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Reframe your Metaphors, and other lessons from Y Combinator S21 Day 1
After a 17-hour marathon through nearly 200 startup pitches, the Equity team was fired up to get back on Twitter and chat through some early trends and favorites from the first day of Y Combinator’s demo party. We’ll be back on the air tomorrow, so make sure you’re following the show on Twitter so you don’t miss out.
What did Natasha and Alex chat about? The following:
- First Impressions: We started by going through top-line numbers, geographic breakdown, and how the accelerator is doing when it comes to the representation of diverse founders. The last bit had a tiny bit of progress, but diversity continues to be an issue in YC’s batches – even as cohort size grows. We also chatted about what startups pitching can work on: like better mics, which are cheap and good.
- Our early favorites: Metaphor, Lumify, Alex’s favorite duo Indian real estate plays, Akudo, Reframe, and Playhouse.
- And some hmmm moments, including our thoughts on Writesonic, which Natasha has a potentially paranoid theory on.
TechCrunch has extensive coverage of the day on the site, so there’s lots to dig into if you are in the mood. More tomorrow!
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:00 a.m. PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts!
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Next-gen skincare, silk without spiders and pollution for lunch: Meet the biotech startups pitching at IndieBio’s Demo Day
Biotech can often, and sometimes literally, fly over our heads. However, the pandemic has shown an increased need for investment and focus on solutions that work on human and planetary health. For IndieBio, a science and biotech accelerator run by VC firm SOSV, this unprecedented year offered high stakes and new challenges.
Today and tomorrow, the biotech accelerator is hosting its twice-annual demo day.
Starting in 2015, IndieBio has provided resources to founders solving complex challenges with biotech, from fake meat to sustainability. Over the years, the accelerator has created a portfolio of biotech companies valued at over $3.2 billion, including companies like Memphis Meats, which develops cultured meat from animal cells; NotCo, a plant-based food brand; and Catalog, which uses organisms for data storage.
As part of the accelerator, each participating company receives $250,000 in capital, numerous other services and access to lab space. In July, the founder and head of IndieBio, Arvind Gupta, left his position to pursue a role at Mayfield. While Gupta remains an adviser, Po Bronson took the role as the new managing director.
Bronson was immediately put to the test. This year, the program expanded from operating solely in San Francisco to also create a cohort based in New York. It also doubled the amount of companies it invested in, bringing this cohort to 20 companies.
As you can imagine, lockdowns ultimately forced founders to delay key lab work in the beginning of the pandemic. Eventually, founders were able to partner with universities, contract research organizations or other biotech accelerators to begin their research, says Julie Wolf, the head of investor relations at SOSV. The NYC class received a “golden ticket” for free lab space come November.
And these dynamics make this cohort all the more fascinating to dive into.
Watch the New York Stream here, which will happen on Tuesday October 27 from 1:00-3:00pm ET.
Watch the San Francisco stream here, which will happen on Wednesday October 28 from 10:00-12:00pm PT.
For those who can’t tune in, here’s a list of all the companies presenting in New York and San Francisco over the next two days.
San Francisco cohort
Reazent: Founded by Sumit Verma, Reazent has discovered and patented a way to manipulate soil bacteria into triggering crops to grow more. It works with 116 strains, from kale to potatoes, and wants to dig into the market of organic agricultural land.
Image Credits: Witthaya Prasongsin / Getty Images
Kraken Sense: Founded by Nisha Sarveswaran, Kraken Sense has created an in-line autonomous device to measure the concentration of pathogens in large-scale food and water systems. The product can be deployed in farms and kitchens and uses refillable single-use cartridges.
Advanced Microbubbles: The startup, led by Jameel Feshitan, has created a platform that helps practitioners deliver drugs to complex and difficult tumors. The company collaborated with NIH NIDA and uses proprietary bubbles to deliver chemotherapeutics. Currently, Microbubbles is working to solve two types of cancers: neuroblastoma and pancreatic cancer.
Cybele Microbiome: CEO Nicole Scott has created a direct-to-consumer skincare line with a focus on prebiotics. The line uses ingredients that work in tandem with the skin microbiome, even triggering it to express natural scents.
Ivy Natal: Ivy Natal is developing a process to harvest healthy human egg cells from skin cells. CEO Colin Bortner is working on a treatment for infertility and plans to enable families to have genetic children who can’t otherwise with current solutions.
Microgenesis: Led by Gabriela Gutierrez, Microgenesis has created a proprietary test and nutraceutical regiment (including probiotics) to help women who struggle with infertility get pregnant. The company worked with a cohort of 287 mothers, and with its product over 75% of patients became pregnant.
