Month: August 2018

LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned social networking platform for the working world with over 500 million users, is making a significant change as it continues to look for ways to make its platform more useful (and used).

The company is relaunching Groups by rolling it into its main app by the end of the month after quietly pulling the standalone app earlier this year, and it will be streamlining the service by cutting out several features, including an ability for Group administrators to pre-moderate comments; and a way to email send Group posts as emails to the whole group, while also adding in new features like threaded replies and the ability to post video and other media.

An announcement detailing the changes was sent out to a select Groups power users earlier today, and we have confirmed the details with LinkedIn directly. Mitali Pattnaik, the product manager for Groups, said that some of the discontinuations — such as the ability to approve posts before they are live — are temporary and will make their way back to the app in some form over time.

The moves come nearly three years after LinkedIn tried another approach to put some more wind into Groups’ sails. In 2015, the company hived off an updated version of Groups into its own standalone app.

Included in the changes, Groups were made private with the aim of reducing some of the spam that people were posting. The bigger idea was that, with some 2 million Groups already on LinkedIn, users would be able to dedicate more time to posting, reading and managing (if they were admins) those groups, and creating new groups, once they were in their own app. And on the part of LinkedIn, it would help the company focus on developing features specifically tailored to the Groups experience.

But the move did not go down well. In the wake of the changes, reports started to surface about how the moves stifled usage of groups, turning the platform into what some were calling a ghost town. And LinkedIn itself, it seems, was finding it a challenge to continue updating the app, even as LinkedIn itself was getting enhanced with new features.

“Being a standalone app, Groups was not able to take advantage of the overall LinkedIn ecosystem,” Pattnaik said. “Everything from the news feed to notifications to search, these things move at a fast pace, and the minute the apps got separated the main app innovated at a much faster pace and became more advanced than the standalone Groups app.”

LinkedIn then quietly pulled the Groups app in February this year, as it announced plans to integrate the feature.

It’s not clear what kind of impact the last three years have had on the product. These days company does not comment on how many groups there are, nor how much they are used, except to say that there are “over 2 million” and that more than half of all LinkedIn members are at least in one group. (The person who oversaw Groups’ move to becoming a standalone app is also no longer at the company.) LinkedIn’s main app, on the other hand, has seen session time rise by 41 percent year-on-year, “growing consecutively for several quarters.”

The removal of the standalone app is in line with how another social network has evolved its own Group effort. Almost exactly a year ago, Facebook announced that it too was killing off its Groups app so that it could integrate the feature closer with the core app experience. In both the case of LinkedIn and Facebook, the idea is somewhat the same: while we have our wider networks of friends and Pages that we follow on both platforms, sometimes there is value in communities that are focused around more specific interests, and ultimately, that might turn out to be the lever that brings more people in and out of using the main service.

On a product iteration level, it seems that LinkedIn is not the only one that found it hard to keep up with changes across two platforms that essentially rested of many of the same mechanics.

As part of being rebuilt on LinkedIn’s platform, Groups will be getting a number of new features — essentially tapping into new features that LinkedIn has rolled out over the last several quarters on its own app but hadn’t built for the (previously standalone) Groups platform.

For starters, conversations taking place in Groups will now appear in-stream on the LinkedIn feed, rather than in a separate tab. When group members are replying to posts, there will now be threaded replies, which will let people respond directly to comments within the thread.

Groups are also going to have a rich media infusion: users will be able to edit posts and share videos and other non-text formats. This is a very long overdue feature, considering how central video and rich media like GIFs have been on other platforms in getting people engaged in a service, and also considering that LinkedIn’s been showing video in its feed for a while now. “Since video launched on LinkedIn, Groups have been asking for this,” she said.

It also looks like LinkedIn will also be pushing a lot more Group activity into your notifications tab, while alongside this, it’s sunsetting the e-mail blast. That might not be such a bad thing: while it did help admins get information out (especially when Groups updates were essentially hidden from the average LinkedIn user), Pattnaik admitted that the email feature “can be abused” by those simply looking to promote themselves.

