131 of 180 Startups Y-Combinator Summer 2021 – Day 2

(YC) is an American seed money Startup Accelerator, It has been used to launch more than 2,000 companies, including Stripe, Airbnb, DoorDash, Coinbase, Instacart, Dropbox, Twitch, & Reddit. The combined valuation of the top YC companies was >$300B by Jan 2021.The company’s accelerator program is in Mt View,CA. It’s considered to be the most successful Startup Accelerators in Silicon Valley.

TOPICS: Delivery, Hiring, Space Monitor, App programming, AirBnB, No Code, Pharma, EduTech, DigitalHealth, B2B, Robo, Therapy, ML, Perks, Sensors, BioSci, AI, Chip Design, QA, Remote Work, Space Tugs, Cloud, Coding, SDK, Glamping, VTOL, Collaboration, App, Batt, Chat, Debit Cd, Metrics.

Welcome back to Tech Crunch’s continuing coverage of Y-Combinator’s Summer 2021 Demo Day 2. Today we’re back in the action, listening to a few hundred rapid-fire pitches throughout the day. What follows are short overviews of each company based on their one-minute pitch. Picked by Peter/CXO Wiz4.biz For full list, go to Tech Crunch.

Day Two companies

1. Locale: think that DoorDash doesn’t have enough food options? Locale is betting that some folks want more options and are willing to pay for that access. The startup wants to help restaurants sell farther from their operations, and its model is showing some early traction. The company’s revenue (GMV, perhaps) scaled from $145,500 in July to $192,000 in August. The startup claims 70% retention month to month and an average order of just over $100.
2. Talentdrop: a hiring marketplace where open jobs are posted with “bounties.” If someone you refer is ultimately hired and stays a while, you get the Bounty. The company says that $1 million in bounties have been posted to the site thus far.
3. HEO Robotics: this startup wants to leverage unused time on existing satellites that monitor the planet to find stuff in space– like other satellites. HEO says that it is selling to the Australian government, and executed a live in-orbit demo during YC Demo. There are going to be many more satellites in space over time, the company says, which could boost demand for its service.
4. Tantl: low-code App Program’g I/Faces (API) are hot, and a team of Google & Apple engineers are building Tantl to make it speedy, too. Tantl enables developers to build faster internal workflows — for $20 bucks a seat. Think skipping repetitive code, easy authentication & customer user interfaces. The SaaS business launched last week and has on-boarded three customers.
5. Flok: is building what it describes as an Airbnb for corporate off-sites. That means the startup is helping connect companies looking to host some IRL activities with a location that will be suitable. In a remote-first area, heading into a remote-friendly future, companies may spend more time and money bringing staff together sporadically. Flok wants to help those events come together faster. Per the startup, it takes around 15% of bookings and has booked 45 events so far worth around $200,000 in revenue.
6. BrightReps: a no-code tool meant to help you shift your company’s customer response workflows from flowcharts/spreadsheets into something more easily updated & iterated upon. Founder says the company is profitable with $740,000 in ARR.
7. Watu: wants to help retailers close the sale they almost made. The platform is building a shopping workflow that lives inside Emails & allows shoppers to make a purchase without getting tossed back to the mobile web.

8.Parallel Bio: coming up with ideas for new pharma products, testing them on non-humans and later scaling up to testing on our species takes a long time and is expensive. Parallel Bio claims to have created a human immune system in a petri dish, which can help with testing new drugs sans using humans on the front lines of testing.

40. Atmana: this team is building a platform to help 15-30-year-olds break tech addictions, specifically addictions to gaming, porn & social media. The company is taking a serious approach with its $90 per year treatment plans, which combine support groups, accountability & education.
41. TransAstra Corporation: Space tugs are a hot item in space (small spacecraft that help get other spacecraft where they need to go). TransAstra, from a former Momentus CEO, is using a new, super efficient “solar thermal rocket engine” that he says accomplishes this type of mission better than anything out there. With $millions in NASA money and hundreds of millions in LOIs, MOUs & contracts, TransAstra sounds like it’s well on its way to being the biggest name in Space Tugs. Do you want one ???
42. Makani Science: this team has built what it says is the “world’s first wireless patch that can accurately and continuously monitor breathing.” Co-founder says the company expects to get FDA clearance within a year.
