Y Combinator

How students are founding, funding and joining startups

February 9, 2019 by Blockchain Interchange Leave a Comment

Shawn Xu Contributor

Shawn Xu is a managing partner at The Dorm Room Fund.

There has never been a better time to start, join or fund a startup as a student.

Young founders who want to start companies while still in school have an increasing number of resources to tap into that exist just for them. Students that want to learn how to build companies can apply to an increasing number of fast-track programs that allow them to gain valuable early stage operating experience. The energy around student entrepreneurship today is incredible. I’ve been immersed in this community as an investor and adviser for some time now, and to say the least, I’m continually blown away by what the next generation of innovators are dreaming up (from Analytical Space’s global data relay service for satellites to Brooklinen’s reinvention of the luxury bed).

Bill Gates in 1973

First, let’s look at student founders and why they’re important. Student entrepreneurs have long been an important foundation of the startup ecosystem. Many students wrestle with how best to learn while in school —some students learn best through lectures, while more entrepreneurial students like author Julian Docks find it best to leave the classroom altogether and build a business instead.

Indeed, some of our most iconic founders are Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, both student entrepreneurs who launched their startups at Harvard and then dropped out to build their companies into major tech giants. A sample of the current generation of marquee companies founded on college campuses include Snap at Stanford ($29B valuation at IPO), Warby Parker at Wharton (~$2B valuation), Rent The Runway at HBS (~$1B valuation), and Brex at Stanford (~$1B valuation).

Some of today’s most celebrated tech leaders built their first ventures while in school — even if some student startups fail, the critical first-time founder experience is an invaluable education in how to build great companies. Perhaps the best example of this that I could find is Drew Houston at Dropbox (~$9B valuation at IPO), who previously founded an edtech startup at MIT that, in his words, provided a: “great introduction to the wild world of starting companies.”

Student founders are everywhere, but the highest concentration of venture-backed student founders can be found at just 5 universities. Based on venture fund portfolio data from the last six years,Harvard, Stanford, MIT, UPenn, and UC Berkeley have produced the highest number of student-founded companies that went on to raise $1 million or more in seed capital. Some prospective students will even enroll in a university specifically for its reputation of churning out great entrepreneurs. This is not to say that great companies are not being built out of other universities, nor does it mean students can’t find resources outside a select number of schools. As you can see later in this essay, there are a number of new ways students all around the country can tap into the startup ecosystem. For further reading, PitchBook produces an excellent report each year that tracks where all entrepreneurs earned their undergraduate degrees.

Student founders have a number of new media resources to turn to. New email newsletters focused on student entrepreneurship like Justine and Olivia Moore’s Accelerated and Kyle Robertson’s StartU offer new channels for young founders to reach large audiences. Justine and Olivia, the minds behind Accelerated, have a lot of street cred— they launched Stanford’s on-campus incubator Cardinal Ventures before landing as investors at CRV.

StartU goes above and beyond to be a resource to founders they profile by helping to connect them with investors (they’re active at 12 universities), and run a podcast hosted by their Editor-in-Chief Johnny Hammond that is top notch. My bet is that traditional media will point a larger spotlight at student entrepreneurship going forward.

New pools of capital are also available that are specifically for student founders. There are four categories that I call special attention to:

University-affiliated accelerator programs
University-affiliated angel networks
Professional venture funds investing at specific universities
Professional venture funds investing through student scouts

While it is difficult to estimate exactly how much capital has been deployed by each, there is no denying that there has been an explosion in the number of programs that address the pre-seed phase. A sample of the programs available at the Top 5 universities listed above are in the graphic below — listing every resource at every university would be difficult as there are so many.

One alumni-centric fund to highlight is the Alumni Ventures Group, which pools LP capital from alumni at specific universities, then launches individual venture funds that invest in founders connected to those universities (e.g. students, alumni, professors, etc.). Through this model, they’ve deployed more than $200M per year! Another highlight has been student scout programs — which vary in the degree of autonomy and capital invested — but essentially empower students to identify and fund high-potential student-founded companies for their parent venture funds. On campuses with a large concentration of student founders, it is not uncommon to find student scouts from as many as 12 different venture funds actively sourcing deals (as is made clear from David Tao’s analysis at UC Berkeley).

Investment Team at Rough Draft Ventures

In my opinion, the two institutions that have the most expansive line of sight into the student entrepreneurship landscape are First Round’s Dorm Room Fund and General Catalyst’s Rough Draft Ventures. Since 2012, these two funds have operated a nationwide network of student scouts that have invested $20K — $25K checks into companies founded by student entrepreneurs at 40+ universities. “Scout” is a loose term and doesn’t do it justice — the student investors at these two funds are almost entirely autonomous, have built their own platform services to support portfolio companies, and have launched programs to incubate companies built by female founders and founders of color. Another student-run fund worth noting that has reach beyond a single region is Contrary Capital, which raised $2.2M last year. They do a particularly great job of reaching founders at a diverse set of schools — their network of student scouts are active at 45 universities and have spoken with 3,000 founders per year since getting started. Contrary is also testing out what they describe as a “YC for university-based founders”. In their first cohort, 100% of their companies raised a pre-seed round after Contrary’s demo day. Another even more recently launched organization is The MBA Fund, which caters to founders from the business schools at Harvard, Wharton, and Stanford. While super exciting, these two funds only launched very recently and manage portfolios that are not large enough for analysis just yet.

Over the last few months, I’ve collected and cross-referenced publicly available data from both Dorm Room Fund and Rough Draft Ventures to assess the state of student entrepreneurship in the United States. Companies were pulled from each fund’s portfolio page, then checked against Crunchbase for amount raised, accelerator participation, and other metrics. If you’d like to sift through the data yourself, feel free to ping me — my email can be found at the end of this article. To be clear, this does not represent the full scope of investment activity at either fund — many companies in the portfolios of both funds remain confidential and unlisted for good reasons (e.g. startups working in stealth). In fact, the In addition, data for early stage companies is notoriously variable in quality, even with Crunchbase. You should read these insights as directional only, given the debatable confidence interval. Still, the data is still interesting and give good indicators for the health of student entrepreneurship today.

Dorm Room Fund and Rough Draft Ventures have invested in 230+ student-founded companies that have gone on to raise nearly $1 billion in follow on capital. These funds have invested in a diverse range of companies, from govtech (e.g. mark43, raised $77M+ and FiscalNote, raised $50M+) to space tech (e.g. Capella Space, raised ~$34M). Several portfolio companies have had successful exits, such as crypto startup Distributed Systems (acquired by Coinbase) and social networking startup tbh (acquired by Facebook). While it is too early to evaluate the success of these funds on a returns basis (both were launched just 6 years ago), we can get a sense of success by evaluating the rates by which portfolio companies raise additional capital. Taken together, 34% of DRF and RDV companies in our data set have raised $1 million or more in seed capital. For a rough comparison, CB Insights cites that 40% of YC companies and 48% of Techstars companies successfully raise follow on capital (defined as anything above $750K). Certainly within the ballpark!

Source: Crunchbase

Dorm Room Fund and Rough Draft Ventures companies in our data set have an 11–12% rate of survivorship to Series A. As a benchmark, a previous partner at Y Combinator shared that 20% of their accelerator companies raise Series A capital (YC declined to share the official figure, but it’s likely a stat that is increasing given their new Series A support programs. For further reading, check out YC’s reflection on what they’ve learned about helping their companies raise Series A funding). In any case, DRF and RDV’s numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, as the average age of their portfolio companies is very low and raising Series A rounds generally takes time. Ultimately, it is clear that DRF and RDV are active in the earlier (and riskier) phases of the startup journey.

Dorm Room Fund and Rough Draft Ventures send 18–25% of their portfolio companies to Y Combinator or Techstars. Given YC’s 1.5% acceptance rate as reported in Fortune, this is quite significant! Internally, these two funds offer founders an opportunity to participate in mock interviews with YC and Techstars alumni, as well as tap into their communities for peer support (e.g. advice on pitch decks and application content). As a result, Dorm Room Fund and Rough Draft Ventures regularly send cohorts of founders to these prestigious accelerator programs. Based on our data set, 17–20% of DRF and RDV companies that attend one of these accelerators end up raising Series A venture financing.

Source: Crunchbase

Dorm Room Fund and Rough Draft Ventures don’t invest in the same companies. When we take a deeper look at one specific ecosystem where these two funds have been equally active over the last several years — Boston — we actually see that the degree of investment overlap for companies that have raised $1M+ seed rounds sits at 26%. This suggests that these funds are either a) seeing different dealflow or b) have widely different investment decision-making.

Source: Crunchbase

Dorm Room Fund and Rough Draft Ventures should not just be measured by a returns-basis today, as it’s too early. I hypothesize that DRF and RDV are actually encouraging more entrepreneurial activity in the ecosystem (more students decide to start companies while in school) as well as improving long-term founder outcomes amongst students they touch (portfolio founders build bigger and more successful companies later in their careers). As more students start companies, there’s likely a positive feedback loop where there’s increasing peer pressure to start a company or lean on friends for founder support (e.g. feedback, advice, etc).Both of these subjects warrant additional study, but it’s likely too early to conduct these analyses today.

Dorm Room Fund and Rough Draft Ventures have impressive alumni that you will want to track. 1 in 4 alumni partners are founders, and 29% of these founder alumni have raised $1M+ seed rounds for their companies. These include Anjney Midha’s augmented reality startup Ubiquity6 (raised $37M+), Shubham Goel’s investor-focused CRM startup Affinity (raised $13M+), Bruno Faviero’s AI security software startup Synapse (raised $6M+), Amanda Bradford’s dating app The League (raised $2M+), and Dillon Chen’s blockchain startup Commonwealth Labs (raised $1.7M). It makes sense to me that alumni from these communities that decide to start companies have an advantage over their peers — they know what good companies look like and they can tap into powerful networks of young talent / experienced investors.

