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Here are the 19 companies presenting at Alchemist Accelerator Demo Day XXV today
When Alchemist Accelerator shifted its Demo Day to virtual earlier this year, Alchemist director and founder Ravi Belani told me it was a move he expected the team to stick with for some time. Nearly half a year later it’s time for another Demo Day — and sure enough, with the pandemic still ongoing, it’s another virtual one.
As an enterprise accelerator, Alchemist focuses primarily on seed-stage companies that make their money from other companies rather than those that sell to consumers. This latest cohort (the accelerator’s 25th) saw nearly 20 companies go through the program, with focuses ranging from physical therapy devices to an AI “coach” for sales reps to productivity tools for software developers.
This afternoon the accelerator is also announcing that Volvo (via the Volvo Cars Tech Fund) has joined Alchemist as an investor. While the two companies did not specify how much Volvo was investing, previous similar partnerships saw companies like GE and Juniper Networks invest around $2 million-$3 million.
Care to see the companies make their debut to the world? Alchemist will be streaming its Demo Day on YouTube, with programming set to begin at 2 p.m. pacific.
Don’t have time to watch the whole thing? Here’s an alphabetized list of all the companies scheduled to present, along with some notes about what each is working on:
Image Credits: Anda Technologies
Anda Technologies: A simplified smartwatch with built-in GPS, calling and a quick symbol-based messaging system, meant to help parents and caretakers stay in touch in situations where a full smartphone might be too much. They initially focused on Latin America, and are now expanding support to U.S. and Europe.
Botco.ai: A “conversational marketing platform” — in other words, marketing chatbots meant to increase sales and conversions. Potential customers can chat with these bots over SMS or messaging apps, and their AI will use its growing understanding of what it knows about your business to respond.
BreachRX: A platform meant to help streamline your company’s response when a security breach happens. They provide response playbooks, help assign tasks to the correct team members and help capture records of how and when your company took action.
ClearQuote: Computer vision-based vehicle inspections. The company says it can scan an entire vehicle for damage using a smartphone camera in around 60 seconds, calculating cost of repair on the fly. Focusing on end-of-lease inspections, used car inspections and rental car return inspections first.
Copilot: An AI-powered “coach” for sales reps. As reps make phone/video calls, Copilot analyzes the conversation and generates “cue cards” with relevant information.
Evolution Devices: A wearable electrical stimulation device meant to help in the rehabilitation process for those with lower limb weaknesses (including stroke survivors or individuals with multiple sclerosis). The device adapts to each user’s own walking pattern, and helps with remote care by reporting data (such as step counts) back to the patient’s therapist.
Faucetworks: An “artificial neurologist,” meant to help more quickly identify neurological emergencies while a patient is in an ambulance en route to a hospital, or at hospitals where no neurologist is on site. Their hardware system asks patients a series of questions, then walks them through a physical exam.
HR Messenger: An HR/onboarding chatbot built to work over WhatsApp/Facebook Messenger, helping to automate things like pre-screening questions, interview scheduling and referral requests. The company says it’s working with clients including KFC and H&M.
Hopthru: Data analysis platform for public transit agencies. Hooks into the data these agencies already collect, cleans it up, then pipes it into a dashboard to help these transit agencies find ways to improve their routes and ridership.
Image Credits: Hubly Surgical
Hubly Surgical: Building a smarter drill for neurosurgeons performing “skull puncture” operations. The company says that many surgeons still use basic, standard (hand-cranked!) drills, which can lead to high complication rates. Hubly’s drill helps to precisely angle the drill and is built to prevent the surgeon from drilling too deep. Expects to see FDA clearance in 2021, and launch in U.S. hospitals in 2022.
HyPoint: Working on high-power, high-density hydrogen fuel cell systems for aviation, meant to dramatically reduce CO2 emissions from air transportation.
Mobiz: A platform for sending personalized marketing messages to your established customer base via SMS, building “personalized micro-sites” for each user based on the brand’s existing data. The company says it’s already working with companies like Burger King and Woolworth, and is currently seeing $6 million in ARR.
Nano Diamond Battery: NDB is aiming to build a self-charging, sustainable battery. This one is perhaps a bit too complex to capture in a sentence or two, so see our previous coverage of NDB here.
Node App: A marketplace for connecting brands with influencers. Node helps to verify each influencer’s audience, then connects brands with these influencers with pre-negotiated deal terms.
