An NYC-based startup that developed technology that extracts carbon dioxide from the air and combines it with water to create vodka has redirected its entire production capacity towards producing hand sanitizer, every bottle of which will be donated through collaboration with NYC officials, and potentially to local restaurants who employ delivery personnel providing critical service as social distancing and isolation measures continue.
Air Co. launched its vodka just last year, using a process it developed (which has received awards from NASA and XPrize) that is actually net carbon-negative. It involves pulling around one pound of carbon dioxide from the air which is then combined with water and turned into pure ethanol using solar-based renewable energy. Ethanol also happens to be the key active ingredient in hand sanitizer, which is generally between 60 and 95 percent alcohol in its most effective iterations.
Air Co’s CEO and co-founder Gregory Constantine told me via email that since the company was founded on the basis of fulfilling a mission of social good, the startup wanted to find some way to help with community efforts to counter the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. It naturally turned to producing hand sanitizer made up 70 percent ethanol, its technology’s primary output.
The company isn’t looking to cash in on the current (ill-advised) panic buying trends, which see supplies of hand sanitizer sold out or dwindling across major retailers and Amazon . Instead, even though it’s now directing 100 percent of its production capacity to making hand sanitizer, it’s also donating all of the volume it produces.
While Constantine says that initially, they’ve been producing smaller volumes than they’d like, and are looking at ramping production by shifting their methods, they’ve still managed to put out over 1,000 50mL bottles, and will “continue to make 1,000 bottles per week and push supply as much as our technology allows us to.”
I asked Constantine how they’re figuring out who receives the hand sanitizer they’re donating, given the many possible parties who would appreciate this kind of charitable action.
“We’re going to be directly supplying all donations at the advice of the city,” he said. “We are also looking to work with local restaurants to have them provide food delivery drivers with our sanitizer given that bars and restaurants have had to shut their doors to patrons, leaving delivery services at the forefront of food services here in New York City.”
Given that they’ve have shifted production away from their revenue-generating business for this effort, I also asked Constantine how long they plan to keep this up. Despite uncertainty about how long the need will exist, he said, they’re going to try to continue producing the sanitizer “for as long as [they] can.”
“We have shifted our production and are running on a very limited team to ensure that we are not furthering the spread of the virus in our efforts,” he added. “Every small piece of help from any person or business goes a long way in a time of need like this, and we plan to help however we can.”
Rocket Lab’s Electron launch vehicle has received Category 1 certification from NASA, meaning it is authorized for use on more important missions, opening up a whole new revenue stream for the growing launch provider.
The certification was largely based on the success of “This One’s for Pickering” in late 2018, the company’s fourth commercial launch, which took a batch of NASA cubesats into orbit as part of the ELaNa-19 mission. This experimental mission was undertaken as part of NASA’s Venture Class Launch Services initiative to test out newer and smaller launch vehicles using non-critical payloads.
“We have a strong partnership with NASA that was established through the ELaNa-19 launch and continues today with the upcoming CAPSTONE mission that will see our Electron launch vehicle and Photon spacecraft deliver a NASA satellite to lunar orbit next year,” said Rocket Lab CEO and founder Peter Beck in a news release.
Certification categories go from 1-3, from “high risk” to “low risk,” based largely on successful launches, which as you might imagine is something of a catch-22: You need the launches to get the certification, but you need the certification to get the launches. Fortunately one can break the cycle with non-essential missions like small experimental satellites — which is sort of the purpose of the VCLS program.
NASA also conducts careful inspections of facilities, manufacturing, and all that. NASA’s Darren Bedell, risk manager for the agency’s Launch Services group, noted that “Rocket Lab’s management team are deliberate in ensuring processes are controlled, repeatable, and measurable to ensure mission success.”
Category 2 certification is in process, but is of course even more stringent and requires six consecutive successful missions with the same rocket configuration. Rocket Lab has 10 in a row at present, but there’s likely a lot of paperwork involved as well.
The company’s next launch is for NASA, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the University of New South Wales — window opens on March 27 (local New Zealand time).
Lime is pausing its electric scooter operations in California and Washington, as well as throughout the countries of Italy, France and Spain to help keep riders safe during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Like you, we are worried about the cities we love and call home, the people we serve, and our colleagues on the ground,” Lime wrote in a blog post today. “Loving cities means protecting them too. For now, we’re pausing Lime service to help people stay put and stay safe.”
The announcement came a day after San Francisco ordered residents to shelter in place, and shortly before New York City told residents to prepare for a shelter-in-place order. Lime will continue operating in other markets but says it has enhanced its cleaning and disinfecting methods.
Spin, on the other hand, is choosing not to suspend its service in San Francisco, unless the city explicitly asks it to. That’s because it’s betting the public transportation system will need support as people are taking essential trips to places like the grocery store or pharmacy.
“During this challenging time in our nation and in light of the CDC’s guidance to avoid public transportation to limit exposure to COVID-19, we believe that Spin scooters can be another safe and reliable option,” Spin CEO Derrick Ko said in a statement. “To the extent that it is safe for our employees, we plan to work with the City to determine how best we can support the City’s desire and needs for continued safe operations of essential transportation, from rides to grocery stores and pharmacies to medical care and testing facilities.”
In a letter to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency yesterday, Ko outlined how Spin is ready and able to work to support health care workers, sanitation workers and other workers who may benefit from its scooters. Currently, Spin is more frequently disinfecting scooters and also encouraging riders to disinfect the handlebars before and after their ride. As for Lime, it says it will keep riders in the loop regarding when it will redeploy its scooters.
With the explosive popularity of B2B services startups, it was only natural that a B2B startup would come along that’s offering a service to help startups become enterprise services themselves.
WorkOS, which is launching out of stealth with seed funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and others, is building a toolkit to help startups meet the requirements for bringing on enterprise clients. The company aims to get startups set up with an API for single sign-on, directory sync, audit trails, role-based access controls and other key services.
