Startup Battlefield
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Ultra-affordable ultrasound startup M-SCAN wins TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Africa
TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Africa just finished in Lagos, Nigeria, where 15 companies took the stage for the chance of winning the $25,000 equity-free grand prize, a trip for two to TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2019 and the coveted title of “Africa’s Favorite Startup.”
The winner of the event was M-SCAN from Uganda, which develops portable mobile ultrasound devices (Ultrasonic probes) that are laptop, tablet and mobile phone compatible. The judges were impressed with its scalability potential to make many other medical access devices affordable for Africa, where mother and infant mortality is unforgivably high.
The runner-up was Bettr, a virtual banking experience powered by your smartphone and your data. Bettr has the potential to make banking way more accessible for millions of people currently unbanked across Southern Africa.
The other startups pitching, chosen from literally hundreds of entries, were:
Apollo Agriculture: Leverages advances in machine learning, remote imaging via satellite and mobile money to deliver input finance and agronomic advice to smallholder farmers with radical efficiency and scalability.
Sudpay: Developed an integrated, multi-support, multi-service and multi-operator digital tax collection platform that connects merchants to financial institutions.
LabTech: UriSAF by LabTECH is a urine testing hardware and software solution designed to speed up the diagnosis of Uterine Tract Infections (UTIs).
Complete Farmer: A “crowdfarming” platform that enables users to invest in sustainable farms and monitor farming activities without discarding their daily routine using data-driven cultivation protocols and IoT-enabled precision farming.
FoodHubs: Uses mobile solar-powered cold carts and cold rooms to help smallholder farmers store their produce, so as to avoid post-harvest losses.
Honey Flow Africa: Optimizes beekeeping operations by digitizing and bringing the power of IoT to the beekeeping process to improve honey production, processing and predictability.
Agripredict: Provides farmers with tools that equip them with information that will improve predicting disease, pest infestations and extreme weather conditions.
MAX: Transforms moto-taxi mobility in Africa using mobile apps, inclusive data-driven asset-finance and a comprehensive driver on-boarding program that uses machine learning and psychometric tests to profile drivers and create credit scores for them. MAX enables financial inclusion for drivers, prioritizes safety and uses IoT technology to track all drivers in real time.
CodeLn: An end-to-end technical recruitment platform that automates the entire recruitment process, making it fast and easy for companies to find and test Software Developers and reduce the risk of bad hires.
Bankly: An innovative financial product focused on reaching the unbanked in Africa, in a “Recharge to Save” model. Bankly developed a cash-digitization payment and savings products, in which users pay using Bankly vouchers.
Powerstove Energy: The world’s first clean cookstove with built-in self-powered IoT System for real-time monitoring. Its 100 percent smokeless biomass cookstove cooks food faster and burns 70 times less fuel using processed proprietary water-resistant Goodlife Biomass Pellets produced from forest and agricultural waste.
Pineapple: A fully decentralized insurer. With Pineapple, members pay premiums into their own wallets rather than a central pot. When claims occur, they are distributed to all wallets in the community, which collectively help pay for the claim.
Trend Solar: Assimilated a 4G Android Smartphone and Solar Home System to provide affordable access to energy, internet and mobile in an all-in-one solution that seeks to address the needs of 640 million+ people currently living off-grid in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Last year, we held our first-ever Startup Battlefield in Nairobi, Kenya. African startups impressed us with their innovative solutions and effective business models, so we had to come back and find even more impressive companies from across the continent. TechCrunch reviews several hundred startups from across the region, selecting the top 15 companies to compete onstage. Our partner for the event was Facebook Start.
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And the winner of Startup Battlefield at Disrupt Berlin 2018 is… Legacy
At the very beginning, there were 13 startups. After two days of incredibly fierce competition, we now have a winner.
Startups participating in the Startup Battlefield have all been hand-picked to participate in our highly competitive startup competition. They all presented in front of multiple groups of VCs and tech leaders serving as judges for a chance to win $50,000 and the coveted Disrupt Cup.
After hours of deliberations, TechCrunch editors pored over the judges’ notes and narrowed the list down to five finalists: Imago AI, Kalepso, Legacy, Polyteia and Spike.
These startups made their way to the finale to demo in front of our final panel of judges, which included: Sophia Bendz (Atomico), Niko Bonatsos (General Catalyst), Luciana Luxandru (Accel), Ida Tin (Clue), Matt Turck (FirstMark Capital) and Matthew Panzarino (TechCrunch).
And now, meet the Startup Battlefield winner of TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin 2018.