Admins are also getting a few new controls. They will be able to pin important items to the top of a Groups’ individual feed, and Pattnaik said that LinkedIn is working on a way to collapse those pinned notifications after they’ve been viewed by the member so that they don’t continue to take up space. They will also be able to approve and remove members by way of the app, as well as send out messages when necessary.

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LinkedIn, it seems, hopes that people will be able to use the LinkedIn app to discover more Groups that they can join — when Groups choose to have themselves “listed” and discoverable — but one thing that won’t be changing with the new version is that those users will still have to get permission from admins before they can join. 

While Groups have a lot in common with how groups of employees might communicate using a messaging app like Slack (or stablemate Yammer, or Facebook’s Workplace) LinkedIn says that it has no plans at the moment to develop Groups into something that could be used in this way.

The reason for this, Pattnaik says, is that for the moment LinkedIn isn’t focused on developing a way to verify whether a person is actually an employee at a particular company. “We are always evaluating ways to verify identity across the site, such as verification processes to help detect fake profiles,” a spokesperson said. It has made some small steps in building products for company-only teams, however, for example Elevate to share content among coworkers.

In the meantime, the company is also continuing to develop other products beyond the main app. Just today, Sales Navigator got a quarterly refresh with more tools to update on deals, stronger integration with CRM apps and more.

With Android Pie now available (on a handful of devices, at least), Google’s prepping the launch of its low-powered counterpart. Android 9 Pie (Go edition) — the successor to the more pithily named Android Go — will be hitting arriving on devices this fall.

Like Android Oreo (Go Edition), the latest OS is a stripped down version of its latest full operating system, designed to run on devices with 1GB of RAM. The more modest hardware requirements make it a compelling match for low-cost devices and thus a solid option for developing markets.

Among other things, it will offer faster boot times than standard Android and will free up space on the phone’s storage. There are new security features on board as well, along with a dashboard for monitoring data consumption. There are a number of updates to individual Go apps, too, including the ability to read sites’ content aloud in Google Go and navigation in Maps Go.

According to Google, the Android (Go edition) is currently available on 200 devices in more than 120 countries.

Holy hackathon, people. Here’s an exciting update on the judges and semi-finalists who are set to make the Virtual Hackathon — at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2018 on September 5-7 — an event that redefines “epic.” Since June, more than 1,000 developers, programmers, hackers and tech makers all over the world have been hard at work on their most creative hacks, and we recruited an impressive panel of judges — check out their bona fides below — to help us narrow the field.

There were so many incredible hacks, but only 30 semi-finalist slots. We don’t envy the judges, but they rose to the challenge. The semi-finalists (see below) represent the 30 highest-scoring teams, and they’ll go on to demo their projects at Disrupt SF 2018.

From that field of 30, the judges will thin the herd down to 10 finalists, and those teams will demo their product to the world on The Next Stage at Disrupt. Only one team will emerge from the pack with a hack so awesome that they simply must be named champion of the first TechCrunch Disrupt Virtual Hackathon — and pocket the $10,000 grand prize. It’s an event you won’t want to miss.

We’re honored to have such an impressive panel of judges from Slack, Pinterest, Color, Google and Cloudflare — some of the top companies in tech.

John Agan

John Agan leads Slack’s partner engineering team to support and grow the partner ecosystem. He works with top partners across the globe to build new, innovative integrations on the Slack platform and drive overall growth and improvement in the Slack app ecosystem. Prior to joining Slack, John was the global director of solutions engineering at GitHub and the principal UX engineer of Analytics Cloud at Salesforce.