As more startups look to approach enterprise from a bottom-up capacity and focus on creating individual use cases, quickly meeting IT administrators expectations can become a shortcut to higher margin customers. The inspiration for WorkOS came from its founder’s previous email startup, which tried to make a play for enterprise adoption and clients but couldn’t cross what he calls “the enterprise chasm.”
“The feedback I got was, this is a great app but we can’t buy this as a company because you’re not enterprise-ready,” CEO Michael Grinich told TechCrunch in an interview. “Even if you focus on the end user experience, there’s a different buyer at the end of that tunnel with a different set of needs.”
Becoming enterprise-ready means meeting the same compliance requirements that IT administrators need to adhere to, something that can obviously be an issue for a small startup that’s light on resources. On the security side, Grinich says that WorkOS is currently in its SOC-2 Type 2 observation period and should receive certification in Q2 of this year.
These are uncertain times to be a startup launching publicly, but Grinich’s description of his company as a “highway onramp to get into [enterprise] ecosystems,” seems apt for startups seeking to quickly build out new revenue streams. Right now, WorkOS operates across a few pricing structures with a free tier that brings users single sign-on support as well as a $99/mo developer tier and $499/mo corporate tiers that scale up WorkOS’s offered functionality substantially.
First Round, SV Angel, Abstract Ventures, Tuesday Ventures and Work Life Ventures are also backers.
Yesterday, San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced a lockdown for six Bay Area Counties: San Francisco, Santa Clara, San Mateo, Marin, Contra Costa and Alameda. The public health order marks a big step to help reduce movement, potential transmission of COVID-19, of the nearly 7 million people within the Bay Area.
It is important to note that the mayor, as of today, has not issued a complete and utter lockdown. This means you can still go outside for exercise and leisure, as well as heading to your local grocery store (mine is giving out free flowers to stressed shoppers). You can also order food delivery from your app of choice. Some restaurants are offering food to-go, or if you’re Black Hammer Brewing, crowlers and growlers to-go.
Per the SF Chronicle, bicycling for exercise is fine, as well as driving to hiking trails and beaches for fresh air. I highly recommend a morning stroll at Lands End or Fort Funston. You’ll also catch a good sunset at Bernal Heights or out on one of the numerous piers.
The guidance, if you leave your house, is to remain six feet away from another individual at all times.
This all in mind, let’s end on a general note. Be kind, tip well, and be thankful for moments of humanity and love in this moment of stress. Everyone is scared and buying out the store’s quantity of toilet paper in one go might not be as thoughtful as you think.
In a volatile trading session that saw the White House signal intentions to release the largest stimulus package since the great recession of 2008, American stocks made up for yesterday’s losses with major indices rising sharply.
The return to gains was welcome after stocks posted huge losses to begin the week, tripping the market’s circuit breakers for the third time in the current period of trading tied to the spread of the COVID-19 virus.
The response to the White House’s plan to stem economic fallout from the virus is receiving — today at least — good marks.
Part of the plan includes providing American’s with direct financial aid in the form of cash. Other governmental action will provide emergency paid medical leave pay, though American will still lag sharply behind the rest of the world when it comes to worker care. How a few weeks of paid leave will hold up against a patchwork, but increasingly broad national quarantine isn’t clear at this time. One of the country’s leading political parties was opposed to a more permanent fix.
The US government is not alone in its stimulus plans. The UK announced a nearly $400 billion package today, for example. Many other governments have executed other packages, and central banks are doing their bit as well.
While the government response is massive, markets and investors may need more assurances.
Today at the bell the scorecard read as follows:
Dow Jones Industrial Average: climbed 4.93%, or 994.50, to close at 21,183.02
S&P 500: rose nearly 6%, or 142.67 points to close at 2,528.80
Nasdaq Composite: was up 430.19 points, or 6.23%, to close at 7,334.78
Each index remains far below its recent highs, and all three are still in bear-market territory.
Individual Performance
Shares of Slack, the popular workplace app that got hit after its guidance was a bit light, rallied today. Uber and Lyft, hit hard in recent weeks as the world has slowly ground to a halt, fell today.
SaaS shares rallied as a group, but failed to make up much ground compared to their recent highs; they remain sharply depressed from prior levels. Cryptos have rallied some in the last 24 hours as well, but, like with most assets, remain far under preceding highs and other local maxima.
In short, while today’s trading was more than welcome, it was just lukewarm comfort after Monday’s epic selloff. And with the US COVID-19 tallies rising, it isn’t clear if tomorrow is going to follow Tuesday’s direction. After all, this rally came after a meltdown.
Pharma giant Pfizer announced on Tuesday that it’s working with BioNTech, a German company working on new kinds of immunotherapy treatments, on a potential COVID-19 vaccine. The joint effort, confirmed Tuesday via a signed letter of intent, will see both partners work together on a a messenger RNA-based vaccine that will seek to prevent people from contracting the new coronavirus.
It’s worth a reminder that any vaccine is going to take, at minimum, between a year and 18 months to develop and certify for general. human use, so don’t think that this is going to result in any kind of short-term solution. But the collaboration does bring together one of the largest and most established players in the realm of pharmaceutical biotech, along with a younger company working at the forefront of mRNA-based immune therapies.
These therapies don’t use samples of the virus itself, as typical vaccines do (in either dead or weakened form, to jump-start the body’s natural defences). Instead, they rely on RNA to kickstart the production of proteins similar enough to the virus that they trigger the body’s development of antibodies effective against the actual target.
This collaboration should result in a clinical test that could kick off as early as April. Both parties aren’t starting from scratch in terms of their work on mRNA-based vaccines: they began working together on R&D to create treatments for the flu starting in 2018.
While work on the collaborative effort begins immediately, across teams located in both the U.S. and German, the two partners still have to hammer out details including financial terms and commercialization of whatever results. The fact that they’re willing to begin working before the ink is dry on those details should give you some idea of the urgency felt behind the project.
This isn’t the only mRNA-based potential COVID-19 vaccine in development: Earlier this week, Moderna announced that they’d already begun human clinical trials of their own coronavirus immunotherapy, after fast-tracking its development in partnership with the National Institutes of Health.
