Year: 2019

Originally from Barcelona, Glovo has become a major player in the on-demand delivery app space. And Glovo isn’t just about ordering food from your favorite restaurants. You can also order groceries, pharmacy items and more from the app. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Glovo founder Oscar Pierre is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin.

Glovo has experienced exploding growth over the past couple of years. When the company announced its most recent round of funding, its service was live in 124 cities across 21 countries. Most of them are currently in EMEA, Latin America and some Sub-Saharian countries. Some of the most important markets include Spain, Argentina, Peru and Italy.

While restaurants still represent the majority of orders on Glovo, the company isn’t giving up on other verticals. For instance, it has signed a deal with supermarket chain Carrefour to deliver thousands of products in less than 30 minutes.

The company currently has over 1,000 employees and works with tens of thousands of independent partners for deliveries. It’s a classic structure for on-demand companies, but it’s going to be interesting to hear Oscar Pierre’s take on the relationship between Glovo and its partners.

Glovo doesn’t want to limit itself to delivering products from A to B. The company has been building darkstores, the equivalent of dark kitchens for groceries. Those micro-fulfillment centers open up a ton of possibilities, such as deliveries in less than 20 minutes and the ability to operate 24/7.

Oscar Pierre also has an unusual background as he started his career as an aerodynamics engineer for Airbus. I personally can’t wait to hear how he made the switch from Airbus to Glovo.

Buy your ticket to Disrupt Berlin to listen to this discussion and many others. The conference will take place on December 11-12.

In addition to panels and fireside chats, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield to compete for the highly coveted Battlefield Cup.

Aerospace engineer and entrepreneur, ​O​scar ​Pierre, is CEO and co-founder of Glovo. He ​began his studies at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. After two years, he moved to Georgia Tech, in United States, to explore better opportunities.

After graduating, he began his professional career as aerodynamics engineer at Airbus, at his base in Toulouse. After 6 months he decided to look for new challenges and dedicate to creating a new business. Glovo began in early 2015. Previously, while studying, Pierre had already founded Zikkomo.com, a solidarity platform with 30 children sponsored in Malawi, and LoveItLocal.es in 2014, a market destined to boost local craft businesses. In January 2017 he was on Forbes magazine's 30under30 annual list of most influential young people.

Azimo, the U.K. headquartered money transfer service backed by Japan’s Rakuten Capital, amongst others, is seeing a change at the top: founder Michael Kent is stepping sideways to become “executive chairman,” while Azimo’s COO Richard Ambrose is being promoted to CEO.

However, perhaps more noteworthy — within the context of a plethora of loss-making fintechs — is that the personnel changes co-inside with the company announcing that it reached profitability during Q2 this year.

Azimo has raised $50 million of investment to date. Along with Rakuten, investors include eVentures, Greycroft, and Frog Capital.

“We’ve bucked the trend in fintech by focusing on profitability and long-term sustainability,” says Ambrose (pictured below), who, prior to joining Azimo two years ago, was an executive at PayPal. “The next big challenge is growing Azimo from a European to a global fintech business. We’re sanguine about this challenge because Europe — with its range of languages, currencies and payment habits — is a good place to cut your teeth before going global”.

And cut its teeth, Azimo has. Founded in 2012, the money transfer service now has 1.1 million registered sending customers and 2.3 million receivers. The average sent per transfer is £250 and users on average send money 2.4 times per month. The company’s main “corridor” focus is Africa, SE Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America. I’m told there are plans for further expansion into Asia later this year.

“I am proud of the growth and success of Azimo, and most of all of the team that made it happen: we’ve created a world-class service and payment platform, which is lowering costs for millions of people around the world,” says Kent in a statement. “Richard has played a big part in the company’s development since he joined Azimo two years ago. I will continue to work closely with him and the rest of the team to make sure that our success story continues”.

Specifically, in his role as executive chairman, the Azimo founder will focus on new and existing investors and partners. Kent is also a fairly prolific angel investor. Along with his business partner Ricky Knox (the founder of Tandem Bank), he has backed the likes of Curve, ComplyAdvantage, YoYo Wallet, Thriva, and Tandem Bank, to name just a few.

The government of Rwanda will soon issue national policy-guidelines to eliminate gas motorcycles in its taxi sector in favor of e-motos.

