accelerator
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Y Combinator to give $10K to 100 grads of its online Startup School
Y Combinator wants to lure more companies into the funnel for its accelerator while democratizing free access to startup knowledge. It’s simultaneously moving up and down market to conquer the acceleration space, with both its recent Series A program for more mature startups and $1 million in grants for high potential founders from its extra-early-stage online course.
Today the entrepreneurship academy announced that the third year of its Startup School program will begin August 27, offering a 10-week set of lectures on how to build, grow and monetize a startup. More than 13,000 companies signed up last year, with 2,800 of the best receiving a YC alumni mentor, and 1,587 completing the program with an online Demo Day. It proved a powerful feeder, leading to 38 being admitted to YC’s core accelerator program that charges 7 percent equity for $120,000 in funding. Those included patent law firm Cognition IP, customer feedback platform Thematic and internet service provider Necto.
Startup School 2017’s participants came from around the world
But this year, YC is going to give 100 high-potential companies that complete the course a $10,000 grant for no equity in return. The cash comes from YC’s own bank account, filled from exits of its portfolio companies over the years and other revenue streams. These prizes could pique the interest of more founders around the world and keep them committed to following through with the self-directed learning. Interested companies can sign up here.
“Useful advice around how to grow products, how to sell, all the mechanics for starting a startup . . . there’s unending demand for that,” says Geoff Ralston, a YC partner and founder of RocketMail that was acquired and became Yahoo Mail. “In some countries it’s the only career path available,” he declares with a bit of the hyperbole Silicon Valley is known for. “In the U.S., it’s become way more mainstream than it ever was years ago.”
The last two years’ Startup School programs have included lectures from WhatsApp’s Jan Koum and Box’s Aaron Levie on how to build a product, Stripe’s Patrick Collison and Pinterest’s Ben Silbermann on hiring and culture, and investors Marc Andreessen and Ron Conway on how to raise money. YC won’t be running the program in partnership with Stanford University like last year, but still hopes to reach as many companies.
Box CEO Aaron Levie gives a Startup School lecture on building product
“Getting the most out of Startup School requires putting a lot in. I watched every lecture, took notes, attended all the office hours, and participated in the online community, and it was all worth it,” said Cognition IP co-founder Bryant Lee. “The learning experience will save you a ton of time down the road.”
Beyond the lectures and shot at the grants, YC will be offering participants more than $50,000 in credits to Amazon Web Services and other enterprise tools, plus discounted payment processing from Stripe. Graduates will also receive an online meeting with a YC partner later in the year to help them prep for applying to the core accelerator. Ralston says YC is already accustomed to vetting thousands of applications, so he’s confident it can sift through the Startup School students to find the gems.
The program effectively creates a vacuum that sucks in startups so YC can start forging a relationship with them. That’s critical, as it needs access to the best companies to make its program profitable since so many early-stage startups are destined to fail or end up generating paltry returns as acqui-hires by bigger corporations.
Startup School founders may be paired with a mentor like YC alum Christian Van Der Henst of Platzi for weekly online office hours
When asked if the “school” might delude some young wantrepreneurs, convincing them to abandon traditional higher learning or safer jobs to launch a company, Ralston countered, saying “I have to reject the idea that knowledge about what it takes to start a startup is weaponized or dangerous to people. I think there are way larger risks in the dynamicism and changes in the wold today than the risks of trying to start a startup or work at a startup and learn an incredible set of skills that are valuable in life or business.” At the very least, having their startup blow up in their face should build character.
“It can be tough for people if and when their startup doesn’t work out,” Ralston concludes. “But it can be tough when you work at a company for 10 years and get fired and don’t know where to go from there.”
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Ocean Solutions Accelerator names its first wave of conservation startups
Early this year the Sustainable Oceans Alliance announced it would be starting its own accelerator with a focus on conservation. The nonprofit has just announced the Ocean Solutions Accelerator’s first wave of startups: a particularly varied and international lineup that’s easy to root for.
You may also remember that the SOA was one of the beneficiaries of the mysterious Pineapple Fund, administered by a mysterious cryptocurrency multimillionaire. No doubt that has helped get the accelerator on its feet in good time.
The startups — which I’m getting to, be patient — will receive an initial investment to cover the cost of relocating to the Bay Area for eight weeks this summer. There they will receive the loving care of the collection of academics, founders, officials and others in or around the Alliance, plus some important “personal development and executive training” intended to keep your company alive long enough to ship a product.
Interestingly, applications were only open to founders 35 years and under, presumably to get that young blood into the conservation game. Here are the five companies selected to take part:
SafetyNet, from London, makes light-emitting devices that attach to fishing nets and can be programmed to attract or discourage certain kinds of fish. This prevents a boat from catching — and subsequently throwing away — thousands of the wrong fish, a huge waste.
CalWave came out of Berkeley a couple of years ago and has been testing and refining its wave-harvesting renewable energy system, and in fact won a big Department of Energy grant just last year. Now presumably the team is looking to go from prototype to product and do some big installs.
Loliware’s edible cups.
