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A handful of years ago, the on-demand or ‘gig’ economy was seen as an innovative system of modern work that provided workers and consumers alike with flexibility, independence, and convenience. It seems like every week, a new on-demand or labor marketplace startup would stroll through Sand Hill Road with a slick logo and a new way to flip the nature of work on its head and would walk out with seven-figure checks.  

However, the gig economy ballooned — now permeating nearly every major industry — and its negative externalities have become inescapably evident. In the past year alone, whether it was new headline-grabbing regulations or new disclosures from the high-profile IPOs of Uber and Lyft, the issue of inequitable labor treatment for gig workers has risen to the forefront of public debate. Now, more activists, founders and companies are dedicated to figuring out how to create a more just and sustainable economic system for gig workers.

This year at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, we’ll be joined on the Extra Crunch stage by a panel of gig-focused civic leaders and founders to break down how one can best be a positive force in the modern gig economy.

From the activist side, we have Derecka Mehrens, an Executive Director at Working Partnerships USA and co-founder of Silicon Valley Rising – an advocacy campaign focused on fighting for tech worker rights and creating an inclusive tech economy. Though Silicon Valley Rising, Derecka has worked with some of the Valley’s largest and most influential tech giants (including Google and Apple) to invest in and improve labor and renter housing protections for local workers. With roughly two decades in civic advocacy, Derecka has helped and continues to help Bay Area workers organize, play more active roles in local policy, and reach milestone victories in wage improvement.

We’ll also dive into the founder’s perspective with Amanda de Cadenet, founder of Girlgaze, a platform that connects advertisers with a network of 200,000 female-identifying and non-binary creatives. Prior to founding Girlgaze, Amanda founded the website, online community and interview series known as “The Conversation”, which focuses on female empowerment and bringing to light key social issues that plague the female-identifying population. As a former photographer, author and TV host herself, Amanda continues to build companies determined to shift the lack of diverse and equal gender representation in media and creative industries. 

We’ll be diving deep into all the roles to be played by the public sector, startups and the private sector, gig workers themselves and the broader community in ensuring we have an equitable future of work landscape. We couldn’t be more excited to tackle all these topics and we hope to see you there! Buy tickets to Disrupt SF here at an early-bird rate!

Did you know Extra Crunch annual members get 20% off all TechCrunch event tickets? Head over here to get your annual pass, and then email extracrunch@techcrunch.com to get your 20% discount. Please note that it can take up to 24 hours to issue the discount code.

On October 18, Nintendo will finally fill a Wii Fit-shaped hole in its product line. The Ring Fit is a kind of spiritual accessor to the numerous fitness titles that helped make the Wii’s motion controls such a massive, demographic spanning success. But the large, round peripheral is perfectly at home on the Switch, taking a page from offerings like Labo, which find clever new ways to leverage existing hardware.

I took the forthcoming peripheral for a brief spin earlier this week, and like Labo was pleasantly surprised with what Nintendo was able to accomplish here, using the Switch’s Joy-Cons as a starting point. Here, each side serves a uniquely different purpose. One slots into the ring and the other into a band that straps on the player’s thigh.

In the case of the former, the controller serves as the brains for the flexible steering wheel controller, measuring movements via built-in sensors, including the accelerometer. Using that set up, you can spin the ring to move selection in the starting menu and squeeze its sides to select. The second controller, meanwhile, serves as a sort of makeshift Fitbit, keeping track of your lower body movement — a pretty central part of the workout.

Adventure is the first title to use the hardware. It almost certainly won’t be the last, though Nintendo, per usual, won’t comment on any future plans. Rather than going the straight sports route, à la Wii Sports, Nintendo’s instead created what amounts to a Final Fantasy-style turn by turn adventure game that makes the player battle bad guys by breaking a sweat.

There are a ton of different games and workout experiences out of the box, but the basic adventure plays out as follows: You move your character by running in place, squeezing the ring to blow up boxes for coins and pulling it apart to suck in power-ups. Jumps are accomplished by pointing the ring downward and pressing in. You will break a sweat.

Your character’s anime-style hair is a big ball of fire, growing or diminishing based on how well you’re keeping up. Every so often along the track, a boss will appear. You’ll then engage in a turn by turn battle using a variety of different ring-based exercises. When it’s the monster’s turn, you’ll squeeze the ring against your torso to defend yourself.