43. Anakin: every e-Commerce site wants to know exactly how every other e-commerce site is pricing the same goods, but it’s not always easy to do this systematically and comprehensively. Anakin fills this role, monitoring competing platforms for their clients and providing real-time pricing data so it can be undercut or otherwise responded to – in order to snatch up that customer. With three “multi$billion-dollar” companies paying half a $million bucks a year already, Anakin seems well on its way to success. And maybe it’ll save you a few bucks as well.
44. FirstIgnite: The team is building a marketplace that pairs companies with Univ experts to tackle challenges they’re facing. The team already has pilots with University of Chicago and Carnegie Mellon, among others.
45. SFA Therapeutics: As digital health matures, SFA\T is the latest to pitch a new focus on treating the root cause of disease, instead of suppressing symptoms for momentary relief. The team is betting on an oral solution for the over 100 million patients who suffer from auto-immune diseases (that doesn’t mean they’re allergic to cars). They currently deal with painful injections as the main solution. The therapeutics company has a Phase 1B trial underway and referenced “strong clinical data” on their drug’s use in combating psoriasis.
46. Laudable: The B2B sales process needs to move past the PDF world. The startup wants to help its customers find & share Videos of their customers using their product to share instead of written testimonials. The startup scaled from $0 to $27,000 in MRR in two months, so it appears to be onto something.
47. Beau: Small businesses have finally been peer pressured into digitizing their operations for more seamless customer experiences — it only took a pandemic. Beau is building a no-code Client workflow for customer communications. With Beau, these businesses can collect submissions, files, payments & send messages to build loyalty (and do their jobs). The minimum viable product (MVP) has been launched to seven paying customers and 65 active companies.
48. Ruth Health: Pregnant women receive a lot of care but once the baby is born, there are months of health issues they still have to deal with — and little support provided by existing medical providers. Ruth Health is a tele-health clinic focused specifically on post-partum care, with $150 out-of-pocket sessions to address common women’s issues like painful sex and unwanted urination. Their rallying cry is “for vagina owners, by vagina owners!”
49. Axolo: is offering what it calls a “war room for each “pull request,” Axolo is a startup building in what we might call the developer productivity space. Its service creates a Slack channel around pull requests that helps engineers avoid swapping from Github back to their internal chats. The company says around 35 organizations are using its product today, and intends to monetize using a freemium model.
50. Ananya Health: the team at Ananya Health is building a medical device that can freeze abnormal cells much cheaper than existing solutions. The team is focused specifically on using the device to treat cervical “pre-cancer” in regions across the world where medical help is hardest to reach.
51. Govly: red tape has a way of bringing people together. Govly helps companies like Cisco & cloud-computing Nutanix come together to bid on government contracts. It wants to grow beyond a SaaS tool and into a marketplace that helps businesses sell into the government. The team hopes to be a better visualization into the business-to-government procurement space.
52. Mach9 Robotics: inspecting stuff in the ground is a huge pain and an aste-risk. Mach9 uses a thermal camera to peer into the Earth and find infra-structure issues. The company claims three paid pilots already.
53. Therify: therapy works better when you’re talking to someone that you feel understands you. Therify provides Mental healthcare as a benefit to companies, focusing on matching patients with therapists who have similar backgrounds. Co-founder says it’s currently running $100,000 in paid pilots with “four global companies.”
54. Jovian: the “Great Resignation” during this Pandemic, has led companies to get quite nifty with their benefits, with one impact being the rise of investment in employee education. To take advantage of these shifting employer habits, Jovian has an ambitious goal: be the best Tech University online. The job-oriented training platform helps professionals shape up on data science & Machine Learning (ML) skills. It has a monthly revenue of $20,000 and is growing 35% month over month.
55. Argonaut: Practically every tech company that wants to scale will need to deploy infrastructure to the cloud, causing words like Kubernetes, Terraform & containerization to be uttered. Argonaut automates this deployment as much as possible to reduce or eliminate the need for specialized engineering work, so even dummies can launch a company.
56. Dots: (one of two companies called Dots in this cohort!) is building a software product to help automate online customer communities, plugging into platforms like Slack and Discord and allowing companies to automate certain tasks and help them ensure new community members don’t slip through the cracks.
57. Epinoma: CRISPR transformed biology, and the world’s understanding of the human genome. Epinoma, led by three biogenetic experts, builds off those learnings to apply them to the world of epigenetics. The first application for its protein is for the liquid biopsy market, which the team estimates is a $50 billion opportunity.