Loliware has created seaweed-based straws and cups that are so compostable you can do it yourself — like, in your mouth. The items last for a day in a drink (or with a drink in them) but when you throw it away it’ll totally dissolve in about two months — or you could literally eat it. The New Yorkers were on Shark Tank and I’m guessing they ate one on camera. You can already order them on Amazon and people say they’re actually pretty tasty.
Etac, a Mexican company from Culiacan, has few details on its site, but SOA’s press release says the company “designs and produces functional nanomaterials for energy and environmental applications, such as oil spill and wastewater cleanup.” I believe them.
And because there can’t be an accelerator without a blockchain startup in it, there’s Blockcycle, based in Sydney, which aims to create a marketplace around waste materials that would normally go to the landfill but could also be valuable to recyclers, reusers and so on. (Turns out there was an uptick in blockchain applications after the Pineapple Fund thing.)
All five companies will present their ideas on September 11 at an event (specifically, a gala) timed to coincide with California Governor Jerry Brown’s Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco. And then in October they’ll present again in Bali at the Our Ocean Youth Summit.
“These ocean entrepreneurs are a beacon of hope at a time when new, bold approaches are needed to fast-track innovation and sustain the health of our planet,” said SOA founder and CEO Daniela Fernandez. “By supporting these incredible startups, we are encouraging young people to take ownership of the environmental threats facing their communities, bet against consensus and re-invent existing markets to benefit, instead of harm, our climate, and ocean.”
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Joseph Lubin, Amanda Gutterman and Sam Cassatt from Consensys to speak at Disrupt SF
There is perhaps no firm that has done as much to promote the adoption of Ethereum as the dominant cryptocurrency platform for actual product development as Consensys.
Founded by Ethereum Foundation co-founder Joe Lubin, Consensys has emerged as an investor, accelerator, educator and product developer in its own right in little more than three years that it has been in existence.
A Princeton-educated roboticist and autonomous vehicle researcher, Lubin has become a billionaire through his bet on Ethereum as the cryptocurrency that would win the hearts and minds of developers.
And with Consensys he’s built an empire that spans the globe. From its headquarters in Brooklyn, Consensys now has operations, offices and partnerships in Ireland, Israel, and Singapore, and the global expansion shows no sign of slowing down.
That’s why we’re absolutely thrilled to have Joe Lubin, Chief Marketing Officer Amanda Gutterman, and Chief Strategy Officer Sam Cassatt join us on the Disrupt SF stage.
Nothing summarizes Lubin’s ambitions for Ethereum better than this comment on the transformative power that he sees in the cryptocurrency.
“We are all passionately building the decentralized world wide web on which economic, social, and political systems will be built going forward.” A short and sweet overview of the @ConsenSys organism from @EtherealSummit at the @knockdowncenter in May. https://t.co/8DGdiyu29E
— Joseph Lubin (@ethereumJoseph) June 19, 2018
Lubin, Gutterman and Cassatt join a world-class agenda, with speakers like Brian Armstrong, Kirsten Green, Reid Hoffman, and Marty Chavez. Tickets to the show, which runs September 5-7, are available here.
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ExceptionAlly helps parents navigate the special needs education labyrinth
The challenges faced by parents of kids with special needs are always unique, but in one way they are surely much alike: making sure the kids are getting what they need from schools is way harder than it ought to be. ExceptionAlly is a new startup that aims to help parents understand, organize and communicate all the info they need to make sure their child is getting the help they require.
“There are millions of parents out there trying to navigate special education. And parents with special needs should have access to more information than what one school tells them,” said ExceptionAlly co-founder and CEO Rayford Davis. “Those with the means actually hire special education attorneys, but those are few and far between. We thought, how can we democratize this? So we’re trying to do what TurboTax did for CPAs: deliver a large percentage of the value for a small percentage of the cost.”
The company just emerged from Y Combinator and is pursuing full deployment ahead of this school year, with a visibility push during the usual back-to-school dates. It’s still early days, but Davis tells me they already have thousands of users who are taking advantage of the free and paid aspects of the service.
Just because a parent has a kid with dyslexia, or a hearing impairment, or a physical disability, doesn’t mean they suddenly become an expert in what resources are out there for those kids — what’s required by law, what a school offers voluntarily and so on. Achieving fluency in these complex issues is a big ask on top of all the usual parental duties — and on top of that, parents and schools are often put in adversarial positions.
There are resources out there for parents, certainly, but they’re scattered and often require a great deal of effort on the parents’ part. So the first goal of the service is to educate and structure the parents’ information on the systems they’re dealing with.
Based on information provided by the parent, such as their kid’s conditions or needs, and other information like school district, state and so on, the platform assists the parent in understanding both the condition itself, what they can expect from a school and what their rights are. It could be something as simple as moving a kid to the front row of a classroom to knowing how frequently the school is required to share reports on that kid’s progress.
Parents rarely know the range of accommodations a school can offer, Davis said, and even the schools themselves might not know or properly explain what they can or must provide if asked.
For instance, an IEP, or individual education plan, and yearly goals are required for every student with special needs, along with meetings and progress reports. These are often skipped or, if not, done in a rote way that isn’t personalized.
