A total of 54 ventures are participating in this year's fall semester of the Harvard Venture Incubation Program, the 12-week acceleration program for startups from every Harvard school.
This fall's teams represent a diversity of industries: 20% are focused on social impact, cultural entrepreneurship or education; 32% on consumer products or services; 22% on health and sciences; and 26% on enterprise or high tech.
Who are we watching closely? Definitely PionEar (winner of $75,000 in a recent Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge contest), but also Umbulizer (winner of this year's social enterprise track at HBS's New Venture Competition) and Hellofriend (called by his co-founders "a morally correct social media").
Here’s the full list of the ventures that were admitted to the 2018 Harvard Fall Venture Program (descriptions provided by Harvard University and edited by BostInno):
Consumer
• Bundle: We provide back-up/flexible child care as an employee benefit for working parents, helping employers reduce absenteeism and attract and retain talent.
• Content Opinions: Creating conversation between unfamiliar perspectives.
• Dystrophic: Dystrophic is a game development studio creating Hexile, a surreal puzzle game based on themes of environmentalism and social awareness.
• GoPay: GoPay helps international students convert currency cheaply to pay directly to their university or any foreign bank account.
• Gumshoe: Personalized restaurant recommendations for individuals or groups.
• Hellofriend: Hellofriend is a decentralized social networking platform for people to buy and sell social experiences around the globe.
• Honeybird: Honeybird is a consumer products company taking on stress, anxiety, and poor sleep. Our first product is a weighted blanket.
• Lesson Squad: Music lessons in the comfort of your home.
• LeverEdge: Decrease student loan rates by negotiating on behalf of large groups of potential borrowers.
• MixTape: Mixtape combines the ease of music streaming with the sentimentality of mixtapes to help you share music more meaningfully with the people you love.
• prettychill: We deliver frozen plant-based mini-meals in convenient resealable bowls straight to your door. Always gluten-free, dairy-free and delicious.
• ReMana: ReMana is reinventing how women pump, store and feed breastmilk. The system reduces the chance of spilling, requires less cleaning and is sustainable.
• Settlyt: Settlyt is a real money peer-to-peer platform that facilitates challenges and arguments between friends in a social way.
• Spruce: Spruce & Co. creates simple products that encourage a healthy lifestyle through everyday routines. Our first product, Sprucies, are gentle, natural, disposable screen cleaning sheets designed to keep your mobile devices clean and bright.
• The Key: We are a location-based, professional networking and career-management tool for the youth, helping them build relationships and find job opportunities.
• Venuefly: Venuefly makes it easy to find event spaces — our platform allows bookers and venues to find, communicate and transact with each other.
• Voodles: Voodles is the first-ever vegetable-based dry pasta. It's organic, allergen-free and, most importantly, unexplainably delicious.
Health and Sciences
• bio.x: bio.x provides a cost-efficient individual-tailored therapeutics platform for human diseases.
• Epigene Medicine: Smart aggregation of genomic data for drug discovery in oncology.
• Flotherm: Flotherm is a novel thermal-compression device for perioperative warming of surgical patients at risk for inadvertent perioperative hypothermia.
• Green Screen: Passive cooling screens designed for the slum communities of Delhi and made of agricultural waste, which would have otherwise been burned by farmers.
• g.Root Biomedical Services: g.Root is a biotech company using algorithms and artificial intelligence to help people interpret and understand complex genetic testing results.
• Koldchain: Koldchain has developed a solution that combines big data and thermosensitive polymers to monitor vaccine & biotech cold chains and prevent fraud.
• Manifold Bio: Creating a new paradigm of protein engineering for therapeutics and diagnostics through high-dimensional data generation and machine learning.
• Memora Health: Memora Health builds workflow productivity software for health care organizations to automate and scale outpatient communication.
• MindMics: We build earphones that help to achieve healthier and happier life by providing mind and body monitoring system.
• Nivien Therapeutics: Nivien Therapeutics finds and develops innovation from tech transfer portfolios at top hospitals and universities.
• PionEar Technologies: Revolutionizing the treatment of ear infections with low-cost, minimally invasive, and selectively permeable ear tube implants.
• Umbulizer: Umbulizer is developing a reliable, low-cost, and portable device that can provide continuous ventilation to patients in resource-limited settings.
Social Impact, Cultural and Education
• A Better Future: We mobilize volunteers to provide pro-bono consulting services for nonprofits on a national scale in China.
• AfyaKit: AfyaKit exists to drive high quality care management by providing actionable, right-level analytics to health managers across Sub-Saharan Africa.
• Boost Finance: Boost Finance is a financial data platform that empowers employers to expand smart cash transfers, the worker benefit for a better future of work.
• CareerCombo: CareerCombo is an online platform aimed at helping young adults both discover and plan for real careers that combine their different passions.
• Chord: Chord allows people to buy a home in increments, building ownership at their pace, and unlocking a new vehicle for institutional investment.
• Coding it Forward: Coding it Forward empowers students to use their tech skills to create social impact in fields like healthcare, education, nonprofit and government.
• Conversational DC: A way to learn languages through immersive, social and cultural activities (e.g. wine tastings, cooking classes) as if you were living abroad.
• Growing Communities: Working to improve nutrition and health worldwide.
• MDaaS Global: MDaaS is providing healthcare for the next billion by building the largest network of health centers in Africa.
• The American Immigrant Project: The American Immigrant Project joins documentary filmmaking and investing to empower immigrant entrepreneurs across the United States.
• Thrively Health: Thrively Health designs, evaluates, and scales community-driven initiatives that solve health, economic and social problems facing women and girls.
Technology and B2B/Enterprise
• AirCrew: We develop advanced catalytic materials to address global needs for air purification for residential, industrial, and automotive sectors.
• ArchSpike: ArchSpike aims to streamline the process of building design and development by integrating real estate market analytics with design software.
• DeepRE.ML: DeepRE.ML is a real estate technology firm that is looking to redefine how critical functions of commercial real estate investments are completed.
• Elios: Elios provides an alert service for early signs of employee and customer risk.
• eudios: We use machine learning to help companies understand and reduce their economic vulnerability to infectious disease outbreaks.
• Inkrypt: A decentralized journalism and media content hosting platform that ensures content authenticity, resilience and censorship-resistance.
• MyToolbox: Labor marketplace for skilled blue-collar workers, offering them a place to keep licenses up to date, find jobs and access basic financial services.
• OZÉ: OZÉ is the business advisor in the pocket of every African entrepreneur. It's a mobile app that turns transactions into business insights.
• Sensii: Product ID system based on material recognition.
• STEMgem: STEMgem is a device toolkit that allows learners to build real, useful and relevant technology. Our mission is to engage teenage girls in STEM.
• TalentLab: TalentLab helps companies quantify the 'cultural fit' of their job applicants.
• Translo: Translo is a privacy-preserving, decentralized and secure biomedical data sharing platform.
• Vikas Birhma: Vikas Birhma provides farmers and buyers a platform that empowers them with transparent price discovery and agency to sell and buy from anyone across India.
• Weave: Weave enables rapid prototyping and management of cloud applications through a simple platform agnostic API and user interface.