Nintendo’s dreamed up an impressive variety of exercises that utilize the ring’s resistance. Playing an hour a day, it’s easy to actually lose some weight. The game also does a pretty good job encouraging you to mix things up. I’d certainly be interested in doing some extended testing — I like the idea of a fitness regiment one can accomplishment at home or in a hotel room with minimal equipment.

You can also detach the Joy-Cons and take the ring with you to get some reps in away from the system — say, on lunch break at work. The controllers will continue to record your progress and upload them when you get back.

That said, I’m pretty committed to the Switch Lite these days. The Ring Fit will work with the system, assuming you also have a pair of Joy-Cons. You can prop up the Lite and use that screen for the game, but you’ll really want a TV screen for the full effect here. It’s easy to imagine, however, Nintendo combining Labo VR with the exercise kit for a more immersive fitness effect.

Most people just guess how to price their vacation rental based on minimal research, or take platforms like Airbnb’s suggestions that just want to maximize their own revenue. Beyond Pricing aligns itself with home owners, taking 1% of bookings to optimize their rates on a daily basis.

As you might expect of a startup that costs 1% to often earn people 10% to 40% more on anything, it blew up. In the 4.5 years since I covered its $1.5 million seed round, it’s grown for 26 to 7,000 cities and 4 to 60 employees. Beyond Pricing now handles over 150,000 listings. It stealthily raised $2 million more in 2016. But today it announces a mammoth $42.5 million Series A funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners .

“We skipped a lot of intermediary funding” Beyond Pricing CEO Ian McHenry tells me with a chuckle. “We wanted to have a capital partner that could help us take a few more risks and build out a bunch of new products and go after Europe in a big way since it’s over half of the whole market.” That cash could grow the startup’s total priced bookings past the $2 billion it’s handled so far, dive deeper into working with professional property managers, and even see it build algorithms for today’s unique hotels with tons of different room types.

Here’s how Beyond Pricing works. You connect your Airbnb and other vacation rental platforms or your own rental calendar. Beyond Pricing scours all the platforms for what similar homes charge, their vacancy rates, what hotels are charging, historic and current demand fluctuations, airline info, weather, and more. You can look at charts of prices in your neighborhood or nearby hotels, and adjust the base and minimum rates. Then Beyond Pricing automatically applies its daily rates to your listing or lets you export them to start earning the most possible.

It’s basically giving the technology big hotel chains use to ordinary people and property managers, or an Uber Surge Price algorithm for Airbnbs. Instead of haphazardly choosing a high season and low season rate or maybe an upcharge on weekends, Beyond Pricing does what no human would or could accurately: provide 365 uniquely optimized prices. While the platforms just want you renting your place out as much as possible to boost their take, even if it means more work and upkeep for you, Beyond Pricing wants you to earn as much as possible to grow its 1% cut.

But next, McHenry wants to go bigger. Modern hotels don’t just have ‘King’ or ‘Two Twins’ rooms. They offer a wide range of suites, views, decors, and amenities. Hotel pricing systems aren’t built for that, but Beyond Pricing is since it’s used to assessing quirky individual homes. One area he’s not keen on: getting back into the risk of managing property. Beyond Pricing was once Beyond Stays, but saw a leaner business in pricing technology instead of cleaning bedsheets.

As LinkedIn announces the next stage of its own ambitions in the world of recruitment by bringing in more big data insights, another one of the startups indirectly chipping away at its position among knowledge workers by providing a way of hiring and building entire teams in remote locations is announcing another round of funding.

Terminal, a San Francisco-based startup and platform that lets companies build out remote engineering teams in international locations, and then helping with the wider practicalities that include finding workspace and sorting out benefits, is today announcing that it has raised $17 million in funding. Terminal’s hubs are currently in Guadalajara, Mexico and Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, and Kitchener-Waterloo in Canada, and the company is going to use some of the funding to expand to 10 other cities globally over the next two years.

The round is being led by 8VC — the venture firm founded by Joe Lonsdale, who also happens to be a co-founder of Terminal (seems like co-founding while also funding is a pattern for Lonsdale, a prolific investor who also famous for being a co-founder of Palantir Technologies).

Others participating include Atomic (where two co-founders, Jack Abraham and Dylan Serota, also co-founders), Cathay Innovation, Cherubic Ventures (where another co-founder, Andrew Dudum, is a partner that also double times also at Atomic), Craft Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and other unnamed investors.