Davis said that by helping parents collaborate with the school and teacher on IEPs and other facets of the process, they accomplish several things. First, the parent feels more confident and involved in their kid’s education, having brought something to the table. Second, less pressure is put on overworked teachers to produce these things in addition to everything else they have to do. And third, it either allows or compels schools to provide all the resources they have available.
Naturally, this whole process produces reams of documents: evaluations, draft plans, lesson lists, observations, reports and so on. “If you talk to any parent of a child with special needs, they’ll tell you how they have file cabinets full of paperwork,” Davis said.
ExceptionAlly will let you scan or send it all these docs, which it helps you organize into the various categories and find again should you need them. A search feature based on OCR processing of the text is in development and should be in place for the latter half of the coming school year, which Davis pointed out is really when it starts being necessary.
That, he said, is when parents need to keep schools accountable. Being informed both on the kid’s progress and what the school is supposed to be doing lets the resulting process be collaborative rather than combative. But if the latter comes to pass, the platform has resources for parents to deploy to make sure the schools don’t dominate the power equation.
“If things progress that way, there’s a ‘take action toolkit’ to develop communications with the school,” Davis said. Ideally you don’t want to be the parent threatening legal action or calling the principal at home. A timely reminder of what was agreed upon and a nudge to keep things on track keeps it positive. “It’s sort of a reminder that we should all be on ‘team kid,’ if you will,” he added.
Schools, unfortunately, have not shown themselves to be highly willing to collaborate.
“We spent about six months talking to over a hundred schools and districts. What we found was not a lot of energy to provide parents with any more information than what the school was already providing,” Davis explained.
The sad truth here is that many schools are already neck-deep in administrative woes, the teachers are overworked and have new responsibilities every year and the idea of volunteering for new ones doesn’t strike even the most well-intentioned schools as attractive. So instead, ExceptionAlly has focused on going directly to parents, who, confidently and well-armed, can take their case to the school on their own.
“Listen, we’re not getting ready to solve all of education today with our solution. We’re going to find that one mom who says, ‘I know there’s more out there, can someone help me find it?’ Yes, we’re going to help you do that,” he said. “Could that put pressure on the system? As long as it does it legally and lawfully, I am perfectly okay with advocating for a child and parents’ legal rights and putting pressure on the system to give them what they by law deserve.”
After the official launch ahead of this school year, the company plans to continue adding features. Rich text search is among them, and deeper understanding of the documents could both help automate storage and retrieval and also lead to new insights. At some point there will also be an optional program to submit a child’s information (anonymously, of course) to help create a database of what accommodations in which places and cases led to what outcomes — essentially aggregating information direct from the source.
ExceptionAlly has some free content to peruse if you’re curious whether it might be helpful for you or someone you know, and there are a variety of paid options should it seem like a good fit.
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Meet the speakers at The Europas, and get your ticket free (July 3, London)
Excited to announce that this year’s The Europas Unconference & Awards is shaping up! Our half day Unconference kicks off on 3 July, 2018 at The Brewery in the heart of London’s “Tech City” area, followed by our startup awards dinner and fantastic party and celebration of European startups!
The event is run in partnership with TechCrunch, the official media partner. Attendees, nominees and winners will get deep discounts to TechCrunch Disrupt in Berlin, later this year.
The Europas Awards are based on voting by expert judges and the industry itself. But key to the daytime is all the speakers and invited guests. There’s no “off-limits speaker room” at The Europas, so attendees can mingle easily with VIPs and speakers.
What exactly is an Unconference? We’re dispensing with the lectures and going straight to the deep-dives, where you’ll get a front row seat with Europe’s leading investors, founders and thought leaders to discuss and debate the most urgent issues, challenges and opportunities. Up close and personal! And, crucially, a few feet away from handing over a business card. The Unconference is focused into zones including AI, Fintech, Mobility, Startups, Society, and Enterprise and Crypto / Blockchain.
We’ve confirmed 10 new speakers including:
Eileen Burbidge, Passion Capital
Carlos Eduardo Espinal, Seedcamp
Richard Muirhead, Fabric Ventures
Sitar Teli, Connect Ventures
Nancy Fechnay, Blockchain Technologist + Angel
George McDonaugh, KR1
Candice Lo, Blossom Capital
Scott Sage, Crane Venture Partners
Andrei Brasoveanu, Accel
Tina Baker, Jag Shaw Baker
How To Get Your Ticket For FREE
We’d love for you to ask your friends to join us at The Europas – and we’ve got a special way to thank you for sharing.
Your friend will enjoy a 15% discount off the price of their ticket with your code, and you’ll get 15% off the price of YOUR ticket.
That’s right, we will refund you 15% off the cost of your ticket automatically when your friend purchases a Europas ticket.
So you can grab tickets here.
Vote for your Favourite Startups
Public Voting is still humming along. Please remember to vote for your favourite startups!