Y Combinator’s Demo Day was a bit different this time around.
As concerns grew over the spread of COVID-19, Y Combinator shifted the event format away from the two-day gathering in San Francisco we’ve gotten used to, instead opting to have its entire class debut to invited investors and media via YC’s Demo Day website.
In a bit of a surprise twist, YC also moved Demo Day forward one week citing accelerated pacing from investors. Alas, this meant switching up its plan for each company to have a recorded pitch on the Demo Day website; instead, each company pitched via slides, a few paragraphs outlining what they’re doing and the traction they’re seeing, and team bios. It’s unclear so far how this new format — in combination with the rapidly evolving investment climate — will impact this class.
As we do with each class, we’ve collected our notes on each company based on information gathered from their pitches, websites and, in some cases, our earlier coverage of them.
Simple Stripes: Aims to make glucose testing cheaper and more accessible by making strips that can be read by any smartphone camera, rather than requiring a dedicated glucose meter. The company says it expects to submit its strips for FDA approval in June.
nplex biosciences: A faster, cheaper way to do the protein panels required in the development of new medications. The company says it has over $4 million in letters-of-intent in the works, including one from a major pharma company.
Healthlane: An app meant to help users in Africa communicate with their doctors, make appointments and track lab results. The company says it has already reached profitability, with a retention rate of 98%.
Breathe Well-being: A 16-week program meant to help users in India with chronic conditions (such as diabetes) in their efforts to lose weight. The company offers a one-on-one diabetes coach who helps the user with tracking things like weight/meals/activity and trains them in cognitive behavioral therapy techniques meant to reduce stress. Currently seeing an $11.2K MRR.
Dropprint Genomics: “Single cell genomics” software meant to reduce the time/financial cost of analyzing individual cell activity to enable better drug discovery. They’ve signed over $1 million in LOIs in two months.
Newman’s: A digital health clinic for men in Indonesia. They’re focusing on problems that are often seen as either embarrassing (hair loss, erectile dysfunction) or are often abandoned (quitting smoking) by making doctor visits easier, cheaper and more private by way of remote consultation. Find our previous coverage of Newman’s here.
Loop Health: Loop Health says that most health insurance in India covers “only hospital stays, not doctor visits.” They’re looking to improve this by offering unlimited access to their designated Loop Health clinics, along with app-based telemedicine.
Synapsica Healthcare: An “AI reporting assistant.” Currently focusing on spinal MRIs, the company says it saves radiologists 80% of their reporting time by automatically annotating measurements and characterizing disc degeneration. The company says it’s currently in a $100K pilot program with a radiology practice tapped by 250 chiropractic clinics.
Volumetric: Volumetric makes 3D bioprinters that create vascularized human tissue. Founded by two PhDs, Volumetric sells its photoactive tissue to pharmaceutical companies and scientists. It’s using the proceeds to move toward building bioprinters and bioinks that can generate functional tissue and even organs. Find our previous coverage of Volumetric here.
Ophelia: Ophelia replaces rehab with telemedicine for America’s 3 million opioid addicts. It lets patients do teleconferenced doctor visits, get prescribed and delivered medications like Buprenorphine and Naloxone, and access therapy without the stigma. The founder started the company after a longtime girlfriend died from opioid addiction, and Ophelia has now treated 40 patients.
Lilia: Claiming that “in the future, women will freeze their eggs upon graduation,” Lilia is an egg-freezing concierge service. The startup charges $500 for concierge, and gets another $500 when somebody is placed in a clinic. Lilia says its total addressable market is $33 billion.
Equator Therapeutics: Equator Therapeutics is developing a drug to help users burn calories without exercise. Founded by a duo of PhDs and a data scientist who worked at a company developing an anti-aging drug, Equator Therapeutics is targeting people dealing with obesity and type 2 diabetes.
Altay Therapeutics: Located inside the Bayer Collaborator in San Francisco, Altay Therapeutics has developed small molecule therapies that block disease-causing DNA-binding proteins (or transcriptional regulators). The company’s initial therapies are focused on arthritis, fibrosis, ulcerative colitis and liver cancer.
Tambua Health: Tambua Health uses an “acoustic” stethoscope and proprietary software to provide advanced imaging for lung imaging without the radiation of an x-ray.
Abalone Bio: Founded by serial life sciences entrepreneurs, Abalone Bio is using libraries of yeast cells expressing billions of antibody variants to grow specific antibodies that can activate or inhibit a drug target. Using gene sequencing, machine learning and synthetic biology, the company makes recombinant protein versions of its antibodies and confirms their efficacy in human cell assays. The company’s initial targets are drugs for pain, inflammatory diseases, rare cancer and rare kidney disease.
Felix Biotechnology: Founded by the famous Yale University researcher Paul Turner, Felix Biotechnologies is developing treatments to address antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria and fungi. These pathogens cause more than 2.8 million infections and 35,000 deaths in the United States alone each year, according to the company. On average, someone in the U.S. dies from an antibiotic-resistant infection every 15 minutes. Researchers have warned that more people will die from antibiotic resistance than from cancer by the year 2050.
Candid Health: Candid Health has developed automated billing software for the healthcare industry that follows up with insurance companies and automatically appeals denied claims. It takes a 5% cut of each payment.
Ochre Bio: Ochre says that most donated livers are discarded — despite there being a shortage — due to them containing too much fat for a successful transplant. They’re aiming to “rejuvenate livers outside the body” by finding ways to treat them prior to transplant.
Fintech
Facio: Brazil has a banking problem. An oligarchy of five banks manage the Brazilian market, and they’re slow, have terrible customer service, high APR and don’t serve SMBs. Facio wants to keep workers from falling victim to predatory debt and instead gain financial freedom with a low-priced payroll loan to employees. It integrates with the employer, deducting loans right from their payroll.
delt.ai: Delt.ai is a digital bank that handles payments, invoicing and corporate cards for poorly served SMEs and freelancers in Mexico. The startup is targeting the $50 billion+ market of business deposits in Mexico. Think of Delt.ai is a Brex or a Mercury, but focused on Latin America.