58. Shimmer: Therapy is good and if everyone could access regular therapy it would be good for the world. But there aren’t enough therapists, and the service is often too expensive for folks in need — if they can get access. Shimmer wants to bridge the need-coverage gap by offering online mental health support groups that are run by coaches. Peer support can be pretty key to helping with various issues, as anyone in recovery can tell you. The company has 105 users today and claims 2x the retention of traditional therapy.
59. HyperGlue: Once you’ve got a big audience, keeping track of what your users are saying about you all around the internet gets tough. HyperGlue analyzes things that people share in places like Reddit & Discord to give product managers an automated breakdown of what people are saying about your product  — the things they hate, the features they want, etc.
60. Oneistox: online-cohort based classes for designers, architects & engineers — sold at roughly $900 bucks a pop. Oneistox wants to fill industry skill gaps through the virtual school, which mainly markets to those in their mid-20s and above. Early completion rates are 82%, dozens of percentage points above industry standards from massive open online course providers — signaling its format may just work.
61. Warrant: Warrant is building a platform that helps developers add authorization & access control to their web & mobile apps. The company’s API manages the complexity – while users are able to define rules that meet the needs of their product.
62. Evidence: Code! Code! Code! Evidence helps data teams replace drag-and-drop business intelligence tools with a code-based workflow, which a fancy way to say that it makes work more simple. The company is betting it can build the default front end for data management, as “every company becomes a data company.” Evidence of this? Evidence has 46 active projects after launching last week.
63. Female Invest: Investment is an industry dominated by men, but women command an increasing proportion of investable income. Female Invest aims to educate & mobilize this growing contingent and already has more than 17,000 paying subscribers in its community. Soon they’ll activate trading as well and fulfill their ambition of becoming the “Robinhood for women.”
64. Inversion Space: Instead of taking stuff to space, Inversion Space wants to bring some back from space. That’s an, ahem, inversion of what we tend to hear from space startups. The startup is building a return “capsule” that is four feet in diameter and wants to be able to drop stuff from space back to the planet in under an hour. Notably the startup claims some $225 million worth of LOIs, which may sound like a lot, but given what it costs to do anything in space, keep the number in scale. Inversion is targeting a first launch (drop?) in mid-2023.
65. Advantage Club: The team is building a wide-ranging platform for employee engagement – teaming perks, exclusive rewards and access to early wages. They’re hoping to bring multiple benefits into a single platform while catering to top customers with their deep web of more than 10,000 brand partners.
66. Zoios: Analytics for HR that the company says can predict who is going to quit, who is burned out, etc. Co-founder they currently have 12 companies as customers paying for 500 seats and have hit an ARR of $24,000.
67. BoldVoice: Duolingo may be the best-known language learning app on the market, but BoldVoice has a deep focus in one area that unicorn is missing: smart speech. The startup wants to help non-native English speakers find (and flaunt) their voices. The startup uses short-form videos, taught by Hollywood accent coaches who traditionally help actors, to deliver content. The curriculum is built around three Ps: posture, to help with the physical feel of using an English R versus a Spanish R; phonology, the vowels and consonants; and porosity, which is the musicality of an accent. In two months, it has hit $5,000 in monthly revenue from over 200 paid uses.
68. Sleek: Impulse buys on the internet aren’t actually any easier than big buys. You still have to go through the whole checkout process, except on the few shops that offer one-click fire-and-forget checkout. But what if I told you there was a startup offering a browser extension that makes every online shop have a one-click checkout … AND it gives you cash back? That’s the pitch with Sleek’s ML-powered checkout bot. By preventing cart rot they increase sales, collect the commissions and pass on the savings to you. Of course, you’re still out the cost of that impulse buy you would have left behind … but let’s not talk about that.
69. Cloudanix: Lots of companies now use more than one public cloud provider. So not just AWS, or just Azure, but GCP and others as well. Cloudanix wants to provide a unified dashboard to help companies keep all their public cloud work secure from a single dashboard. Per its website, the startup provides security monitoring & “remediation workflows” when needed. As the world becomes increasingly a multi-cloud domain, the company could find itself riding a secular shift.
70. Stipop: An easy-to-install SW Develop Kit (SDK) that developers can use to add stickers to their consumer chat apps. Already has 150,000 stickers designed by 5,000 artists and has been integrated into over 100 apps. Stipop monetizes through brand-sticker partnerships.