Awards by category:
Hottest Media/Entertainment Startup
Hottest E-commerce/Retail Startup
Hottest Marketing/AdTech Startup
Hottest Enterprise, SaaS or B2B Startup
Hottest Platform Economy / Marketplace
Hottest Cyber Security Startup
Hottest Internet of Things Startup
Fastest Rising Startup Of The Year
Hottest GreenTech Startup of The Year
Best Angel/Seed Investor of the Year
Hottest VC Investor of the Year
Hottest Blockchain/Crypto Startup Founder(s)
Hottest Blockchain Protocol Project
Hottest Corporate Blockchain Project
Hottest Blockchain ICO (Europe)
Hottest Financial Crypto Project
Hottest Blockchain for Good Project
Hottest Blockchain Identity Project
Hall Of Fame Award – Awarded to a long-term player in Europe
The Europas Grand Prix Award (to be decided from winners)
The Awards celebrates the most forward thinking and innovative tech & blockchain startups across over some 30+ categories.
Startups can apply for an award or be nominated by anyone, including our judges. It is free to enter or be nominated.
What is The Europas?
Instead of thousands and thousands of people, think of a great summer event with 1,000 of the most interesting and useful people in the industry, including key investors and leading entrepreneurs.
• No secret VIP rooms, which means you get to interact with the Speakers
• Key Founders and investors speaking; featured attendees invited to just network
• Expert speeches, discussions, and Q&A directly from the main stage
• Intimate “breakout” sessions with key players on vertical topics
• The opportunity to meet almost everyone in those small groups, super-charging your networking
• Journalists from major tech titles, newspapers and business broadcasters
• A parallel Founders-only track geared towards fund-raising and hyper-networking
• A stunning awards dinner and party which honors both the hottest startups and the leading lights in the European startup scene
• All on one day to maximise your time in London. And it’s PROBABLY sunny!
That’s just the beginning. There’s more to come…
Interested in sponsoring the Europas or hosting a table at the awards? Or purchasing a table for 10 or 12 guest or a half table for 5 guests? Get in touch with:
Petra Johansson
Petra@theeuropas.com
Phone: +44 (0) 20 3239 9325
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Meet Alchemist Accelerator’s latest demo day cohort
An IoT-enabled lab for cannabis farmers, a system for catching drones mid-flight and the Internet of Cows are a few of the 17 startups exhibiting today at Alchemist Accelerator’s 18th demo day. The event, which will be streamed live here, focuses on big data and AI startups with an enterprise bent.
The startups are showing their stuff at Juniper’s Aspiration Dome in Sunnyvale, California at 3pm today, but you can catch the whole event online if you want to see just what computers and cows have in common. Here are the startups pitching onstage.
Tarsier – Tarsier has built AI computer vision to detect drones. The founders discovered the need while getting their MBAs at Stanford, after one had completed a PhD in aeronautics. Drones are proliferating. And getting into places they shouldn’t — prisons, R&D centers, public spaces. Securing these spaces today requires antiquated military gear that’s clunky and expensive. Tarsier is all software. And cheap, allowing them to serve markets the others can’t touch.
Lightbox – Retail 3D is sexy — think virtual try-ons, VR immersion, ARKit stores. But creating these experiences means creating 3D models of thousands of products. Today, artists slog through this process, outputting a few models per day. Lightbox wants to eliminate the humans. This duo of recent UPenn and Stanford Computer Science grads claim their approach to 3D scanning is pixel perfect without needing artists. They have booked $40,000 to date and want to digitize all of the world’s products.
Vorga – Cannabis is big business — more than $7 billion in revenue today and growing fast. The crop’s quality — and a farmer’s income — is highly sensitive to a few chemicals in it. Farmers today test the chemical composition of their crops through outsourced labs. Vorga’s bringing the lab in-house to the cannabis farmer via their IoT platform. The CEO has a PhD in chemical physics, and formerly helped the Department of Defense keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists. She’s now helping cannabis farmers get high… revenue.
Neulogic – Neulogic is founded by a duo of Computer Science PhDs that led key parts of Walmart.com product search. They now want to solve two major problems facing the online apparel industry: the need to provide curated inspiration to shoppers and the need to offset rising customer acquisition costs by selling more per order. Their solution combines AI with a fashion knowledge graph to generate outfits on demand.
Intensivate – Life used to be simple. Enterprises would use servers primarily for function-driven applications like billing. Today, servers are all about big data, analytics and insight. Intensivate thinks servers need a new chip upgrade to reflect that change. They are building a new CPU they claim gets 12x the performance for the same cost. Hardware plays like this are hard to pull off, but this might be the team to do it. It includes the former co-founder and CEO of CPU startup QED, which was acquired for $2.3 billion, and a PhD in parallel computation who was on the design team for the Alpha CPU from DEC.
Integry – SaaS companies put a lot of effort into building out integrations. Integry provides app creators their own integrations marketplace with pre-boarded partners so they can have apps working with theirs from the get go. The vision is to enable app creators to mimic their own Slack app directory without spending the years or the millions. Because these integrations sit inside their app, Integry claims setup rates are significantly better and churn is reduced by as much as 40 percent.
Cattle Care – AI video analytics applied to cows! Cattle Care wants to increase dairy farmers’ revenue by more than $1 million per year and make cows healthier at the same time. The product identifies cows in the barn by their unique black and white patterns. Algorithms collect parameters such as walking distance, interactions with other cows, feeding patterns and other variables to detect diseases early. Then the system sends alerts to farm employees when they need to take action, and confirms the problem has been solved afterwards.