Despite four of the five co-founders (the last is Luke Finney, who seems to be full-time just on Terminal) being from the VC world, the startup has raised relatively little funding since being founded two years ago: prior to this it had only disclosed one raise, totalling $10 million, according to PitchBook data.

LinkedIn has carved out a big swathe of the online recruitment market specifically in the area of knowledge workers, who also use the platform to provide public profiles of themselves, to brush up their skills, and to network with other folk in their various industries. That business has racked up 4 million hires this year already, CEO Jeff Weiner noted earlier today at a company event.

But within that, there are a lot of more specific use cases where the LinkedIn model is not a perfect fit, and that’s opened the door for a lot of other kinds of businesses to establish themselves and thrive.

Terminal is an example of one of these. Its particular pain point has to do with the dearth of engineers in major tech centers, and beyond, with typically five job openings for every one engineer in the U.S. alone.

While the technology world has coalesced around several key geographical areas — Silicon Valley at the epicentre and several major metropolitan areas like New York, London, Berlin and so on complementing that — the fact remains that the demand for engineers in those places, where the companies are based, still outstrips supply. On top of that, the biggest cities are overcrowded and expensive, and that turns off many people from wanting to live in them.

Terminal’s solution is to source suitable engineers in other locales and use its platform to help a company build a team from them. This is not just about building a team ‘in the cloud’ — although the idea is that, yes, the cloud is basically what makes all of this possible — but also covering office space, payroll and other HR specifics and more.

“Terminal is taking aim at the biggest problem holding back innovation: access to top technical talent.” said Joe Lonsdale, partner at 8VC, in a statement. “The best engineers are no longer concentrated in the Bay Area. They exist all over the world. Terminal helps startups access these engineers. Many of our fast-growing companies at 8VC rely on Terminal to help them scale.” Customers currently include Bungalow, Chime, Dialpad, Earnin, Gusto, Hims/Hers, and KeepTruckin.

Other startups have emerged to redress the imbalance of talent in specific locations while also helping to support new ecosystems to emerge: Andala is taking a somewhat similar approach, but it focuses on emerging markets to source talent, and engineers on its platform tend to work as contractors, not full-time employees.

While Andala is tapping into a big swing in the direction of contact-based talent sourcing, it’s interesting to see Terminal taking the bet on the fact that it can successfully create teams remotely that might just remain for the long term.

“We’re providing life-changing opportunities for engineers,” said Terminal CEO, Clay Kellogg, in a statement. “Developers and programmers love building their careers in an engineer-centric community working on world-changing products. We’re offering them a vibrant community with all of the HR resources, benefits and perks that they can get if they worked in Silicon Valley — without having to leave their hometown. This funding means we can provide exciting growth opportunities to even more engineers around the world.”

The push to more flexible working environments — including allowing people to work from home, as well as work more flexible hours — has really disrupted the traditional idea of 9-5 and everyone working together in a big (or small) building in order to get things done. At best, the consequences of that have sometimes led to more productivity and employee satisfaction, but challenges also remain. Terminal’s aim at building whole full-time teams in remote locations is interesting in that it will once again put a new spin on the idea of workplace culture, but for many businesses, especially startups, it’s a leap that is worth taking.

“KeepTruckin has built a modern technology platform to usher the fragmented trucking industry into the digital age, and our engineers have been at the center of creating a customer-centric experience since day one,” said Shoaib Makani, CEO and co-founder, KeepTruckin, in a statement. “As a fast-growing company, being able to attract and retain top tech talent is critical to our success. Terminal has been a key partner in helping us build our engineering team in Vancouver and tapping into Terminal’s extensive network has reduced the time it takes to scale our team.”

Amazon Alexa is already capable of identifying different voices to give personalized responses to different users in the household, thanks to the added support for voice profiles two years ago. Now, those same personalization capabilities will be offered to Alexa Skill developers, Amazon has announced.

Alongside Amazon’s big rollout of new consumer devices on Wednesday, the company also introduced a new “skill personalization” feature for the Alexa Skills Kit, that lets developers tap into the voice profiles that customers create through the Alexa companion app or from their device.

This expanded capability lets developers make skills that are able to remember a user’s custom settings, address their preferences when using the skill, and just generally recognize the different household members who are speaking at the time, among other things.

To work, Alexa will send a directed identifier — a generated string of characters and numbers — to the skill in question, if the customer has a voice profile set up. Every time the customer returns to that skill, the same identifier is share. This identifier doesn’t include any personally identifiable information, Amazon says, and is different for each voice profile for each skill the customer users.