Nexu: Like many other personal financing operations in Latin America, car financing is an expensive, low-tech, arduous process. Nexu, a financing platform for Latin American car dealerships, uses dynamic credit scoring to give car buyers an approval with a turnaround of a few seconds. The founding team met as Wharton MBA candidates.
Fondeadora: Fondeadora is joining Mexico’s saturated fintech scene, with its alternative neobanking debit card. The company offers a fully mobile digital savings account run within its app. Fondeadora says it has 65,000 users and $6.5 million monthly transactions. Albo, another Mexico-focused debit card, currently owns the market share with 200,000 monthly active customers who are spending and making transactions in its platform and $26 million in capital raised. But the banking problem in Mexico is big enough that multiple startups can thrive. Out of the 130 million population of Mexico, 45% are underbanked, meaning they lack deep financial products designed to help them compound wealth through lending and savings features.
yBANQ: A collections and reconciliation system for large B2B companies in India. The company says it has found 18 customers since launching in late January, reaching a GMV of around $18K.
ZeFi: A savings account that converts USD deposits to/from “stablecoin” cryptocurrencies behind the scenes, with ZeFi lending these funds out to borrowers to gain interest.
Grain: Grain hooks your existing debit card to a “responsible” amount of credit (currently capped at $500, and based on your income/cash low), hopefully helping those with minimal/bad credit build up their credit report over time. In the three months since launch, the company says it has signed up 1,000 customers, and expects to make around $80 per customer per year.
CrowdForce: Lets local merchants in Africa act as bank branches, serving as an intermediary on transactions when a bank is too far away. The company says it made $70K in net revenue last month, making an average of $20 per year per customer.
Stark Bank: A banking API to handle B2B transactions for tech companies in Brazil. A little over a year after launch, the company says it’s seeing $12 million in monthly gross volume.
Bamboo: An online brokerage for high-wealth individuals in Africa to buy securities from around the world. The company says it already has over 2,100 investors who have traded over $1.6 million on the platform since launching roughly five months ago, currently accounting for over $10,000 in monthly revenue.
Swipe: Pitching itself as “Brex for Africa,” Swipe gives African SMBs a credit card to help cover payroll and expenses. They onboard businesses by providing them with free expensing/billing tools, then offer credit accordingly. The company says it’s currently working with 30 companies, with $200K in credit deployed.
goDutch: A payments card for splitting costs amongst groups that often share bills, such as roommates. Focusing on India. Charges are put onto one card and deducted from each group member’s account automatically.
Paymobil: Uses stablecoin cryptocurrencies to transfer money across the globe through a Venmo-style app. The founder, Daniel Nordh, notes that he previously led consumer design at Coinbase.
Karat: Karat offers banking, loans and credit cards to influencers. By using data on their popularity to manage risk, Karat has achieved 40% APR on its loans with an average repayment time of 45 days. Thanks to its founders’ experience building influencer tools at Instagram and structuring debt at Goldman Sachs, it’s already signing up stars with over 10 million followers.
Homestead: Homestead helps home owners convert their garages into rental properties at no upfront cost. Homestead pays for all the construction, tenant search and management, and then splits the rent income with the home owner. A new California law allows the state’s 8 million garages to be rented out as living spaces, creating an enormous market opportunity. Homestead’s founders met at MIT’s graduate school of architecture and city planning, and the startup has already done $1 million in sales.
Benepass: Benepass offers a benefits card for startups and small businesses. Using the Benepass debit card, employees can pay for tax-advantaged benefits and wellness perks like flexible spending accounts, childcare, commuting, fitness and education while an app tracks their buying. Free for employers, Benepass has a 6% take rate but can save thousands on income and payroll taxes. With startups desperate to compete with tech giants for top talent, Benepass could ensure employees feel supported.
GAS POS: U.S. gas station owners are racing to upgrade outside pumps with EMV technology, a global standard for credit cards equipped with computer chips. GAS POS was founded to deliver a modern point-of-sale system that will help North America’s 180,000 gas stations comply with EMV and make transactions more secure. The company has several sources of revenue, a 3% fee on processed payments, SaaS free for equipment and an offer to customers to provide next-day funding.
YearEnd: YearEnd is building tax software for the paper rich, helping startup employees file their taxes while optimizing for their equity. The startup charges $330 per year for individual users and is hoping to sell to businesses that can add YearEnd as an employee benefit.
GIGI Benefits: India’s GIGI Benefits is looking to be the benefits provider for the nation’s gig economy workers. The business takes a page from companies like last year’s hottest Y Combinator startup, Catch, or the venture-backed Trupo, to provide things like health insurance and retirement investment accounts to gig economy workers.
Easyplan: Easyplan is the Qapital or Digit for India, allowing users to seamlessly save money for certain specific goals.
Haven: Haven is a next-gen platform for servicing home mortgages, offering more modern customer interfaces, better payment modeling for lenders and more.
WorkPay: WorkPay describes itself as “Gusto for Africa” — next-gen payroll and related services targeting small and medium businesses in the region.
Spenny: Spenny is a savings tool for Indian consumers that lets customers start banking money away by rounding up their purchases.
Kosh: Kosh is an algorithmically enhanced savings and investment platform for India, allowing those with good credit to effectively vouch for friends with limited credit to help them borrow.
Nonprofit
Potential: Potential is a nonprofit that wants to connect the formerly incarcerated to jobs and resources. The company works with detention centers and employment organizations to make a more friendly hiring environment.
Y Combinator’s Demo Day was a bit different this time around.
As concerns grew over the spread of COVID-19, Y Combinator shifted the event format away from the two-day gathering in San Francisco we’ve gotten used to, instead opting to have its entire class debut to invited investors and media via YC’s Demo Day website.