VadR – VR/AR is grappling with a lack of engaging content. VadR thinks the cause is a broken feedback loop of analytics to the creators. This trio of IIT-Delhi engineers has built machine learning algorithms that get smarter over time and deliver actionable insights on how to modify content to increase engagement.
Tika – This duo of ex-Googlers wants to help engineering managers manage their teams better. Managers use Tika as an AI-powered assistant over Slack to facilitate personalized conversations with engineering teams. The goal is to quickly uncover and resolve employee engagement issues, and prevent talent churn.
GridRaster – GridRaster wants to bring AR/VR to mobile devices. The problem? AR/VR is compute-intensive. Latency, bandwidth and poor load balancing kill AR/VR on mobile networks. The solution? For this trio of systems engineers from Broadcom, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, it’s about starting with enterprise use cases and building edge clouds to offload the work. They have 12 patents.
AitoeLabs – Despite the buzz around AI video analytics for security, AitoeLabs claims solutions today are plagued with hundreds of thousands of false alarms, requiring lots of human involvement. The engineering trio founding team combines a secret sauce of contextual data with their own deep models to solve this problem. They claim a 6x reduction in human monitoring needs with their tech. They’re at $240,000 ARR with $1 million of LOIs.
Ubiquios – Companies building wireless IoT devices waste more than $1.8 billion because of inadequate embedded software options making products late to market and exposing them to security and interoperability issues. The Ubiquios wireless stack wants to simplify the development of wireless IoT devices. The company claims their stack results in up to 90 percent lower cost and up to 50 percent faster time to market. Qualcomm is a partner.
4me, Inc. – 4me helps companies organize and track their IT outsourcing projects. They have 16 employees, 92 customers and generate several million in revenue annually. Storm Ventures led a $1.65 million investment into the company.
TorchFi – You know the pop-up screen you see when you log into a Wi-Fi hotspot? TorchFi thinks it’s a digital gold mine in the waiting. Their goal is to convert that into a sales channel for hotspot owners. Their first product is a digital menu that transforms the login screen into a food ordering screen for hotels and restaurants. Cisco has selected them as one of 20 apps to be distributed on their Meraki hotspots.
Cogitai – This team of 16 PhDs wants to usher in a more powerful type of AI called continual learning. The founders are the fathers of the field — and include professors in computer science from UT Austin and U Michigan. Unlike what we commonly think of as AI, Cogitai’s AI is built to acquire new skills and knowledge from experience, much like a child does. They have closed $2 million in bookings this year, and have $5 million in funding.
LoadTap – On-demand trucking apps are in vogue. LoadTap explicitly calls out that it is not one. This team, which includes an Apple software architect and founder with a family background in trucking, is an enterprise SaaS-only solution for shippers who prefer to work with their pre-vetted trucking companies in a closed loop. LoadTap automates matching between the shippers and trucking companies using AI and predictive analytics. They’re at $90,000 ARR and growing revenue 50 percent month over month.
Ondaka – Ondaka has built a VR-like 3D platform to render industrial information visually, starting with the oil and gas industry. For these industrial customers, the platform provides a better way to understand real-time IoT data, operational and job site safety issues and how reliable their systems are. The product launched two months ago, they have closed three customers already and are projecting ARR in the six figures. They have raised $350,000 in funding.
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Meet 11 new startups launching out of the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator
Today, 11 new companies launch out of the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator based in NYC. This is the 14th cohort of startups to launch out of ERA, and each company has received $100,000 in seed funding from the accelerator.
These startups span a wide variety of industries, from hospitality to new retail to healthcare. So without any further ado, here are the 11 companies launching out of ERA:
Butler
Butler wants to handle room service and amenities for hotels, partnering with hotels to provide room service, catering and other food-based amenities from Butler’s various hubs across the city. Using SMS as a means of communication with guests, Butler can serve a larger number of hotels. Right now, Butler serves 5,000 rooms in Manhattan.
Choosy
Leveraging machine learning algorithms that scour social media, Choosy quickly whips up fashion designs, sends them to China for manufacturing and offers flash-fashion items via Instagram. As brands like H&M and Top Shop continue to speed up their operations and offerings, Choosy looks to use tech to keep up the pace.
Flume Health
Flume Health works with self-insured employers and healthcare providers to ensure that employees are best utilizing their healthcare benefits. The company says that 78 percent of employees don’t understand how their benefits program works, costing companies up to 26 percent more for healthcare. Flume Health uses concierges to connect employees with the best healthcare at the lowest price based on their benefits plan, reducing healthcare costs by 20 percent to 60 percent.
HealNow
HealNow wants to bridge the gap between healthcare professionals, pharmacies and patients, offering an ordering and payments platform for pharmacies. Patients can pay, schedule deliveries and enter medical information online to receive their prescription or equipment, while doctors and hospitals can offer on-demand delivery of the prescriptions they write.
Myro
Deodorant stops being optional around the age of 13, but many deodorants are made with potentially harmful chemicals and toxins. Myro offers an all-natural formula in a refillable container, letting users feel good about what they’re putting on their body as well as reducing plastic waste. Plus, they smell good. Myro launches later this summer.
