Eric Migicovsky, the founder of Pebble and former Y Combinator partner, is back in a YC batch with his new startup called Beeper.
Vicki Thompson
As 373 startups get set to pitch investors this week, it seems quaint to think that not so long ago it was a big deal when a Y Combinator batch topped 100 for the first time.
The Mountain View-based startup accelerator and investor is going back to a two-day program on Tuesday and Wednesday after this past March's marathon online pitches by more than 300 companies in a single day. It is the fourth time that YC's Demo Days are being done virtually since being forced to do so by the pandemic last year.
In addition to the mushrooming size of batches, the identities of the companies in them are far less closely guarded than in the days when founders were required to keep mum until Demo Day. Nearly half of this batch has already talked publicly about what they do.
That includes 79 from the Bay Area that are described below, including one from Eric Migicovsky, the creator of the Pebble smartwatch and former YC partner.
The app from his new Palo Alto company, Beeper, lets users access all of their messaging apps in one place. Despite all of the experience he has as a founder former YC partner, Migicovsky told the Business Journal that he still sees value in being in its Summer 2021 batch.
"YC is the best startup community in the world, I know that from 10 years of being part of it," he said. "It felt natural to do my second company there, too."
In addition to the online demo days, coaching sessions and presentations have also been done virtually. This has allowed a number of teams to go through YC without coming to the Bay Area.
This makes it difficult to draw any conclusions about whether the batches would have gotten this big if founders were required to move to the San Francisco and Silicon Valley area. But it's clear that the program sometimes referred to as the "Harvard of startup accelerators" still has a strong appeal to founders.
Here are the 79 Bay Area companies in the Summer 2021 batch that have talked publicly about their business ahead of this week's Demo Days. More will be reported on as they make their pitches this week:
Ecommerce
- Alchemy Technologies Inc., San Francisco: Helping entrepreneurs build e-commerce storefonts without code is what this startup is all about.
- Anakin Technologies Pte Ltd., San Francisco: This startup automates the task of keeping track of what e-commerce customers' competitors are selling and for how much. In addition to its San Francisco headquarters, Anakin also operates in India and Singapore.
- Nasdisc, San Francisco: Vinyl records, CDs and cassettes are the focus of this online marketplace set up to help people buy and sell them. It takes a 12% cut of each sale.
- Revery AI, Emeryville: This company has developed a virtual dressing room where shoppers can mix and match outfits and visualize them instantly.
- Synder (aka Cloud Business Inc.), San Francisco: Easy accounting for e-commerce is what this startup promises. It connects sales platforms such as Shopify, Stripe, Amazon or Etsy into one ecosystem, with the goal of consolidating cash flow, automated accounting and inventory management.
- Varos Corp., San Francisco: This company provides real-time competitive and market intelligence data for e-commerce. Customers send their data in, it gets anonymized, and then they can see how their metrics compare against peers.
Life science, health
- Ananya Health, San Francisco: This startup has developed a portable device deigned to treat cervical cancer.
- Catenya Biosciences, Berkeley: This biotech is working on ways to couple proteins in ways that may help cure autoimmune disorders such as multiple sclerosis.
- Comet Healthcare Inc., Palo Alto: Virtual physical therapy for pelvic and orthopedic problems is what this startup offers.
- Dive Health, San Francisco: This startup promises to figure out what treatment migraine patients should be using, based on their DNA and symptoms, and offers to deliver it to their door.
- Epinoma Inc., San Francisco: This is a developer of blood tests designed to detect early recurrence in cancer patients. It aims to replace traditional methods such as CT imaging and protein markers.
- Genomelink (aka Awakens Inc.), Berkeley: Genomelink provides a way to use DNA test results from companies like 23andMe/Ancestry to get further analysis from hundreds of other apps.
- Lumify Care Inc., San Francisco: This startup has set up an online hub where nurses can find a number of resources and tools to help with their work.
- Momo Medical BV, San Francisco: This company sells an Internet-connected pressure sensor for beds in hospitals and nursing homes that is designed to help detect when people need to be moved to prevent bed sores.
- Pillar, San Francisco: This startup provides an operating system which health and wellness companies can use to offer health coaching from a provider network it has developed.
- Reprosent, Los Gatos: This company's app tracks a cancer patient's daily symptoms and uses this data to produce reports that are sent to their oncologist.
- Rinse Dental Inc., San Francisco: This company says it is building the "One Medical for dental care," comparing its service to the San Francisco operator of a network of concierge health clinics.
- SafeBeat RX Inc., San Francisco: This startup offers a take-home kit that combines FDA-approved wearables and ECG software it has developed that lets patients start heart medications at home instead of under observation in a hospital.
- Shimmer, San Francisco: This startup offers online mental health support groups that are led by peer coaches.
- Verano Health, San Francisco: This is a nonprofit that provides telehealth services to Americans who have diabetes and are on Medicaid. That fits the description of about 30% of the people in that program.