Beyond Dorm Room Fund and Rough Draft Ventures, some venture capital firms focus on incubation for student-founded startups. Credit should first be given to Lightspeed for producing the amazing Summer Fellows bootcamp experience for promising student founders — after all, Pinterest was built there! Jeremy Liew gives a good overview of the program through his sit-down interview with Afterbox’s Zack Banack. Based on a study they conducted last year, 40% of Lightspeed Summer Fellows alumni are currently active founders. Pear Ventures also has an impressive summer incubator program where 85% of its companies successfully complete a fundraise. Index Ventures is the latest to build an incubator program for student founders, and even accepts founders who want to work on an idea part-time while completing a summer internship.

Let’s now look at students who want to join a startup before founding one. Venture funds have historically looked to tap students for talent, and are expanding the engagement lifecycle. The longest running programs include Kleiner Perkins’ class=”m_1196721721246259147gmail-markup–strong m_1196721721246259147gmail-markup–p-strong”> KP Fellows and True Ventures’ TEC Fellows, which focus on placing the next generation’s most promising product managers, engineers, and designers into the portfolio companies of their parent venture funds.

There’s also the secretive Greylock X, a referral-based hand-picked group of the best student engineers in Silicon Valley (among their impressive alumni are founders like Yasyf Mohamedali and Joe Kahn, the folks behind First Round-backed Karuna Health). As these programs have matured, these firms have recognized the long-run value of engaging the alumni of their programs.

More and more alumni are “coming back” to the parent funds as entrepreneurs, like KP Fellow Dylan Field of Figma (and is also hosting a KP Fellow, closing a full circle loop!). Based on their latest data, 10% of KP Fellows alumni are founders — that’s a lot given the fact that their community has grown to 500! This helps explain why Kleiner Perkins has created a structured path to receive $100K in seed funding to companies founded by KP Fellow alumni. It looks like venture funds are beginning to invest in student programs as part of their larger platform strategy, which can have a real impact over the long term (for further reading, see this analysis of platform strategy outcomes by USV’s Bethany Crystal).

KP Fellows in San Francisco

Venture funds are doubling down on student talent engagement — in just the last 18 months, 4 funds have launched student programs. It’s encouraging to see new funds follow in the footsteps of First Round, General Catalyst, Kleiner Perkins, Greylock, and Lightspeed. In 2017, Accel launched their Accel Scholars program to engage top talent at UC Berkeley and Stanford. In 2018, we saw 8VC Fellows, NEA Next, and Floodgate Insiders all launch, targeting elite universities outside of Silicon Valley. Y Combinator implemented Early Decision, which allows student founders to apply one batch early to help with academic scheduling. Most recently, at the start of 2019, First Round launched the Graduate Fund (staffed by Dorm Room Fund alumni) to invest in founders who are recent graduates or young alumni.

Given more time, I’d love to study the rates by which student founders start another company following investments from student scout funds, as well as whether or not they’re more successful in those ventures. In any case, this is an escalation in the number of venture funds that have started to get serious about engaging students — both for talent and dealflow.

Student entrepreneurship 2.0 is here. There are more structured paths to success for students interested in starting or joining a startup. Founders have more opportunities to garner press, seek advice, raise capital, and more. Venture funds are increasingly leveraging students to help improve the three F’s — finding, funding, and fixing. In my personal view, I believe it is becoming more and more important for venture funds to gain mindshare amongst the next generation of founders and operators early, while still in school.

I can’t wait to see what’s next for student entrepreneurship in 2019. If you’re interested in digging in deeper (I’m human — I’m sure I haven’t covered everything related to student entrepreneurship here) or learning more about how you can start or join a startup while still in school, shoot me a note at sxu@dormroomfund.com. A massive thanks to Phin Barnes, Rei Wang, Chauncey Hamilton, Peter Boyce, Natalie Bartlett, Denali Tietjen, Eric Tarczynski, Will Robbins, Jasmine Kriston, Alicia Lau, Johnny Hammond, Bruno Faviero, Athena Kan, Shohini Gupta, Alex Immerman, Albert Dong, Phillip Hua-Bon-Hoa, and Trevor Sookraj for your incredible encouragement, support, and insight during the writing of this essay.

Startup accelerators helped spark Latin Americas tech boom

October 6, 2018 by Blockchain Interchange Leave a Comment

Agustín Esperón Contributor

Agustín Esperón is the co-founder and UX/art director at Wideo.

Five years ago, no startups from Latin America were participating in prestigious U.S. accelerators like 500 Startups or Y Combinator. In fact, no Latin American startup reached the renowned Silicon Valley accelerator, Y Combinator, until 2015, when Colombia’s Platzi was invited to join.

It seemed that Latin America was not yet on anyone’s radar at the big global accelerators. At the time, 500 Startups in Silicon Valley was one of the only global accelerators that was paying attention to Latin America. 500 Startups’ first Latin American startup investment was Chile’s Welcu in Batch 2 (2011), followed by Brazil’s ContaAzul in Batch 3 (2012) and Mexico’s Yogome and Brazil’s Ingresse in Batch 4 (2012). Alongside fashion platform Femeninas, we were one of the first startups based in Argentina to be accepted into the program in 2012.

500 Startups has since focused on forging partnerships and investing in startups in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Chile and Peru.

Nowadays, dozens of Latin American startups, principally from Colombia, are joining U.S. accelerators. Since 2016, Rappi, UBits, Ropeo, Hogaru and Tributi have entered Y Combinator from Colombia, while RunaHR, Grin, BrainHi and Fintual have brought Mexico, Puerto Rico and Chile into the YC network, as well. Over the past five years, global and local accelerator programs have taken hold across Latin America. What’s more, we’re starting to see many specialized programs emerge and focus on accelerating companies in specific sectors, such as agtech, fintech and social impact. Here’s how the role of the accelerator is evolving in Latin America.

The inflection point: Start-Up Chile and NXTP Labs

When Start-Up Chile launched in 2010, it became the darling of the Latin American tech ecosystem. In dozens of articles, Start-Up Chile is known as the “spark that ignited Latin America’s startup ecosystem,” and is often identified as the inspiration for government acceleration programs worldwide. Among programs in Latin America that arose from the Start-Up Chile “spark” are Startup Peru, Parallel 18, IncuBAte, Startup Mexico, Ruta N and 21212.

However, there are two other local accelerator programs that arose around the same period, without as much global publicity as Start-Up Chile. 500 Startups Mexico City and NXTP Labs launched their local acceleration programs in 2010 and 2011, respectively, focusing on Spanish-speaking Latin American startups at a time when Start-Up Chile was still only focused on accelerating foreign enterprises. Of the 16 startups that graduated from NXTP Labs’ second group, 13 were from Latin America, 10 of which were specifically founded in Argentina.

Accelerators are now one of the top ways for Latin American startups to secure funding and reach international markets.

We went through NXTP Labs’ accelerator program in 2014, after they had successfully graduated dozens of local companies. But even before they became one of the region’s top private accelerators, NXTP Labs was one of the most active early-stage investors in Latin America. To date, there are still very few fully private venture capital funds in Latin America, including NXTP Labs, Magma Partners and Kaszek Ventures.

Since they began, Start-Up Chile, NXTP Labs and 500 Startups Latam have accelerated more than 2,000 startups in total, generating millions of dollars in revenue and investment, and creating hundreds of jobs across Latin America and beyond.

More importantly, they created the impetus for a steady wave of startup accelerators to enter the Latin American ecosystem.

The newcomers: industry-specific accelerators

In the past few years, accelerators of all kinds have cropped up in Latin America to provide mentorship, support and investment for startups as they grow. However, the regional trend has been to shift away from general support (i.e. the Start-Up Chile model) toward more specialized, industry-specific acceleration. Even NXTP Labs has pivoted its accelerator programs, focusing almost exclusively on fintech and agtech startups in Latin America, as they believe these two fields provide a competitive advantage in the local markets.

The new tendency toward specialization has led to the rise of programs such as The Yield Lab, an Argentine agtech accelerator, Chilean Bci Labs, focused on fintech, and Startupbootcamp’s new fintech program in Mexico City.

According to Gust’s Latin American accelerator report, more than half (58 percent) of startup accelerators in the region are focused on a specific vertical rather than trying to be a jack-of-all-trades.

Most of the government-funded accelerators, such as Startup Mexico, Parallel 18, Ruta N and Startup Peru, still support startups from every sector. MassChallenge Mexico also allows startups from any industry to apply for acceleration.

What’s next: bringing women into entrepreneurship

While fintech, agtech, blockchain and other hot industries have gotten their share of the limelight, there is still a massive elephant in the room (or the co-working space) in Latin America: the lack of women. A random sampling of 50 startups selected for accelerator programs this year in Latin America revealed just 28 percent had female founders.

A recent blog found just four incubator and accelerator programs that are specifically targeted toward enabling female founders in Latin America: Empoderando Mujeres in Mexico, Capital Abeja and The S Factory in Chile, and WIN Lab, which is actually based in Miami.

This vertical is one that is missing from the conversation in Latin America, and the world. Women make up just 17 percent of startup founders and receive only 2 percent of VC dollars, but it is estimated that fully incorporating women into entrepreneurship could boost the global GDP by US$12 trillion.