Orcadex
Orcadex is a business intelligence platform focused on the blockchain and cryptocurrency verticals, collecting data via machine learning and natural language processing to offer analysis and insights to customers. The platform helps professionals create models and identify trends as the blockchain space continues to rapidly evolve. Orcadex launches to a closed group of institutional investors in June.
Spin Analytics
Spin Analytics is a fintech company focused on offering credit risk modeling for financial institutions. The company works with banks to offer actionable insights for meeting regulatory compliance and reporting requirements, reducing the time and cost of maintaining compliance.
Spryfit
Spryfit is where HQ meets the gym. Users connect their fitness trackers and try to achieve their fitness goals with the hopes of winning a cash prize. The idea is to use underutilized health data from wearables and smartphones to motivate users to get fit for the cash prize. The company currently has 50,000 users.
StellarEmploy
Hourly workers like waiters tend to churn in and out of positions often. StellarEmploy uses deep learning algorithms to match employee performance to job fundamentals, letting companies recruit hourly workers that will enjoy the job, do a great job, and stay put. Some of StellarEmploy’s customers include Home Chef and IBEX Global.
Welnys
Big companies understand that healthy employees are both more effective and more cost efficient, which is why many companies have implemented a wellness program for their workers. But Welnys wants to do the heavy lifting for those companies, offering a marketplace for workplace wellness vendors such as yoga and meditation instructors, nutritionists and more.
Young Alfred
Young Alfred wants to make buying home insurance as simple as possible. The platform lets users identify their needs, while a machine learning algorithm identifies customer risk and makes custom recommendations for home insurance that fit the users needs. Young Alfred has relationships with Progressive and Hippo, and users can check-out online direct from the Young Alfred website.
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EarthNow promises real-time views of the whole planet from a new satellite constellation
A new space imaging startup called EarthNow aims to provide not just pictures of the planet on demand, but real-time video anywhere a client desires. Its ambition is matched only by its pedigree: Bill Gates, Intellectual Ventures, Airbus, SoftBank and OneWeb founder Greg Wyler are all backing the play.
Its promise is a constellation of satellites that will provide video of anywhere on Earth with latency of about a second. You won’t have to wait for a satellite to come into range, or worry about leaving range; at least one will be able to view any area at any given time, so they can pass off the monitoring task to the next satellite over if necessary.
Initially aimed at “high value enterprise and government customers,” EarthNow lists things like storm monitoring, illegal fishing vessels (or even pirates), forest fires, whale tracking, watching conflicts in real time and more. Space imaging is turning into quite a crowded field — if all these constellations actually launch, anyway.
The company is in the earliest stages right now, having just been spun out from years of work by founder and CEO Russell Hannigan at Intellectual Ventures under the Invention Science Fund. Early enough, in fact, that there’s no real timeline for prototyping or testing. But it’s not just pie in the sky.
Wyler’s OneWeb connection means EarthNow will be built on a massively upgraded version of that company’s satellite platform. Details are few and far between, but the press release promises that “Each satellite is equipped with an unprecedented amount of onboard processing power, including more CPU cores than all other commercial satellites combined.”
Presumably a large portion of that will be video processing and compression hardware, since they’ll want to minimize bandwidth and latency but don’t want to skimp on quality. Efficiency is important, too; satellites have extremely limited power, so running multiple off-the-shelf GPUs with standard compression methods probably isn’t a good idea. Real-time, continuous video from orbit (as opposed to near-real-time stills or clips) is as much a software problem as it is hardware.
Machine learning also figures in, of course: the company plans to do onboard analysis of the imagery, though to what extent isn’t clear. It really makes more sense to me to do this on the ground, but perhaps a first pass by the satellite’s hardware will help move things along.
Airbus will do its part by actually producing the satellites, in Toulouse and Florida. The release doesn’t say how many will be built, but full (and presumably redundant) Earth coverage means dozens at the least. But if they’re mass-manufactured standard goods, that should keep the price down, relatively speaking anyway.
No word on the actual amount raised by the company in January, but with the stature of the investors and the high costs involved in the industry, I can’t imagine it’s less than a few tens of millions.
Hannigan himself calls EarthNow “ambitious and unprecedented,” which could be taken as an admission of great risk, but it’s clear that the company has powerful partners and plenty of expertise; Intellectual Ventures doesn’t tend to spin something off unless it’s got something special going. Expect more specifics as the company grows, but I doubt we’ll see anything more than renders for a year or so.
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Here’s what you’ll learn at Atrium’s fundraising workshop
Justin Kan is qualified to teach you how to pitch, and isn’t shy about it. Having raised about $90 million for a few companies and sold his startup Twitch to Amazon for almost a billion dollars, not being shy is actually part of what Kan teaches. His legal services startup Atrium today officially launches Atrium Scale, its free Series A fundraising workshop that’s helped eight startups raise $100 million since it started in beta five months ago. The two-day in-person seminar includes pitch coaching, intros to investors and mentors, follow-up online pitch deck help, legal advice, Amazon and Google Cloud credits and tax and accounting services.