The country’s president Paul Kagame previewed the plan last week. “We will find a way to replace the ones you have now. We urge taxi-moto operators to help us when the phase-out process comes,” he said speaking at a youth forum.

The Director General for the Rwanda Utilities Regulatory Authority Patrick Nyirishema confirmed Kagame’s comments were ahead of a national e-mobility plan in the works for the East African nation.

“The president’s announcement is exactly the policy direction we’re in…it’s about converting to electric motos…The policy is prepared, it’s yet to be passed..and is going through the approval process,” Nyirishema told TechCrunch on a call from Kigali.

Motorcycle taxis in Rwanda are a common mode of transit, with estimates of 20 to 30 thousand operating in the capital of Kigali. The country has come a long way since the 1990s, becoming a test-bed for drone-delivery and prioritizing initiatives to become an African tech hub.

Nyirishema explained that converting to e-motorcycles is part of a national strategy to move Rwanda’s entire mobility space to electric. The country will start with public transit operators, such as moto-taxis, and move to buses and automobiles.

“Once the policy is out, we’ll no longer permit any motorcycle that is not electric to be added to a fleet,”  Nyirishema said, adding that the country’s regulators will need to create an appropriate transition period and program for taxi operators to move to e-motos.

The news comes as Africa’s motorcycle taxi markets — worth an estimated $4 billion — have seen a flurry of tech investment and expansion. Uber and Bolt got into the motorcycle taxi business in Africa in 2018.

Norwegian (and Chinese backed) browser service Opera’s recent $50 million backed West Africa product expansion included linking its new payment app to ORide, a motorcycle ride-hail venture it launched in Nigeria.

Nigerian motorcycle taxi and delivery startup MAX.ng raised a $7 million Series A round with participation from Yamaha. The company is using the funding to pilot e-motorcycles in Africa powered by renewable energy.

Another local moto-taxi venture—Uganda’s SafeBoda—received outside capital in a Series B round co-led by the venture arms of Germany’s Allianz and Indonesia’s Go-Jek. 

The Director General for  Rwanda’s Utilities Regulatory Authority Patrick Nyirishema prepared to confirm partners for the country’s e-moto conversion.

One startup that says it will be involved is Ampersand, a Kigali based venture that has already begun to pilot EVs and charging systems in Rwanda.

The company has worked with a feasibility study for implementing electric vehicles across Rwanda since last year, according to CEO Josh Whale. “We’ve also got a grant from the government…and it’s been tied in really well with the feasibility study,” he told TechCrunch.

Ampersand has shaped its own e-motorcycle model, building the batteries and fitting them into new motorcycle chassis imported from Asia. To keep the taxi-moto riders consistently moving—vs. delayed while recharging—the startup has developed a battery swapping system and station.

One motorcycle ride-hail startup that’s been testing an Ampersand e-moto is Cango. Founded in 2015, the company has app-based, on-demand taxi-moto fleets in Rwanda and Congo.

“We intend to be among the first to switch our fleet, as the [Ampersand] bikes are ready,” Cango co-founder Barrett Nash told TechCrunch in a message from Kinshasa.

Ampersand CEO Josh Wale sees electricity changing the micro-economics of motorcycle taxi markets. He estimates taxi riders in Rwanda spend $2000 a year on fuel and oil-charges for their gas machines.

“Looking at it from a driver point of view, from day one they are paying less for the bike and the battery by going electric,” he said.

Trump said in July that some U.S. suppliers would be allowed to sell to Huawei while it remains blacklisted, but so far no vendors have been allowed to do so. Reuters reports that more than 130 applications have been submitted by companies that want to do business with Huawei, but the U.S. Commerce Department has not approved any of them yet.

Huawei has served as a bargaining chip in the U.S.-China trade war, which escalated again last week when Trump said he would adds tariffs to $550 billion worth of Chinese imports, after China said it would impose duties of $75 billions on U.S. goods. Trump’s mixed signals during this weekend’s G7 summit also created confusion on Wall Street.

When both presidents met at the G20 Summit in June, Donald Trump told Chinese leader Xi Jinping that he would allow some American companies to sell to Huawei, even though it remains on the Commerce Department’s Entity List. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross said the Commerce Department would begin accepting applications again, requiring companies to prove that the tech they sell to Huawei would not pose a national security risk.