A lot has changed in Latin America since we launched our company and entered our first accelerator in 2012. Dozens of global accelerators and companies looking to support and invest in Latin American companies are joining the local accelerators that paved the way, such as Start-Up Chile and NXTP Labs.

More than ever before, the prestigious accelerator programs, such as Y Combinator in Silicon Valley and other programs across Europe and the U.S., are accepting startups from Latin America. Local accelerators are refining their strategies and focusing primarily on niche industries, such as agtech and fintech, to tap into Latin America’s competitive advantages. Accelerators are now one of the top ways for Latin American startups to secure funding and reach international markets. While there are still gaps to fill, it’s been rewarding to watch these programs develop and succeed in the region.

Ready, Set, Raise is a new accelerator built for women by women

September 16, 2018 by Blockchain Interchange Leave a Comment

Women in tech are not only significantly under-funded by venture capitalists, but they also often lack access to the early-stage support granted to their male counterparts.

To enroll in a startup accelerator like Y Combinator, for example, it’s expected founders relocate to the Bay Area for three months. Women, who are more often caregivers, might not be able to do that, and even if they can, the program may not cater to their specific needs.

Female Founders Alliance (FFA), a relatively new network of female startup founders, has built a free, non-dilutive five-week accelerator for women by women. Called Ready, Set, Raise, its goal is to help more female-founded startups raise VC through workshops, 1-on-1 coaching, legal clinics, communications and speech coaching and more. The accelerator, sponsored by Trilogy Equity Partners, kicked off at the end of August and will culminate with a private demo day with VCs in Seattle on September 27th.

“I don’t know many women who can uproot their families for three months to go live in another city,” FFA founder Leslie Feinzaig told TechCrunch. “When I was working on my company, I wanted to apply to Y Combinator but I was a new mom, it was 100 percent a non-starter.”

Feinzaig knows the trials and tribulations of raising VC as a female entrepreneur all too well. As the founder of an edtech startup called Venture Kits, she tried, unsuccessfully, to procure venture backing. That struggle is why she started FFA, which began as a Facebook group to connect female founders in the Seattle area but has expanded across North America.

The accelerator is designed to allow founders to tune into the programming remotely. Participants are only required to be on-site in Seattle, where FFA is based, for one week, during which the organization is providing free childcare.

Q1 2018 global diversity investment report: Investing trends in female founders

FFA’s accelerator is among a new class of efforts created for women in tech. All Raise’s Founders For Change initiative, for example, and new female-focused funds, like Sarah Kunst’s Cleo Capital, are all working to close the gender funding gap.

“I know it seems to people like there’s a lot happening around female founders and diverse founders, but in the context of the size and scale of that gender gap, we are barely getting started,” Feinzaig said. “We need all the accelerators. We need hundreds of funds. We are nowhere close to making a real dent in equal leadership.”

Today, FFA is announcing their inaugural class of startups, eight in total. Here’s a closer look at the group:

Chanlogic: Based in Seattle, the SaaS startup provides a product for e-commerce channel managers.
Esq.Me Inc.: A Portland-based document marketplace for lawyers created by lawyers.
Future Sight AR: A Houston-based AR product for engineering, procurement and construction companies.
geeRemit: Based in Raleigh, the startup leverages the blockchain to power remittances to Africa.
Magic AI: A Seattle-based AI startup for livestock care.
MoxieReader: Based in New York, an edtech startup focused on improving child literacy through tech.
Pandere Shoes: Based in Anchorage, the startup is creating expandable shoes.
Zeta Help: A San Francisco-based financial support platform for millennial couples.

All 59 startups that launched today at Y Combinators S18 Demo Day 2

August 23, 2018 by Blockchain Interchange Leave a Comment

From yeast-grown cannabinoids to project management software to consumer apps looking to gauge opinions on college campuses, a wide variety of spaces was represented on the second day of pitches from Y Combinator’s Summer 2018 class.

As we noted yesterday, B2B software and services was the biggest vertical with 30 percent of the 132 startups falling into that slice of the categorical pie. Healthcare-related startups were close behind with 28 percent. Here’s the full breakdown if you’re curious.

Aerospace: 3%
Agriculture: 1%
Automotive: 2%
B2B Software and Services: 30%
Blockchain: 5%
Consumer Goods and Services: 9%
Consumer Media: 7%
Education: 3%
Fintech: 6%
Government: 1%
Healthcare: 28%
Industrial: 1%
Real Estate and Construction: 4%

Below is an exhaustive look at the group of 59 startups that presented today. We swear you’ll feel like you were actually there at the Computer History Museum watching the presentations alongside us. Also, if you’re thirsty for more of the latest picks from one of Silicon Valley’s premiere accelerators check out our list from Day 1.

Mental Happy

Mental Happy is an employee gifting service that assembles what it calls a Cheerbox. Taking sham expressions of care for laboring office drones to the next level, Mental Happy throws out the flowers and ditches the dumb office knickknacks in favor of positive messaging and things they reckon employees can actually use, including food, wellness gifts, and personalized notes. The average price for one of these bundles of joy? $59 on average. Some people are buying, too. The young company says it has already generated $50,000 in sales over the last two months.

Titan

With a service that already holds $10 million in assets from thousands of clients, Titan is setting itself up to stand above other consumer-facing fintech offerings. The company is an asset manager that’s building, managing, and explaining its investment theses for normal investors. The company takes its customers through their portfolio using in-app video and other illustrative tools to make understanding strategies easier — and investing with the company more transparent.

Kinside

The cost of childcare is one of the biggest financial burdens American families face, and though there’s up to $30 billion in government money available for childcare in the U.S. each year, it’s locked up in flexible spending accounts that are so complicated that 90 percent of that funding goes unused.

Kinside wants to help by automating the claims process. It also serves as a childcare management tool, letting parents pay their care providers with a Venmo-like feature, while making it simpler for companies to offer childcare benefits that can help attract talented employees. The company, which launched just six weeks ago, says it plans to target employers with more than 20 employees, which is a big market. There are more than 620,000 such businesses in the U.S. As for the total addressable market Kinside sees itself chasing, it’s $2.8 billion.

Fixers

Travel and experience marketplace Fixers pitches experiences ranging from yoga retreats to trail running weekends and music festivals that are curated by the locals in-the-know. It’s designed to help travelers discover and book trips they couldn’t find anywhere else. The company has seen $1.7 million in sales in 8 months, with 7,000 activities booked, and the company hasn’t spent a dollar on marketing. The founders assert that millennial travelers are primarily motivated by experiences, rather than destinations. Entrepreneurs like yoga teachers are running businesses and retreats and making money on Fixers.

64-x

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

Papa

Papa’s slogan is “grandkids on demand.” To solve the problem of loneliness, Papa connects college students with senior citizen homes. College students are matched with seniors to help them with tasks related to transportation and technology, but mainly the goal is to provide companionship for people who are at risk of loneliness. The founders assert that loneliness puts the country’s more than 50 million seniors at risk for health problems like Alzheimer’s; indeed, Medicare covers Papa through a UPMC health plan because of the more widely accepted belief that socializing well into one’s golden years is a critical component to living a healthier life.

Tall Poppy

Unhappy employees cost money, but Tall Poppy thinks it can keep more of them in place by providing an educational toolkit to those who are being harassed, a kit that teaches them how to lock down their online presence and manage incident response properly.

The brainchild of Leigh Honeywell, a security specialist, the startup grows out of the work that Honeywell has been doing to hunt down trolls in online communities since 2008, including at Slack, where she protected colleagues who’d been targeted by outsiders by starting, first, with strengthening their otherwise vulnerable personal accounts, then targeting sites where bad actors congregate.

Tall Poppy not only works with customers to educate them how to protect themselves but also to make them aware of the laws in each state that they can use to protect themselves and punish their attackers. Meanwhile, for $150 a seat per year, its software is comparable to other risk management tools.

AnchorUSD

AnchorUSD is a stable cryptocurrency backed one-for-one by the US dollar. The founding team wants to be the trusted reserve currency of the crypto financial system. They are aiming to develop a service that will provide the most trusted, stable storage of value on the blockchain.

Tether is not trusted, but since there’s no other option it has become the medium of exchange. Anchor wants to replace Tether. It’s built on Stellar and has become the official partner of Stellar, which means they’re cheaper, faster and safer. Transaction costs plus interest on float. The founder claims to have solved Stripe’s scaling problems and the other worked on growth at Facebook.

Ixora

Ixora’s technology wants to do nothing more than enable the creation of photorealistic environments for any kind of visual entertainment, and it says it can do this a heck of a lot more cheaply than big studios.

According to Ixora, major film studios produce 100 blockbuster films each year that feature than 1,000 CGI shots — each costing them roughly $10,000 a pop. Its software can do the same for next to nothing, Ixora says, and it can do it within “hours.” If that pitch isn’t compelling enough, consider beyond movies that TVs, games, and VR experiences are all beginning to require movie-level graphics. With rich photorealistic environments becoming the norm across the entertainment industry (witness “Game of Thrones” and “The Jungle Book” as just two examples), Ixora could be catering to a sizable market for a long time to come.

Berbix

Image: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

Collecting and identifying photo identification becomes a breeze with Berbix, a company that’s aiming to make what amounts to Stripe for identity verification. The company has developed an integration with its software so that companies can cut costs and deter fraud. Founded by two former product and engineering leaders for trust and safety at Airbnb, they’re trying to build identity verification for all kinds of peer-to-peer marketplaces and online platforms, which they see as a $10 billion opportunity (at least).

Dataform

Dataform is building software to help the data teams that spend 80% of their time preparing and formatting the data they need to conduct analyses, create dashboards or perform machine learning functions. The company has built toolkits that help collect and manage that data so it can be used (This post was updated to clarify Dataform’s business and url).