I went through Atrium Scale myself, pretending I was the founder of a hypothetical startup that replaces your phone’s contacts app. While the lectures were full of valuable tips, you can get a lot of those from instructional blog posts by Kan and other VCs. But the small group Q&A and coaching with entrepreneurs who’d successfully raised did a remarkable job of improving attendees’ pitches and the esoteric song-and-dance necessary to get investors to part with their cash.
Atrium co-founder Justin Kan
Here’s a breakdown of how Atrium Scale works:
- When: Once per quarter over a Saturday and Sunday
- Where: Atrium’s offices in downtown San Francisco
- How much: Free, but Atrium hopes you’ll end up using its legal services
- Who: Startups planning to raise their Series A in the next six months, the sooner the better, who fly themselves in from all over the world
- Who gets in: Atrium selects the 10 percent of applicants most ready for venture funding. Applications can be submitted here
- Investors involved to date: Sequoia, General Catalyst, Accel, Venrock, Social Capital, Signia, KPCB, Lightspeed
- Mentors: Justin Kan (Atrium, Twitch), Holly Liu (Kabam, Y Combinator), James Richards (Teleborder, TriNet), Andrew Trader (Zynga), Ashu Desai (Make School)
What Atrium Scale teaches
The Atrium Scale method revolves around the concepts of how to pitch and when. While there are plenty of ways to show off a business, Kan recommends a calculated approach to storytelling. “When should you raise? When you can convince investors to give you money and when cash is the constraint to scaling your business,” Kan said to kick off our program.
The song
“It all starts with a narrative — 99 percent is the work of building the business, but an important 1 percent is convincing people,” Kan relays.
First, explain how the world is a certain way. Describe the problem, why it’s big and who in the market would pay for a solution. Demonstrate that you’re an expert.
Second, explain how the world is changed by your solution to the problem. Frame what’s possible for businesses or consumers once they have your product.
Third, explain how the world is new now that your solution exists. Provide metrics on traction and mechanisms for growth, and show why your team is uniquely equipped to succeed. Identify adjacent markets your product will conquer.
Unlike the frothy days of yore, “people are no longer willing to lose money on a per-unit basis,” says Kan. VCs will demand to understand your unit economics and scalable customer acquisition strategy that turns cash invested into more cash earned.
Perhaps the most important part of the pitch is practice, though. Pitch to fellow founders, investors or angels, but explicitly tell them you want feedback, not money. Running through the pitch over and over boosts confidence, A/B tests narratives and unearths questions. Know your numbers by heart so you always seem sure of where the business is heading, and define a personal pitching style that plays to your personality strengths.
Kan says it all comes down to making investors see your vision for how you’re going to become a massive company.
Atrium Scale helps here by letting you pitch in groups, as well as one-on-one with mentors. Simply being surrounded by people all trying to improve creates an atmosphere conducive to progress rather than getting defensive about criticism. There could be better homework or takeaway materials to help startups continue to improve after the workshop ended, but I heard entrepreneurs work out kinks and trim off tangents that could have derailed their pitch during a real meeting.
The dance
Where Atrium Scale shined brightest was digging into the cadence of the fundraising process. Anyone can work out a decent pitch in their garage, but it takes special know-how to navigate turning that pitch into money in the bank. This is the kind of in-group knowledge that often makes it tough for outsiders to break into Silicon Valley.
You should pitch wide, planning to talk to at least 10 to 20 investors, but knowing it can take 100 ‘nos’ to get a ‘yes.’ Pick investors not based on their firm’s name recognition but their expertise and track record in your industry. Contact investors at least three to four weeks out and schedule meetings in as rapid succession as possible. The goal is to be able to get term sheets back at the same time so you can play firms off each other and pick the best deal.
You’ll start with single partner meetings. You’ll hear back within 24 to 48 hours if they go well, and you can assume they didn’t if you don’t hear back soon. Those that like you will set up multi-partner meetings, and you should ask them what their colleagues will want to know. If that goes well you’ll be brought in for an exhaustive full-partnership pitch where they’ll try to poke holes in your business. Lots of questions means lots of interest, while few questions and VCs bored on their phones means you’re toast.
If the partnership believes in you, you’ll quickly receive a term sheet, but you don’t have to sign it right away. Since you can’t fire your investors, be sure to call their references so you’re sure which you want to work with forever. This also gives you time to go back to other firms you’ve pitched. Don’t say who it’s from, but use your existing term sheet as leverage to get them to give you one or one with a better deal.
Aim for a lead investor that will put in at least 25 percent of the round volume and then fill it out with other firms, strategics and angels. Know that the median delay for investor due diligence is 41 days, so make sure you have enough runway to wait that long after you complete the pitch process. The fundraise should last you 12 to 18 months, but be careful because your spending will expand to take up what’s in the bank. Be ready by then to show you’ve hit new milestones that de-risk your business.
The program also reviewed more advanced topics like raising money from strategic investors, equity versus SAFE financing, crooked deal terms like ratchets and liquidation preferences and how to manage your board. That one-size-fits all info is certainly helpful, but thanks to the small class size, Atrium Scale’s Q&As let founders get answers to industry-specific questions and their own edge cases.
