct-to-consumer fashion brand with stylish, minimalist offerings for plus-size women, including tunic shirts and an apron dress. It’s very early days for the brand, but since launching in recent weeks, they’ve seen $25,000 in sales.

Why we liked it: This direct-to-consumer fashion brand is bringing higher quality, better-designed clothing options to a market that’s underserved and growing quickly. What’s not to like?

ShopWith

Influencers of the world are uniting on mobile app, ShopWith, which allows shoppers to browse virtual storefronts and aisles alongside their favorite fashion and beauty creators and YouTubers. Users can see exactly what products those influencers have featured and can buy them without ever leaving the app. It’s a free download and hours of commercially consumptive fun.

It’s like the QVC model, but for GenZ shoppers whose buying habits are influenced by social video content on YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat. The company revealed that one beauty influencer made $10,000 within five hours using the ShopWith platform. The founders are former product managers with experience building social commerce products at Facebook and Amazon.

Why we liked it: The QVC for GenZ not only has a nice ring to it, it’s a recipe for making cash registers hum. A mobile-first, influencer-based shopping company is something that we’d definitely not call an impulse purchase.