CB Therapeutics

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

RevenueCat

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

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

HeyDoctor

Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

HeyDoctor is the online prescription service for a growing of startups and services that are pitching medications and prescriptions online. Working with these companies, HeyDoctor can prescribe and refill prescriptions for medicines ranging from birth control, hair growth or replacement, urinary tract infection treatments, lab work and much more.

The company envisions creating an alternative medical record platform that’s open and accessible to patients and portable among on-demand providers. Already, more than 125,000 primary care visits have been conducted on the platform in the last 6 months. Last month, it made $105,000 in revenue, and it says that number reflects 22 percent growth month over month.

Anima App

Or Arbel, the former chief executive and cofounder of YO, is back with a new company that’s a bit more sophisticated in its goals and complicated in its execution. Arbel is one of the co-founders of the new Y Combinator-backed startup Anima, which allows designers to convert design to code, automatically.

Using the tool, Arbel and his team — individuals who are culled from the engineering and design ranks of Google, Apple, and Amazon –estimate that development teams can save weeks of work, eliminating crosstalk between designers and developers. It has some early believers, too. According to Arbel, Netflix, Google, and Amazon are already using its tools, for which it plans to charge $500 per seat per year.

ShopWith

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

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

ZiffyHomes

ZiffyHomes is bringing the co-living model popularized in the U.S. to millennials in India. With a clutch of managed, co-living, furnished apartments already in its portfolio, ZiffyHomes is already serving more than 2,000 young Indian professionals and seeing $2.2 million in annual revenue from the three Indian cities in which it operates. But it has ambitions to cater to up to 60 million more people across the country who fit into its target demographic, and given that it takes 20 percent of the rent paid, you can see how its revenue could grow quickly.

The company has competition, of course. It compares itself to WeWork, yet WeWork itself is making major inroads in India. Another, smaller competitor, a Mumbai-headquartered startup called Awfis meanwhile announced $20 million in new capital last month. But given the relative newness of this model to India and the size of the addressable market, this opportunity looks like a solid one to us.

Reformer Therapeutics

Reformer Therapeutics is developing a pipeline of drugs for many diseases, with an emphasis on deadly triple negative breast cancer that is currently treated with an outdated toxic chemo. Their breast cancer drug is called Reformer 1 and targets cells that cause cancer to spread. The drug has proved safe in human clinical trials, and the team is starting a 3 year FDA trial. The founders met working together at Science Exchange.

Ajaib

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

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

Emojer

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

Snark AI

Snark AI helps companies rent GPUs that aren’t in use. It’s one way to potentially reduce the cost of that GPU over time, which may be a substantial investment initially but could produce a meaningful return over time while it isn’t in use. How it works broadly: The startup matches the proper amount of GPU power to whatever a team needs, and then deploys it across a network of distributed idle cards that companies have in various data centers.

Snark’s approach can also ostensibly make “deep learning” run faster. In fact, its founders say the company is already working with five companies (which, okay, fine, could well be other startups in its cohort) to make their research cycles ten times faster.

Scanwell Health

Urinary tract infections are highly uncomfortable and distracting and worse, often become more advanced, fast. It’s long been the case that treatment has required a doctor visit. But as of last month, a young San Francisco-based startup called Scanwell Health began selling directly to consumers the first time and, for now, remains the only FDA-cleared urine testing app that allows someone to test their urine at home using a paper test strip and a camera phone. (Its app uses sophisticated color metrics to analyze the strip and determine what’s what.)

Little wonder there’s some demand for the product. Company founder Stephen Chen said the company sold out of its kits – – 2,000 of them — as soon as they became available. Note the kits cost $5. A consultation to Scanwell to confirm the results — it relies on outside physicians — costs customers another $25

Grin

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

Mutiny

Mutiny helps business-to-business, software-as-a-service companies present a message that’s customized to each visitor on their website.

For example, when you visit the homepage of Mutiny customer Amplitude, things like the customer testimonials and the call to action will change depending on the size of your company. As for the size of the opportunity that Mutiny is chasing by helping its customers personalize theirsites? It claims it’s $5 billion.

LemonBox

LemonBox is a startup that lets Chinese consumers buy U.S. health products at affordable prices. Today, it allows Chinese consumers to buy LemonBox-branded daily vitamin packs.

Further down the line, the goal is to expand into more specific verticals, including mother and baby, as well as beauty. It could even move beyond e-commerce with services like consultations with dietary experts.

Osh’s Affordable Pharmaceuticals

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

Ubits

Ubits is Lynda.com for Latin America. Ubits offers corporate training classes in Spanish for topics like leadership, sales and Microsoft Excel. Currently, there are no good options available in Spanish, the second most common language in the world. Ubits has 1000 videos on 80 online courses. They have 75 customers including Citi, Dow, Nestle, BNP Paribas, who pay on average $9K a year. They have $700K in ARR, growing 40 percent month over month.There are 40 million office workers in Latin America. They charge $50 per employee per year.

Incentiveai

Cryptocurrency projects can crash and burn if developers don’t predict how humans will abuse their blockchains. Incentiveai has built artificial intelligence simulations that test not just for security holes, but for how greedy or illogical humans can crater a blockchain community.

Crypto developers can use the service to fix their systems before they go live. They can either pay Incentivai to audit their project and produce a report, or they can host the AI simulation tool like a software-as-a-service. Already, the company — founded just two months ago — says it’s seeing $250,000 in revenue from three paying customers, including market forecasting startup Augur, which is perhaps best known for orchestrating the first ICO on the ethereum network.

Toybox

Toybox is pitching a software service that lets designers communicate changes to developers on any website without ever having to write a line of code. The changes are noted as CSS edits for developers, so the quick fixes can be implemented easily. It reduces the need for communication between designers and developers over minor changes to images or visuals and can significantly speed up production, the company said. The company has picked a $180 price point per seat. They have 400 active users after launching four weeks ago.

Kunduz

Using a network of 7,000 tutors, Turkish test-prep app Kunduz is building a service that the company argues is ten times cheaper and faster than traditional tutoring options. Like its U.S. counterpart, Toot, Kunduz users take a picture of a problem using the app, and then it links the studen with a tutor. Students looking for help typically get an answer in 10 minutes, according to the company, which says that one-third of the questions asked are “repeat” questions and thus can be answered within seconds without the help of a human. Launched in Turkey first, Kunduz has already answered 3 million questions in its home market, where its addressable market is in the $2.4 billion range. Next up, it says, is India.

The Good Food Institute

The current system for making meat is broken. The Good Food Institute, a non-profit promoting meat alternatives and clean meat, is operating as a think tank and accelerator for the plant-based and clean meat sector. It’s designing curriculum for colleges across the country. It currently has 350 entrepreneurs in its ecosystem. And it’s launching a conference around clean meat and plant-based meat. The organization is trying to boost portfolio growth in the plant-based substitute and clean-meat space, and it’s consulting with venture firms that are looking at investing in the industry.

And Comfort

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

Bot M.D.

Doctors in emerging markets will have access to an artificially intelligent clinical assistant if the founders of Bot M.D. have their way. The company has developed a bot that can provide answers to questions about drugs, drug interactions and diseases, while also transcribing dictated case notes. For any doctor with a smartphone, Bot M.D. could be their downloadable, affordable, and scalable way to improve patient care in places where the help is sorely needed. The data it gleans from these interactions could prove lucrative, too. As the company notes, pharmaceutical companies shell out $3 billion a year to understand their doctor-customers. If it can be repository for them, it can potentially garner a percentage of that spend.

OKCredit

OKCredit helps small and mid-size businesses in India — the world’s largest base of SMBs — which extend $500 billion of credit to consumers every year…on paper. OKCredit digitizes their transactions and records payment, reducing the burden of these businesses that are currently maintaining and accounting paper account books.

It appears to have struck a chord. Already the company is working with 15,000 businesses, and it hasn’t spent any money on marketing it says. As for the need it’s addressing, it says it’s a $300 billion market.

Emptor

No need to caveat this Emptor. Helping local companies find facilities and maintenance providers like janitors, landscapers and HVAC repair technicians, Emptor bills itself as a Thumbtack for the enterprise and includes a machine learning system that will classify spending and provide recommendations for cost reductions.

That kind of offering could be music to hospitals’ ears. Many hospitals lose money, and those that don’t see margins on average of just 2.6 percent, says the company. Things are poised to grow worse for them, too, owing to a regulation passed in 2015 that could reduce spending on hospital services by up to $250 billion by 2030, according to a study published last year in Health Affairs. If Emptor can give them a way to control their operating expenses and improve their margins, everyone wins.

Dinesafe

Put simply, Dinesafe wants to ensure that outbreaks of food poisoning will be a thing of the past. Foodborne illnesses sicken 48 million people, and kill roughly 3,000 people in the U.S. alone each year. Through its website iwaspoisoned.com, the company allows for user-generated reports of food poisoning to detect outbreaks in real time. In fact, the company says it predicted that Chipotle would have food safety issues prior to its spate of outbreaks earlier this year.

The company has 25,000 consumer subscribers and offers data services, surveillance, benchmarking and industry analytics to corporate customers and 280 public health agencies. The service is helpful for restaurants, too. If they want to stay ahead of these trends, they need this data. No wonder 16 restaurant chains are already signed up for the service.

Modern Treasury

Providing payment fulfillment services for businesses that still use old line payment mechanisms like checks, wire transfers or automated clearing houses, Modern Treasury wants to save companies time and money. Acting as a Stripe for non-credit card transactions, the company offers a way for businesses to swap out the homegrown infrastructure and excel spreadsheets they were using to manage payments.

