TechCrunch’s top 16 picks from Techstars April virtual demo days

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Like other accelerators, Techstars, a network of more than 40 corporate and geographically targeted startup bootcamps, has had to bring its marquee demo day events online.

Over the last two weeks of April, industry-focused accelerators working with startups building businesses around mobility technologies (broadly) and the future of the home joined programs in Abu Dhabi, Bangalore, Berlin, Boston, Boulder and Chicago to present their cohorts.

Each group had roughly 10 companies pitching businesses that ran the gamut from early-childhood education to capturing precious metals from the waste streams of mining operations. There were language companies, security companies, marketing companies and even a maker of a modular sous vide product for home chefs.

The ideas were as creative as they were varied, and while all seemed promising, about two concepts from each batch stood out above the rest.

What follows is our completely unscientific picks of the top companies that pitched at each of these virtual Techstars demo days. In late May or early June, expect to see our roundup of the next batch of top picks from the their next round of demo days.

Hub71

Techstars’ inaugural cohort for its accelerator run in conjunction with Abu Dhabi-based technology incubator Hub71 included a number of novel businesses spanning climate, security, retail, healthcare and property tech. Standouts in this batch included Sia Secure and Aumet (with an honorable mention for the novel bio-based plastic processing and reuse technology developer, Poliloop).

• Aumet: With more than 50,000 medical manufacturers worldwide and distributors working to determine who to buy from and sell to, the medical equipment market is a massive and massively inefficient one. Aumet is pitching a service looking to bring transparency to an industry that claims $250 billion in sales in the Middle East alone.
• Sia Secure: Another company with a particularly timely pitch in the COVID-19 era, Sia Secure boasts an impressive founding team looking to build a business solving the problem of secure online communications. As the number of digital cameras proliferate, so does the potential that those cameras could be hacked. Sia offers a secure software service that device manufacturers and video communications providers can integrate to ensure that communications channels are locked down.

Mobility Accelerator

Techstars’ Torino-based mobility accelerator is focused on smart cities and smart mobility. Pitches ranged from water-monitoring technologies for snowmelt to communication and payment infrastructure for vehicles.

• V2X Network: This Munich-based startup founded by a clutch of Nvidia engineers is building an autonomous transaction network for vehicles. Applications range from vehicle charging to entertainment to integration with urban mobility services. “We connect the digital identity of the car with a bank account and we store the cash inside the car’s wallet,” said chief executive officer Ahsan Shamim. “The market for connected vehicle services is expected to be $1.5 trillion dollars.”
• Tuc Technology: Sergio Pininfarina, the chief executive of Tuc Technology, comes from a long line of Italian car designers known for their close partnership with a whole host of automakers (including, most famously, Ferrari). His family founded the eponymous auto company, Pininfarina, and ran the company until its sale to Mahindra Group in 2015. At Tuc, the younger Pininfarina is pitching a patented modular interior design platform that mirrors work being done by companies like Canoo, looking to bring it to the mass auto market.

BSH Future Home Accelerator

The corporate accelerator program based in Germany and organized in conjunction with appliance and home goods maker BSH Group is focused (nominally) on tools for connected homes and companies to manage data associated with them. A few interesting startups in the bunch were tangentially connected to home automation (like Quant Co, which pitched artificial intelligence as a service), but the gadgets in this cohort won out with pitches for a modular sous vide and cooking app and a smart locker that integrated with tracking systems to protect against porch thieves.

• Nise: In the new world of COVID-19 cooking, devices like the Nise, a modular sous vide device connected to an app with step-by-step cooking instructions and an integration with online grocery stores, seems like an easy sell. Indeed, since its launch on Indiegogo, the company has sold $400,000 worth of its devices. The team boasts programmers from Facebook and chefs from one of Canada’s top restaurants.
• PorchPod: The ugly-but-practical PorchPod is a Wi-Fi-enabled smart locker for packages. It unlocks by scanning a package’s tracking bar code to provide access to any legitimate delivery, according to the company, accepting multiple deliveries over time.

Bangalore

The geographically defined accelerator based in India’s teeming tech hub had a number of fascinating business ideas come through its program. Top picks included a cloud-spending optimization service and a managed marketplace for warehouse space with an honorable mention for Lancify, a training and job placement program for SaaS sales.

• Lightwing: Business operations are increasingly run on hosted computing platforms like Azure and AWS, but most businesses don’t have a great grasp on what they’re spending and how much of their money is being wasted unnecessarily. Lightwing’s team wants to solve that problem with a managed service that monitors and optimizes computing resources on cloud platforms so companies can cut costs.
• Odwen: “We are building India’s largest and fully integrated warehouse network,” says Vijay Anand Bhagavatula, chief executive and founder of Odwen. Small and medium-sized warehouses make up 90% of the storage capacity in India and cover 300 million square feet of storage. “These mom-and-pop warehouses store inventory for 50 million SME companies. This inventory is at risk and we are going to change this,” says Bhagavatula. The company provides software and security technologies to upgrade warehouse storage and safety.

