Ravi Belani, the managing partner of Alchemist Accelerator, had a message to share before getting to the business of hearing from founders of the incubator's latest Demo Day class Tuesday.
"I hope everybody is more grateful now for each breath that they're taking, and that you are using your breath to do what you are destined to do in this world today," Belani said. The hard times caused by Covid-19 bear a lesson for each of us, Belani said, especially that the pandemic showed people that they shouldn't take things for granted, like the ability to breathe.
And with that, Alchemist kicked off its 28th Demo Day, which showcased 23 companies — six of which are located in the Bay Area with five of those based in San Francisco.
The Palo Alto-based accelerator focuses on seed-stage companies whose customers are enterprises, rather than consumers, and offers a six-month program that primarily serves teams with technical founders. Its network of mentors, customer advisers, investors and partners has grown to more than 17,000 individuals since its founding in 2012.
Alchemist saw some of its biggest funding raises during the past year, Belani said. More than 180 of Alchemist's portfolio companies have received institutional investments or significant seed raises, and 41 of them have been acquired.
Here are the six Bay Area companies featured in Alchemist's 28th Demo Day:
Creatify
- San Francisco
- Platform to create, sell and buy NFTs
- Founders: Mike Krilivsky, Nick Fallon, Reza Handley
- For people interested in creating, selling or buying non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, Creatify offers a platform that doesn't require users to code in order to create the image-based crypto assets. Users can also buy and sell NFTs by using a credit card or bank account, rather than cryptocurrency (though crypto is an option).
Speechki
- San Francisco
- Audiobook recording with synthetic voices
- Founders: Dima Abramov, Sergey Baranov
- Speechki is a cloud-based audiobook recording platform that uses artificial voices. A normal audiobook takes 30 days and costs roughly $5,000 to record, whereas Speechki's artificial voice can record a book in 12 hours at a cost of $400. The platform records and proofs in 72 different languages and features 250 different artificial voices.
11Sight
- San Francisco
- Instant customer engagement platform
- Founders: Aleks Gollu, Farokh Eskafi
- 11Sight lets companies instantly connect with current and prospective customers by connecting them through a video or audio call. Prospects can make a call to a company through their Facebook and LinkedIn pages or through the company's website. "People buy from the business they connect with first," said co-founder and CEO Aleks Gollu.
The Bright App
- San Francisco
- Back office tool for personal trainers
- Founders: Nerissa Zhang, James Zhang
- When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, many one-on-one personal trainers lost access to their main platform for doing business: fitness clubs and gyms. The Bright App replaces that platform with a one-on-one video interface and also provides personal trainers with lead generation, sales, scheduling and billing functions.
EMBER Medical
- San Francisco
- SaaS toolkit for physicians in the Middle East and North Africa
- Founders: Shadi Wahba, Mohamed Elshazly
- EMBER Medical has built an all-in-one software-as-a-service platform for physicians in the Middle East and North Africa. The company's platform includes patients' electronic medical records and digital tools for telemedicine, scheduling and payment tools. The platform also includes a doctor's directory system and an easy way for new patients to contact doctors.
Tensorfield Agriculture
- Union City
- Agricultural vision and microfluidics tech
- Founders: Xiong Chang, Sandeep Mirchandani, Louise Thomas, Cheehan Weereratne
- Weeding crops can be an expensive and costly enterprise, particularly in a time when farm labor is scarce. Tensorfield Agriculture lessens the need for human labor by using robots to scan fields for weeds using computer vision. The robots then use precisely-targeted thermal microdosing — the application of hot, food-safe oils — to kill weeds.