Leena AI

Leena AI is building HR bots to answer questions for employees instantly. The bots can be integrated into Slack or Workplace by Facebook, and they’re built and trained using information in policy documents and back-end systems.

Some of of the questions and answers are pretty standard, covering things like vacations and expense reports. But Leena AI also uses natural language processing to understand a company’s unique terminology or just the unusual ways someone might ask those questions.

Abacus Protocol

Abacus Protocol allows any company to tokenize both fungible and non-fungible assets (like commodities, equities, or debt) and automate their compliance demands — like know your customer, SEC registration exemptions and securities restrictions. These functions happen not just at the time of issuance but also on every secondary transaction or transfer of the security token. Using the platform, companies can take advantage of the benefits of tokenizations, making assets more liquid and simplifying bookkeeping without needing to hire a dev team.

HappiLabs

HappiLabs is a virtual lab manager, spanning topics from biotech and brain research to robotics. It’s already working with 26 labs across the country, helping them buy everything from beakers to gloves to specialized machines in a cost-effective way.

Founder and CEO Tom Rugins is a former Ph.D. student and lab manager himself, and he said he was taken aback at how far behind scientific purchasing was from the rest of the retail world.

Federacy

Federacy has a mission to make bug bounty programs available to even the smallest startup. The idea is to make it free and simple for startups to set up bug bounties.

For now, the co-founders are vetting every researcher they bring on the platform. While they realize this approach probably won’t be sustainable forever, they want to control access while they build out the platform.

College Pulse

The youngs in Gen Z love to take quizzes and companies love selling to the youngs in Gen Z. Those two truths have the team behind College Pulse salivating about the opportunity they see for their business. Using the company’s service, students can poll their community to find out what’s going on around their campus. Queries range from finding the correlation between sexual activity and GPA, to what’s the most popular spot to get a malt around town. Already active on 33 college campuses around the country, the company is profitable from selling its access to a much-envied audience of open wallets. Founded on Dartmouth’s campus, the company sees a future in an ad-supported content delivery platform for folks who want to know.

Medinas Health

Tackling a $765 billion problem of healthcare waste Medinas Health is giving hospitals an easy way to resell their used and surplus medical equipment and supplies. The company has already raised $1 million for its marketplace to help healthcare organizations buy and sell equipment. With a seed round led by Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s Sound Ventures, and General Catalyst’s Rough Draft Ventures fund, the company is also working to lower costs for cash-strapped rural health care centers.

OpenPhone

OpenPhone has been working on an app to make it easier to get and use a business phone number. You don’t need a second phone, you don’t need to get an expensive solution designed for big teams.

After downloading the iOS or Android app, you can get a second phone number for $9.99 per month. It can be a local or a toll-free number in the U.S. or Canada. You can also port an existing phone number and get rid of your second phone.

iLabService

iLabService is a Chinese laboratory monitoring, management and automation service. They use sensors to monitor lab equipment and alert you when something is wrong. They are currently tracking 1500 pieces of equipment. There are 300,000 labs in China using 25 million pieces of equipment. They charge 200 million for the equipment per year, creating a $5 billion market opportunity in China. The founders spotted this massive unmet customer need while working at ThermoFisher.

Splish

The Splish app pops content into video loops of between 1-5 seconds. Photos can be uploaded too, but motion must be added in the form of an animated effect of your choice. So basically, nothing on Splish stays still.

While wobbly, content on Splish is intended to stick around, rather than ephemerally pass away (à la Snaps). The idea is that sharing stuff on Splish is a bonding experience; part of an ongoing smartphone-enabled conversation between mates, rather than a selectively manicured photoshoot. In fact, the startup has quickly zeroed in on teens, primarily because unlike adults who take vacation photos and capture dinner outings that they post to social media, teens “don’t have anything to do,” so it tells them what to post. (These “cues” can include suggestions like that users film themselves chugging hot sauce, for example.) Teens apparently like the idea. Launched six weeks ago, the company says the average user opens the app four times a day. It isn’t disclosing how many users it has attracted so far.

CowryWise

CowryWise wants to bring the benefits of algorithmically managed investment platforms to Africans across the continent. Taking a page from the Betterment and Wealthfront playbooks that have been popularized in the U.S., CowryWise enables young, high net-worth Africans to invest their money more intelligently — with the machine learning tools previously available only to large financial services institutions.

Radix Labs

Radix Labs wants to be the operating system for laboratories. Organizing lab equipment in a networked fashion could have a dramatic impact on research and development. Today, lab equipment is like maniframes in the 80s, where each device needs to be programmed separately. Running experiments serially can reduce the time it takes to come up with results, letting biologists automate their labs and experimentation to mimic the mass production of manufacturing.

Kyte

Last year, Indian businesses sent 180 billion SMS messages to customers, 60 percent of which was spam according to the team at Kyte. The company’s AI-powered SMS inbox looks to ditch the spam and organize transactions notes as well as coupons for Indian users into a cleanly designed hub. The inbox decluttering startup is growing 13 percent week over week as it looks to capture the 300 million smartphone users in India.

Hypcloud

Image credit: Li-Anne Dias, Crunchbase News.

Hypcloud is building a real estate development financing platform in Germany. The team is hoping to distinguish what they’ve built by enabling more collaborative and efficient negotiation times through a more streamlined workflow that will hopefully give customers quicker access to financing partners. Using the web-based software, clients can negotiate with up to 5 banks at the same time to get better terms.

Miru

Miru built an AR app that shows users what any piece of furniture will look like in their home. The Miru app places items in your living space using a computer vision pipeline that lets you pull items from any retailers website. Ikea has similar services, but only for their own catalogue of products. Furniture visualization is a 6.5 billion market, but that’s just the beginning. While using Miru’s visualization service, the app can map your home and gather data for future home projects like painting and flooring.

Klarity

Klarity wants to automate parts of the contract review process by applying artificial intelligence, specifically natural language processing. It offers a subscription cloud service that checks contracts in Microsoft Word documents, making suggestions when it sees something that doesn’t match up with the playbook checklist.

The product then generates a document, and a human lawyer reviews and signs off on the suggested changes, reducing the review time from an hour-plus to 10 or 15 minutes.

SF17 Therapeutics

The founding team from precision medicine startup Simpatica Medicine is back with SF17 Therapeutics, a precision medicine analytics platform providing monitoring for pediatric rheumatologists for life-threatening conditions. The technology enables pediatricians to match patients with the right treatment regimen or regimen changes if a course of treatment isn’t working. That same platform is also being used to demonstrate drug discovery capabilities that can identify targets for new drug compound development.

Outvote

Outvote wants to make grassroots-style campaigning easier and more personal, with the launch of an app that allows people to text their friends with reminders to vote.

While today there are a lot of tools for voter outreach, many of those operated by well-known organizations like MoveOn involve people opting in to receive texts from the group in question. Outvote is different because it’s a tool that helps individual voters reach out to their own personal acquaintances, family and friends. The idea, says its founder, is to learn which of one’s friends and associates are not voting, then pressure them to get to the polls.

Curebase

Curebase is aiming to run clinical trials faster and cheaper than anyone else via software that reduces recruitment times, automates manual steps, and lets drug companies distribute their trials to clinics. Considering that clinical trials are logistical nightmares, often coordinated across dozens of locations, any solution sounds like an improvement, and Curebase’s “clinical trial marketplace” says that already, three deals are expected to generate $175,000 in revenue that should help it convince more customers of the merits of its software and full-service support.

OneGraph

OneGraph is a GraphQL service that aims to connect the world wide web’s SaaS APIs and help customers build integrations way quicker than is currently possible. OneGraph has support for than a couple dozen APIs including Stripe, Salesforce, GitHub and more.

DreamCraft

DreamCraft is a platform that lets video game modders create and monetize games without writing code. The company says game modding is a $4 billion industry, but that modders generally don’t make any money because they simply don’t own the original games. On DreamCraft, modders will be able to create new games, while keeping 70% of the revenue and gaining the freedom to host these titles. The co-founders hail from Google and EA, and want to build the platform that will act as the app store for game modders.

Sparkswap

Using the Lightning Network to perform trustless, peer-to-peer swaps, SparkSwap is looking to build a new way to trade cryptocurrency pairs like Bitcoin and Litecoin without depositing assets on an exchange.

ExceptionAlly

ExceptionAlly aims to help parents understand, organize and communicate all the info around providing care and education for a child with special needs, from autism to Down Syndrome.

The first step is education: Based on information provided by the parent, the startup’s platform assists the parent in understanding both the condition itself, what they can expect from a school, and what their rights are (like whether their kid merits a front-row seat or how often teachers are sharing reports on a child’s progress). It can also help parents collaborate with schools and teachers to create individual education plans.

Beyond education planning, ExceptionAlly has plans to replace the costly financial and healthcare planning experts who often cost these same parents upwards of $10,000 a year. How big a business the startup can create is an open question, but we love the idea of parents no longer needing a lawyer or other pricey professional to negotiate on their behalf of their child.

Here are the 63 startups that launched today at Y Combinators S18 Demo Day 1

August 22, 2018 by Blockchain Interchange Leave a Comment

From “cheese 2.0” to connecting flights for satellites, Y Combinator showed off a wide array of early-stage startups fresh from its YC Summer 2018 batch. A total of 63 companies took to the stage in front of a full audience at the Computer History Museum today in Mountain View to pitch on-off switches for organisms, laundry detergent subscription services, gymless gyms, lab-grown palm oil and sugary sugar substitutes.