But one of the reasons no licenses have been granted yet is because the Commerce Department is unclear about what it is supposed to do. Former Commerce department official William Reinsch told Reuters that “nobody in the executive branch knows what [Trump] wants and they’re all afraid to make a decision without knowing that.”

In addition to providing telecom equipment, Huawei is an important customer for many U.S. tech firms, including Qualcomm, Intel and Micron. Out of the $70 billion in parts it bought last year, $11 billion of that went to U.S. suppliers. The U.S. claims Huawei is a national security risk, a charge the company has repeatedly denied.

Mythic Markets, a young, San Francisco-based fractional investing platform for fans, has raised $2 million in seed funding led by Slow Ventures, with participation from Third Kind Venture Capital, Global Founders Capital, and others.

The company is being led by cofounder and CEO Joseph Mahavuthivanij, who previously spent a couple of years as an associate with the seed- and early-stage fund Social Leverage.

We can see why it piqued the interest of investors. Mythic is capitalizing on the broader trend of fractional ownership that gives numerous investors a piece of the same — hopefully appreciating — asset. The idea dates back fifty years or so to vacation time-shares, but it has picked up momentum of late, with startups asking potential customers to buy parts of new cars, homes, art, sneakers, and even virtual items.

For its part, Mythic is focusing on pop culture collectibles, starting with an Alpha Black Lotus, a trading card that only fanatics of the game “Magic the Gathering” might recognize but that’s apparently worth $90,000 right now. (Mythic, which opened up the card to investors last week, has broken its ownership into 2,000 shares, 663 of which have been purchased.)

Mahavuthivanij says Mythic will next offer a collection of five “Magic the Gathering” booster boxes circa 1994 and that it has other assets that it plans to acquire shortly off its balance sheet. “There’s just a huge secondary market for this stuff,” he says enthusiastically. “It trades like stock. You can watch the daily moving average of any moving card.”

To be on the safe side, Mythic only offers securities that are regulated by the U.S Securities & Exchange Commission, which not only includes rare and appreciating collectibles, similar to stocks, but also other things that Mythic plans to start selling next year, including vintage comic books, sci-fi memorabilia and, a little further afield, esports team equity. Investors needn’t be accredited but neither can they invest more than 10 percent of their income or net worth in an offering.

It’s little wonder that Mahavuthivanij cofounded the company. He’d earlier become tangentially familiar with Rally Road, a Social Leverage portfolio company sells stakes in classic cars to investors, and wondered if he couldn’t apply a similar idea to one of his great personal passions: card collecting.

In a way, it’s payback to an unfair universe. As a kid, Mahavuthivanij collected limited edition “Magic the Gathering” cards, assembling a collection that he thinks would have been worth $1 million today — but that was stolen from a car in 2002. As he began trying to reassemble his collection, he came to appreciate how much the market had changed and how richly priced some of the cards had grown, including those that weren’t reprinted outside of English.

As he saw investment grade cards soar further in value and out of his own reach, he couldn’t help but notice that on some of the same secondary markets, the same trends were quickly elevating the prices of other industries like comic books, where one Wonder Woman comic book produced in 1941 sold for $1 million in 2017, a record amount. (The buyer was presumably inspired in part by “Wonder Woman,” the movie starring Gal Gadot, which had come out just three months earlier.)

Whether Mythic can start throwing off real money is a giant question mark, as it is with most two-year-old companies. It does have additional revenue streams in mind. Namely, the company also expects to generate revenue eventually by offering a premium subscription model that offers early access to collectibles on its platform, opportunities to attend fan club appearances, and  opportunities to see special assets made available to the company at shows like Comic-Con and elsewhere.

It’s also chasing a growing market, one where there isn’t much hard data to quantify its size but that’s known to be more profitable than the traditional toy market because there aren’t manufacturing costs and prices are typically higher, sometimes by a shocking amount.

On the other hand, the collectibles market is highly sensitive to the disposable income of its investors, which may well shrink if a recession begins to take shape, even if they are buying bite-size stakes.

It’s also the case that a growing number of younger collectors are satisfied with digital images of what they like, rather than the actual items, a kind of sub trend that’s largely driving crypto collectibles — unique digital assets that can bought and sold and sometimes swapped between players in gaming environments.