Rectify: A tool meant to automatically detect and redact sensitive information when sharing documents outside of an organization. Focusing on the insurance market at first. Founder Melissa Unsell-Smith says the Rectify founding team previously worked together for 15 years in AT&T’s corporate legal department.
RubiLabs Inc: A platform focusing on making on-demand deliveries of medical products (vaccines, medications, etc.) to hospitals and pharmacies in Africa via drones, motorcycles and other dedicated vehicles. The company estimates that it has already saved 7,000+ lives.
Seventh.ai: Pitching itself as “Carta for intellectual property,” Seventh.ai helps founders identify which parts of their business can/should be patented, to better understand what the competition has patented, and to work through the patenting process. The company says it’s currently seeing around $250,000 in ARR. Founder Alex Polyansky says he spent 10 years as a patent examiner at the USPTO.
Tocca: A platform meant to help B2B companies throw branded virtual sales events, providing things like virtual lobbies, stages, breakout rooms and person-to-person networking tools. Integrates into tools like HubSpot and Salesforce to make post-event followups more efficient.
Image Credits: Veamly
Veamly: A “unified inbox” feed for developers that brings threads and messages from Slack, GitHub and Jira into one view, as well as a unified search that can dig in across these tools. Founder Emna Ghariani says the company’s “proprietary prioritization engine” helps to sort tasks and tickets by importance, and to analyze the time they’re spending in each tool throughout the week.
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Delightree raises $3M to help franchise business owners simplify their operations
Owning one brick-and-mortar business seems complicated enough. But running multiple locations? For many owners, that’s a constant juggling act of phone calls, check lists and driving back and forth from store to store. In the middle of a pandemic, it gets all the more complex.
Delightree, a company out of the previous Alchemist Accelerator class, has raised $3 million to build a tool hyper-focused on helping owners of franchise businesses (think hotels, gyms, restaurant chains, etc.) take their operations and workflows digital.
A big part of the idea with Delightree is to move much of what currently happens through pen-and-paper checklists over to smartphones, allowing franchise owners to know what’s going at their locations from afar. They digitize workflows like the daily store opening/closing procedures or maintenance routines, with employees checking boxes on their devices rather than a paper to-do list. If something gets missed along the way, Delightree can automatically ping the owner to let them know before it becomes an issue.
They’ll also help to automate and track things like onboarding new employees and staying prepared for inspections, while giving owners a centralized place to make team-wide announcements or contact employees.
Delightree evolved out of a previous company built by its co-founders, Madhulika Mukherjee and Tushar Mishra. They’d been working on Survaider, a tool that monitored customer feedback across social media, review sites, etc., and turned that feedback into actionable to-do lists.
“When we were piloting it, our customers started saying: ‘can we create our own tasks? Or can I tell something to my employees through this?’ ” Mishra told me. “It was just such an obvious problem, so we started building Delightree.”
Delightree co-founders Tushar Mishra and Madhulika Mukherjee
The team has also been working on a feature they call Delightcomply, which helps stores stay up to date on the latest CDC guidelines for businesses operating through the pandemic, and to automatically share compliance details with potential customers. A business could use Delightcomply to publicly outline the steps it’s taking to keep employees/customers safe, for example, with the listing automatically updated to show the status of each task.
Delightree is currently working directly with each new customer to help them through the initial setup — specifically, to help franchisees take the standard operating procedures they receive directly from the brand owners and turn them into Delightree workflows. They’re still working out their exact pricing model, but say that they charge on a per-location-per-month basis, with pricing varying depending on the size/complexity of the business. They’ve set up a waitlist for anyone interested.
This $3 million seed round was funded by Accel Partners, Emergent Ventures, Brainstorm Ventures, Axilor Ventures and Alchemist. As part of the deal, Emergent partner Anupam Rastogi has joined Delightree’s board of directors.
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RenovAI helps retailers offer automated interior design advice to their customers
Alon Gilady, CEO of RenovAI, told me his startup is trying to solve the problem that many of us face when we’re moving into a new home — we aren’t interior designers, but we can’t afford to hire real designers, either.
Apparently Gilady’s co-founder and vice president of products, Alon Chelben, had this issue himself when he moved into a new apartment and tried to use DIY design applications, only to be disappointed by the “very ugly” results.
“He thought to himself, ‘I cannot design,’ ” Gilady said. “From that idea, we realized that there’s an opportunity here.”