71. Telivy: SMBs need cyber insurance, and Telivy wants to give it to them. It’s as simple as that. They specialize in this and offer better & cheaper coverage so that SMBs can meet compliance and other requirements easier.
72. HomeBreeze: a home repair marketplace that is aiming to get rid of the annoying back-and-forth estimate process, instead providing up-front fixed/guaranteed prices & instant service scheduling. Co-founder says the company is seeing over $60,000 in monthly revenue after launching in May.
73. Tuli Health: is building software that helps pharmacies in the U.K. perform in-house diagnostic tests. It started with COVID testing but is now expanding into allergy testing. Co-founder says the company has on-boarded 147 pharmacies that have run over 7,000 diagnostic tests so far, accounting for $400,000 in revenue.
74. Alchemy: sure, Shopify made it easier for businesses to sell online, but how do those same businesses create a dynamic, differentiated experience for their customers? Alchemy is a visual development platform that enables brands to build unique e-commerce experiences, sans the code. It launched in late July and has so far landed 11 initial customers accounting for $2,800 in monthly recurring revenue.
75. Hypercontext: This company says it helps managers run better meetings by streamlining meetings according to their team’s Objectives & Key Results (OKR) and providing a dedicated place for agendas, feedback, follow-up steps, etc. The team says its MRR is currently at $37,000, charging teams $7 per user per month.
76. Bedrock AI: Some of the best gems sit in the footnotes of corporate filings, from 10-K annual reports to Form D filings. Bedrock AI’s software extracts key factoids to limit information overload and better supplement those who spend their days working though the fine text of public company data.
77. Hiration: LinkedIn may have disrupted resumes, but Hiration wants to disrupt LinkedIn’s role in the job search process. The startup is building a way for job seekers to quickly create efficient resumes. Through partnerships with over 80 institutions, including Stanford & University of Texas, Hiration created 125,000 resumes in August. It has an annual recurring revenue of $500K.
78. CellChorus: All kinds of medicines, therapies, vaccines and other research processes need to understand what effects they create on a cell-by-cell level, but observing this directly can be very difficult. CellChorus does it, though, and has trained a machine learning model to watch footage of cell interactions and automatically derive conclusions like which cells perform best and why. They’ve already got traction and have been in multiple prestigious journals, so while it’s not something you’ll be using at home, it could be standard issue tech in medical research soon.
79. Secoda: wants to aggregate your company’s data in a single place, so that internal teams can better work together and share metadata, queries & more. Part of its pitch is that current tools in its domain are more targeted at enterprise-scale companies, while it wants to target smaller startups to start. That’s a standard Global Traffic Mgr (GTM) model for YC startups, but in this case it doesn’t bother us. The company claims $40,000 in ARR today.
80. Flowly: pairs virtual reality headsets with a heart rate sensor to generate visualizations that the team is proving can reduce pain (and thus, opioid usage). They’ve got a $1.2 million grant from the NIH, and Co-founder says the company is currently seeing over $40,000 in monthly revenue.
81. Revery AI: is building a “virtual dressing room” that helps online shoppers visualize how clothing they’re shopping for will actually look like on a person, tapping AI to impose clothing images on models while allowing users to customize said model to look more like they do.
82. Plug: One App Program’g I/F(API) to process payments across multiple providers. Plug takes a 1% cut while saving teams up to 30% in processing fees and have processed over $230,000 to date.
83. Abbot: This former GitHub team saw firsthand the power of a streamlined, remote-first operating system, and now it’s building tools for other startups to do the same. Abbot makes the traditional team chats on Slack or Discord into a command center to get tasks done. It reacts to messages by running programs, deploying software or, heck, even displaying the weather.
84. mello: after the absurd last few years, it’s no surprise we’re seeing an uptick in companies focusing on burnout. Mello reduces burnout by regularly checking in with employees, detecting shifts in happiness/productivity and offering up ways you might help them dig their way out. Currently ties into Slack, with plans for Teams/Discord/Google integrations on the roadmap.
85. Quest: an audio Q&A platform where experts can share advice & stories in short audio clips; think a micro-podcasting Quora. The startup is focusing specifically on business advice early on and has over 10 hours of content from speakers at companies like YC & Google.