In a bit of a surprise twist, YC also moved Demo Day forward one week, citing accelerated pacing from investors. Alas, this meant switching up its plan for each company to have a recorded pitch on the Demo Day website; instead, each company pitched via slides, a few paragraphs outlining what they’re doing and the traction they’re seeing, and team bios. It’s unclear so far how this new format — in combination with the rapidly evolving investment climate — will impact this class.
As we do with each class, we’ve collected our notes on each company based on information gathered from their pitches, websites and, in some cases, our earlier coverage of them.
Datasaur: A tool meant to help humans label machine data data sets more accurately and efficiently through things like auto-correct, auto-suggest and keyboard hotkeys. It’s free for individual labelers, $100 per month for teams of up to 20 labelers, with custom pricing for larger teams.
1build: Automatic, data-driven job cost estimates for construction companies. You upload your plans, and 1build says it can prepare accurate bids “in minutes.” The company projects a revenue run rate of over $600,000, and says it has completed estimates for mega companies like Amazon, Starbucks and 7-Eleven.
Handl: An API for turning paper documents — including handwritten ones — into structured data ready to be plunked into a database or CRM. While the company says that around 85% of its processing is handled by their AI, it’s backed by humans to validate data when the AI’s confidence is low. Nine months after launch, the company is seeing an ARR of $0.9 million.
Zumo Labs: Uses game engines to generate pre-labeled training data for computer vision systems. By synthesizing the data rather than collecting it from photos/videos of the real world, the company says it can create massive data sets faster, cheaper and without privacy issues.
Teleo: Retrofits existing construction equipment to allow operators to control them remotely. The company says it has built a “fully functional teleoperated loader” since being founded three months ago, and plans to charge construction companies a flat monthly fee per vehicle. The company’s co-founders were previously head of Hardware Engineering and director of Product Manager at Lyft, with both having worked on Google’s Street View team.
Menten AI: Menten AI says it’s using “quantum computing and machine learning” combined with synthetic biology to design new protein-based drugs.
Turing Labs Inc.: Automated, simulated testing of different formulas for consumer goods like soaps and deodorant. Home products and cosmetics can be months of work for R&D labs. Turing has built an AI engine that helps with this process — much like the AI engines used in drug discovery — cutting down the time to days. It’s already working with some of the biggest CPG companies in the world. You can find our previous coverage on Turing here.
Segmed: Segmed is building data sets for AI-driven medical research. Rather than requiring each and every researcher to individually partner with hospitals and imaging facilities, Segmed partners with these organizations (currently over 50) and standardizes, labels and anonymizes the data.
Ardis AI: Ardis AI wants to build the foundation of artificial general intelligence — technology that read and comprehend text like a human. By combining neural networks, symbolic reasoning and new natural language processing techniques, Ardis AI can serve companies that don’t want to hire teams to do data extraction and labeling.
Agnoris: Agnoris analyzes a restaurant’s point-of-sale data to recommend changes to pricing, delivery menus and staffing. For $3,600 per year per restaurant location, Agnoris claims to be able to raise profits by 20%. The company started after the founder opened a restaurant that was packed yet losing money, so it built machine learning tools to improve margins and now it’s selling that software to all eateries.
Froglabs: Froglabs provides weather forecasting AI to businesses for predicting solar and wind energy production, delivery delays, staffing shortages, sales demand and food availability. By ingesting petabytes of weather data, it can save companies money by ensuring their logistics aren’t disrupted. Founded by a long-time Googler who started its Project Loon internet-beaming weather balloons, it’s now signing up e-commerce, retail, rideshare, restaurant and event businesses.
PillarPlus: PillarPlus is a platform that automates the blueprint-designing phase of a building project. It takes a design from an architect or contractor and maps out mechanical, fire, electrical and plumbing details, and estimates the bill of materials and project cost, steps that otherwise take months of work.
Glisten: Glisten uses computer vision and machine learning technologies to develop better, more consistent data sets for e-commerce companies. Its first product is an AI-based tool to populate and enrich sparse product data. Find our previous coverage of Glisten here.
nextmv: Nextmv gives its customers the ability to create their own logistics algorithms automatically — allowing businesses to optimize fleets and manage routes internally.
Visual One: Movement-detecting security cameras can bring up a lot of false positives: there’s motion, yes, but not necessarily anything harmful. Visual One has built an AI platform that integrates with home security cameras to “read” the specific movements that they detect. Owners can create customised alerts so they get notifications only for what they care about. The company’s software can check for furniture-destroying pets, package-lifting thieves, the death-defying antics of toddlers and more. Find our previous coverage of Visual One here.
PostEra: “Medicinal chemistry-as-a-service” is the idea here: PostEra’s platform can design and synthesize molecules faster and at a lower cost than the typical R&D lab, speeding up the research time it takes to test new combinations in the drug discovery process.
Hardware and Robotics
Cyberdontics: Robotics have already revolutionized surgery, courtesy of companies like da Vinci-maker, Intuitive. Cyberdontics is aimed at doing the same for oral surgery, beginning with crowns — one of the more expensive and time-intensive procedures. The company says its robot is capable of performing the generally two-hour procedure in 15 minutes, charging a mere $140 for the job.
Avion: Focused on inhabitants of difficult to reach areas in Africa, Avion is building a drone-based delivery system. The plans consist of medium and long-range medical drones tied to a centralized hub. The drones are hybrid and autonomous with vertical take-off capabilities, able to take 5-kg payloads as far as 150 kms.
SOMATIC: Industrial bathroom cleaning is a prime “dull”/“dirty” candidate to be replaced by automation. Somatic builds large robots that are trained to clean restrooms via VR. The system sprays and wipes down surfaces and is capable of opening doors and riding up and down in the elevator. Find our previous coverage of SOMATIC here.
RoboTire: Anyone who’s ever sat in a service shop waiting room knows how time-intensive the process can be. RoboTire promises to cut the wait time from 60 minutes down to 10 for a set of four tires. The company has begun piloting the technology in locations around the U.S. Find our previous coverage of RoboTire here.