While there are other online design services, Gilady said most of them are focused on creating 3D visualizations, or on connecting customers with human designers.
RenovAI (which is part of the current class of startups at Alchemist Accelerator) can also create visualizations, but its focus is on building AI tools that understand the principles of good design. And while the team started out by thinking of the consumer problem, they decided that the best path to market was by working with retailers.
RenovAI’s products can design an entire space based on a customer’s specifications and taste. There’s also RenovAI Scout, which recommends a specific product based on your taste and current room design; and Complete the Look, which recommends items that complement what you’re already buying.
But what does it mean for an AI to understand good design? Gilady said the team has trained its algorithms on “thousands of different floor plans” to understand the rules of how a room should be laid out, and also broken down design into 16 different “substyles.”
“Our picture recommendation engine goes through the images to understand the relations between the items, the color, the palette, the texture and material,” he said. “It does a statistical analysis to understand how things are matching each other, how to create the design rules of every substyle.”
RenovAI already has pilots with online furniture retailers like Made.com and Mobly. And Gilady said that there’s plenty of opportunity for growth, even during the COVID-19 pandemic, as plenty of people are stuck at home and wanting to make improvements.
“I think more and more retailers and mom-and-pop shops are paying more attention to online,” he said. “[They know] that if they offer a more fun and seamless experience online, in the long run, it’s a bigger opportunity and we can reach more customers.”
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Unveiling its latest cohort, Alchemist announces $4 million in funding for its enterprise accelerator
The enterprise software and services-focused accelerator Alchemist has raised $4 million in fresh financing from investors BASF and the Qatar Development Bank, just in time for its latest demo day unveiling 20 new companies.
Qatar and BASF join previous investors, including the venture firms Mayfield, Khosla Ventures, Foundation Capital, DFJ and USVP, and corporate investors like Cisco, Siemens and Juniper Networks.
While the roster of successes from Alchemist’s fund isn’t as lengthy as Y Combinator, the accelerator program has launched the likes of the quantum computing upstart Rigetti, the soft-launch developer tool LaunchDarkly and drone startup Matternet .
Some (personal) highlights of the latest cohort include:
- Bayware: Helmed by a former head of software-defined networking from Cisco, the company is pitching a tool that makes creating networks in multi-cloud environments as easy as copying and pasting.
- MotorCortex.AI: Co-founded by a Stanford engineering professor and a Carnegie Mellon roboticist, the company is using computer vision, machine learning and robotics to create a fruit packer for packaging lines. Starting with avocados, the company is aiming to tackle the entire packaging side of pick and pack in logistics.
- Resilio: With claims of a 96% effectiveness rate and $35,000 in annual recurring revenue with another $1 million in the pipeline, Resilio is already seeing companies embrace its mobile app that uses a phone’s camera to track stress levels and application-based prompts on how to lower it, according to Alchemist.
- Operant Networks: It’s a long-held belief (of mine) that if computing networks are already irrevocably compromised, the best thing that companies and individuals can do is just encrypt the hell out of their data. Apparently Operant agrees with me. The company is claiming 50% time savings with this approach, and have booked $1.9 million in 2019 as proof, according to Alchemist.
- HPC Hub: HPC Hub wants to democratize access to supercomputers by overlaying a virtualization layer and pre-installed software on underutilized super computers to give more companies and researchers easier access to machines… and they’ve booked $92,000 worth of annual recurring revenue.
- DinoPlusAI: This chip developer is designing a low latency chip for artificial intelligence applications, reducing latency by 12 times over a competing Nvidia chip, according to the company. DinoPlusAI sees applications for its tech in things like real-time AI markets and autonomous driving. Its team is led by a designer from Cadence and Broadcom and the company already has $8 million in letters of intent signed, according to Alchemist.
- Aero Systems West: Co-founders from the Air Force’s Research Labs and MIT are aiming to take humans out of drone operations and maintenance. The company contends that for every hour of flight time, drones require seven hours of maintenance and check ups. Aero Systems aims to reduce that by using remote analytics, self-inspection, autonomous deployment and automated maintenance to take humans out of the drone business.
Watch a live stream of Alchemist’s demo day pitches, starting at 3PM, here.
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Replex gets $2.45M seed round to help track cloud native spend
Replex wants to help track cloud spending, but with a cloud native twist, and today it announced a $2.45 million seed round. The company previous raised $1.68 million in 2017 for a total of $4.15 million so far.