Sha Sha Chu

Sha Sha Chu has 15 years of experience as a developer and engineering leader. She currently serves as the Android platform technical lead at Pinterest, where she guides the overall technical direction of the Pinterest app for Android. Previously, Sha Sha worked in the games industry, shipping several console and PC titles for franchises like James Bond, The Lord of the Rings and The Sims during her time at EA. She also contributed to development on one of the first major cloud gaming platforms with OnLive. Sha Sha holds a master’s degree in computer science from Stanford.

Wendy McKennon

Wendy McKennon, vice president of product at Color, oversees product quality and user experience. She spent several years at Google as a team leader and as an individual contributor on products such as Google Maps, Wallet and AdWords. Prior to her time at Google, she worked at Method Design and Yahoo. Wendy holds a degree in symbolic systems from Stanford University.

Marily Nika

Based in San Francisco, Marily Nika currently works on Google Assistant. She’s also a founder in the edtech space and a board member for two startups. Marily holds a doctorate in computer science, and loves new tech and fresh ideas. She’s participated in 30 hackathons to date, emceed TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathons in London and Berlin, delivered three TEDx talks and received international recognition — including the Woman of the Year 2018 Award (FDM Group) and WISE Influence Award 2015 for empowering the #womenintech community. You can find Marily on Twitter @marilynika.

Jennifer Taylor

Jennifer Taylor, head of products at Cloudflare, leads the delivery of world-class, cloud-based performance, security and content delivery solutions for companies of all sizes. Previously she was a senior vice president of product management for search at Salesforce, where she built enterprise search experiences that connect people with relevant information they need to produce business results. She led Salesforce’s Data.com, which helps customers sell faster and smarter using a foundation of intelligent insights. She also shaped the direction of Salesforce Chatter, the company’s powerful collaboration software. Prior to Salesforce, Jennifer held a variety of senior product management and marketing roles at Facebook and Adobe. Earlier in her career, Jennifer worked as a product manager at Macromedia (acquired by Adobe) for Dreamweaver — the popular graphical Web development tool — and she worked as an associate at Vector Capital.

And here, ladies and gentlemen, are the 30 semi-finalist Virtual Hackathon teams that will demo their products at Disrupt SF 2018 — but only 10 of them will move on to demo their hack on The Next Stage.

• Loro
• Pulse
• Wellsheet
• Smart Folios
• Rivis
• Wavy
• faceStylr
• Janus
• Who’s Up?
• Citymixr
• Check-In Cheque-Out
• Warmly
• ourBlock
• SeeThru Price Transparency Marketplace
• GeoWorx
• Splitsies
• Linda
• HEARTPartner
• Blindsight – Virtual Eyes Through Haptic Feedback
• TalkTalk
• ProblemPal
• Proliferate
• Bocabot
• Crohn’s AI
• CAR-O-KE
• Pricepoint
• Airship bot
• UPayBro
• PruPay
• Candid

In addition to the overall best in show prize from TechCrunch, we had amazing participation for our sponsors, like Visa, who gave out a slew of cash and an Oculus VR headset to the hack teams that used their API the best. Check out all the crazy projects and sponsor contests on the hackathon page.

While the potential for entertainment in virtual and augmented reality has grabbed the most headlines, these new platforms promise radical transformations across industries and the very way that people interact with their world.

And no company is doing more to develop the toolkit for how to build applications for these new interactions than 6D.AI.

At our inaugural TC Sessions: AR/VR event on UCLA’s world-famous campus on October 18, join 6D.AI co-founder and chief executive Matt Miesnieks and head of developer relations, Bruce Wooden, as they discuss 6D’s big vision of using smartphone cameras to build a cloud-based map of the world’s three-dimensional data.

The company’s goal is nothing short of supercharging augmented reality content in a way that could actually make it useful to people.

Miesnieks certainly knows about the need for applications to drive adoption in a new ecosystem. After a career in the trenches developing mobile software infrastructure for companies like Samsung and Layar, Miesnieks made the jump to AR software infrastructure in 2009.