Naturally, Mahavuthivanij — who is running Mythic with three other cofounders plus several other part-time contractors — thinks Mythic can change the market and grow it exponentially by divvying it up. If enough potential investors gravitate toward the idea, he might be right, too. We’ll stay tuned to see what happens.

Add another one to the Google Cemetery.

Google has disclosed that it will shut down Google Hire, the job application tracking system it launched just two years ago.

Google built Hire in an effort to simplify the hiring process, with a workflow that integrated things like searching for applicants, scheduling interviews, and providing feedback about potential hires into Google’s G Suite (Search/Gmail/Calendar/Docs etc.)

It was built mostly for small to medium sized businesses, with a price that ranged from $200 to $400 a month depending on how many G Suite licenses you needed.

Hire came into existence after Google acquired Bebop — a company started by VMWare founder Diane Greene — for a reported $380 million in 2015. Greene went on to act as the CEO of Google’s Cloud division, but left the role in early 2019.

In an email to customers, Google says:

While Hire has been successful, we’re focusing our resources on other products in the Google Cloud portfolio. We are deeply grateful to our customers, as well as the champions and advocates who have joined and supported us along the way.

On the upside: it’s not getting the axe immediately. In fact, you can keep using it for over a full year; Google says it won’t actually be shutdown until September 1st of 2020. Just don’t expect any new features to be added.

Google also notes that it intends to stop taking payment for the product in the meantime, saying that customers will see no additional charges for Google Hire after their next billing cycle.

SpaceX has completed a second low-altitude test flight of its ‘Starhopper’ demonstration prototype, which is being used to test technologies that will be used to build the full-scale next-generation SpaceX ‘Starship’ spacecraft. This test involved ‘hopping’ the Starhopper (hence the name, get it?) to a height of around 150m (or a little under 500 feet), the highest it’s flown so far, at a SpaceX test facility in Texas. After the hop, it successfully navigated itself to a target landing pad a short distance away.

This is the second untethered test trip for the Starhopper, and will is intended to be its last, as SpaceX moves forward with construction of its Starship Mk I and Mk II prototypes, which is taking place currently and simultaneously at sites in Florida and Texas. Today’s attempt was the second try after a planned test yesterday was aborted at the last second, with SpaceX resetting and ensuring everything was in place for this longer hop, which lasted a full 60 seconds.

In July, SpaceX ran its first untethered hop, which is designed to test the operation of the Raptor engine SpaceX is developing for Starship, along with other subsystems for use in the production Starship. That flew only for around 22 seconds, and attained a height of just 20 meters (a little over 65 feet).

Construction is currently in progress at both SpaceX’s Texas and Florida facilities on its full-scale Starship prototypes, which SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is ambitious will begin their own flight testing later this year, in perhaps as little as a few months. The larger prototypes, which should be closer to what will actually launch, will test more Raptor engines working together and aim to fly to higher altitudes, another key step as the company works towards a true first orbital test flight.

Ultimately, SpaceX is hoping to replace both Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy entirely with different configurations of Starship, which will help the company in terms of cost efficiency thanks to its fully reusable nature, and streamlining all of its rocket construction efforts around one type of vehicle.

“One app to rule them all” is a compelling idea if you’re a healthcare giant.

In this imagined model, patients flock to one comprehensive user experience for all their healthcare needs, from insurance and scheduling to lab results and disease management. And the healthcare giant, which has developed or acquired its way to market dominance, now has the ability to guide patients to their preferred providers, treatments and services.

But “one app to rule them all” is flawed. Not only does it ignore the way people use technology, it puts the patient experience second. Forcing patients to use one app for every healthcare interaction disregards the complexity and specificity of individual diseases and patient profiles.

Until now, we haven’t had to reckon with the “one app” problem, because most healthcare experiences have been relatively disparate. But as payers, providers, pharmacies, pharma and digital health all race to create digital experiences and solidify their offerings, we will soon have to confront this question: Will we end up with separate disease management apps that work together in a best-of-breed ecosystem model, or will several large players dominate with one app to rule them all?

How we got here

Up until now, the question of who would control the user experience wasn’t a material issue in the market. Most apps didn’t have a large enough user base to impinge on their competitors, and organizations created “single function” experiences for a specific problem space.

Payers created tools to let you look up coverage and find providers, health systems allowed you to book appointments and see your EMR and lab data, pharmacies allowed you to refill prescriptions, pharmaceutical companies made apps to support their specific medicines and most successful digital health companies have focused on individual diseases and specific use cases.