As companies shift to a cloud native environment, and move ever more quickly, it is increasingly important to get visibility into how development and operations teams are using resources in the cloud. Replex is designed to give more visibility into spending and to help optimize the container environment in the most economical way.
Company CEO and co-founder Patrick Kirchhoff says the product is about controlling spending in a cloud native context. “The Replex platform enables operators, finance and IT managers to see who spends what. We allow them then to right-size clusters, pods and container sizes for optimal results, and they are able to control the cost, manage chargebacks and find [optimal] capacity,” he explained.
Replex cloud spending control panel. Screenshot: Replex
While there are variety of similar cloud cost control startups out there, Kirchoff says his company has been purpose built for cloud native environments and that is a key differentiating factor. “We see that the way organizations work has completely changed because with the move to cloud native infrastructure, teams within the business lines are now able to provision infrastructure on their own. Central IT departments still need to control costs and govern these resources, but they don’t have the tools to do that anymore because the existing tools are built on architectures for traditional infrastructure, and not for the cloud native approach,” he said.
Kirchoff says that developers tend to over provision just to be on the safe side, but using data from Replex, customers can figure out the optimal amount to provision for a particular workload, work with development teams, and that can save money in the long run.
Investors across the two rounds include Entrepreneurs Investment Fund, eValue, EnBW New Ventures, High-Tech Gruenderfonds (HTGF) and Technologiegruenderfonds Sachsen (TGFS). The company is currently participating in the Alchemist Accelerator . The latest round closed in December. The previous one in May 2017.
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Meet the startups in Alchemist’s 20th cohort
Yesterday, enterprise tech accelerator Alchemist announced a fresh $2.5 million in venture capital funding. Today, it presented its latest cohort of startups, 19 in total, to a jam-packed audience of investors.
Alchemist invests $36,000 in companies with a revenue stream that come from enterprises, not consumers, with a bent toward technical founders. Its 20th cohort included a mental health startup, a construction tech business, a fintech company and more. Here’s a quick look at the startups that just completed its six-month program:
Cruz Foam: Makes compostable packaging “from the ocean for the ocean.” Instead of using finite petroleum-based materials, Cruz Foam transforms waste into a structural foam that is at-home compostable. The startup counts Pepsi among its first customers. Cruz Foam is working with the beverage maker on a sustainable packaging project.
Bobly: Gathers real-time information that helps businesses better understand their customers through a gamified software product.
DeepBench: The MIT tech startup’s software enables companies to create their own network of knowledge experts, with a mission to “unlock the world’s knowledge by reducing the cost of finding and matching experts.”
dumpling: Empowers gig workers to run their own “highly personal” grocery delivery businesses. Dumpling says they make $8 in revenue on each order and is active in 24 states. The startup is led by Nate D’Anna, the former director of corporate development at Cisco.
Ejenta: Allows health providers to remotely monitor patients from their homes using technology developed by NASA intended to monitor astronauts. Ejenta is currently working with health providers across the U.S. Ejenta charges health providers a per patient, per month subscription fee that’s 100 percent reimbursable by Medicare.
IoTrek: Leverages artificial intelligence and IoT to improve the productivity of construction job sites. The startup says it has raised $500,000 in funding so far from European and Indian investors.
AirBoard: Developer of “the world’s most powerful drone” for the agricultural industry. AirBoard’s drone is the size of two Toyota Prius cars and will focus initially on automated agtech pesticide spraying.
Walrus Security: Founded by Michael Walfish, a former professor of computer science at New York University, Walrus Security ensures digital payments are transferred safely. Walrus has already landed backing from some high-profile angels, including Alex Roetter, the former SVP of engineering at Twitter and the president of Kitty Hawk.
Insera Health: Developer of a voice-enabled app that collects a patient’s medical history to improve medical encounters. Insera says this improves the experiences for patients and doctors, with better communication and outcomes.
Laava Tech: Decreasing energy consumption for indoor farmers with proprietary LED lighting and a Light as a Service (LaaS) business model.
Oberon Global: Helps conduct and manage compliant token sales. Oberon provides a secure investor onboarding platform for funds, as well as companies raising money under Regulation D 506(b) and 506(c).
Autify (formerly known as Behivee): Automates software testing with artificial intelligence.
PenguinSmart: Initially focused on the China market, PenguinSmart provides an AI-assist rehab support service for speech and language therapy. The startup is led by Amy Kwok, a speech-language pathologist.