Morphle: Designed to replace outdated analog microscopes, Morphle’s system uses robotic automation to improve imaging. The startup processes higher-resolution images than far pricier systems and with a much smaller failure rate. Morphle has begun selling its system to labs in India.
Daedalus: Founded by an early engineer at OpenAI, Daedalus is building autonomous software to allow industrial robots to operate without human programming, beginning with CNC machines. The company projects that it can improve productivity in the metal machining market by 5x.
Exosonic, Inc.: Exosonic makes supersonic commercial aircraft that don’t have to produce a loud sonic boom, so they can be flown over land. Its goal is a plane that can fly from SF to NYC in three hours. The CEO worked on NASA’s low-boom X-59 aircraft while at Lockheed Martin. Exosonic now has letters of intent from a major airline and two Department of Defense groups, plus a $300,000 U.S. Air Force contract.
Nimbus: Founded by a serial entrepreneur and based in Ann Arbor, Mich., Nimbus is developing the next-generation vehicle platform for urban transportation. Founder Lihang Nong previously launched the fuel-injection systems developer PicoSpray and is now looking to answer the question, “Can a vehicle be several times more space and energy efficient than today’s cars while actually being more comfortable to ride in?”
UrbanKisaan: UrbanKisaan is a vertical farming operation based in India that delivers fresh produce subscriptions to households. Its farms of stacked-up hydroponic tables can be located near cities with just 1% of the land usage of traditional agriculture, and there are no pesticides necessary. In a market with a growing middle class seeking healthy foods, delivering from farm-to-door could let UrbanKisaan control quality and its margins.
Talyn Air: Two former SpaceX engineers have developed a long-range electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft for passengers and cargo. The startup has created an electric fixed-wing aircraft that is caught mid-air with a custom winged drone during take offs and landings, an approach that its founders say give this aircraft three times the range of its competitors, at 350 miles.
Developer Tools
BuildBuddy: Two ex-Googlers want to provide a “Google-style development environment” to all by building an open-source UI/feature set on top of Google’s Bazel software. The company says that their solution speeds up build times by up to 10x. It’s free for independent developers, with the price scaling from $4 per user to $49 per user depending on the size of the team and the features required.
Dataline: Meant to let websites gather analytics data from users who are using ad-blocking tools. Claiming that most ad-blocker users care mostly about display ads or cross-site tracking, the company says that first-party analytics gets hit as “collateral damage.” By acting as a “smart proxy” that runs on a sub-domain, Dataline avoids most ad-blocking systems (for now, presumably.)
Cortex: Many modern online software applications are powered by countless independent, purpose-focused tools — or “microservices.” Cortex monitors your app’s microservices to automatically flag the right person (hooking into Datadog/Slack/PagerDuty/etc.) when one breaks.
apitracker: Even if your website seems to be loading fine, the APIs you use to make it work might be having trouble, breaking things in not so obvious ways. Apitracker… tracks your APIs. It monitors the APIs you use, alerting you when one of them starts to fail and providing insights into their overall performance.
Freshpaint: Freshpaint’s “autotrack” system collects all pageviews/clicks/etc. across your site, allowing you to push it into tools like Google Analytics/Facebook Pixel etc. retroactively without requiring your dev team to make manual trackers for each event. The base plan is free for sites with fewer than 3,000 users and $300 for sites with up to 50,000 monthly users, after which point the pricing shifts to custom packaging.
Datree: Datree allows companies to set up rules and security policies for their codebase, and ensures those rules are followed before any code is merged. Charging $28 per developer (noting that it’s free for independent/open source projects), they’ve pulled in ~$230K in revenue to date. Find our previous coverage of Datree here.
fly.io: Deploys your app on servers that are physically closer to your users, decreasing latency and improving the user experience. If your app grows more popular in a certain city, Fly detects that and scales resources accordingly.
Sweeps: Sweeps claims that they can make your website 40% faster with one line of code, by more intelligently loading all of the third-party tools that a website is using. The team says that their tech not only improves speed but does so while improving SEO.
Orbiter: Orbiter is an automatic real-time monitoring and alert system integrated with Slack to ensure better customer service and revenue management.
Release: Product releases can be tricky. Release provides a staging management toolkit — it builds a staging environment each time there’s a pull request, allowing for faster/more collaborative development cycles.
Signadot: Signadot is monitoring and management software for the microservices that modern startups rely on to power their own applications and services, hopefully flagging issues before they become apparent to the end user.
Raycast: Raycast is a universal command bar for developers and many of the tools they use. Users can integrate apps including Jira, GitHub or Slack and take a Superhuman-like approach to completing forms and tasks. The team is pitching the tool as a way to help engineers get their non-engineering work done quickly.
Cotter: Cotter is building a phone number-based login platform that authenticates a user’s device in a workflow that the company’s founders say has the convenience of SMS-based OTP without the security issues. The startup is aiming to target customers in developing countries where email is less utilized and less convenient as a login.
ditto: Ditto’s founders are hoping to create the Figma for words, helping teams plan out more thoughtfully the copy they use to describe their products and workflows. The collaboration tool created by Stanford roommates Jolena Ma and Jessica Ouyang currently has 80+ different companies represented among their users.
Scout: A continuous integration and deployment toolkit for machine learning experiments inside a GitHub workflow.
ToDesktop: ToDesktop has designed a service to automate all of your desktop application publishing needs. It works with Windows, Mac and Linux and provides native installers, auto-updates, code signing and crash reports without the need for any infrastructure or configurations for developers.
DeepSource: DeepSource is a code review tool that allows developers to check for bug risks, anti-patterns, performance issues and security flaws in Python and Go.
Flowbot: Flowbot is a natural language, autocomplete search tool for coding in Python. It lets Python developers type in plain English when they can’t remember the exact function they’re thinking of, with Flowbot digging through documentation and considering the context to find the code it thinks you’re looking for.
PostHog: PostHog is a software service that lets developers understand how their users are actually working with their products. It’s a product analytics toolkit for open-source programmers.
Y Combinator’s Demo Day was a bit different this time around.