Image Credits: Westend61 / Getty Images
AsimicA: Led by Nikolai Mushnikov, Asmicia has created a new way to bring stem cells to microbes. The company could lengthen and grow the yields of bio-manufacturing, and is currently working to select the right fermentation partner.
Liberum: CEO Aidan Tinafar is working to disrupt what they think could be a $400 billion market opportunity: recombinant proteins. Liberum has created a protein printer that could cut down the creation of custom recombinant proteins from weeks to a few hours.
Khepra: Led by Julie Kring, Khepra is leveraging fuel production as a way to store extra renewable energy. The company is building a series of reactors that could take your old plastic bottles and cardboard boxes, extract chemicals and fuels, and sell that fuel to refineries.
Carbix: Carbix, led by Quincy Sammy, takes enriched CO2 and converts it into raw material that can then be repurposed into industrial products.
Spintex: CEO Alex Greenhalgh is creating a new, scalable way of making silk. The company mimics spider spinning and uses a natural protein, with an end product that they see as better than premium silk.
New York cohort
Biomage: CEO Adam Kurkiewicz wants to make single-cell sequencing data more accessible for research biologistics. The technology could help scientists explore human cells to enhance medicine and drug discovery.
Diptera.ai: Vic Levitin is creating a scalable, affordable and sustainable way to fight mosquitoes and their diseases.
Cayuga Biotech: Damien Kudela, CEO of Cayuga Biotech, has created a drug that could induce clots and stop severe bleeding situations.
Brightcure: Chiara Heide, CEO of Brightcure, has created a bioactive cream that uses natural bacterium to restore a woman’s natural microbiome.
Multus Media: CEO Cai Linton is producing an ingredient that hopes to make cultivated meat production affordable and accessible.
Image Credits: Getty Images
BioFeyn: The company uses nanotechnologies based on human medicine to deliver nutrients and disease prevention to fish. CEO Timothy Bouley is working to make eating healthy fish a sustainable practice.
Halomine: Ted Eveleth, CEO, wants to turn every surface into an antimicrobial surface. Halomine’s product, Halofilm, can be used in tandem with any household bleach cleaner to enhance disinfection techniques.
Allied Microbiota: Lauralynn Kourtz, CEO of Allied Microbiota, wants to use natural microbes to eliminate toxic waste. The company uses bacteria to clean contaminated soils.
Scindo: Scindo, led by Gustaf Hemberg, uses enzymes to make plastic biodegradable.
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Pear hosted its invite-only demo day online this year; here’s what you might have missed
Pear, the eight-year-old, Palo Alto, Calif.-based seed-stage venture firm that has, from its outset, attracted the attention of VCs who think the firm has an eye for nascent talent, staged its seventh annual demo day earlier this week, and while it was virtual, one of the startups has already signed a term sheet from a top-tier venture firm.
To give the rest of you a sneak peak, here’s a bit about all of the startups that presented, in broad strokes:
- ) AccessBell
What it does: Video conferencing platform for enterprise workflows
Website: accessbell.com
Founders: Martin Aguinis (CEO), Josh Payne (COO), Kamil Ali (CTO)
The pitch: Video has emerged as one of the prominent ways for enterprises to communicate internally and externally with their customers and partners. Current video conferencing tools like Zoom and WebEx are great for standalone video but they have their own ecosystems and don’t integrate into thousands of enterprise workflows. That means that API tools that do integrate, like Agora and Twilio, still require manual work from developer teams to customize and maintain. AccessBell is aiming to provide the scalability and reliability of Zoom, as well as the customizability and integrations of Twilio, in a low code integration and no code extensible customization platform.
It’s a big market the team is chasing, one that’s expected to grow to $8.6 billion by 2027. The cost right now for users who want to test out AccessBell is $27 per host per month.
2.) FarmRaise
What it does: Unlock financial opportunities for farmers to create sustainable farms and improve their livelihoods
Website: farmraise.com
Founders: Jayce Hafner (CEO), Sami Tellatin (COO), Albert Abedi (Product)
The pitch: Over half of American farms don’t have the tools or bandwidth they need to identify ways to improve their farms and become profitable. The startup’s API links to farmers’ bank accounts, where its algorithm assesses financials to provide a “farm read,” scoring the farms’ financial health. It then regularly monitors farm data to continuously provide clean financials and recommendations on how to improve its customers’ farms, as well as to connect farmers with capital in order to improve their score. (It might suggest that a farm invest in certain sustainability practices, for example.)