Rosalyn Inc: A proctoring platform that uses AI and computer vision to make exams secure and scalable. The startup says it reduces overhead and lets companies scale up their certification process while reducing fraud.
Gridline AI (formerly known as Solisite): Helps property owners turn roofs from liabilities into assets by reducing roofing costs and generating additional income for commercial real estate.
Tangent: Is using AI to provide high-quality content for marketing campaigns. The AI-enabled platform develops personalized images for the fashion e-commerce industry. Expects $600,000 in revenue by the end of Q4 2019.
Foresight Mental Health: Delivers end-to-end mental healthcare with a tech-enabled platform that develops treatment plans, provides a real-time tracker of symptoms and more. The company plans to open a brick-and-mortar location in San Francisco in 2019.
Bitesize: A B2B messaging platform that lets companies speak directly with customers via SMS.
Digify: A document security service that provides insights and protection to users sharing documents online.
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Jupiter Networks invests $2.5M in enterprise tech accelerator Alchemist
Alchemist, which began as an experiment to better promote enterprise entrepreneurs, has morphed into a well-established Silicon Valley accelerator.
To prove it, San Francisco-based Alchemist is announcing a fresh $2.5 million investment ahead of its 20th demo day on Wednesday. Jupiter Networks, a networking and cybersecurity solutions business, has led the round, with participation from Siemens’ venture capital unit Next47.
Launched in 2012 by former Draper Fisher Jurvetson investor Ravi Belani, Alchemist provides participating teams with six months of mentorship and a $36,000 investment. Alchemist admits companies whose revenue stream comes from enterprises, not consumers, with a bent toward technical founders.
According to numbers provided by the accelerator, dubbed the “Y Combinator of Enterprise,” 115 Alchemist portfolio companies have gone on to raise $556 million across several VC deals. Another 25 have been acquired, including S4 Capital’s recent $150 million acquisition of media consultancy MightyHive, Alchemist’s largest exit to date.
Other notable alums include Rigetti Computing, LaunchDarkly, which helps startups soft-launch features and drone startup Matternet.
Alchemist has previously raised venture capital funding, including a $2 million financing in 2017 led by GE and an undisclosed investment from Salesforce.
Nineteen companies will demo products onstage tomorrow. You can live stream Alchemist’s 20th demo day here.
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Moesif raises $3.5M seed round to provide insight into API usage
Today, many companies provide developer access to their services via APIs. Moesif, a San Francisco startup, wants to help these companies gain insight into their customer’s API usage patterns. Today, the company announced a $3.5 million seed round.
The investment was led by Merus Capital, with participation by Heavybit, Fresco Capital and Zach Coelius, whose investments include Cruise Automation, which was sold to GM in 2016 for $1 billion.
Moesif co-founder and CEO Derric Gilling says Moesif is akin to Mixpanel or Google Analytics, except instead of tracking web or mobile analytics, it looks at API usage. “As more and more companies are using and creating these APIs, there comes a point where you need to understand how your customers are using them, any problems they are running into and how do you actually decrease developer churn.”
Heat map showing API usage by region. Screenshot: Moesif
The company is aiming at two primary types of users. First of all, there are developers who can use the monitoring features to understand when there are issues with the API. These folks have access to the free tier.
Moesif also targets business units like product management, sales and marketing, which use the tool to understand who’s using the API, how often and, with machine learning, understand who is likely to stop using the product based on how they are using it. The tool can tie into other business systems like Mailchimp or a CRM tool to get a more complete picture of customers as they use the API.
The product was released last year, and Gilling says his company already has 2,000 customers, which includes both the free and paid tiers. He said they have had particular success with SaaS and fintech companies, both of which make heavy use of APIs. Customers include PowerSchool, Schwab and DHL.
While the company currently consists of two founders and one employee, flush with the seed investment, it intends to hire around 10 people in the next six months, including a VP of engineering, additional developers and sales and marketing folks.
Moesif was founded in late 2016, and the founders went through the Alchemist Accelerator last year.
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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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Our favorite startups from Alchemist Accelerator batch 15
Founded as an enterprise alternative to accelerator stalwarts like Y Combinator, Alchemist Accelerator has managed to assemble a solid track record in its five years of operation. Going into batch 15, 159 companies have graduated from Alchemist, of which 89 have closed institutional rounds and 15 have been acquired.
The latest batch of 19 companies surely hopes to push those numbers even higher. Read More
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