Skill developers can then leverage this information to generate personalized greetings or responses based on the customers’ likes, dislikes, and interests.

If the customer doesn’t want to use skill personalization even though they configured a voice profile, they can opt out of the feature in the Alexa app.

Personalization could be a particular advantage to Alexa skills like games, where users may want to save their progress, or to music or podcasts/audio programming skills, where taste preferences come into play.

However, Alexa’s process for establishing voice profiles still requires manual input on users’ parts — people have to configure the option in the Alexa companion app’s settings, or say to Alexa, “learn my voice.” Many consumers may not know it’s even an option — which means developers interested in the feature may have to educate users by way of informational tips in their own apps, at first.

The feature is launching into preview, which means Amazon is just now opening up the ability to select developers. Those interested in putting the option to use will have to apply for access and wait to hear back.

For the past few years, OnePlus has happily pushed into a six-month product refresh cycle. It’s a model that’s worked well for the plucky smartphone maker, and another way it’s managed to buck some of the prevailing industry trends as competitors struggle to maintain sales amid a global slowdown.

As tends to be the case, the year’s second flagship seems to mostly be about refining its predecessor — and keeping the company competitive. The OnePlus 7T adopts the 90Hz AMOLED screen offered on the 7 Pro, coupled with a three-camera set up on the rear.

That last bit keeps with the company’s solid design language, with a large, circular configuration that’s an aesthetic improvement over Apple’s square situation. The lenses are a 48 megapixel main, 2x telephoto and ultra-wide-angle with a 117-degree field of view.

The speakers have been upgraded to include Dolby Atmos and fast charging has been amped up, promising a full charge in an hour. That’s nearly 25% faster than OnePlus’s previous version of Warp Charge.

Perhaps most interesting is that the company gets the jump on the competition by being the first to ship with Android 10 preloaded. How far the company has come from the CyanogenMod days. Of course, it continues to offer a customized experience through the “bespoke” OxygenOS.

I’m usually resistant to Android add-ons, but OnePlus has generally done a good job augmenting and, in some cases, improving the stock Android experience. In addition to design choices, the company says the latest version of the software includes “370 rigorous optimizations.”

The best bit continues to be the pricing. The OnePlus 7T will run $599 when it starts shipping on October 18. It’s a nice price for a solid piece of hardware in an era when flagships routinely run in excess of $1,000.

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Alongside all the new Alexa-powered consumer devices Amazon introduced yesterday, the company also unveiled a new set of tools for the makers of smart home device skills that will allow them to tap into Alexa to re-order their supplies. Think — things like printer ink, air filters for smart thermostats, detergent for washing machines, or anything else that has replaceable parts.

This is an area Amazon has focused on before, by way of the Dash Replenishment Service, or DRS. Devices that use the service’s APIs can automatically re-order their supplies, after a customer sets up their account and selects the product they’ll want to be shipped when they run low.

The new set of tools is an extension to that earlier service, as it will allow the device makers to alert their customers they’re low on necessary supplies by way of Alexa’s skills.

This will work by way of a new set of inventory sensors, due to launch soon, in Amazon’s Smart Home Skill API. There are three different types of sensors to choose from, depending on the device’s needs.

The first to arrive sometime later this year is the Alexa.InventoryLevelSensor. This will address the needs of devices where the consumable product is stored internally — like the batteries in smart cameras or printer ink, for example.

Next year, two other sensors will launch. The Alexa.InventoryUsageSensor will work when the product is not stored internally, but the device can determine when a certain amount of consumable inventory is used. In this case, good examples would include a smart coffee pot, washing machine, or dishwasher.

The third, Alexa.InventoryLevelUsageSensor, can be used when the consumable product is stored internally, and the device can report on its usage rather than its current state. For example, a smart thermostat could report the fan time to let customers know it’s time to change the air filter. Or a vacuum cleaner could alert customers to replace a dust bag.

By using these APIs, Alexa can help the customers manage their household supplies, by letting them know they’re low or helping them to set up automatic re-orders in the Alexa app. If the customer chooses to set up smart re-ordering, that’s when the Dash Replenishment Service will kick in. Unlike Amazon’s “Subscribe & Save” shopping feature, these smart home supply re-orders will only be placed when the consumable item is running low.