Eventually, the idea is to also use the granular insights it’s garnering and sell these to hedge funds, state governments, and other outfits that want a better handle on what’s coming — be it around food security or climate changes.
3.) Sequel
What it does: Re-engineering life’s essential products – starting with tampons
Website: thesequelisbetter.com
Founders: Greta Meyer (CEO), Amanda Calabrese (COO)
The pitch: Founded by student athletes from Stanford, Sequel argues that seven out of 10 women don’t trust tampons, which were first designed in 1931 (by a man). New brands like Lola have catchy brands and new material, but they perform even worse than legacy products. Sequel has focused instead on fluid mechanics and specifically on slowing flow rates so a tampon won’t leak before it’s full, instilling more confidence in its customers, whether they’re in the “boardroom or the stadium.”
The company says it has already filed patents and secured manufacturing partners and that it expects that the product will be available to buy directly from its website, as well as in other stores, next year.
4.) Interface Bio
What it does: Unlocking the therapeutic potential of the microbiome with a high-throughput pipeline for characterizing microbes, metabolites, and therapeutic response, based on years of research at Stanford
Founders: Will Van Treuren, Hannah Wastyk
The pitch: The microbiome plays a major role in a wide range of human diseases, including heart disease, kidney disease, liver disease, and cancer. In fact, Interface’s founders — both of whom are PhDs — say that microbiome-influenced diseases are responsible for four of the top 10 causes of death in the United States. So how do they better seize on the opportunity to identify therapeutics by harnessing the microbiome? Well, they say they’ll do it via a “high-speed pipeline for characterizing metabolites and their immune phenotypes,” which they’ll create by developing the world’s largest database of microbiome-mediated chemistry . . . which the startup will then screen for potential metabolites that can lead to new therapies. (We spilled our coffee during this pitch so missed some details, but presumably you can learn more from the startup’s founders and site.)
5.) Gryps
What it does: Gryps is tackling construction information silos to create a common information layer that gives building and facility owners both rich and permanent access to document-centric information
Website: gryps.io
Founders: Dareen Salama, Amir Tasbihi
The pitch: The vast size and complexity of the construction industry has resulted in all kinds of software and services that address various aspects of the construction processes. Ye that has led to data and documents being spread across many siloed tools. Gryps says it picks up where all the construction-centered tools leave off: Taking delivery of the projects at the end of a construction job and providing all the information that facility owners need to operate, renovate, or build future projects through a platform that ingests data from various construction tools, mines the embedded information, then provides operational access through owner-centered workflows.
6.) Expedock
What it does: Automation infrastructure for supply chain businesses, starting with AI-powered freight forwarder solutions
Website: expedock.com
Founders: King Alandy Dy (CEO), Jeff Tan (COO), Rui Aguiar (CTO)
The pitch: Freight forwarders take care of all the logistics of shipping containers including financials, approvals and paper work for all the local entities on both sides of the sender and receiver geographies, but communications with these local entities are often done through unstructured data, including forms, documents, and emails and can subsequently eat up to 60% of operational expenses. Expedock is looking to transform the freight forwarding industry by digitizing and automating the processing and inputting of unstructured data into various local partner and governmental systems, including via a “human in the loop” AI software service.
7.) Illume
What it does: A new way to share praise
Website: illumenotes.com
Founders: Sohale Sizar (CEO), Phil Armour (Engineering), Maxine Stern (Design)
The pitch: The process of thanking people is full of friction. Paper cards have to be purchased, signed, passed around; greetings on Facebook only mean so much. Using Illume, teams and individuals can download its app or come together on Slack and create a customized, private, and also shareable note. The nascent startup says one card typically has 10 contributors; it’s charging enterprises $3 per user per month, ostensibly so sales teams, among others, can use them.
8.) Quansa
What it does: Quansa improves Latin American workers’ financial lives via employer-based financial care
Website: quansa.io
Founders: Gonzalo Blanco, Mafalda Barros
The pitch: Fully 40% of employees across Latin America have missed work in the past 12 months due to financial problems. Quansa wants to help them get on the right track financially with the help of employers that use its software to link their employees’ payroll data with banks, fintechs and other financial institutions.
There is strength in numbers, says the firm. By funneling more customers to lenders through employers, for example, these staffers should ultimately be able to access to cheaper car loans, among other things.