Berlin

Another geographically focused accelerator based in the growing entrepreneurial ecosystem of Berlin, the cohort boasted some strong showings from across the European Union and beyond. Standouts in digital marketing and language learning were complemented by companies like Recroot, which is trying to solve the problem of how to hire hourly workers quickly and efficiently using video profiles.

• Kitchn.io: A marketing-automation software service that catches mistakes in advertising on social media before they’re distributed to the wide world, Kitchn.io is making a pitch for a multi-billion-dollar advertising category. Users can pick from templates that the company calls recipes to automate marketing messaging on Facebook. In March, the company automated 7,000 tasks and has 43 agencies and companies working with its software.
• Beelinguapp: Already used by more than three million people, David Montiel’s language-learning app Beelinguapp presents potential investors with an impressive existing user base. A former language teacher and programmer at Google, LinkedIn and eBay, Montiel is a lifelong teacher and student of language learning. Using parallel text displays and audio, Montiel’s app uses popular songs and stories to teach different languages. Users pay for a premium subscription and the company is already profitable, boasting more than 250,000 monthly active users.

Boston

Techstars Boston’s demo day had a wide variety of companies on offer, like S/O/S, a vending-machine tech shop that wants to bring women’s essentials to where they are needed, and a health tech company working in Brazil (Precavida). But while those companies were neat, a few others really caught our eye.

• Phoenix Tailings: Mining is a notoriously dirty business, one that is as carbon-intensive as it is ecologically damaging. Phoenix Tailings has an interesting approach to make the entire mining business a bit more efficient and green. In short, it takes tailings ponds (huge artificial lakes full of post-mining sludge), and re-mines them for other metals often used in technology products. The process won’t end tailings ponds and the problems they pose, but if its tech works as well as it hopes, Phoenix could cut down on a nasty process and marginally reduce mining’s environmental impact.
• Cortex: As the internet transitions from its text-roots to a more image-based future, what images sites use — or don’t use — could impact brand awareness, click-through rates and more. Cortex wants to bring a little intelligence to how websites handle images, allowing companies to present different segments of their traffic with different images so they can make the best impression. In time, if Cortex gets its way, the internet you see will be increasingly visually tailored to what you like, and, what’s most likely to get your wallet out. (The company’s website doesn’t have pricing information, but we presume Cortex is a SaaS company.)

Boulder

On Techstars’ home turf, companies like VideoPeel (from a former Facebook developer) pitched an easy tool to make customer testimonials and BestShot offered an adherence program for fertility treatments. But for us, the standouts tackled issues of remote education and data transfer that seemed particularly prescient in these pandemic times.

• Beanstalk: Amy Molk, founder and chief executive of Beanstalk, noted that 79% of kids are watching more videos on screens than the World Health Organization recommends. “Since screen time isn’t going away we are going to change it,” says Molk. Beanstalk has programs in STEM, music and art and offers live segments to teach various skills and subjects with video replays online. Kids can share work and engage in interactive games, rewards, missions and achievements. “Kids are part of the content,” says Molk.
• Sympatic: With a pitch to monitor and manage data sharing between organizations, Sympatic, founded by a University of Chicago researcher, gives access between different organizations to data through a single channel. Sympatic logs activity and creates a data audit. “Existing data sharing relies on trust, Sympatic lets you verify,” says Piers Nash, the company’s chief executive. Data analytics and sharing is a $3 trillion business, according to Nash and Sympatic is looking for its piece of that pie.

Chicago

Techstars Chicago demo day had a few surprises this year. With presenting companies running the gamut from cybersecurity (more on that in a second), to ad campaigns projected onto windows, there was a lot of creativity to parse through. As with every batch, however, a few companies left a deeper impression.

• Havoc Shield: In 2019, working from home was still somewhat rare amongst office types, but in 2020, it’s rarer to actually go into work at all for that same cohort. Havoc Shield, which helps small businesses, individuals and remote workers stay safe, is probably seeing good business momentum. Its service (remote security policies, training, phishing simulations, etc.), runs from $8 to $12 per month, inexpensive enough for nearly any business that needs to keep workers connected, but safe. Cybersecurity has been a hot market in the last few years, even before remote work went mainstream. It will be interesting to see if Havoc Shield can parlay this unique moment into rapid growth.
• ContractCloud: With the Federal Reserve’s money printer continuing to go brrr and more cash destined to land in the hands of governments at all levels to deal with the economic fallout from the COVID-19 epidemic, access to government contracts becomes more important for small businesses. ContractCloud, founded by Michelle Atkinson, aims to provide transparency around government contracts available to small businesses. As Atkinson notes, the U.S. government remains one of the largest buyers on the planet. “We are democratizing access to government contracts,” says Atkinson. A monthly subscription gets companies access to potential opportunities and provides a proposal outline giving applicants a framework to use to bid on a government contract.