As concerns grew over the spread of COVID-19, Y Combinator shifted the event format away from the two-day gathering in San Francisco we’ve gotten used to, instead opting to have its entire class debut to invited investors and media via YC’s Demo Day website simultaneously.
In a bit of a surprise twist, YC also moved Demo Day forward one week citing accelerated pacing from investors. Alas, this meant switching up its plan for each company to have a recorded pitch on the Demo Day website; instead, each company pitched via slides, a few paragraphs outlining what they’re doing and the traction they’re seeing, and team bios. It’s unclear so far how this new format — in combination with the rapidly evolving investment climate — will impact this class.
As we do with each class, we’ve collected our notes on each company based on information gathered from their pitches, websites, and, in some cases, our earlier coverage of them.
Apartio: Apartio offers long and short-term rentals to business travelers in Brazil. The company plans to target businesses with employees coming through Brazil, acquiring travelers directly on Airbnb and Booking.com.
Valienta: Valienta is a software that wants to simplify the process of direct selling networks in Latin American countries. Direct selling accounts for $27 billion worth of goods – making it a massive opportunity in Latin America. The 13 million direct sellers are mostly women who resell to personal networks, like the Avon woman in the U.S. Valienta wants to modernize this process with a single app.
Trustle: When a child stops sleeping through the night or starts having tantrums, parenting can feel like they’re flying blind. Trustle is a $50 per month subscription for parents that gives them access to a dedicated parenting and child development expert. The founders think the internet has created too much conflicting advice and opinions for parents, resulting in frantic Googling that doesn’t lead to good advice. Trustle actually wants to solve another problem: there are 180,000 preschools teachers with a masters in child development being paid on average $35K a year, representing an incredibly underutilized and undervalued pool of expertise. Trustle wants to connect the two with its system for parents to learn about and act on their child’s cognitive, social, emotional and behavioral development. The founding team includes the former head of impact at Google for Education, a clinical child psychologist and a former EdTech startup founder.
Viya: Viya is a mobile-first, apartment-rental system for the Latin America market. The company offers city center room and apartment leases in conjunction with cleaning, maintenance and laundry services, meant to simplify the life of tenants.
Jamiphy: Jamiphy’s pitch is simple: TikTok for musicians. With the shutdown of live events all over the world, the startup certainly has a potential market, providing musicians a place to host short music videos live. The company launched in Indonesia earlier this month.
Breezeful: Uses machine learning to find the best home mortgages in your area, with the company negotiating with lenders on your behalf — and, ultimately, earning a finders fee from lenders when a deal is closed. They’ve made $7K in revenue since launching 9 weeks ago.
Modern Village: Wants to be the “Chief of Staff” for busy families, charging $30 per month to help handle things like childcare, cleaners, grocery and meal planning, etc. The company estimates that it can save parents around 10 hours per week. Currently in private beta.
LegionFarm: Esports Coaching. Legionfarm charges customers an hourly rate to team them up with top tier/pro players who can coach them in games like Apex Legends, Destiny 2, and Fortnite. The company says that in the last year alone it’s facilitated over 350,000 hours of coaching (with players paying an average of about $16 per hour) with an ARR of $7.2 million. We wrote about Legionfarm previously here.
StayQrious: Online group classes (beginning with coding class) meant for kids in India from age 8-15. The company says it’s seeing 90% student retention since launching three months ago.
Yukstay: A platform meant to increase long-term rentals in Indonesia, providing tools for rental agents to onboard new units and for customers to view/book them. The company says it expects to do $170K in gross revenue in March.
Refund Giant: Helps visitors to the UK reclaim VAT taxes that they’re able to — but often don’t — get refunded when they leave. Users upload pictures of their receipts and RefundGiant handles all the paperwork, taking a 25% cut of any refund.
Sayana: A subscription-based mental wellness app that uses a chatbot-like interface to help users track their feelings while offering mindfulness tips. Currently seeing around $15,000 in monthly revenue, with 25% month-over-month growth.
HelpNow: HelpNow is looking to reduce the time required to get an ambulance in India by mobilizing Uber drivers, providing them with training (AHA certification) and basic life support equipment. They have 347 vehicles on the roads of Mumbai, with over 9100 calls for help serviced. The company was started after the father of one of the founders had a heart attack and was told he’d be waiting over 45 minutes for an ambulance; his dad was saved when they opted to drive him in their own car.
Global Belly: Develops and ships custom-branded products for influencers, focusing first on food (such as baking kits or recipe boxes.) The company says it currently has 17 influencers on the platform with 200 more on the way, and is currently seeing around $25K in monthly revenue.
Whatnot: A marketplace for selling buying/selling professionally authenticated collectibles, beginning with FunkoPop figures. Think GOAT for collectible. The company says it’s seeing $30K per month in GMV roughly three months after launch. Find our previous coverage of Whatnot here.
Pantheon: Modeled on knowledge-based game-show-style events for academic students like the Science Bowl or the UK’s University Challenge, Pantheon is a learning app where middle- and high-school-aged students come together not only to compete against each other, but to meet like-minded nerds to chew the fat. It also serves as a kind of ‘recruitment’ platform, where colleges and companies can discover promising candidates.
Glimpse: Just as we are being told to isolate ourselves to slow the spread of the coronavirus, here is an app to help you pass some time in a less lonely way. Glimpse lets you set up and have short — 2 minutes or less — video chats with friends, or friends of friends. Way less passive than the endless scroll through Instagram, sometimes a quick burst of interaction can be more valuable than a full day of meetings.
Multiverse: Inspired by open-ended games like Dungeons & Dragons and DIY game building on sites like Roblox, Multiverse is a platform that lets you build your own role-playing games.
Nugget: “Instagram for audio,” Nugget lets users record short audio clips, apply filters to juice up the sound, and share them on a social feed. The spontanaeity of a snapshot applied to the medium of podcasting: most definitely an app for our times.
Together: Facebook leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to privacy. Together aims to plug that gap with a paid social media app that it says ensures privacy for its users.