86. SnapCalorie: Nobody likes counting calories, because 1) calories taste great and 2) it’s a pain. But SnapCalorie could at least address (2) by providing a calorie estimate of a meal from a single image that they claim is more accurate than a nutritionist’s. The founder also co-founded Google Lens & the Cloud Vision API – so he knows of what he speaks.
87. Bree: zero interest cash advances (up to $100) in Canada; instead of fees, Bree allows users to tip the service when it’s been helpful. Co-founder says the company did $14,000 in advances and saw $1,800 of revenue in July.
88. Zuma: is building out an “AI leasing agent” that helps make the most of web interest by responding and following up on every lead. In eight months, the team has grown to $388,000 ARR.
89. Medium Biosciences: uses machine learning to find new/novel enzymes for biotech companies. The company says by cutting out much of the trial-and-error, it cuts a 10-week process down to 2 weeks.
90. Hyperseed: already backed by Silicon Valley investors, Hyperseed makes it easier for finance professionals to create custom pricing & billing applications. The full-stack development environment helps finance teams add their thoughts into tech stacks, doing what the no-code team thinks Excel can’t.
91. Glitzi: An alternative to actually going to a salon or spa to get beauty or grooming services, Glitzi is an on-call service that connects beauty professionals directly to clients. The clients get the convenience of home care and the pros make more for the personalized service and no fees or rent for spa space. Everyone wins, and of course everyone is beautiful … that means you!
92. MayaEats: Pitching itself as “Uber for kitchens,” MayaEats works with “underutilized” kitchens to analyze their region/potential audience and build a virtual brand to sell on platforms like DoorDash & Uber Eats. They’ve already processed over 57,000 orders, accounting for $2 million in GMV and a monthly recurring revenue of $30,000.
93. Catena Biosciences: auto-immune disorders are devastating & difficult to treat (especially if you love your car). Catena has a new approach born out of work at CRISPR – the co-inventor’s lab. By attaching custom proteins to red blood cells, they can retrain the immune system to cease its mistaken & destructive response, potentially providing a treatment for graves’ disease, celiac disorder, multiple sclerosis & more. Big Pharma is already nosing around, as you might expect, and I predict a large valuation quite soon. (But more importantly, treatments for serious disorders.)
94. Keyri: a password-less authentication API, a la WhatsApp’s web/desktop login experience. Tap an in-app button or scan an on-screen QR code to start the sign-in process, then use biometrics to prove you’re you — no passwords to type or share. Co-founder says the company has four LOIs signed and is already working with 57 startups.
95. Fitia: this App creates personalized nutrition plans, using ingredients in local grocers, for LatAm users who want to lose weight. Users pay $55 per year, and the now-profitable startup attracts $70,000 in monthly revenue. Beyond trying to democratize the nutritionist, Fitia is also growing a database of over 1 million Latin American foods & recipes.
96. Evidently AI: machine-learning models are used almost universally in tech stacks, but telling when they’re failing and how isn’t as simple and established as something like “500 Error server not found.” Evidently AI wants to make tracking & debugging ML systems simpler & easier, so that faults can be identified & fixed faster. As authors of dozens of ML models themselves, the team thinks they’ve got the savy to do it.
97. Adaptyv Biosystems: a smaller, faster chip for biotech companies to synthesize & screen proteins. CEO says their chip is 100,000x smaller than existing options, allowing them to screen “millions of drugs instead of thousands.”; from the data they’ll gather, they’ll build “the world’s largest protein database.”
98. Awesomic: team is building a design freelancing platform with a big emphasis on getting design jobs done quickly without the stress of hiring a designer.
99. Craft Aerospace: is designing & testing a totally novel new vertical take-off & landing (VTOL) aircraft designed to fly & land in / around cities, making regional travel faster & cheaper. The design of the aircraft is pretty wild, but it actually makes a lot of sense.
100. Snowboard Software: If you know what the “Snowflake data cloud” is, Snowboard might be for you. Snowboard is a data catalog for Snowflake, allowing you to dig through your data on the platform faster, find data issues, etc. You can self-host it, or they’ll host for you; it’s free to start tinkering with, and you start paying after 1,000 indexed columns. The company says it’s currently seeing $15,000 ARR with four companies on-boarded.
101. Jupe: sells glamping-in-a-box. The company has booked some $6.5 million in revenue this year and claims to be profitable. It sells software & hardware + takes a pretty big cut of total spent. Er, is glamping a big industry? It is growing during the COVID era.