The benefit of this design is that it can help nudge smart home device users to place orders — from Amazon, the company hopes, just by having Alexa remind them. And it can also work even if the customer doesn’t want to set up automatic re-ordering for some reason — perhaps because they shop for supplies locally or want to comparison shop online.

Amazon says August, Blink, Ring, Schlage, and Yale are already working on including inventory sensors to report battery levels from their skills, and Coway is working to report the usage of air filters.

In addition to helping their customers manage their household, the new feature will also enable smart home kill developers to establish recurring revenue streams associated with their devices. When a customer signs up for Dash Replenishment, Amazon pays out a one-time referral fee. And then as the re-orders come in, developers will earn a revenue share on all the orders placed — even if ordered manually following an Alexa notification. Of course, if the device maker is selling its own manufactured products, they’ll earn even more.

Amazon says all U.S. developers will be able to use the new inventory sensors soon.

StrongSalt, then known as Overnest, appeared at the TechCrunch Disrupt NYC Battlefield in 2016, and announced a searchable encryption product, which remains unusual to this day. Today, the company announced a $3 million seed round led by Valley Capital Partners.

StrongSalt founder and CEO Ed Yu, says encryption remains a difficult proposition, and that when you look at the majority of breaches, encryption wasn’t used. He said that his company wants to simplify adding encryption to applications, and came up with a new service to let developers add encryption in the form of an API. “We decided to come up with what we call an API platform. It’s like infrastructure that allows you to integrate our solution into any existing or any new applications,” he said.

The company’s original idea was to create a product to search encrypted data, but Yu says the tech has much more utility as an API, and that’s why they decided to package it as a service. It’s not unlike Twilio for communications or Stripe for payments, except in this case you can build in searchable encryption.

The searchable part is actually a pretty big deal because, as Yu points out, when you encrypt data it is no longer searchable. “If you encrypt all your data, you cannot search within it, and if you cannot search within it, you cannot find the data you’re looking for, and obviously you can’t really use the data. So we actually solved that problem,” he said.

Developers can add searchable encryption as part of their products. For customers already using a commercial product, the company’s API actually integrates with popular services, enabling customers to encrypt the data stored there, while keeping it searchable.

“We will offer a storage API on top of Box, AWS, Google cloud, Azure — depending on what the customer has or wants. If the customer already has AWS S3 storage, for example, then when they use our API, and after encrypting the data, it will be stored in their AWS repository,” Yu explained.

For those companies who don’t have a storage service, the company is offering one. What’s more, they are using the blockchain to provide a mechanism for the sharing, auditing and managing encrypted data. “We also use the blockchain for sharing data by recording the authorization by the sender, so the receiver can retrieve the information needed to reconstruct the keys in order to retrieve the data. This simplifies key management in the case of sharing and ensures auditability and revocability of the sharing by the sender,” Yu said.

If you’re wondering how the company has been surviving since 2016, while only getting its seed round today, it had a couple of small seed rounds prior to this, and a contract with the US Department of Defense, which replaced the need for substantial earlier funding.

“The DOD was looking for a solution to have secure communication between between computers, and they needed to have a way to securely store data, and so we were providing a solution for them,” he said. In fact, this work was what led them to build the commercial API platform they are offering today.

The company, which was founded in 2015, currently has 12 employees, spread across the globe.

What do you wish you’d known about building a company beforehand? It’s a question that haunts many a startup founder their first time around.

Serial SaaS-focused entrepreneur David Cancel has found some answers for himself, having founded a good half-dozen companies over the last two and a half decades. He’ll be discussing his lessons with you next week at Disrupt SF (Oct. 2-4).

Currently the CEO and cofounder of Drift, a fast-growing marketing software company, he’s had a long string of exits including Performable (HubSpot, where he became CPO), Ghostery (Evidon), Lookery (Adknowledge), Compete (TNS/WPP), BuyerZone (Reed Elsevier) and more.

This time around, he tells me he’s focused on people — making sure the team fits together right for what the company is building. When he first started founding companies, he was focused on getting to product-marketing fit as fast as possible. As he gained more experienced, he became focused on process first. But that still wasn’t the right approach. So now he is focused on people, because getting the right team together and preventing interpersonal problems is worth far more than anything else. How does he make that happen? He’ll come prepared to share tactics — and because this is on the Extra Crunch stage, the audience will have extra time to ask questions themselves.