A founding partner of the firm Super Ventures, which exclusively invests in augmented reality startups, Miesnieks was drawn to 6D and its vision as soon as he saw it demonstrated in the labs at Oxford University.

Wooden, 6D’s head of developer relations, has his own storied career in the world of augmented reality. He was a co-founder of Altspace (which was sold to Microsoft) and SVVR, the world’s largest virtual reality community.

“We want to be a platform that informs AR app developers of the real world without the real world — the structure of the real world, what’s going on in the real world, who else is in the real world — and let them build intelligent apps on top of that,” Miesnieks has said of his company’s mission.

TC Sessions: AR/VR on October 18 at UCLA is a single-day event designed to facilitate in-depth conversations, hands-on demos and networking opportunities with the industry leaders, content creators and game changers bringing innovation to the masses.

Purchase your Early Bird tickets here for just $99 and you’ll save $100 before prices go up!

Students get a special rate of just $45 when they book here.

If you’ve made any payments with a chip card, you’ve probably had awkward moments — those long seconds after you’ve inserted the card and everyone behind you is (literally or metaphorically) tapping their foot, waiting for the card to be processed.

Well, Square has been working on this problem for a while now. Last fall, for example, CEO Jack Dorsey said the company had gotten the processing time down to under three seconds.

Today, the company is announcing that it’s shaved even more time off, and that Square Readers can now process chip cards in two seconds. To achieve this, it says it’s worked closely with payment partners — and it’s also streamlined the process so that you can remove your card as soon as it’s read, without waiting for the response from the card issuer.

In contrast, when the Wall Street Journal timed chip cards in over 50 transactions a couple years ago, it found that the average processing time was 13 seconds. Those extra seconds might not sound like much in theory, but again, if you’re in a hurry or you’ve got a line of people behind you, the wait can be painful.

Plus, it sounds like this can make a real difference for businesses. In the announcement, Regan Long, co-founder and brewmaster at Local Brewing Co., said that with his brewery’s location near the Giants’ AT&T Park in San Francisco, there’s usually “a rush of customers all ready to close out their open beer tabs at the same time.”

“With Square’s chip card reader update, we’ve cut processing time in half — helping us keep customers happy and on their way to catch the first pitch,” he added.

In addition to faster chip card processing, Square is making another speed-related announcement: With the latest update, Square’s free point-of-sale app will allow sellers to skip collecting signatures if they choose.

Andy Rachleff, who cofounded the venture firm Benchmark back in 1995 and has more recently been leading the wealth management firm Wealthfront and teaching at Stanford, is widely sought out for his startup advice. It has become harder to come by, though, given the demands on Rachleff’s time. Most notably, Rachleff has had to dial back his work at Stanford to just one course during one quarter of the year — a class that we can only guess is heavily oversubscribed by students.

That doesn’t mean he doesn’t enjoy the work. Right now, he’s helping two longtime friends, AppDynamics cofounder Jyoti Bansal and VC John Vrionis with a new kind of accelerator program they are launching today (more on that here). In a quick call to discuss that program earlier this week, he also fielded a few questions from us about the current state of early-stage startup investing and how founders can best navigate it.

We asked him, for example, about how a glut of seed-stage investment has impacted the way that startups are raising money — often in pre-seed, then seed, then post-seed rounds, before raising Series A funding. We wondered if, nomenclature aside, he felt things had changed fundamentally.

As it turns out, he does not. “While the structure and characters involved are very different than 10 years ago, the steps you need to go through are no different,” said Rachleff. “The whole point is to understand what an investor at the next round expects. You have to determine whether or not you’re ready [for that next meeting], and try to achieve product-market fit as fast as possible before you get to it.” Indeed, Rachleff suggested that he thinks it unwise for founders to raise seed rounds serially. “When companies raise seed funding, [that money] is to prove the dogs want to eat the dog food. If they can’t [prove that], and they have to ask for more seed funding,” the startup becomes “less compelling” to later investors.