     Hera: this team is building a Calendar app with an emphasis on productivity, with a number of overt and more subtle features aimed at helping people get the most out of their meetings without living in a bloated calendar app.
102. Astek.: helps doctors find the right antibiotic faster — an hour, the company says, instead of days — in emergency situations. The company expects to charge $100 per test.
103. Bite Ninja: wants drive-thru restaurants to use its freelancers (ninjas) to help others order and receive food (bites), allowing people to take drive-thru orders from home. One of the co-founders ran a BBQ restaurant chain called Baby Jacks, where he built out the initial concept. The team says it’s currently running pilots with five chains and would make $150,000 per restaurant location.
104. ClearMix: organizing an in-person video team at a global company can be tough at the best of times, let alone during a pandemic. ClearMix is a fully remote video production suite that lets video teams record & produce videos quickly & professionally, but entirely online. No doubt it’s going up against some heavy hitters in the Adobe vein, but the need is clear.
105. Sequin : A fintech play, Sequin wants to give women Debit Cards to help them build credit — the card features what the company called “live credit reporting” — so that more women can access debt products. The company plans to eventually build a credit card product as well. Per Sequin, it expects to generate around $60 per user per year thanks to interchange incomes.
106. Teamspace: A remote collaboration platform built by a Facebook product designer who worked on the company’s Workplace product. The startup hopes to reduce team misalignment by giving them a “shared canvas” where they can tackle problems together.
107. Repool : pitched as “AngelList for hedge funds,” Repool wants to let more people build hedge funds. “Focus on trading, we’ll take care of the rest,” they say. Co-founder says the company has two funds on-boarded after launching two weeks ago, already accounting for $36,000 in ARR.
108. SigmaOS: A browser designed for work, it wants to be the main tool startups use to access the web, with an interface meant to promote multi-tasking & collaboration. Outstanding features include split-screen capabilities, browser-based collaboration pages and focus mode. The productivity software startup charges $10 a month — and claims it’s gaining one customer every two minutes.
109. Whalesync: No-code tools are definitely popular (there have been plenty in the last two days) but they don’t solve every problem. And it turns out they create at least one new one — keeping data in sync between no-code tools can be tough and your devs end up having to code a data pipeline anyway. Whalesync connects no-code tools with each other, staving off the “real” coding for another step or two.
110. Level: a Fintech financing platform that buys loans from Fintech startups helping them gain access to capital to scale faster. The company analyzes the Fintech company’s performance & Loan portfolio to source low-risk loans it can purchase at a discounted rate.
111. Inflow: a self-help app for helping people manage Atten Deficit Hyper-Activity Disorder ADHD. The company is promising symptom improvement on par with in-person treatment while making it “100x more affordable and accessible.” Co-founder Levi Epstein says Inflow has 2,700+ paying members and is currently seeing $33,000 in monthly recurring revenue.
112. Jingu Health: ,millions of women suffer from vaginal infections with no effective treatment, but Jingu Health is coming to the rescue with a powerful tool. They target the underlying cause of these infections by analyzing the micro-biome with computational biology tools & reprogramming it (think “more of this, less of this,” not bioengineered microorganisms). They claim to have the first pill-based treatment. It’s even FDA approved.
113. Litnerd : wants to help make kids better readers by keeping them more engaged in reading. They livestream actors into the classroom on a weekly basis to act out and advance stories the kids have spent the last few days reading, provide lesson plans for teachers and more.
114. Waterplan: tech & water may not usually mix well, unless you’re Waterplan. The startup helps industrial facilities mitigate water risk, a growing threat due to climate change. It has $345,000 in annual recurring revenue thanks to 12 pilot customers.
115. Moxion Power: we expect this company to announce a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC-led) deal to go public in the next month. It’s building large, mobile batteries that construction sites and other commercial operations can use to provide power in locations where they today use generators. Lower emissions is a win. The company expects to get its first production facility online in Q1 2022. Given the huge interest in EV tech more generally today, we like Moxion’s chances of raising the capital it needs to give its business a shot.
116. Lightly: a machine learning (ML) startup that helps ML teams prioritize the data most in need of labeling, pointing them to the data subsets that will have the biggest impact on their overall model accuracy.
117. Beeper: you probably use a half dozen chat apps. Beeper merges them all together — even iMessage, through some hackery involving forwarding messages from a Mac or jailbroken iPhone — and adds things like unified search. Co-founders previously worked together at Pebble, the early smart-watch company one founded.