9.) SpotlightAI
What it does: Spotlight turns sensitive customer information from a burden to an asset by using NLP techniques to identify, anonymize, and manage access to PII and other sensitive business data
Website: hellospotlight.com
Founder: Austin Osborne (CEO)
The pitch: Data privacy legislation like GDPR and CCPA is creating an era where companies can no longer use their customer data to run their business due to the risks of fines, lawsuits, and negative media coverage. Spotlight’s software plugs into existing data storage engines via APIs and operates as a middleware within a company’s network. Using advanced NLP and OCR techniques, it says it’s able to detect sensitive information in unstructured data, perform multiple types of anonymization, and provide a deep access control layer.
10.) Bennu
What it does: Bennu closes the loop on management communication
Website: bennu.io
Founder: Brenda Jin (CEO)
The pitch: Today’s work communication is done through forms, email, Slack, and docs; the timelines are unnatural. Bennu is trying to solve the problem with communication loops that use integrations and smart topic suggestions to help employees prepare for substantive management conversations in seconds, not hours.
11.) Playbook
What it does: Playbook automates the people coordination in your repeatable workflows with a simple system to create, execute and track any process with a team, customers, and more
Website: startplaybook.com
Founders: Alkarim Lalani (CEO), Blaise Bradley (CTO)
The pitch: Whether you’re collecting time cards from 20 hourly workers every week, or managing 30 customer on-boardings – you’re coordinating repetitive workflows across people over email and tracking it over spreadsheets. Playbook says it coordinates workflows between people at scale by taking programming concepts such as variables and conditional logic that let its customers model any workflow — and all packaged in an interface that enables anyone to build out their workflows in minutes.
12.) June Motherhood
What it does: Community-based care for life’s most important transitions
Website: junemotherhood.com
Founders: Tina Beilinson (CEO), Julia Cole (COO), Sophia Richter (CPO)
The pitch: June is a digital health company focused on maternal health, with community at the core. Like a Livongo for diabetes management, June combines the latest research around shared appointments, peer-to-peer support and cognitive behavioral therapy to improve outcomes and lower costs, including through weekly programs.
13.) Wagr
What it does: Challenge anyone to a friendly bet
Website: wagr.us
Founders: Mario Malavé (CEO), Eliana Eskinazi (CPO)
The pitch: Wagr will allow sports fans to bet with peers in a social, fair, and simple way. Sending a bet requires just three steps, too: pick a team, set an amount, and send away. Wagr sets the right odds and handles the money.
Users can challenge friends, start groups, track leaderboards, and see what others are betting on, so they feel connected even if they aren’t together. Customers pay a commission when they use the platform to find them a match, but bets against friends are free. The plan is to go live in Tennessee first and expand outward from there.
14.) Federato
What it does: Intelligence for a new era of risk
Website: federato.ai
Founders: Will Ross (CEO), William Steenbergen (CTO)
The pitch: Insurance companies are struggling to manage risk as natural catastrophes continue to grow in volume and severity. Reinsurance is no longer a reliable backstop, with some of the largest insurers taking $600 million-plus single-quarter losses net of reinsurance.
Federato is building an underwriter workflow that uses dynamic optimization across the portfolio to steer underwriters to a better portfolio balance. The software ostensibly lets actuaries and portfolio analysts drive high-level risk analysis into the hands of underwriters on the front lines to help them understand the “next best action” at a given point in time.
15.) rePurpose Global
What it does: A plastic credit platform to help consumer brands of any size go plastic neutral
Website: business.repurpose.global
Founders: Svanika Balasubramanian (CEO), Aditya Siroya (CIO), Peter Wang Hjemdahl (CMO
The pitch: Consumers worldwide are demanding businesses to take action on eliminating plastic waste, 3.8 million pounds of which are leaked into the environment every few minutes. Yet even as brands try, alternatives are often too expensive or worse for the environment.
Through this startup, a brand can commit to the removal of a certain amount of plastic, which will then be removed by the startup’s local waste management partners and recycled on the brand’s behalf (with rePurpose verifying that the process adheres to certain standards). The startup says it can maintain a healthy margin while running this plastic credit market, and that its ultimate vision is to become a “one-stop shop for companies to create social, economic, and environmental impact.”
16.) Ladder
What it does: A professional community platform for the next generation
Website: ladder.io
Founders: Akshaya Dinesh (CEO), Andrew Tan
The pitch: LinkedIn sucks, everyone hates it. Ladder (which may have a trademark infringement battle ahead of it) is building a platform around community instead of networks. The idea is that users will opt in to join communities with like-minded individuals in their respective industries and roles of interest. Once engaged, they can participate in AMAs with industry experts, share opportunities, and have 1:1 conversations.