We asked him about some of the biggest mistakes that founders make, and he said that many of these center on who founders approach for funding, how they pace the rate at which they approach investors, and how, exactly, they pitch their startups. On that last point, said Rachleff, “People think data is a way to compel people, but it’s the story that compels people, and that has never changed, whether you’re talking about political campaigns or business presentations.” (We asked for more details, but he half-kiddingly suggested that founders will need to hear about the importance of narratives via that aforementioned accelerator program.)

We also asked Rachleff about some now-famous research he prepared some time around 2006 that suggested that every year, about 15 U.S. startups are created that eventually reach $100 million in annual revenue. His point at the time was that VCs can only succeed by getting behind those companies. (It’s largely the premise around which the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz was launched, cofounder Marc Andreessen had told this editor when the firm’s first fund was getting off the ground back in 2009.)

We wondered: is that number still 15 so many years later? Rachleff noted that he hasn’t updated his research, but he said he doesn’t “think it’s much bigger in the U.S. I do think the number is larger with Chinese companies, but here, I bet you it hasn’t changed or maybe it’s 20 companies each year that at some point reach $100 million in annual revenue.”

Before we jumped off the phone, Rachleff had a question for us, which is why there aren’t more articles about seed-funded companies going out of business. (Maybe he thinks this would keep more people from pursuing half-baked ideas.)

“Thousand of companies are raising seed funding — 10 times the amount of companies that were starting with a Series A” during the go-go dot com era of the late ’90s, he said. “But when I ask investor friends what’s happening to them all, the best answer I get is that a small number of them are successful, a slightly larger portion get acqui-hired, and the largest portion keeps raising money to keep the hope alive.”

Some of them “get to $1 million to $2 million in revenue to reach breakeven,” Rachleff continued, but, alas, that’s no reason for celebration. If a startup has raised outside funding and “there’s no money to grow into a business, that’s a failure.”

Airbnb this morning announced the launch of A Fair Share. The initiative promises to donate $10 million to seven organizations, including The New York Immigration Coalition, New York Mortgage Coalition, New York State Rural Housing Coalition Inc., Win, GMHC, CSNYC and Abyssinian Development Corporation.

It’s not all just a goodwill gesture, however. As The New York Times notes, the generosity comes as the popular subletting service is looking to raise the profile of NY Assembly Bill A7520, which would go a ways toward helping legitimize the service within the confines of the country’s largest metropolitan area.

“We wanted to make the point of what the impact of tax collection and remittances would be if we were able to collect on behalf of our community here,” Airbnb public policy manager Josh Meltzer told the paper.

The service handily points out that the donation would be a fraction of the $100 million in tax revenues that could be raised for the state, should the bill go through. But Airbnb has proven unpopular among many tenants for the impacts it has on neighborhoods.

Earlier this month, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio signed a bill aimed at curbing illegal short term rentals, requiring services like Airbnb to include addresses and names of hosts in listings. City Council, meanwhile, also recently struck a blow to ride hailing services like Uber and Lyft by capping the issue of new licenses.

With so much money being stuffed into Silicon Valley companies these days, it’s hard to stand out as an investor, but John Vrionis and Jyoti Bansal have what they think is a winning approach — one that’s a win for startup founders, too.

A little background first. Back in May, Bansal who sold his company AppDynamics to Cisco for $3.7 billion last year, announced that he was teaming up with Vrionis, who’d spent the previous 12 years with Lightspeed Venture Partner. What they created together is a new venture firm called Unusual Ventures.

It launched publicly with a $160 million debut fund and a mission of also creating a startup education program. Fast forward a few months, and the firm will today begin accepting applications for a seven-week accelerator program that promises founders seven different three-hour-long sessions — one each week for seven weeks — with veterans of the startup industry. In return, they receive a convertible note that can range from $250,000 to $1 million, depending on the stage of the company.