Winner: Legacy
Legacy is tackling an interesting problem: the reduction of sperm motility as we age. By freezing men’s sperm, this Swiss-based company promises to keep our boys safe and potent as we get older, a consideration that many find vital as we marry and have kids later.
Read more about Legacy in our separate post.
Runner-Up: Imago AI
Imago AI is applying AI to help feed the world’s growing population by increasing crop yields and reducing food waste. To accomplish this, it’s using computer vision and machine learning technology to fully automate the laborious task of measuring crop output and quality.
Read more about Imago AI in our separate post.
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Meet the five Startup Battlefield finalists at Disrupt Berlin 2018
Thirteen companies took the stage today at Disrupt Berlin, delivering six-minute pitches and demos, then answering free-for-all questions from expert judges. Now that the judges have given us their feedback, we’ve chosen five finalists.
These finalists will all take the stage again tomorrow afternoon to present in front of a new set of judges, who will have time to ask more in-depth questions. Then one winner will be chosen to take home the Disrupt Cup — not to mention $50,000, equity-free.
Here are the finalists. The competition will be live-streamed on TechCrunch starting at 2:05pm Berlin time on Friday.
Imago AI
Imago AI is applying AI to help feed the world’s growing population by increasing crop yields and reducing food waste. To accomplish this, it’s using computer vision and machine learning technology to fully automate the laborious task of measuring crop output and quality.
Read more about Imago AI here.
Kalepso
Kalepso says it can do better than other database offerings out there by melding strong security with high reliability, while filling in the spots where sensitive data can be accessed or obtained in the clear. Its Harvard-educated founders argued that all the existing database services out there are either slow or insecure.
Legacy
Legacy is tackling an interesting problem: the reduction of sperm motility as we age. By freezing men’s sperm, this Swiss-based company promises to keep our boys safe and potent as we get older, a consideration that many find vital as we marry and have kids later.
Polyteia
Polyteia is building a platform that would allow city leaders to unify and analyze the data that represents the constituents they serve. The problem, the company says, is that local governments collect a lot of data, but they aren’t always great at organizing and using it efficiently.
Read more about Polyteia here.
Spike
Spike lets family and doctors lend a hand to diabetes patients by sending them real-time alerts about their stats. And the app’s artificial intelligence features can even send helpful reminders or suggest the most diabetes-friendly meals when you walk into a restaurant.
Read more about Spike Diabetes here.
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Koo! is a social network for short-form podcasts
Alexandre Meregan says that music, and audio in general, has always been core to his life. But one day on his five-minute commute to work, trying to listen to a podcast for the first time, he realized that by the time he arrived at work he had only heard an introduction and a commercial jingle.
He immediately went to work on Koo!, a short-form podcast app aimed at young people. Koo! lets users record up to one minute of audio, add “sound stickers” like a drum roll or a poop sound, and share the “Koo” in a feed with their friends and followers.
Meregan believes that some young people are hesitant to share their thoughts on social media, which is mostly picture or video-based, because of the quantification of their self-worth through Like counters. With Koo! users can simply speak their thoughts without having to share a picture or video.
“At Koo! we believe a lot of great content is being held back by teenagers due to insecurities that comes with photo and video,” said Meregan onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin on the Startup Battlefield. “We feel that what you say should be more important than how you look.”
Like most social networks, Koo! is primarily focused on acquiring new users before focusing on a revenue model. Ad-supported revenue is the most obvious option to make money, but Meregan says that the team has been floating around a few other ideas, as well.
One user-acquisition tactic, according to Meregan, is to target YouTube content creators and give them a complimentary service to share their thoughts and voice.
A handful of startups have tried their hand at audio-based social networks, but few have managed to gain much traction.
Koo! is backed by Sweet Studio, though Meregan declined to share the amount of funding the company has received to date.
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Rlay offers a blockchain-powered platform to help companies build better crowdsourced data sets
The team behind Rlay believes that blockchain technology can play a crucial role in helping businesses crowdsource their data-gathering tasks.
Founder Michael Hirn said this is a problem he encountered while working with Sunstone Capital to develop a more quantitative approach to venture capital, which meant pulling startup data from a wide variety of online sources. It ended up being an incredibly time-consuming process, and he said, “90 percent of the time was spent cleaning the data and acquiring the data.”
CTO Max Goisser argued that this is a broad problem. There are already successful examples of crowdsourced data, most notably Wikipedia, but in his view, they succeeded because “these things were of value for the entire world — everyone’s interested in that.”