There are plenty of people looking to help startups in Silicon Valley, but few are giving away this high-quality of education for free. Accelerators can charge 7 percent of equity and advisors can charge a percentage point or two. That can be worth a lot if the startup does well. Consultants want cash that pre-A startups rarely have. But Atrium is merely looking for lead generation and it needs them to raise money to be able to afford its legal services. That aligns the workshop well with the outcomes for the companies.
If you have a dumb business idea, no amount of turd polishing will get you legitimate funding. But for startups on to something that just need help communicating, Atrium Scale could be a quick and cheap way to boost their chances of getting picked from the crowd.
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DFS Lab is helping the developing world bootstrap itself with fintech
Entrepreneurs have it rough in Africa, India, Pakistan — places where VC cash doesn’t fall from the sky and necessary infrastructure like reliable banking and broadband can be hard to come by. But companies grow and thrive nevertheless in these rugged environments, and DFS Lab is an incubator focused on connecting them with the resources they need to go global.
The company was founded, and funded, on the back of a $4.8 million grant from the Gates Foundation, which of course is deeply concerned with tech-based solutions for well-being all over the world. Its name, Digital Financial Services Lab, indicates its area of focus: fintech. And anyone can tell you that sub-Saharan Africa is one of the most interesting places in the world for that.
This week DFS Lab is announcing a handful of new investments — modest ones on the scale companies are used to in Silicon Valley, but the money is only a small part of the equation. Investment comes at the end of a longer process, the most valuable of which may be the week-long sprint DFS Lab does on the ground, helping solidify ideas into products, or niche products into products at scale.
The relative lack of VCs and angel investors puts early-stage companies at risk and can discourage the most motivated entrepreneur, so the program is aimed at getting them over the hump and connected to a network of peers.
The latest round puts a total of $200,000 into four startups, each touching on a different aspect of a region or vertical’s financial needs. All, however, are largely driven by the massive growth of mobile money in Africa over the last decade and the more recent, ongoing transition to modern smartphones and the app/data landscape familiar to the U.S. and Europe.
- Nala aims to move p2p payments away from the antiquated but widely used USSD system (more on this later) to a Venmo-like app interface that integrates multiple native mobile currencies like M-Pesa into a single tool.
- Cherehani connects female entrepreneurs with financial resources; the idea is to provide both much-needed credit and financial literacy at as early an age as possible. (They have a chatbot too, naturally.)
- Nobuntu is a platform through which South Africans can open and contribute to pension plans via mobile money, simply and with low overhead costs.
The fourth company is choosing to remain in stealth mode for now, but you see the general theme here.
For one reason or another there are major gaps in everyday services that many of us take for granted — the ability to prove one’s identity, for example, is critical but commonly absent. I talked with Paul Damalie, founder of a DFS-funded company called Inclusive that helps address that particular shortcoming.
Basic ID verification can be difficult when you remove many of the things we take for granted. So when, for example, someone wanted to get a loan, a savings account, or some other basic financial service, “Originally you’d have to literally walk into the bank to do it,” Damalie said. Needless to say that isn’t always convenient, and banks as well as users want better options.
“We’ve been collecting existing databases and building a layer of rich access around it,” he continued. “Now we can use facial recognition to check those details. Once you have the ID, you need to check it with the government records” — which Inclusive also does. A range of other data creates a confidence score in the person’s identity, helping avoid identity fraud.
Another opportunity arises not from these gaps but from the unique ways in which the African ecosystem has evolved. USSD, which I mentioned before, is probably unknown to many of our readers — it certainly was to me. But it’s become a standard tool used regularly by millions for important tasks in Africa; if you want to work in that market, you have to deal with USSD one way or another.
The problem is that, as you might guess from Nala trying to deprecate it, USSD is a technology dating back to the ’90s, a text-based interface that’s rudimentary but, much like SMS, universally accepted and intelligible. The importance of cross-platform compatibility in mobile markets as fragmented as these can’t be overstated.
So bridging the gap between USSD and a “traditional” (as we might call it) payment app is a unique opportunity, and one a company called Hover (also in the DFS Lab portfolio) is addressing. Its tech acts as a sort of translation layer between USSD and smartphone app interfaces, allowing for modern app design but also deep back-compatibility. It’s an opportunity specific to this time and this area of the world, but nevertheless one that may end up touching millions.
And from the narrowness of its vision that DFS Lab derives its effectiveness.
“They’re one of the most specialized accelerators in the world,” said Damalie. “It goes beyond just funding — it involves having the right kind of network: access to partners, data, sources across the continent. They had context-relevant fellows, people who had very specific challenges.”
“The grant was useful and let us build a proof of concept, and of course the Gates Foundation gives us credibility. But they were taking bets on us as individuals.”
Although DFS Lab has heretofore been funded by the Gates infusion, that well will run dry soon. Jake Kendall, DFS Lab’s executive director, indicated that the plan is to move towards a more traditional investor fund. They already focus on profitability and the potential for growth to the continental stage or beyond; this isn’t a charity but tactical investment in such a way that social good is a necessary byproduct.
“The best way to have a global impact is to be self-sustaining,” he said.
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