- Zeit Medical, Redwood City: This company has developed a headband that constantly monitors the electrical activity of a wearer's brain. It is designed to detect the onset of a stroke and notify 911 immediately.
Fintech
- Apollo Card Inc., San Francisco: A debit card that rewards users with purchases of stock is the innovation that this startup has come up with.
- Dots, San Francisco: This startup is building software that its says lets marketplace owners pay their sellers in the ways they want to be paid, such as Venmo and Paypal.
- Financial Choice Inc., Mountain View: This startup offers a unified checking and investment account. It keeps the full balance invested to get market returns while retaining instant access to cash even when the markets are closed.
- Hyper, Mountain View: Helping Discord users get paid for the games and other content they create on the platform is what this startup is all about.
- Hyperseed (aka Seed Technologies Inc.), San Francisco: This company developed a no-code software platform for finance professionals to do things like create insurance underwriting models for different states and generate customer ratings.
- Level (aka Asabase Inc.), San Francisco: This startup provides financing to lending startups by buying loans from them, in small quantities at first and growing as they do.
- Levro, San Francisco: This startup operates as a multicurrency business neobank (Forbes defines neobanks as "fintech firms that offer apps, software and other technologies to streamline mobile and online banking"), designed to help companies expand using one account for transactions in more than 30 currencies.
- Mentum, San Francisco: This company offers software designed to help fintechs in Latin America offer investment services. It offers access to the U.S. and local stock markets.
- Sequin Financial Inc., San Francisco: This startup offers what it calls the first debit card that builds credit for women. It does this by tracking purchases and repayments to credit bureaus.
- Telivy Inc., San Francisco: Insurance agencies are the focus of this startup, which helps them get cyber insurance for their small-business customers.
- Slope Tech Inc., San Francisco: This startup provides a way for B2B businesses to offer "buy now, pay later" with diverse payment options at checkout. It handles the lending, underwriting, debt collection and payments.
- Zage Inc., San Francisco: This company's online payment platform is designed to let users pay merchants without sharing their bank details, and provides some cash back every time.
Software development tools
- Argonaut, Sunnyvale: This startup says its tools automate parts of the software development process, letting engineers devote their time to other tasks.
- Gallery (aka Moniod Inc.), San Francisco: This startup's cloud-agnostic software is designed to help engineering teams replicate, manage and share templates to speed up workflows.
- MergeQueue, San Francisco: This startup says that its software developer tool automates workflows, which can save engineers up to five hours a week and helps them avoid the frustration of broken builds.
- Meticulous, San Francisco: This company offers a tool to designed catch bugs in web applications as they are being developed.
- Tantl, San Francisco: Low-code software that helps developers build internal workflows, such as allowing customer support reps to quickly process refunds, is what this startup is all about.
- testRigor Inc., San Francisco: This company says its software tests can be written in plain English to emulate the experience of an app's end users. It says this tests builds 15 times faster.
Data storage, management, analytics
- Basis, San Francisco: This startup provides a platform that it says can be used to build end-to-end data pipelines quickly.
- Cloudthread Inc., San Francisco: This startup offers an analytics platform that's designed to help engineering teams build cost efficiently in the cloud.
- Pipekit Inc., San Francisco: This company's app is designed to help data teams quickly create complex data pipelines. It says this cans save companies hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.
- Telmai, Foster City: This startup's data monitoring software is designed to quickly detect and investigate data quality issues.
- Zensors Inc., San Francisco: This company's AI-powered visual sensor technology is designed to help replace dozens of IoT-type sensors and get actionable data by using existing cameras.
Social networking, chat, collaboration
- Beeper, Palo Alto: This is a startup co-founded by Eric Migicovsky, the creator of the Pebble smartwatch and a YC partner for four years. It provides a universal chat hub for a number of apps like WhatsApp, Slack, Facebook Messenger and Twitter direct messaging.
- Flow Club (aka Happy Rhinos Corp.), San Francisco: This startup has developed an invite-only online co-working app that it designed for entrepreneurs. It offers sessions that it describes as a work sprint where participants say at the start what they hope to get done and then celebrate their progress with others in the group.
Cleantech and environmental tech
- Bluumbio Inc., Berkeley: Creating bacteria and plants that can remove industrial chemicals from contaminated sites is what this startup is working on.
- Ferveret Inc., San Jose: This startup boasts that its liquid cooling technology helps to save data centers 96% in cooling costs, 68% on capital costs and reduces their carbon footprint by 40% while doubling chip performance.
- Waterplan (aka Climateplan Inc.), San Francisco: As climate change squeezes availability, this startup offers software to help customers manage water availability in their facilities.
Food prep and delivery
- ByteKitchen Ltd., Mountain View: This startup helps food brands deliver meals from its network of kitchens.