It felt like every other startup was trying to make us try vegan chicken nuggets, but from a bird’s-eye view, this YC batch saw startups clustered around B2B software and services (30 percent of companies), healthcare (28 percent), consumer goods and services (9 percent) and consumer media (7 percent). (Yes, blockchain companies were right behind, comprising 5 percent of companies.)

For this batch, YC’s efforts to get more female founders on board mostly held steady, with 15 percent female founders, down one percent from last round’s 16 percent. YC’s diversity tracking around race showed a little more activity: 11 percent of this cohort’s founders were black or latinx, up from 9 percent in the previous group. A total of 19 countries were represented across the 132 companies pitching over two days, and 28 percent of companies were based outside the U.S.

Which companies will go on to make a unicorn-sized splash? Are there really that many vegans? To figure it all out, you can read through our full list of the day’s YC S18 companies below (be sure to take a coffee break or two) or check back later for our own picks of today’s most interesting startups. Without further ado…

Public Recreation

The founders of Public Recreation want to take your workout outside. The company offers a modular system of benches, bars and smart lockers that can be installed anywhere, and for a subscription price of $50/month customers get access to classes ranging from yoga to strength training and conditioning. Their first pop up is in San Francisco… literally on the corner of Octavia and Hayes.

BlueCargo

BlueCargo is optimizing container management for ports, kind of like Jenga for shipping containers. Normally, a single move costs a port $30, but up to 50 percent of those moves might not even be needed at all. Due to inefficient shuffling processes, terminals waste as much as $20 billion a year, but BlueCargo would eliminate that waste with machine learning, they say. The company has one paid pilot with France’s port of Saint Nazaire to date, with three more in the works around the world. BlueCargo is also about to start working with the port of Long Beach, Calif. — one of the largest ports in the U.S.

HoneyLove

HoneyLove aims to disrupt the traditional shapewear market by making an affordable, high-quality product that actually works.

The $89 product uses supportive structures inside the seams of the garment, similar to the flexible boning used in old-school corsets, and encases those structures in a soft channel of protective fabric. This simple enhancement ensures that the garment doesn’t bunch up around the legs or waistband. The company has already sold $500K in product

C16 Biosciences

C16 Biosciences is aiming to greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions across the globe with their lab-grown palm oil, an alternative to a product that is found in a truly massive amount of goods. C16’s alternative grown in bioreactors with yeast is 20 percent less expensive to customers but “doesn’t destroy the planet,” the company says. The startup has already begun early partnerships with a number of beauty and food distributors that together spend about $1.2 billion on palm oil annually.

Kobo360

Kobo360 is a Nigerian startup that wants to be the Uber for logistics and trucking in Nigeria… with a twist. With $1.3 million in funding already in the bank, the startup not only has an on-demand trucking solution linking shippers with excess trucking capacity, it has also set up a crowdfunding platform called Kobo Wealth Investment Network, or KoboWIN to enable Kobo drivers to finance new trucks through citizen investors and pay them back directly (with interest) over a 60-month period.

JetLenses

JetLenses is taking on the major contact lens e-commerce sites and other online ordering systems. The startup’s goal is to bring down the cost of prescription products by automating the overhead associated with these businesses, then pass those savings on to consumers.

For example, it automates the process of contacting doctors to verify prescriptions by maintaining a data set of existing practices, automatically faxing the office to verify the prescription and then processing the doctor’s office response.

Higia

By monitoring thermal patterns inside a breast, the startup Higia hopes it can offer women a better, non-invasive method to detect breast cancer. The company’s wearable device, called EVA, can be placed under any sports bra, and offers a new way to fill the gaps that current screening techniques aren’t addressing — things like early breast cancer detection in women with high breast density. The company has already pre-sold 5,000 units in Mexico and will begin shipping them in the fall of 2018.

CSPA

Founder and head of engineering at Crunchyroll, James Lin knows all about the pain of finding and hiring talented software engineers. That’s why Lin started The Computer Science Proficiency Assessment, which is basically the SAT for software engineers. Lin and his team have created standardized exams that are held in classrooms on or near college campuses and test both practical knowledge and theoretical principles.

Students pay to take the tests and have their results shared with the more than 60 companies that are now accepting the results when considering new candidates.

Sterblue

Sterblue is a French drone software startup aiming to get off-the-shelf drones inspecting large outdoor structures up close with automated insights that identify anomalies that need a second look.

The startup’s software is specifically focused on enabling drones to easily inspect large power lines or wind turbines with simple automated trajectories that can get a job done much quicker and with less room for human error.

Cambridge Glycoscience

Looking to bake the perfect treat with a sugar substitute that can mimic not just the sweetness, but the gooey caramelization and sticky sweetness that typically only comes from real sugar? Well, YC company Cambridge Glycoscience has the sweetener for you. The company expects to produce its sugar substitutes at a cost that can make low- and no-sugar foods even more accessible for mainstream consumers. So toss that corn syrup and get ready for a new flavor revolution.

Their manufacturing process will let them produce their sugar substitute at scale and they have a patent portfolio to protect their innovation. Notably, they have signed letters of intent with five companies already, including Haribo.

Togg

Yingzhe Fu, a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, has been developing this home sensing and automation product at least since his graduation in 2016. Togg’s product is now installed in eight assisted living centers around the U.S. and is able to capture more accurately than actual caregivers at a facility changes in residents’ health, including sleep, breathing, bathroom visits and movement speed.

Given the explosion in the number of elderly in need of home care (both in the U.S. and in Fu’s native China), it seems like Fu’s Togg is a product hitting the market at the right time.

AskMyClass

Using smart speakers like the Amazon Alexa or Google Home, AskMyClass is bringing a deeper set of skills to elementary school classrooms. Like homes, schools are quickly picking up on the benefits of smart speaker deployment, and using AskMyClass teachers now can let those speakers handle a range of daily tasks, from vocabulary reviews to refocusing exercises — the software can even take notes and make lists for teachers on the go.

Teachers using it are reclaiming as much as 75 minutes a week in the classroom by using AskMyClass as a kind of teaching assistant. For example, AskMyClass can run math drills with one set of students while another works directly with their instructor. In five weeks, they’ve on-boarded 436 classrooms.

Skydrop

Making e-commerce easier across Latin America, Skydrop is focused on estimating drop-off times, buying and printing shipping labels and handling returns for its customers. Through a network of independent drivers, alongside a logistics platform recreated from the ground up, Skydrop is looking to offer shipping labels at a fraction of the cost by aggregating orders with thousands of like-minded (and like-sized) businesses. Companies simply add Skydrop’s plugin to their own online store and watch their logistics burdens take off.

Cytera CellWorks

Cytera CellWorks hopes to revolutionize the so-called “clean meat” industry through the automation of cell cultures. It uses robotic automation to configure cell cultures used in things like growing turkey meat from a petri dish or testing stem cells.

Originally, the company was going to go for general automation in the lab, but had enough interest from clients and potential business in just the cell culture automation aspect they’re focused on that for now, and changed the name for clarity.

JITX

Designing circuit boards as a service won JITX a spot in this latest batch of Y Combinator companies. Currently, every circuit board is designed manually by skilled engineers, but using JITX’s machine learning software, circuit boards can be created automatically, which can save both time and money for hardware companies.

Names & Faces

Not Facebook but not LinkedIn either, Names & Faces aims to offer any growing company a simple, fast directory of employees built specifically for that purpose alone. The company wants to solve a problem experienced by everyone at a company, from its low-level employees to chief executives: when your company gets bigger, it’s hard to keep track of who’s who. Names & Faces already has more than 100 customers, including L’Oreal, Uber and FedEx, with sales doubling month to month.

Buttermilk

Buttermilk offers a variety of Indian dishes at a low price that can be cooked up by simply adding hot water. Based in Seattle, Buttermilk launched in 2017 to the local market and has since expanded to serve their products across the country.

Dishes include Sambar, Daal, Khichdi, Rasam and Upma, all of which cost $6 each. Buttermilk also sells Basmati rice for $1.50. And there are “suites,” which pack a handful of meals into one shipment.

Send Reality

Send Reality is looking to offer full 3D-modeling for virtual walk-throughs of real estate listings. The company sends photographers out to the listing with an iPad, a commodity depth sensor and a specialized Send Reality app. These photographers take hundreds of thousands of photos, and the Send Reality technology stitches those photos together to create a complete 3D model.

Send Reality sells directly to realtors, offering the product for $500 to $800 depending on the size and complexity of the home. In the future, the company can bring down that price point by allowing realtors to scan the home themselves from their own smartphone.

Allotrope Medical

Allotrope Medical has developed an electrical stimulation technology for smooth muscles that allows surgeons to identify critical tissue structures and distinguish functional from dysfunctional urologic and gastrointestinal issues. The Houston-based company is focused initially on decreasing the rate of injury to ureters during surgery.

With more than 3 million surgeries performed in the U.S. alone requiring identification and protection of ureters, there’s a $3.2 billion burden on healthcare systems due to injuries. The company is running an active clinical trial in Dallas and aims to be on the market by the end of 2019.

Augmented Radar Imaging

Augmented Radar Imaging wants to address the kind of issues that have caused high-profile driverless vehicle accidents. The company aims to solve two problems for current radar technologies: recognizing stationary objects and triggering false alarms.

With a team of radio engineers, physicists and data scientists, ARI has built a wide field-of-view high-resolution radar system called Camdar that provides 3D spatial imaging plus velocity data and a solid state sensor with no moving parts that claims to be 300x more accurate than GPS. With five radar units per average in a self-driving vehicle, ARI could be looking at a $100 billion market if it can make inroads on those roads.

