YC Demo Day: Blood, mushrooms and porn addiction take center stage

Hedgehog from Palo Alto is building a robotic mushroom and fungi farm.

Hedgehog

Sara Bloomberg,

Sonya Herrera

September 08, 2022, 02:58pm PDT Updated 09/08/2022 3:44 pm

Another Y Combinator Demo Day (really two days) concluded on Thursday, and there were plenty of intriguing and eye catching startups from the Bay Area and beyond that pitched their products and services.

The accelerator held the event online, again, but around half of the founders participated in the three-month program in person, many of whom moved out to the Bay Area just for the program.

Back in April, we noticed that there were several startups in the winter batch named after food. For the summer batch, the theme seemed to be naming companies after animals:

Coverage Cat (New York)
Access Owl (Mountain View/Berlin)
Invofox (Madrid)
Feather (Seattle)
Hedgehog (Palo Alto)
Pulppo (Mexico City)
Videobug (Bengaluru/Sunnyvale)
Slauth.io (Tel Aviv)
Raven (Bengaluru)
Wolfia (Mountain View/Austin)
TigerEye (San Francisco)

There were many startups from around the world that caught our eyes. They include blood testing startups promising better health, robotic mushroom farming and an app for peer supported porn addiction recovery (though it's not clinically classified as an addiction, according to WebMD.)

Click through the slideshow below to learn more about some of the startups from the summer batch in the Bay Area and beyond.

YC Demo Day Summer 2022

1 of 24

Airhart Aeronautics (Long Beach, CA): Designing semiautonomous airplanes that are as easy to fly as a car is to drive.

Airhart Aeronautics

Array Labs (Sunnyvale): Designing satellites to collect 3D images.

Array Labs

Banabo (S.F.): Privacy-first marketing tools for a post-third-party cookie world.

Banabo

Be Golden (S.F.): Consumer blood testing kits for monitoring inflammation. Consumer blood testing kits for monitoring inflammation.

Be Golden

Birch Biosciences (Portland, Oregan): Using enzymes to break down plastic for recycling.

Birch Biosciences

Capsule (S.F.): An app that lets you quickly search for products to buy online just from a screenshot.

Capsule

Delight (S.F.): A dating app for people looking for more serious relationships and only want to date one person at a time.

SF Business Times

Fetii (Austin): An app for on-demand transportation for groups of up to 15 people.

Fetii

Hedgehog (Palo Alto): Building a robotic mushroom and fungi farm.

Hedgehog

Illuminant Surgical founder Eldrick Millares

Illuminant Surgical (Cambridge, Massachusetts): Projecting x-rays directly onto patients during surgery to help surgeons perform more accurately.

SF Business Times

Invofox (Madrid): Automated data extraction from invoices for software companies.

Invofox

Iollo (Palo Alto): At-home consumer blood testing kits for monitoring metabolomics to create personalized lifestyle and health recommendations.

Iollo

Keylika (Walnut Creek): Drug development utilizing metals, including a dermal patch for iron deficiency.

Keylika

Knowtex (S.F.): Automating doctor's notes with a virtual assistant to reduce the amount of time spent manually entering data like billing codes.

Knowtex

Malama (Stanford): Remote monitoring of diabetes to improve maternal health outcomes.

Malama

Maverick Bioworks (S.F.): Using biotechnology to extract lithium more sustainably.

Maverick Bioworks

Moonshot (London): An angel investing platform for athletes that lets them raise funds for a share of their income.

Moonshot

Needl (Seattle): A search engine for your computer than can search across multiple web apps with a single query.

Needl

Polymath Robotics (S.F.): Developing software than can turn any industrial vehicle into an autonomous and remotely operated vehicle.

SF Business Times

Relay (Salt Lake City): A peer-to-peer virtual support app for addiction, beginning with porn addiction (not clinically classified as an addiction).

Relay

Seaflight (Torrance): Designing autonomous, electric wingships that can fly at ultra-low altitudes to transport cargo along coastlines.

Seaflight

Shinkei Systems (New York): Developing robotic tools that can automate seafood processing while maintaining quality.

Shinkei Systems

Signatur Biosciences (S.F.): Using PCR technology to test for dozens of complex diseases (e.g., bipolar disorder, endometriosis and opioid addiction) with a single test.

Signatur Biosciences