The longer term ‘moat’ is the data it collects from users, from which it thinks it can generate more revenue per user than LinkedIn. (By the way, this is the startup that has already signed a term sheet.)
Exporta
How it works: Exporta is building a B2B wholesale marketplace connecting suppliers in Latin America with buyers in North America.
Website: exporta.io
Founders: Pierre Thys (CEO), Robert Monaco (President)
The pitch: The U.S. now imports more each year from Latin America than from China, but LatAm sourcing remains fragmented and manual. Exporta builds on-the-ground relationships to bring LatAm suppliers onto a tech-enabled platform that matches them to U.S. buyers looking for faster turnaround times and more transparent manufacturing relationships.
Via
What it does: Via helps companies build their own teams in new countries as simply as if they were in their HQ.
Website: via.work
Founders: Maite Diez-Canedo, Itziar Diez-Canedo
The pitch: Setting up a team in a new country is very complex. Companies need local entities, contracts, payroll, benefits, accounting, tax, compliance, and more. Via enables companies to build their own teams in new countries quickly and compliantly by leveraging local entities to legally employ teams on their behalf, then integrating local contracts, payroll, and benefits in one platform. By plugging into the local hiring ecosystem, Via does all the heavy lifting for its customers, even promising to stand up a team in 48 hours and at less expense than traditional alternatives. (It’s charging $600 per employee per month in Canada and Mexico, where it says it has already launched.)
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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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Join us Wednesday, September 9 to watch Techstars Starburst Space Accelerator demo day live
The 2020 class of Techstars Starburst Space Accelerator is graduating with an official demo day on Wednesday at 10 a.m. PDT (1 p.m. EDT), and you can watch all the teams present their startups live via the stream above. This year’s class includes 10 companies building innovative new solutions to challenges either directly or indirectly related to commercial space.
Techstars Starburst is a program with a lot of heavyweight backing from both private industry and public agencies, including from NASA’s JPL, the U.S. Air Force, Lockheed Martin, Maxar Technologies, SAIC, Israel Aerospace Industries North America and The Aerospace Corporation. The program, led by managing director Matt Kozlov, is usually based locally in LA, where much of the space industry has significant presence, but this year the demo day is going online due to the ongoing COVID-19 situation.
Few, if any, programs out there can claim such a broad representation of big-name partners from across commercial, military and general civil space in terms of stakeholders, which is the main reason it manages to attract a range of interesting startups. This is the second class of graduating startups from the Starburst Space Accelerator; last year’s batch included some exceptional standouts like in-orbit refueling company Orbit Fab (also a TechCrunch Battlefield participant), imaging microsatellite company Pixxel and satellite propulsion company Morpheus.
As for this year’s class, you can check out a full list of all 10 participating companies below. The demo day presentations begin tomorrow, September 9 at 10 a.m. PDT/1 p.m. PDT, so you can check back in here then to watch live as they provide more details about what it is they do.
A synthetic data API that allows AI teams to generate their own custom datasets up to 99% faster — no tedious collection, curation or labelling required.
founders@bifrost.ai
A virtual reality content management system that makes it super easy for curriculum designers to create and deploy immersive learning experiences.
founders@holos.io
Infinite Composites Technologies
The most efficient gas storage systems in the universe.
founders@infinitecomposites.com
Lux is developing next generation System-on-Foil electronics.
founders@luxsemiconductors.com
Natural Intelligence Systems, Inc.
Developer of next-generation pattern-based AI/ML systems.
leadership@naturalintelligence.ai
Engineering collaboration software for teams building challenging deep tech projects.
founders@prewittridge.com
Providing satellite radar-based intelligence for decision makers.
founders@satim.pl
Developing stratospheric microballoons to capture the freshest, high-res earth observation data.
founders@urbansky.space
Real-time remote robotic controls.
founders@vrotors.com
Proactive air insights.
founders@weavair.com
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Student-led accelerator Envision reaches demo week for class one, looks to class two
Back in early July, TechCrunch covered the Envision Accelerator. The program was put together by a group of students and recent graduates, often with some early venture capital experience, to help give some young startups a boost, and to shake up industry diversity metrics at the same time.
Now on the other side of their first batch’s official program and into its investor week, Envision shared a number of statistics regarding that first cohort, and talked about plans for its second.
What I appreciate about the Envision group is that by simply going out and making their own accelerator, they have shown that it is possible to attract a diverse group of startups to a program. How diverse? Let’s find out.