Called Unusual Academy, the idea is to help these teams reach so-called product-market fit faster than they could otherwise. It also aims to prevent them from taking on too much seed funding, which can scare off Series A investors who sometimes see a glut of seed funding as a sign that a startup can’t figure out what it’s doing.

For its first batch, Unusual will be looking to work with between six and 10 companies, mostly of the business-to-business variety, and no team is too nascent, according to Vrionis. “It can be anything from a notebook idea, to a company that has already raised $7 million in funding,” he says. Unusual Ventures says it will later choose a second cohort of companies that are more consumer facing, though plans for that next batch haven’t been firmed up just yet.

It is a bit gimmicky? Yes. But given the talent Vrionis and Bansal have assembled to help startups, it’s also compelling. For example, one of the startup veterans who will spend three hours with select startups is Andy Rachleff, one of the cofounders of the storied venture firm Benchmark. Rachleff — who has for years taught entrepreneurship at Stanford while also heading up the wealth advisory startup Wealthfront — will spend three hours offering his insights on fundraising, time that some startup founders might kill for.

Another instructor is Adam Grant, the Wharton psychology and management prof and best-selling author, who will spend several hours with Unusual’s companies talking about culture and leadership. A third is Bansal himself, who will be advising the startups on how to recruit early customers and devise a strong early sales process. “Jyoti is the best I ever saw at finding early customers,” says Vrionis, who was an early supporter of Bansal when he launched AppDynamics. (Lightspeed wrote one of its first checks.) “People want him involved in their startups.”

Unusual Academy’s lessons will be held, for now, in a space in Redwood Shores, Ca., so it’s probably ideal only for Bay Area-based founders who can  travel to the different lessons over the seven-week period, which kicks off in October.

Eventually, says Vrionis, the hope beyond organizing a consumer track is to host the startups in other cities, or, at least, to let them log on remotely to hear from the advisors it assembles.

If you’re a b2b startup interested in applying for the program, just click over here.

Dating and networking app Bumble today announced the launch of Bumble Fund, a new vehicle focused on early stage investments specifically aimed at helping diverse, female entrepreneurs raise capital for their businesses. Sarah Jones Simmer, Bumble Chief Operating Officer, will lead Bumble Fund’s investment strategy along with Bumble Senior Advisor, Sarah Kunst, the company says.

“Investing in and empowering women in business is something that our founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd is deeply passionate about and is at the very core of what Bumble stands for,” said Jones Simmer, in a statement about the fund’s launch. “Through Bumble Fund we’ll look not only to support those women leaders who have been largely ignored, but we’ll also demonstrate why those investments build smart, successful businesses.”

Bumble Fund’s initial commitments include one of the winners of Bumble’s first “Bizz Pitch” competition, Sofia Los Angeles, a swimwear company founded by Anasofia Gomez. Its other commitments so far include Mahmee, a health care platform for coordinating prenatal and postpartum care; Female Founders Fund, another early stage fund for backing female talent; BeautyCon, the digital media company and festival operator focused on the beauty industry; and venture fund Cleo Capital, also focused on female founders.

The new fund will make investments that range from $5,000 to $250,000, in companies that are headed by women and focus on women’s interests. Bumble has committed over a million so far, it says.

The team will also work to identify new, potential investments via Bumble’s own Bumble Bizz platform – the dating app’s business networking platform available within its flagship mobile app. The company will also find new founders to back through its future Bumble Bizz pitch competitions, it says.

The move could help bring more attention to Bumble Bizz, while giving the company a stake in promising companies. Bumble, however, only spoke of the need for more investment in female founders, not the other bottom line advantages to its own operations.

In a blog post, Bumble shared the fact that startups headed by women had only received 2% of all venture capital last year.

“For black, Latinx, and other women from underrepresented groups, that statistic is even more bleak,” the post explained. “Black women are both the most educated and most entrepreneurial demographic in the U.S., but received only 0.2% of all venture funding for their startups last year,” it noted.