“But what if you wanted to crowdsource something that is [only] interesting to you as a company?” Goisser said. Then you’d need the right incentive system to convince people to contribute. And that’s where Rlay (pronounced “relay”) comes in — the startup is launching onstage today as part of our Startup Battlefield at Disrupt Berlin.
There are other startups, like Dirt Protocol, offering blockchain-powered tools for data collection and verification. But it sounds like one of Rlay’s big selling points is its ability to integrate with existing enterprise database technology.
In other words, Rlay leverages the blockchain side of things to provide a mechanism for people to contribute data and be rewarded for their contributions (each customer decides how they want to structure the incentives), but the goal is to collect the data in a format that’s useful for the company, and where, if the company desires, it can be kept private.
“We abstract over the backend database that you as a company would use, we abstract over the blockchain or ledger technology — it’s currently Ethereum, but technically, it doesn’t matter,” Hirn said. “So you don’t have to figure out how to work between Postgres and Ethereum, you don’t have to figure out ‘How do we represent the data?’, all of that is taken care of by Rlay.”
As for the incentives, he said:
There are almost as many ways [of] incentivizing as there are different types of financial products. Obviously some ways are more robust than others and we outlined a very general and universal incentive mechanism in our whitepaper, but for most of the applications that is a little bit to complex. So with Rlay, we will provide some templates in the future and certainly advice for certain ways when we work with a client, but Rlay just gives a good interface to define these things very easily.
Ultimately, this should allow companies to acquire the data they need at a lower cost than going out and buying data sets or hiring their own data collection team. For example, Hirn said Rlay is working with “a big name in the blockchain space” to gather environmental, social and governance (ESG) data required by hedge funds and other investors.
For now, Hirn said Rlay is focused on working with developers to collect data that’s online but not aggregated or structured in a way that makes it easily accessible. In the ESG case, that means writing scripts to pull the data from the reports that many companies are already publishing. Ultimately, Rlay could move into collecting data from the physical world, as well.
Goisser said the company is also developing various ways to recognize and resolve conflicting data, so its customers can be sure that the information they’re collecting is accurate.
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Olho do Dono is the winner of Startup Battlefield Latin America
Fifteen startups spent the day presenting onstage in São Paulo, Brazil. For the finalists, that meant presenting twice — once in the initial rounds, then again for our finalist judges.
This was all part of Startup Battlefield Latin America, an event that we put on in partnership with Facebook’s FB Start program. After a full day of pitches and panels, the judges have chosen a winner, who will receive $25,000 (equity free) and a trip for two to TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2019.
Check back on TechCrunch tomorrow to watch the full videos of the presentation. In the meantime, our winner (all descriptions provided by the companies):
Olho do Dono
Olho do Dono offers software that uses a portable 3D camera to estimate cattle weight, allowing cattle owners to monitor livestock weight evolution in a frequent and stress-free manner.
And our runner up:
Unima
Unima developed a fast and low-cost diagnostic and disease surveillance technology that allows anyone, even people with no technical training, to diagnose a disease at the point of care, without using lab equipment, with results in 15 minutes and at $1 per test.
And our finalists:
1Doc3
1Doc3 has developed a platform that allows users to ask healthcare questions to doctors anonymously, and for free.
Agilis
Agilis is an online asset-backed lending platform, based in Argentina. Agilis monetizes customer assets to empower them with simple and fast access to convenient financing.
Cuenca
Cuenca offers a no fee, fast response banking service.
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Meet the five Startup Battlefield finalists at Disrupt SF 2018
Over the past two days, 21 companies have taken the stage at the Disrupt SF Startup Battlefield. We’ve now taken the feedback from all our expert judges and chosen five teams to compete in the finals.
These teams will all take the stage again tomorrow afternoon to present in front of a new set of judges and answer even more in-depth questions. Then one startup will be chosen as the winner of the Battlefield Cup — and they’ll also take home $100,000.
Here are the finalists. The competition will be livestreamed on TechCrunch starting at 1:35pm Pacific on Friday.
CB Therapeutics
CB Therapeutics is a new biotech company that aims to change the game with cannabinoids produced cleanly and cheaply in the lab, out of sugar. What it’s done is bioengineer microorganisms — specifically yeast — to manufacture cannabinoids out of plain-old sugars.
Read more about CB Therapeutics here.
Forethought
Forethought has a modern vision for enterprise search that uses AI to surface the content that matters most in the context of work. Its first use case involves customer service, but it has a broader ambition to work across the enterprise.
Read more about Forethought here.
Mira
Mira is a new device that aims to help women who are struggling to conceive. The Mira Fertility system offers personalized cycle prediction by measuring fertility hormone concentrations in urine samples, telling women which days they’re fertile.