Cancel will also be sharing his insights on the evolution of the SaaS market over the 20+ years he’s been building enterprise-focused solutions. In the early days, it was a greenfield where simply building a great product could get you further. Then it became a matter of iterating on SaaS concepts for an exploding range of B2B use-cases. Today, the know-how to build SaaS companies is widely understood, and now it’s a matter of being able to go the fastest to expand across B2B markets. Where does that leave the opportunities for startups? Come prepared to hear more details, and ask him your questions yourself.

In order to hear from him, you’ll need to grab your Innovator, Founder or Investor pass to Disrupt SF. You just have a few more days to secure your seat and save a cool $600 before prices increase next week.

The Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, based in New York, is ready to once again unveil its latest class of startups. Thus far, ERA has produced 190 startup which have raised more than $450 imllion in capital and exceed $2 billion in valuation collectively, according to the accelerator.

So without any further ado, let’s take a look at these new startups:

CoolR is tackling the CPG retail and beverage industries with a machine learning platform that’s meant to not only track inventory and shelf performance but also detect planogram non-compliance, foreign products and pricing inconsistencies. The company does this by combining its machine learning platform with hardware such as wireless cameras and sensors.

Everybody loves online shopping, but no one likes dealing with returning unwanted products. Cricket Returns is looking to solve that by allowing retailers to optimize their online return policies based on the product, category, place and/or time. Cricket Returns is easily integrated with Shopify merchants and the company says it delivers a measurable ROI improvement for managing and accepting returns.

FoodFul is bringing tech to the dairy farm with the DairyX product. It uses sensors and cloud-based software to monitor cow health and measure feed efficiency, saving the farmers from making extra on-farm visual inspections and giving them the tools to make data-driven decisions.

Intenseye is focused on improving workplace safety through a machine-learning video analytics platform. The company allows manufacturing facilities to link their existing video infrastructure to the Intenseye cloud platform that analyzes worker body posture, protective equipment and danger zone violations in real time.

Maia is an employment platform that allows employers to capture and engage with the 92 percent of people that visit a job application site but don’t apply. The system integrates with an employer’s career site and offers exit forms for folks leaving without applying, giving them the opportunity to be on tap for future employment options, as well.

Much like ZocDoc connects patients to the right doctor, My Wellbeing is looking to connect therapists and mental health professionals with their clients. Therapists get new client leads and access to a professional community of other vetted therapists, and clients can find the right therapist using the My Wellbeing matching technology.

Navimize is a platform that will help healthcare professionals minimize wait times for their patients. The software integrates with electronic medical records systems to detect, and even predict, delays in real times and notify upcoming patients of those delays, allowing them to show up at the exact right time.

Polymer wants to bring the power of big data analytics and data science to small data, like raw spreadsheets in Excel, Google Drive or Salesforce. Polymer search users can visualize their small data, ask complex questions, and automatically receive insights about their data with absolutely no coding whatsoever.

Recapped is a communication platform for enterprise deals that consolidates the communication between salespeople and clients. Salespeople can simply create an action plan to close the deal and share a link with clients. Rather than hopping between tools like Zoom, Dropbox, Docusign, email, etc, Recapped allows both parties to collaborate on next steps for a deal much more efficiently by simply integrating with those tools in a single place.

She’s Well is a concierge service for women and couples seeking professional fertility services. The platform connects users to a wide variety of service providers, including IVF, egg freezing, and wellness coaching. She’s Well tries to bring pricing transparency to the industry by aggregating the nation’s largest network of fertility centers, labs, and financing partners.

Sigo is looking to offer insurance in a new way. The company offers mobile-first non-standard auto insurance to Spanish-speaking drivers. The demographic may have limited insurance histories, and Sigo uses data to provide non-standard, lower-cost policies offering quotes that are bilingual, clear, and compliant without charging extra to drivers.

Stix is a new d2c brand looking to offer products in the women’s health category, starting with pregnancy tests. The company delivers the product discreetly and conveniently at an affordable price point. The hope is to make awkward pharmacy visits a thing of the past.

Techmate offers on-demand technical support to businesses with remote workers and satellite offices. The company matches customers with a vetted, qualified technician within two hours by factoring in office location, appointment time and job scope.

Tembo Health is a telemedicine company serving retirement homes, senior care centers and skilled nursing facilities to connect patients with specialty services like psychiatry and cardiology. The platform connects the specialists to patient data and collaborates with the nursing staff to provide better care plans.