Canary Technologies

The Canary Technologies co-founders have worked in the hotel industry, and have come to the conclusion that existing hotel software is awful. The company is working to tackle some of this dated software piece-by-piece, starting with their far less dated programs used to handle offline booking processes. They’re getting rid of paper contracts, instead using modern software that can make life easier for hotels.

Qurasense

Qurasense doesn’t think your period blood should go to waste. The company has developed a “diagnostic menstrual pad” called the Q Pad that includes an embedded collection strip that passively collects blood samples on a test strip that can be mailed for diagnostic testing which is then turned into data.

So far the company has run five clinical trials of a total of 500 women. It has 14 validated blood screening tests and two tests for sexually transmitted diseases and will operate on a $25 a month subscription model. Qurasense is working with Stanford Medicine to become the go-to platform for cervical cancer screening.

Inokyo

Inokyo wants to be the indie Amazon Go, with a cashierless autonomous retail store. Cameras track what you grab from shelves, and with a single QR scan of the app on your way in and out of the store, you’re charged for what you’ve picked up.

The first store is now open on Mountain View’s Castro Street, selling an array of kombuchas, snacks, protein powders and bath products.

Tenderd

Based in Dubai and serving the entire Middle East and North African region, Tenderd is an on-demand marketplace for heavy equipment like bulldozers and cranes. Think of it as the Uber for heavy equipment. The company began when the company’s founder left San Francisco to run the family business in the United Arab Emirates because of a family emergency. When he took the wheel, he steered the company toward what he realized was the most profitable business — renting out the heavy equipment. However, the process was so slow and cumbersome that the seasoned Bay Area resident launched Tenderd to solve his — and the region’s — problem.

Momentus

The heart of Momentus’ propulsion technology for space flight is a new system that uses water as a propellant instead of chemicals.

Using water has several benefits, the startup says. One, it’s a fuel source that’s abundant in outer space, and it’s ultimately better and more efficient fuel for flight beyond low Earth orbit.

Spero Foods

Spero Foods is joining the legion of companies trying to transform the food industry with substitutes for animal proteins based on data analytics. Founder Phaedra Randolph launched the company after experiencing the transformative benefits of transitioning to a plant-based diet. Most vegetable substitutes for animal proteins lacked the flavor, texture and nutritional heft of their animal corollaries. So Randolph used her background in bioscience and software engineering to tackle the taste issue.

InkHunter

InkHunter is an augmented reality tattoo try-on app. The idea is that you can see how a tattoo might like on your skin before you actually make a booking with the tattoo artist.

The app requires people to anchor the virtual design by making a few pen marks on their skin where they want the tattoo to live. It also supports taking and sharing photos.

FREY

FREY is pitching dudes a new kind of detergent for the new way they live their lives (read on a monthly subscription basis). The company bills itself as an antidote to the tired myth that only women are doing laundry with products that incorporate natural ingredients, heady fragrances and plant-derived surfactants, enzymes and oils for stain fighting. Add that subscription model and 20 percent month-over-month growth in the last 12 months and product margins post 60 percent post-shipping, and that’s a pitch that won’t rinse out in the wash.

Aalo

If you’re tired of the universal sameness of the typical IKEA, West Elm or CB2-bedecked apartment, well look no further than Aalo, the new YC company that wants you to be your own furniture designer. With a Lego-like (not Legolas) furniture system composed of customizable, hackable and reusable parts, individuals can design their own furniture with a by-the-inch customization system for do-it-yourself designs. Founded by ex-Toyota engineer Sejun Park, Aalo was created when an attempt to “hack” an IKEA shelf collapsed under the burden of its shoddy materials and zero weight support.

Demonpore

Nanopores identify molecules like DNA and Demonpore is the world’s first mechanical nanopore. Because normal, fixed nanopores require a good fit, they can only look at molecules that fit a pore well, which usually means being limited to DNA. Demonpore can change its size, making it possible to examine any kind of molecule at the nanometer scale. With a founder from Halcyon Molecular and a team of 70 scientists and engineers, Demonpore is developing a universal biomolecular sensor that can measure “virtually any type” of molecule with relevance to human health.

Savvy

Imagine being the all-seeing, all-knowing lookout for all of your company’s interactions with vendors, suppliers and customers. That’s what the YC-backed startup Savvy is looking to provide to users by bringing together all of a company’s cloud applications into a single view. “Savvy is the glue between your work applications.” Not just slang for pirates, savvy is the know-how for all external interactions and can make businesses more savvy about their communications and operations.

Cloud Workout

Logging onto Twitch may not be the most physically active experience in the world, but Cloud Workout wants to take the site’s model and build a fitness empire in its image, bringing fitness instructors to their site who can become fitness personalities and build audiences. The company’s streaming product is in private beta currently.

Synvivia

Genetic engineering is one of the most powerful new tools of the 21st century, but its ascendance has come with attendant fears that the technology may not be able to be controlled when it’s unleashed from a laboratory. YC-backed Synvivia is developing what amounts to the kill switch for synthetic biology outside of a lab. Commercializing technology developed by UC Berkeley with grants from the NSF and DARPA, Synvivia’s genetically encoded bio-containment system engineers organisms to only live when they have access to specific, small molecules. These type of control and containment measures are critical for the development of the industry.

RealtyBits

With a service that’s creating blockchain-based tokens for commercial real estate properties, RealtyBits is hoping to increase liquidity for investors and property owners. The goal is to let real estate funds take cryptocurrency investments from verified financiers globally while reducing transaction costs, which can amount to 10 percent in fund creation and investments across what the company says is a $9 trillion industry.

#ME

Taking the Highrise virtual community one step further, #ME is an avatar-based social network where users can make friends and influence virtual people through real-time games and experiences. The original bootstrapped social media avatar game from which #ME evolved has already raked in $5 million in sales and attracted more than 3 million registered users. At the core of that popularity is the company’s ability to create virtual identities untethered from the real world that appeals to a Gen Z audience, according to the founder’s pitch.

“We’re taking everything we learned from Highrise and building a better one,” says Anton Bernstein, the company’s chief executive. “The next Facebook will be a virtual world. And we launched it 30 days ago.”

Grabb-It

Grabb-It turns a car’s side rear window into a full-color display, playing location-aware ads to anyone who might be standing curbside. The product’s designed for rideshare/delivery drivers, enabling them to make a bit of extra coin while doing the driving they’re already doing.

As the driver crosses town, the ads can automatically switch to focus on businesses nearby. Near the ball park? It might pitch you on tickets for tonight’s game. Over in The Mission? It could play an ad about happy hour at the bar behind you.

Alpha Vantage

For investors seeking a new way to create alpha from financial market data, Alpha Vantage has an API toolkit to give them a leg up. Using these low-cost APIs, developers can create digital assets like iOS/Android apps and trading monitoring, management and suggestion toolkits. The company already has over 100,000 registered users making over 300 million API requests on a daily basis.

BrainHi

Co-founders Israel Figueroa Fontanez and Emmanuel Oquendo came up with the idea for BrainHi in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. When the devastation wrought by the hurricane made communicating with doctors’ offices nearly impossible on the island of Puerto Rico, the two founders thought there must be a better way to manage the process. The solution they came up with is an automated answering service that handles phone calls, texts and Facebook messages with an automated bot that can schedule doctors visits and answer non-medical questions. The company already has 100 doctors, chiropractors and veterinarians in the U.S. and Puerto Rico.

BHRD

Managing relationships with shareholders is an expensive business for public companies. Recalcitrant board members, activist shareholders and others can create problems for a management team focused on long-term growth. Using BHRD, companies can focus on targeting and engaging the investors who are aligned with their long-term vision, freeing big business to focus on their business, rather than managing shareholder expectations.

Camelot

Camelot is a mobile app for esports betting… and one of the first companies to blaze a trail in the sure-to-be-lucrative business operating at the intersection of video gaming and sports betting. The company gives fans access to live updates and stats and an interface to bet against friends. In the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision, there are billions of dollars to be made facilitating betting in any sport — including esports. Camelot is rolling the dice that it can hit the right number in this emerging market.

Inscribe

Using a web platform and APIs, Inscribe is pitching a service to identify digital forgeries in documents. The company’s technology uses image forensics and machine learning to check documents like bank statements, tax forms and forms of state and national identification to look for tampered names, figures, text or signatures. The killjoys at Inscribe may finally get rid of the fake ID, but they’re also solving a billion-dollar market in online fraud.

Fintual

Image credit: Li-Anne Dias, Crunchbase News.

Betterment, the wildly successful automated financial management and investment platform, is getting a Latin American twist with Fintual. The company offers wealth management services through low-fee mutual funds intelligently managed by the same sort of toolkit that used to be available to big banks and the quant programmers that work for them. It’s already a success in the markets it’s selling into, with week-over-week growth of around 10 percent.

Four Growers

The robot revolution is coming for agriculture, and one of the places where those robots will first raise their flag is in the hothouse. That’s the vision that Four Growers has laid out as it seeks to sell its robots to farms already squeezed by a labor shortage that shows no sign of relenting. The company pitches consistent quality of picked grapes or cherry tomatoes and a “workforce” that’s dependable and efficient. Four Growers predicts it can replace at least four human laborers with its robots, representing incredible economic efficiencies for growers.

AnnieCannons

AnnieCannons is a San Francisco-based nonprofit coding bootcamp aimed at transforming survivors of human trafficking into software developers or professionals in the technology industry.

Founded by Jessica Hubley and Laura Hackney, the organization aims to help the up to 18,000 people who the Justice Department believes are trafficked in the U.S. every year. The organization reaches out to after-care services organizations around legal aid and counseling services that are interested in placing survivors into a job-training program. AnnieCannons starts with basic technical and job proficiencies and then works on getting their students into coding and development work.