The Envision cohort
According to data provided to TechCrunch by Annabel Strauss and Eliana Berger from the Envision team (more on them here, if you’re curious), 17 companies made it into the first group. Of those 17 companies and their founding teams, around one-third of founders were black, around one in five were Latinx and more than 75% had a female founder.
Those are impressive metrics, frankly, especially when we consider what other groups have managed in recent sessions. Envision’s founders also skew young, not a surprise, given that the effort was effectively students making a program for their fellow students, with a three-to-one bias in favor of undergrads versus graduate students.
We’ll list the participating companies with links to their sites below, as per usual with this sort of accelerator roundup.
But, before we do, a few notes on how the first batch went down. When we last talked about Envision, they were still fundraising to pull together more capital to give to their selected companies. The idea was to provide $10,000 in equity-free capital, along with an eight-week program of lectures, networking and hands-on help from the Envision collective and a group of advisors.
According to Strauss and Berger, Envision was able to raise all the money that it needed to provide funding to its selected companies, though not every team picked up the full $10,000, with the duo noting that the amount varied based somewhat on need.
It will not be clear for a bit if the companies that went through Envision’s maiden class manage to raise more capital, scale, and become success. But for the Envision team itself, round one went well enough that a second effort is just around the corner.
And when it comes to that second push — or class, really — Envision remains in a hurry. After putting together its initial cohort while building its own organization on the fly, the group is going to kick off its second batch in October, giving it slim breathing room between cohorts.
There’s a reason for the haste, however. First, Envision wants to add two weeks to its programming, bringing the accelerator to a total of 10 weeks to include more training, and to fit that into the current semester, October was the kickoff month. Strauss and Berger noted that some students are taking leave during the first semester of this academic year.
More on Envision itself when we hear more on how the first batch did in attracting investor interest.
Here are the companies from batch one:
- Adora: Adora is a personalized, digital campus visit platform that makes compelling visits accessible to everyone.
- Devie: Devie is a parent coaching app that guides parents through challenges in a personal, accessible and actionable way.
- Forage: Forage is a mobile application that provides real-time pricing at grocery stores so families can save money.
- Holdette: At Holdette, we make professional work wear with real pockets for women entering the workforce for the first time.
- Justice Text: Justice Text makes video evidence management software to produce fair outcomes in the criminal justice system.
- Klara: Klara is a data science platform transforming the way consumers discover skincare and haircare products.
- Mindstand: Mindstand helps leaders identify implicit bias, employee engagement and culture fit within their internal communications.
- MODE: MODE helps people discover and purchase clothes through a personalized, social shopping experience.
- Mylabox: Mylabox is a cross-border e-commerce marketplace enabling SMBs in LatAm to access high-quality overseas products.
- Nibble: Nibble is a platform solving food waste by helping restaurants sell excess meals and ingredients at a discount.
- Pareto: Pareto is building a library of quick-to-launch workflows that startups can deploy for operations as they scale.
- Schefs: Schefs is a platform for college students to facilitate and participate in themed conversations over a virtual meal.
- UrConvey: UrConvey is a safe app that makes it easy to ride share with people you know by harnessing your network.
- Vngle: Vngle is a decentralized grassroots news network bringing “various angles” of local reality coverage to news deserts.
- Wellnest: Wellnest is a joyful journaling app that increases mindfulness by prioritizing user experience, voice and insights.
- Winkshare: Winkshare is a secure messaging app designed for the modern relationship. Your relationship, your business.
- Yup: Yup rewards valuable opinions across the web. Rate anything, earn rewards for accuracy, and gain status.
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TechCrunch’s favorite companies from 500 Startups’ latest demo day
Today 500 Startups hosted a virtual demo day for its 26th batch of startups, a group of companies that TechCrunch covered back in February.
500 is not the only accelerator that moved its traditional investor pitch event online; Y Combinator made a similar move after efforts to flatten the spread of COVID-19 required changes that made its traditional demo day setup temporarily impossible.
In addition to hosting a few dozen startup pitches today, 500 also explained changes to its own format and provided notes on the current state of the venture market.
Regarding how 500 Startups is shaking up how it handles its accelerator, the group intends to pivot to a rolling-admissions setup that will give participants more flexibility; the group will still hold two demo days each year — TechCrunch has more on the changes here.
Regarding the venture market, 500 Startups said venture capital’s investment pace could slow for several months. This seems likely, given how the economy has taken body blows in recent weeks as huge swaths of the world’s economy shut down. What advice did 500 have in the face of the new world? What you’d expect: startups should cut burn and focus on customers.