- Locale, Los Gatos: This company has set up a marketplace where people can order food from a variety of sources many miles apart, and have it delivered all in one box. It has partnered at first to deliver orders everywhere from San Francisco to Santa Cruz.
- MayaEats (aka Unavu Inc.), Sunnyvale: This startup says it aims to do to the restaurant industry what Airbnb did to hotels and Uber did to taxis. It matches up delivery-only food brands with underutilized kitchens that can cook for them.
- SliceQ, Mountain View: This company has developed an automated phone ordering system for restaurants, boasting that its customers have increased their sales by over 10%.
Mobility and delivery
- Bouyant Aero, San Francisco: Using unmanned blimps, this startup moves middle-mile air freight at what it says is half the cost of a small plane.
- Cache, San Francisco: Founder Christopher Wu previously helped DoorDash work with "ghost kitchens" that make delivery-only meals. His new startup uses lockers and software designed to help make delivery easy for "dark stores" — online-only convenience stores.
- Nash, San Francisco: This startup offers software that businesses can use to provide same-day delivery of what they sell, without having to operate their own fleets.
Sales, marketing
- Breadcrumbs.io Inc., San Francisco: This startup has devised a no-code scoring engine designed to analyze customer and prospect data to identify hidden revenue opportunities.
- ScaleVal (aka Blabl Inc.), San Francisco: This company provides dashboards and reports intended to quantify and communicate the financial value of what its customers deliver to clients.
- Storylane, Santa Clara: This is a startup with no-code software designed to help marketing and sales teams create and share interactive product demos in 10 minutes.
HR, recruiting, training
- Careerist (aka Job Easy Inc.), Sunnyvale: This 100-person startup offers a learning platform that trains job seekers for tech jobs and also automates their job applications. It partners with small bootcamps and tutors to provide live, job-specific classes.
- Greenwork, San Francisco: This one is starting out with a software platform that helps government-funded training programs find jobs for people they train. But it says its ultimate goal is to build what it calls "LinkedIn for blue-collar workers."
- idemeum, Palo Alto: This one offers a passwordless application management platform designed to be a single place for small and medium businesses to set up and manage employee access to apps. It is also set up to be able to automate employee onboarding and account provisioning.
- itsmello, San Francisco: This startup's software is designed to help companies measure, track and take action to make sure their team members aren't burning out.
- Talentdrop Inc., Atherton: This company operates a marketplace where hiring companies can post bounties for their jobs. Anybody who successfully refers a job candidate collects the reward.
Cryptocurrency, NFTs
- Coinfeeds, San Francisco: This startup says it wants to be the "Bloomberg for crypto." What its software is designed to do is provide real-time news and social sentiment on any cryptocurrency.
- Dime, San Francisco: This startup says it helps creators turn their content into NFTs, the one-of-a-kind digital versions that people can own.
- Hedgehog Technologies, San Jose: This company has developed a cryptocurrency robo-adviser that is designed to help investors automatically find the best prices.
Cybersecurity
- Cloudanix, Sunnyvale: This company says its technology helps DevOps teams improve the security of their cloud infrastructure.
- Keyri, San Francisco: This company provides passwordless signup and login for mobile apps. It is designed to eliminate account takeover fraud by leveraging smartphone biometrics.
- PlusIdentity Inc., San Francisco: This company has built a password manager that's specifically designed for startups. It hopes to eventually grow with them and address other security needs as they mature.
- StandardCode Inc., San Francisco: The company's software automates online ID and age verification of children, helping companies comply with child data privacy laws such as COPPA and GDPR-K.
Artificial intelligence, machine learning
- Evidently AI Inc., San Francisco: This startup is building an open-source standard to evaluate and monitor machine-learning models in production. It is designed to help enterprise data science teams operate their models more reliably and detect and resolve issues.
- Unbox Inc., San Francisco: This company has developed a collaborative quality assurance platform for machine learning. It says this makes it easy for both technical and no-technical people to find failures and biases in models, identify their root causes and make sure they will never happen again.
B2B software tools
- jestor, San Francisco: This startup provides a no-code software tool that chief operating officers can use to automate what they track about how their companies are scaling up.
- Metlo (aka S2 Labs Inc.), San Francisco: This company says it provides a way for companies to handle all of the metrics they use to measure their business in a standardized way.
- OneSchema, San Francisco: This startup says its software lets companies import customer data 10 times faster.
Real estate
- Playhouse (aka Square Footage Inc.), San Francisco: This startup has a mobile app that can be used to browse video listings of homes and neighborhoods.
Other
- Potion AI Inc., San Francisco: This startup offers software that's designed to help R&D teams formulate products like cosmetics and paints. It is designed to do with data what is usually done in labs when designing new molecules. Its first focus is on the beauty and personal care market.
- Rootly Inc., San Francisco: This one has developed an IT incident management platform designed to help companies resolve problems faster by automating manual admin tasks.