Zelos: Zelos lets gamers earn rewards across multiple video games for free. Its 32K weekly players complete challenges (like scoring three kills in a minute), earning points that can be collected and redeemed for virtual goods, discounts, or raffles. Game developers seeking more engagement are incentivized to integrate with Zelos, which earns money from a $5/month premium subscription for faster point-scoring that it splits with devs.
The Mercer Club: The Mercer Club is a luxury men’s streetwear and shoe rental service. Customers pay $75 per month to rent up to two items per week, so they don’t have to buy a $1000 Gucci hoodie just to wear it for one Instagram. Its “Rent The Runway for men” model has already grown to $100,000 ARR.
Adla: Adla sends college girls boxes of clothes they can try on and buy, then it picks up the rest. Adla improves margins through high geographic density and virality amongst campus communities. It charges a $7 markup per item, and hopes to eventually earn commissions by recommending brands who need to jumpstart their customer base.
Virgil Insurance: Virgil Insurance helps seniors turning 65 to buy Medicare-subsidized health insurance. The online broker makes it easy to compare plans while offering an experience that doesn’t require waiting on hold with a call center. 10,000 Americans turn 65 each day and insurance brokers earn $6 billion in commissions on them per year. The founders previously built fintech startups like Trim for cancelling subscriptions and Octane Lending for financing power-sports vehicle purchases.
Art in Res: Art In Res is a fine art marketplace where customers can buy on layaway. The startup signs up artists who are producing more than they’re selling, then equips them with tools for offering discounts, installment pricing, and monetizing their social media followers. Art In Res’ co-founder was a painter who learned to code to pay the bills, and he’s now partnered with 125 artists looking for a new ecommerce channel.
Hideout: The U.S. restaurant business is a $860 billion market and yet 59% of all orders are by millennials are for takeout or delivery, states Hideout. The startup is building a portfolio of delivery-only, restaurant brands, starting with a Japanese katsu sando concept, an organic bowls brand and soon an Italian subs and bento box-focused concepts.
Duffl: Duffl is targeting the real-time and often last-minute needs of college students by providing delivery within 10 minutes of common essentials. The company stores frequently purchased products near campus and hires students to deliver those goods via electric scooters. Revenue is generated through a delivery fee and margins optimized from buying products in bulk.
Thunderpod: Sort of like a fitness-fueled Tomagotchi. Each user gets a “Thunderpod” avatar, and it grows with each activity you do: the app records your movements, you can do fitness challenges against friends, or you can dip into is a large catalog of user-created fitness challenges, such as dances. One of a growing number of consumer and social apps coming out of India’s booming tech market.
Carupi: Carupi has developed a peer-to-peer marketplace for used cars that started in Brazil, and plans to come to the U.S. by the first quarter of 2021.
Motion: The team at Motion is building an extension that helps Chrome users manage their time on the web more efficiently. The tool goes beyond a simple blacklist and whitelist, with a more flexible structure allowing users to shift their habits over time on sites they have designated as “unproductive.” The tool is free for now but the team hopes to eventually develop a broader B2B strategy after becoming a favorite product of consumers.
Cron: Cron is building a Superhuman for Google Calendar. Cron’s co-founder Rapheal Schaad previously designed the original iA Writer app. His new startup is charging $19 per month to give G Cal power users some added power features that cleans up workflows and integrates with other productivity apps.
Moons: Moons describes itself as a SmileDirectClub for Latin America. Launched in March 2019, Moons offers orthodontic treatments as well as clear aligners, and claims it is half the price of SmileDirectClub. The company has $600,000 in monthly sales, and has hired over 200 people across 15 retail locations. Find our previous coverage of Moons here.
Chutney: Targeting India’s emerging population of online users, Chutney wants to be the “Amazon for India’s mass market.” Using WhatsApp, customers can purchase fresh fruits and veggies from nearby mom and pop stores and have next day pickup.
Yassir: Yassir is an app that is designed for French-speaking Africa. It wants to offer a suite of financial services for an estimated population of 430 million people across 29 countries.
EduRev: EduRev is an edtech company targeting 200 million Indian students that are preparing for exams. The subscription cost for the exam prep platform is $50 a year, and it has over 450,000 monthly active users. Instead of after-school coaching, EduRev is an app that provides preparation courses to students digitally.
Riya Collective: Indian wedding attire is expensive, so Riya Collective launched a Rent The Runway-style offering specifically focused around it. The clothing rental startup is founded by two Indian American entrepreneurs, and uses a data-driven styling and sizing algorithm. Riya Collective has grown from $10,000 in monthly revenue to $50,000 in monthly revenue in three months.
TagMango: A “Cameo for India” TagMango lets users book personalized shoutouts from top influencers and celebrities. The startup is, in simple terms, cashing in on making Bollywood more interactive and accessible. TagMango charges an average of $20 per video.
FitnessAI: With 18,000 paying users, FitnessAI generates personalized weight lifting plans. The founder, Jake Mor, has been building applications for 10 years — and fitness apps for four years. The startup charges $90 per year. Find our previous coverage of FitnessAI here.
GiveAway: Founded 12 months ago, GiveAway is creating a peer to peer marketplace to give away used things. It has successfully completed over 170,000 transactions across a user base that spans 5 countries. Unlike a traditional marketplace, GiveAway makes its users buy goods with virtual currency through bidding.
Deep Meditate: Charging $26 a year, Deep Meditate offers a personalized meditation practice. The app currently has 158,000 monthly active users.
Pahamify: Founded by a Youtube science influencer in Indonesia, Pahamify is an app to help Indonesian students pass the college entrance exam. The startup goes against traditional methods of preparation, such as in-person tutoring, and charges roughly $24 a year to students. Each month, per the company, 65,000 users are using Pahamify.
Edlyft: Founded by two former high school classmates and Computer Science majors who reunited in the Bay Area after college, Edlyft provides a mentor network, tutors, and peer support for college students who may lack a background in CS, but are pursuing it as a major or career.