Got all that? OK, let’s talk about our favorite companies from the current 500 cohort.
Our faves
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Listen to the TechCrunch staff’s YC Demo Day wrap-up call here
It’s been a bonkers week in the world, with markets gyrating, companies fretting, investors tweeting and founders re-cutting their 2020 forecasts. But for one collection of startups, the past few days weren’t about work crises or the latest Slack share price. Instead, for Y Combinator’s Winter batch, it was Demo Day week.
TechCrunch has covered Y Combinator companies since time immemorial. And we’ve been present throughout a number of format changes over the years. We’ve been around for things like the old single-day events in the South Bay computer history museum, and we’ve been around for the SF era. Hell, we were there for the two-stage concept.
But this year’s Demo Day brought with it something altogether new: No in-person pitches and demos. Yep, in response to COVID-19, Y Combinator made its demo day virtual, even scooting up its presentations by a full week. Obviously we tuned in en masse, writing a host of posts about the presenting companies (read them here, here, here and here). We also caught up with CEO of Y Combinator, Michael Seibel, to here his take on what’s ahead for the accelerator.
Given the scale of change, however, we weren’t content with just those entries. So, we gathered the TechCrunch crew, hopped on a Zoom, invited in our friends until our Zoom account maxed out (we didn’t know that that was a thing; more capacity coming) to chat over observations and the most interesting startups. We didn’t even miss the usual slew of Y Combinator live tweets — for the most part.
Hit the jump and we’ve got the recording for you. And see which companies the TechCrunch staff liked the most.
The Chat
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At the sixth annual Pear Demo Day, weather balloons, branded credit cards and lots of top degrees
Pear, a Palo Alto-based seed-stage fund that has made its name through early bets on Guardant Health, DoorDash, Memebox and Gusto, hosted its sixth annual demo day this week in what proved to be a scorchingly hot afternoon in Woodside, Calif. — not that invitees were put off by the heat.
Hundreds of investors showed up at a sprawling public estate and surrounding gardens to see the dozen teams that Pear spent the summer working with, each of them less than nine months old, according to Pear, and many incorporated only in recent months. (Each has also only received less than $200,000 so far from Pear, and no other institutional investment.)
While some are sure to evolve into other ideas or dissolve into other endeavors, the whole of the group gave those gathered food for thought and a first look at some very solid talent.
Following are the companies that presented:
1) Windborne: Founded by three Stanford grads and another from Harvard, this startup aims to improve the accuracy of weather data where it’s currently limited, like over oceans, by using weather balloons that could allow the team to do things like tell shipping companies which route to take to minimize fuel burn. CEO Paige Brown also says their system can fly 60 times longer than existing solutions and for the same price. The more specific claim: that in a single $350 flight, a Windborne balloon can fly for more than five days and travel a quarter of the way around the world, collecting direct measurements in places no one else can.
The team apparently bonded as engineers in the Stanford Student Space Initiative and they’ve all worked at SpaceX.
2) Guild: This one was started by two Stanford grads and helps companies make branded credit cards. Why would they bother? Because, the startup claims, branded credit cards are a lot more lucrative — increasing spending by 20%, cutting churn by roughly half and generating $50 per year of profit per customer. Co-founder Michael Spelfogel says he knows of which he speaks, having tried, unsuccessfully, to launch a branded credit card while at Lyft.
He also says the idea is to partner with sports teams first.
3) Polimorphic: Started by two computer scientists out of MIT, this startup is building a “civic media platform” meant to help politicians communicate with constituents. The platform basically invites visitors to express their views directly to their political and government leaders, while it also gives campaigns, civic groups and governments a way to engage with those individuals (though the latter has to pay to do this). It’s a meaningful market, they argue, saying that campaign spending has been growing by 50% in between major election cycles, with $9 billion spent in 2016 alone.
Of course, because this was a demo day, the founders also talked about their traction, saying they already have three letters of intent, and volunteering that they’re in early talks with three presidential campaigns.
4) Gradio: Launched by graduates of Stanford, Georgia Institute of Technology, NYU and MIT, Gradio says it speeds up the process of collecting and labeling data for use with AI and machine learning. The “Gradio data engine” corrects mislabeled data, identifies and removes “low value” data and highlights the highest-value data. It’s a smart pitch, considering that acquiring and labeling data right now requires tons of human labor and often requires pricey domain expertise and that, even so, something like one if five data points is mislabeled at a typical AI company.