118. Levro: business itself is increasingly global. Which is great for remote workers, but a bit wonky when it comes to payments & banking. Levro appears to be prepping to help smooth the currency situation by offering a multi currency banking service. The company dangled a hook during its pitch, offering free payments up to a transaction cap for folks tuned into Demo Day. Let’s see if that helps it drive early sign-ups. Its website currently only lets folks sign up for updates, so it may be some time until we fully grok Levro’s early traction.
119. testRigor: has a better way to test for quality assurance. TestRigor has created technology that allows companies to run tests that better emulate the way end users engage with their applications. The software claims to be faster, non-engineer friendly, and thus – more scalable for its clients. Netflix is one of the customers fueling testRigor’s $700,000 annual recurring revenue.
120. Heimdal: pulls valuable minerals out of seawater while simultaneously sequestering carbon dioxide, producing carbon-negative materials for the concrete and glass industries. Cement manufacturing is notoriously a huge polluter, so with regulations coming in, they and everyone else are jonesing for green processes and raw materials.
121. Unbox: QA doesn’t get enough love in the Mach Learning world, but it matters. ML models can be biased as heck, or simply broken. Unbox wants to help ML team members, both technical and not, to find issues in ML models and create tests to check to make sure that fixes work. The team hails from Apple. Unbox did not share growth metrics.
122. Fizz: is building a Debit card that helps college students in the U.S. to start building out their credit without having to learn lessons about overzealous credit use the hard way. Building good credit early is critical – but can be tough – for college students operating on tight budgets.
123. Mentorcam: a marketplace connecting people with those they admire for advice — sorta like Cameo for 1:1 advice. Charging $20-$300 per video, they saw $7,000 in gross sales in August. Notably, the company says, nearly half of its users are repeat customers.
124. Nash: has built software atop mass-market delivery APIs (it listed DoorDash & Uber, among others) to allow other companies to offer same-day delivery. Why is it neat? Because SMBs can’t code, having another company plug them into delivery networks could unlock the delivery market for companies that can’t afford an engineering team. Per Nash, it has a 10% take rate and is doing around $60,000 in GMV.
125. Tenyks: helps AI developers figure out how/why their computer vision systems are doing what they’re doing and build more reliable systems. With both co-founders having Ph.D.s in “Explainable AI,” this one seems like a good fit. Founder says they’re currently working with one customer, with four more getting set up now and seven+ on the wait-list.
126. Maroo: “Save the date” doesn’t exactly scream stable revenue, so Maroo is building a payments service for the Wedding industry. The startup is rethinking how the business owners within the wedding industry — from caterers to that charming venue you eye every time you drive past it — receive payments. As for the happy couple, Maroo offers a buy now, pay later service for a more accessible financing option,
127. Tavus: wants to replace written outreach (think sales Emails and such) with computer-generated deep-fakes. Yes, you read that correctly. Customize the name, company & other aspects and get hundreds of tailored videos that look just like someone recorded a video message just for the recipient. Is it a good idea? We’ll see … but like it or not it’s here, and it seems to be effective.
128. MarqVision: monitors the large eCommerce marketplaces and aims to automatically detect/flag counterfeits – while providing brands a dashboard for sending take-down requests. Co-founder says that they’ve reached $100k in MRR after launching 9 months ago.
129. Enso: is building a data processing tool that helps automate developer processes that require a ton of repetitive manual work. The no-code platform wants to put components built by its community of experts into the hands of data scientists.
130. Metlo:, built by former Facebook & Uber engineers, helps companies store their business metrics (like “daily active users”) in a standardized, transparent way across different tools without a bunch of duplicated work. In seven weeks, the startup landed four design partners.
131. MergeQueue: When you’ve got 20 engineers all coding separately to build a new feature, it can take as long to integrate and reconcile their work as it does to do it in the first place. MQ automates code submission workflows to avoid build failures that result in costly code reviews & delays. The team encountered this issue at Google (easy to imagine) and hacked together their own solution there — now they’ve built something for everyone else to use.

Comments: for the rest of the 180 Startups from day 2, go to Tech Crunch.

from Tech Crunch 01 Sep 21 enhanced by Peter /CXO Wiz4.biz

For more Info on Starting a Business, click on Startup Ideas.