BuyCoins

BuyCoins wants to be the cryptocurrency exchange for Africa. Emerging markets are the ideal test bed and proving ground for cryptocurrencies and, in some cases, they’re the least able to take advantage of the purported efficiencies that these new platforms offer. BuyCoins is the only exchange in Nigeria that allows Nigerians to buy and sell cryptocurrencies, ranging from Bitcoin and Ethereum, to Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash, directly with their local bank account or debit card. There’s already $4 billion traded in cryptocurrency in Nigeria and the market is growing quickly.

Mac’d

Mac’d is a build-your-own mac and cheese restaurant that lets customers choose their own adventure from the beginning. The company plans to expand through a low-cost “ghost kitchen” approach, where it rents out kitchen space and sells its mac and cheese strictly through providers like UberEats, Caviar, DoorDash and Postmates.

And to quote TechCrunch’s Megan Rose Dickey: “The mac and cheese was bomb.”

Penta Medical

For professional athletes, nothing is more frightening or career damaging than an injury. And Penta Medical wants to make those fears a thing of the past. The company has developed a wearable cold laser therapy system that purports to relieve muscle and joint pain, increase circulation and relieve muscle spasms, all with a tap of a button on the smartphone. Indeed, Penta also tracks injury data, provides coaches and healthcare providers with visual representations and range of motion trends.

Coaches can even track how their team compares with others in a league. It’s important to note that the company isn’t for athletes alone. People in the U.S. are already spending $6 billion and they’re the ideal market for Penta Medical’s smart hardware for chronic pain treatment and management.

Data Driven Bioscience

The 10 times faster and 10 times cheaper cancer diagnoses that Data Driven Biosciences promises for hospitals that use its genomic diagnostic tests could transform untold numbers of lives. Dr. Sandeep Dave, the oncologist and tenured professor from Duke University who founded the company, experienced firsthand how patients and doctors are affected by delays in getting a correct diagnosis of cancer.

Using standard equipment already deployed at hospitals around the country, Data Driven Bioscience is pitching a test that connects with the company’s cloud-based machine-learning software and a database of more than 10,000 tumors to diagnose cancers within 24 hours.

Rain Neuromorphics

The founders of Rain Neuromorphics found inspiration for their processor for artificial intelligence applications in the function of the human brain. The company touts its Memristive Nanowire Neural Network chip architecture as being able to train larger, more powerful neural networks than any commercial chip that’s currently on the market. Fast, fully parallel and ultra scalable, these chips are said to be capable of both online training and low-power inference, to enable complex machine learning applications both in the cloud and directly on a device.

As neurons increase, training time increases dramatically, but the company’s neuromorphic hardware scales well in time, but take up a lot of space on a chip. The company’s new architecture creates a structure that is filled with neurons connected by nanowires, and believes it can build and train the equivalent of $1 billion. With a $2 million letter of intent from OpenAI, several patents filed and contracts with TSMC, the company is putting its neurons where its synapses are.

Spate

The “Google Trends” for business is exactly what Spate wants to be for its users. The company is pitching a predictive engine that can let companies know what types of latte people will be drinking, the skin care products they’ll be using and the food that their dogs will be eating in the next year. It’s no surprise that the team at Spate is looking to take on Google, since that’s where the company’s founding team cut its teeth.

Their work (initially as one of the famed 20 percent projects) at the search giant led to a product, which drove decision-making over how to steer some of the world’s largest consumer packaged goods brands. They predicted the cold brew and turmeric trends and have a bet that yellow will be the next big color in the fashion world. There’s a spate of information out there, and the company wants to be the funnel to focus that flood of information into the right decisions.

Optic

Optic gives developers a way to grab very common coding use cases that they can drop right into their code. It works by finding the sort of routine additions developers might need, like how to create a form that will add a user to a database, as well as all the ancillary parts that come with it, like tests.

It works within a developer’s IDE, so they don’t have to look externally for the code they need. Right now it works for JavaScript, with Python next on the docket.

Phiar

Phiar is building an augmented reality navigation app for driving that shows a driver exactly where to go without taking their eyes off the wheel. With efficient AI fit into a smartphone, Phiar’s software can run at 200 fps on a dash-mounted iPhone.

With deep AI and computer vision expertise plus a team with members from Apple, Microsoft and VMware, Phiar wants to build the “killer AR application” to address the 1.7 billion people who use a navigation app each month. Phiar is counting on AR being the next meaningful evolution in driving navigation tech and a software solution that keeps a driver’s eyes on the road in front of them.

Seattle Food Tech

Photo: James A. Guilliam/Taxi/Getty Images

Seattle Food Tech looks to create what effectively looks and feels like a chicken nugget out of plant-based food — all the way down to the puff it gets in an oven.

It’s planning to sell its first product to larger food services companies. That’s the market that’s most useful, environmentally speaking, given that a significant portion of the chicken consumed by the population comes through food services.

Prodigal Technologies

Prodigal Technologies wants to improve the ways lenders collect money from borrowers. The company wants to make debt collection, if not kinder or gentler, then certainly more efficient. If a payor misses a payment, lenders can now reach out on any messaging platform and enable lenders to find borrowers where they are. The company has 11 pilots and three paying customers that handle $11 billion in origination of loans. There are $50 billion loans that aren’t paid, and with, Prodigal lenders can get a 20 percent improvement in loan repayment.

Viaopt

In the U.S., trucks are moving goods across the country with roughly 35 percent of their available cargo space underutilized. Viopt, a software company that aims to be an Uber pool for shipping, thinks it has the solution. If the 65 percent of underutilized capacity could be filled it would save $30 billion for companies and remove 100 million tons of carbon emissions. By linking small and medium-sized companies with excess capacity, the company hopes to give small retailers the same logistics opportunities that were only available to the largest retailers, shippers and logistics companies like Anheuser-Busch, Bimbo Bakeries and Turkey Hill Farms.

Goodly

Perks for employees are becoming a big business in the tight labor market and Goodly wants to make one of the most important perks — student loan repayment — easy and accessible for employers. While the benefits of providing this benefit are universally inarguable, when you look at statistics indicating that women hold two-thirds of student debt and owe half a trillion dollars more than their male colleagues, the perk becomes more persuasive. Couple that with the statistic that African American employees hold 31 percent more student loan debt than their white peers, and Goodly’s offering looks even better to employers worried about improving diversity.

In all, an employer contribution of less than the cost of a cup of coffee could help the average employee pay off their debts 8.5 years faster. Talk about potentially doing well by doing good. Offers 50 percent higher retention for millennial employees and is tackling a $5.4 billion market.

Regology

Hoping to take a bite out of the $10 billion market for financial services regulatory compliance, Regology has developed an automated software system to ease the burden for the world’s biggest financiers. Last year companies spent $54 billion on compliance and were still fined $22 billion for compliance failures. The company claims that its software can handle in a matter of hours the manual monitoring tasks that took companies months. Working with wealth management, banking, insurance and cryptocurrency companies, the company’s machine learning software aims to take the sting out of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s oversight.

Enveritas

Battling deforestation and child labor in manufacturers’ supply chains with software, Enveritas is helping companies secure themselves against reputational risk and increase efficiency in their operations. Initially focused on coffee companies, the platform Enveritas has built gives coffee companies a way to verify sustainability at origin for the coffee they source. While coffee may be the first industry, the work can be applied to other tropical products, including cocoa, cotton and palm oil (although if C16 — another YC company — has its way, palm oil may not be an issue).

Mylk Guys

Mylk Guys is the 100 percent vegan online grocery store I’ve never wanted, but maybe you have. Undoubtedly better for the environment than a carnivorous diet, vegan options can be healthy and they may be tasty, but the foods that combine the two are few and far between. Giving a curated approach to all of the foods on the market, Mylk Guys is the online vegan grocery store aiming to make shopping “simple af.” The company bills itself as the “online vegan Trader Joe’s.” There are 21 million vegans in America that spend $54 billion on groceries.

Numericcal

Simplifying machine learning on edge devices. Machine learning today lives in the cloud and it’s the biggest downside of machine learning in many systems, according to the founders of Numericcal. The solution is to move the processing down to the edge — something that can take two to six months for programmers. Numericcal has 20 billion potential devices that it can service in less time and for less money.

Oxygen

Breaking freelancers from the month-to-month boom-and-bust payment cycles that bind them, Oxygen provides working capital loans to freelancers who can go months without getting a paycheck. The company is more than willing to work with a group of borrowers who collectively make $1.4 trillion in 1099 income annually and who are locked out of loans. Oxygen offers flat-fee access to credit and free mobile banking, all while using machine learning to determine credit worthiness. Freelance workers of the world unite, indeed!

Hepatx

Hepatx is creating therapies for severely damaged livers. Chronic liver disease affects 3.9 million Americans and is the cause of death for more than 40,000. The founders of Hepatx are developing a regenerative solution enabling hepatocyte production for therapeutic purposes. That means regenerating liver cells to avoid the cost and morbidity of whole organ transplant. More than 200,000 people in the U.S. need a liver transplant but only a few thousand get one. Hepatx aims to fix the liver by taking fat tissue, turning that into liver cells and introducing that into patients to regrow the liver.

Plexus

Plexus is looking to create a low-cost, flexible glove for controlling augmented reality and virtual reality experiences. It’s a silicone glove, secured by velcro, that doesn’t cover your hands or fingers entirely, so it shouldn’t leave you super sweaty.

The tracking sensors grab the position of where the hands are in space via the magnetically attached tracker and, after calibrating a resting state of the user’s fingers, individual sensors communicate their position to the game engine.