As for who will use the technology, the founders say they’re targeting companies in the natural language processing space first.
5) Sympto Health: Launched by two founders from UC San Diego (one who graduated, one who dropped out to build Sympto), this startup is trying to tackle a universal problem, which is that patients very often forget clinical instructions, and when that happens, they sometimes wind up being readmitted to the hospital.
Sympto ties into a care facility’s existing systems/workflows and sends “patient engagement” messages — things like surgery checklists, pre-appointment questionnaires, etc. — to minimize missed information and unnecessary readmissions. It says its patient-as-an-engagement service has already landed the company two enterprise contracts worth $300,000, too.
6) Smarty: This startup was founded by a single person with multiple degrees (HBS, MIT) who previously worked as a software engineer at Yammer.
What she has built: an automation tool that’s focused on business tasks like scheduling meetings, making introductions and finding flights for out of town meetings. The tool is being made available first to users of G Suite and Office 365 (which have 200 million paying users, combined); they’ll be asked to pay Smarty $20 a month for its workflow automation tool. Eventually, though, it aims to be its own client.
7) Impct: Started by two MBAs from National Chengchi University and another from Stanford, Impct is making what it called snacks for good. It’s not that they’re more healthful than other options; instead, the idea is for companies to buy these white-label snacks for their offices, then re-invest a percentage of their sales into social responsibility programs chosen by employees. The thinking is that employees want their kombucha; why not spend on snack bars and drinks that give back?
8) Learn to Win: Started by two Stanford MBAs who say traditional learning management systems fall short of the needs of high-performance teams, Learn to Win is a “micro learning” training program that’s right now being used by 100 sports organizations; it also has a signed contract with the Air Combat Command to train fighter pilots.
What the program ostensibly offers: content that’s presented in a visual and easy-to-use content authoring engine, the ability to deploy mobile active learning content to users, and and the ability to quickly evaluate results and iterate.
Next on the startup’s to-do list: enticing other entities with training challenges, including in the commercial airline industry, at oil and gas companies and within police and fire departments.
9) Fanimal: Founders with degrees from Stanford, Columbia University and UC Berkeley (and who’ve worked at Boston Consulting Group, Gunderson Dettmer and Hackbright Academy) decided to come together to tackle two annoying problems associated with buying tickets for live events: high fees, and that feeling when you buy tickets for a group of people . . . then need to chase them down for reimbusement.
With Fanimal, everyone in a social group pays individually and receives their own tickets, and there are no hidden fees. Instead, Fanimal makes money by adding a “small markup” to tickets. Since launching a few weeks ago, they’ve sold more than $31,000 in tickets.
10) Xilis: A Stanford PhD and a PhD from UNC Chapel Hill (both now Duke University professors focused on oncology and precision health) came together for this company out of their acute awareness that when someone is diagnosed with cancer, finding the right treatment frequently takes months and often comes with countless side effects. To speed along the process, their company, Xilis, uses “micro-organoids” to make thousands of 3D replicas of a patient’s tumor in about six days, which the company says can be used for testing for drug compatibility faster.
They say it works, too. At least, the co-founders, Xiling Shen and David Hsu, claim they’ve tested the technology with 12 patients, with a 100% success rate in predicting how a tumor will respond to medication.
11) Equipped: Founded by two Stanford grads who’ve worked variously for the NBA, Tesla and Amazon, Equipped has an interesting proposal. What if instead of lugging an oversized umbrella to the beach or bringing a soccer ball to the park, you could get these things where they make sense, in on-demand equipment lockers at the beach, or outside a park, where you could rent what you need, then return it?
Nike seems to like the idea. CEO Dan Mandelman says the sports retail giant is paying them $200,000 for six lockers in LA, with the cities of Burlingame, San Ramon and Redwood City currently implementing pilot programs.
12) Maker: Two Stanford MBAs with marketing and management consultant experience have created a marketplace for small-batch wines.
Maker finds small/independent wineries, cans their product under the Maker label, then delivers to the end customer.
By the way, you can get a flavor for Pear’s demo day here if you’re curious.
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YC is doubling down on these investment theses in its most recent batch
Nearly 200 startups have just graduated from the prestigious San Francisco startup accelerator Y Combinator . The flock of companies are now free to proceed company-building with a fresh $150,000 check and three-months full of tips and tricks from industry experts.
As usual, we sent several reporters to YC’s latest demo day to take notes on each company and pick our favorites. But there were many updates to the YC structure this time around and new trends we spotted from the ground that we’ve yet to share.
CTO and HR demo days
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