But now that digital health has taken root and patient adoption is expanding, these “single function” experiences are starting to bump into each other. And organizations are reacting to this change in different ways.

Many health systems and payers recognize this as an opportunity to create an ecosystem model, taking best-of-breed solutions for each core patient need and connecting them through identity and data linking so they work seamlessly together.

But alarmingly, some large organizations see this as an opportunity to assert more control over the patient experience.

They’re attempting to develop “one app to rule them all” solutions, with one user experience covering all patients with all possible diseases.

At Propeller, we recently “broke up” with a customer who couldn’t see past their vision for a single dominant app to rule the marketplace.

It was a tough decision, but one I felt we had to make. Here’s why.

Why “one app to rule them all” results in a worse patient experience

The advantage to “one app to rule them all” is obvious on its face. Patients would have fewer apps to download and engage with, advantages that seem more pronounced in more complex and comorbid patients. Organizations would also be able to guide patients to their preferred providers, treatments and services via a single app.

But there’s a significant problem with this approach.

When one platform tries to excel in a vast number of areas, it usually ends up doing them all badly. If you’ve used a leading marketing software platform that I won’t name, you know this to be true. And healthcare is even more difficult, because it’s at once more complex and more personal. It turns out it is pretty easy to build a complex and complicated product, but it is very hard to build a simple one, especially with a multitude of inputs and use cases.

All my experience in digital health has told me this: It’s very difficult to build an engaging and useful user experience in one disease state, let alone across multiple disease states within one experience.

Enrolling users is hard. Keeping them engaged is hard. Improving specific clinical outcomes — and proving it continuously — is especially hard. Making a great product requires an obsessive focus on a specific user and problem space, as well as relentless experimentation and iteration. When you don’t have that singular focus, the needs of the patient are deprioritized compared to the needs of the organization, and the user suffers.

To make this approach worthwhile, you’d have to believe that the convenience of one app would make up for a worse user experience by driving higher enrollment or retention rates. You’d have to believe that user experience simply doesn’t matter as much as the convenience of an all-in-one platform.

I don’t believe that. Healthcare isn’t fast food. People’s humanity, dignity and lives are at stake, and they deserve our obsessive focus on an experience built specifically for them.

Why a “best of breed” ecosystem approach is best

We’ve learned a lot in the last 20 years about how people prefer to use technology. If you want evidence that “best of breed” is the future, you only need to look to the other industries experiencing digital transformation.

For example, look at Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). It’s dominated by a large number of specific solutions that work together through identity (OAuth) and data integrations (APIs).

It’s a similar story in consumer apps. There is no single fitness app, travel app or communication app. In entertainment many tried to become the “one app,” but instead we have witnessed a proliferation of vertical content providers with individual subscriptions, such a Netflix, HBO, Disney and ESPN, all of which work together seamlessly on your Apple TV. Even when a major company acquires or develops new solutions, they often keep the solutions separate in terms of user experience. For example, Facebook has unbundled Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp instead of bundling them all as Facebook.

We as consumers are comfortable using specific solutions to solve specific problems, and want them all to work together with ease. Often, we find that when a major player branches into more and more solutions because they want our total business, each solution becomes more shoddily made, less intuitive and more poorly supported.

Now, this situation is not necessarily universal. In China, products like Tencent’s WeChat have expanded across multiple healthcare verticals, backed by very different market dynamics (both in healthcare and in technology). Yet even WeChat looks to third parties with best of breed solutions to grow their ecosystem, in addition to building multiple solutions themselves.

What the future looks like

The future I envision may not feature a single app, but neither is it complicated.

In this future, patients use a core clinical app, likely provided by their health system or primary care provider, that takes care of clinical interactions like scheduling, clinical data, reminders and follow-ups.

Beyond that, patients use a set of specific apps that specialize in particular health issues — for example, respiratory disease, diabetes, mental health, increasing activity or improving sleep. Those apps will rise to the top because they’re the best on the market at managing those issues. The experience of managing your mental health will feel different than managing your diabetes, just as using Instagram feels different than using Facebook.

In this ecosystem model, the patient’s core clinical app will link out to and connect to the problem-specific solutions. Health systems and physicians will adopt a small number of specialized platforms and products to focus on large clinical domains like cardiovascular, diabetes, respiratory and mental health. Data from these solutions will integrate back to the provider’s organization and will be available in the EMR and for population health management.