Origami Labs
Origami Labs wants to bring voice assistants right to your ear without requiring you to wear a device like a Bluetooth headset or Apple AirPods. Instead, the startup is using a ring on your finger combined with bone conduction technology to allow you to use your smartphone’s built-in assistant – whether that’s Google Assistant or Siri – in an all-new way.
Read more about Origami Labs here.
Unbound
Unbound makes fashion-forward vibrators, and their latest is the Palma. The new device masquerades as a ring, offers multiple speeds, and is completely waterproof. And the team plans to add accelerometer features.
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Mobility startups: Apply to exhibit for free as a TC Top Pick at Disrupt SF ‘18
Mobility is one of the most rapidly advancing technologies going, and we’re searching for the rising stars of early-stage mobility startups to apply as a TC Top Pick for Disrupt San Francisco 2018 on September 5-7 at Moscone Center West. It’s a competitive application process, but if TechCrunch editors designate your company as a Top Pick, you get to exhibit for free in Startup Alley — the show floor and heartbeat of every Disrupt event. Besides, who doesn’t love free?
Mobile tech is on the cusp of a revolution, and we’re interested in startups focused on everything it entails — autonomous vehicles, sensors, drones, security — or something else altogether. Flying cars, anyone? Exhibiting in Startup Alley will expose your startup to more than 10,000 attendees, including potential investors, customers, partners and more than 400 media outlets.
Here’s how the TC Top Pick process works. First things first: apply now. Our expert team of editors will review each application and choose only five mobility startups as TC Top Picks. They also will select five startups for each of the following tech categories: AI, AR/VR, Blockchain, Biotech, Fintech, Gaming, Healthtech, Privacy/Security, Space, Retail or Robotics. A total 60 companies will exhibit in Startup Alley as a TC Top Pick.
If your mobility startup makes the cut, you receive a free Startup Alley Exhibitor Package, which includes a one-day exhibit space in Startup Alley, three founder passes good for all three days of the show, use of CrunchMatch — our investor-to-startup matching platform — and access to the event press list.
In addition to all the other potential media opportunities, TC Top Picks also get a three-minute interview on the Showcase Stage with a writer — and we’ll share the heck out of that video across our social media platforms. That’s promotional gold right there, folks.
And who knows? As a Startup Alley exhibitor, your company might even get selected as the Startup Battlefield Wildcard — if they do, you get to compete in Startup Battlefield for a shot at the $100,000 prize.
Disrupt San Francisco 2018 takes place on September 5-7. Don’t miss your opportunity to exhibit in Startup Alley for free. The TC Top Pick deadline is June 29, and we have special offers for early applicants. Does your startup have what it takes to be one of the five mobility TC Top Picks? Apply today to find out.
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And the winner of Startup Battlefield Europe at VivaTech is… Wingly
At the very beginning, there were 15 startups. After a morning of incredibly fierce competition, we now have a winner.
Startups participating in the Startup Battlefield have all been hand-picked to participate in our highly competitive startup competition. They all presented in front of multiple groups of VCs and tech leaders serving as judges for a chance to win €25,000 and an all-expense paid trip for two to San Francisco to participate in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch’s flagship event, Disrupt SF 2018.
After many deliberations, TechCrunch editors pored over the judges’ notes and narrowed the list down to five finalists: Glowee, IOV, Mapify, Wakeo and Wingly.
These startups made their way to the finale to demo in front of our final panel of judges, which included: Brent Hoberman (Founders Factory), Liron Azrielant (Meron Capital), Keld van Schreven (KR1), Roxanne Varza (Station F), Yann de Vries (Atomico) and Matthew Panzarino (TechCrunch).
And now, meet the Startup Battlefield Europe at VivaTech winner.
Winner: Wingly
Wingly is a flight-sharing platform that connects pilots and passengers. Private pilots can add flights they have planned, then potential passengers can book them.
Runner-Up: IOV
IOV is building a decentralized DNS for blockchains. By implementing the Blockchain Communication Protocol, the IOV Wallet will be the first wallet that can receive and exchange any kind of cryptocurrency from a single address of value.
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Meet the five finalists at the Disrupt Berlin Startup Battlefield
Disrupt is back in Berlin, where 15 teams have just taken the stage as part of the Startup Battlefield. Each startup demonstrated their product and answered questions from our expert judges. Afterwards, we narrowed it down to five companies that will be competing tomorrow to take home €42,000 and the Battlefield Cup. Tune in tomorrow at 3:10pm Berlin time to watch the finals. Read More
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