Bumble, whose app now has over 37 million users worldwide and has an 85% female workforce, says it wants to help solve the problem of women being “largely ignored by the venture capital establishment” with this fund.

SAP, the German-based enterprise software giant, has unveiled the New York-based cohort from its SAP.io Foundry accelerator programs focused on women-led technology companies.

The first program was launched in San Francisco in July 2017, and while the company has launched additional accelerator programs in Berlin and Tel Aviv (with plans for a Paris accelerator in the Fall), it’s SAP’s San Francisco and New York programs that have a specific focus on women and founders of color, according to Vanessa Liu, a vice president in charge of the New York program.

“The first one launched last summer, with San Francisco that was in July. Berlin launched in the fall with TechStars as a partner, Tel Aviv launched with The Junction,” Liu said. 

The partnerships with Techstars in Berlin and The Junction in Tel Aviv were designed solely to gain exposure to those markets, while the San Francisco and New York programs focused on diversity — as well as building out the SAP network among startups.

The Foundry accelerator programs are independent from the company’s $35 million Foundry fund, according to Liu. Companies that progress through the program give up no equity and receive no capital. Rather, the companies involved get access to the SAP network of partners and customers and the companies various technical and support services, Liu said.

“This is more about how do you work together with SAP and customers like GE, Coca Cola, and Stanley Black & Decker,” said Liu. 

For the New York cohort that demoed their wares yesterday, eight of the nine companies that participated were also based in New York, with one group of founders making the trek up from Georgia for the program.

And while there’s been no instance yet where companies that graduate from the accelerator receive a capital commitment later from the Foundry fund, Liu did not rule out the possibility.

That Foundry fund typically will invest between a quarter of a million and one million dollars into companies focused on machine learning, big data, and other enterprise software related applications. Checks are typically $250,000 at the seed stage increasing to $1 million as a company grows into a Series A investment.

In some ways, Liu said, the Foundry fund was a way for SAP to build on the work it had done with startups through its (now independent) Sapphire Ventures fund. That had been the vehicle SAP had previously used to connect with the startup world and early stage tech companies and entrepreneurs.

“We’re definitely not the first to market,” said Liu. “But we’re looking at it not just only in making investments and thinking about how to do that but it’s also about cultivating investments and making sure that we do that right.”

For the Foundry accelerator programs in the U.S. doing it right means focusing on gender and racial diversity. The criteria for the program is that at least one c-suite executive and member of the founding team be female. And of the nine companies in the cohort, only two companies were admitted where women were not serving in the chief executive role, Liu said.

These are the executives and companies that went through the SAP.io Foundry Accelerator in New York.

Tongtong Gong, founder and COO of Amberdata, a provider of monitoring and analytics for blockchain infrastructure and smart contract applications.

Margaret Martin, founder and CEO of CN2, a software service that transforms the CAD, 3D and 2D content they create everyday into compelling mobile X-Reality (AR+VR=XR) applications.

Ariadna Quattoni and Paul Nemirovsky, founders of DMetrics, which enables non-developers to build machine learning algorithms to extract insights from any text, in mere hours, and with zero coding.

Kate Brandley Chernis, co-founder & CEO of Lately, is selling a machine learning-based marketing dashboard to provide more consistent marketing messages across large platforms.

Shirley Chen, founder & CEO of Narrativ, sells a contextually relevant smart linking and ad placement technology

Lisa Xu, co-Founder & CEO of Nopsec, a provider of threat prediction and cyber risk remediation solutions for enterprises to prevent security breaches.

Jade Huang, co-founder & CEO of StyleSage,  which enriches product listings with attributes and then maps those products to eCommerce sites.

Jag Gill, founder & CEO of Sundar, a software service connecting apparel brands and retailers with suppliers of textiles, raw materials and garments.

Susan Danziger, Co-founder and CEO of Ziggeo, an embeddable video recorder/player that captures video and provides insights.