We’ll end up with a diverse ecosystem of solutions, each the best in their vertical, delivering a tailored user experience based on the needs of the specific patient and provider type.

And patients will be better off for it.

“The Irishman,” the much-anticipated Martin Scorsese film produced by Netflix, will get a theatrical release on November 1. It will then debut on the streaming service about four weeks later, on November 27.

This follows a similar pattern to the release of Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma” last year, which saw Netflix (which had previously insisted that any theatrical run happen simultaneously with a film’s streaming debut) debuting the film in theaters three weeks before it came to streaming.

Netflix doesn’t report box office numbers, so it’s not clear how much money it’s making from these theatrical rollouts.

Regardless, committing to a real theatrical release helps Netflix attract big-name filmmakers like Scorsese and Cuarón, and it also gives them a better chance at winning awards. (“Roma” won three Oscars earlier this year, including Best Director, prompting a broader debate about whether streaming films should be eligible for Oscars.)

Deadline reports that the roughly four-week theatrical window was not enough to convince the major theater chains to sign up — apparently they’re concerned that if they give in to Netflix, the Hollywood studios will start demanding shorter theatrical windows too.

“The Irishman” stars Robert De Niro as Frank Sheeran (a union official with ties to organized crime) and Al Pacino as Jimmy Hoffa (ditto). It will premiere at The New York Film Festival on September 27.

In addition to reuniting De Niro and Scorsese for the first time in two decades, and bringing Pacino and Scorsese together for the first time ever, the film is also noteworthy for its use of extensive special effects, so the actors to play younger versions of their characters.

About one-fourth of the startups in Y Combinator’s summer batch had a female founder. Not the most disappointing statistic if you consider this: Companies with at least one female founder have raised only about 11% of venture capital funding in the U.S. in 2019, according to PitchBook. Companies with female founders exclusively have raised just 3%.

There is so much room for improvement.

To close the funding gap, programs tailored to female entrepreneurs are working tirelessly to mentor and incubate upstarts in hopes of impressing venture capitalists. Ready, Set, Raise, an accelerator program built for women, by women, is amongst the new efforts to help female and non-binary founders raise more dollars, or, at the very least, build relationships with investors.

The accelerator program, created by the Seattle-based network of startup founders and investors called the Female Founders Alliance, is today announcing its second batch of companies, a group that includes a sextech business, an AI-powered tool for podcasters and a line of workwear created for women who work on farms, construction sites and factory floors.

Ready, Set, Raise has partnered with Microsoft for Startups to provide entrepreneurs $120,000 in Azure credits, as well as technical and business mentoring from executives of the Redmond-based software giant. Other new partners include Brex and Carta, two well-funded companies that plan to lend the support of their executives to teach entrepreneurs about startup finance, valuation and fundraising terms. 

“Both FFA and Microsoft recognize a major lapse in opportunities given to women and non-binary founders,” writes Ian Bergman, a managing director of Microsoft for Startups, in a statement. “We look forward to our continued work together to promote this necessary shift in the VC landscape.”

“My experience fundraising was undeniably shaped by the fact that I am a woman, and at the time was a new mom,” Feinzaig, who previously founded an edtech startup, told Seattle Business Magazine earlier this year. “A year later, I was about to give up. Instead, I started a Facebook group, including all of the founders and tech startup leaders I knew. It was the group that I needed, made up of people who knew exactly what I was going through. That’s how the Female Founders Alliance was born.”

FFA’s Ready, Set, Raise provides its companies childcare throughout the six-week program, in which companies work one-on-one with experienced coaches ahead of a demo day that will take place on October 16th. 

Here’s a look at Ready, Set, Raise’s sophomore class of startups:

• Echo Echo: AI-powered tools for podcasters.
• Give InKind: Coordinates support through major life events.
• Honistly: A provider of extended auto warranties to help with short-term cash needs.
• Juicebox It: Modernizes erotica with a chatbot that is arousing and educational. 
• Panty Drop: A personalized intimates shopping experience for women sizes XS-6XL.  
• The Labz: A platform that protects and memorializes creative content development in real time.
• Tougher: Functional, well-fitted workwear for women in the skilled trades.