Startup incubator and investment group Y Combinator today held the first of two demo days for founders in its Summer 2020 batch.
So far, this cohort contains the usual mix of bold, impressive and, at times, slightly wacky ideas young companies so often show off.
This was Y Combinator’s second online demo day, its first all-virtual class and the first time that it held live, remote pitches. The event largely went well, with founders dialing in from around the globe to share a few paragraphs of notes and a single slide. There were few technical hiccups, given the sheer number of startups presenting.
But if you are not in the mood to parse through dozens (and dozens) of entries detailing each startup that showed off its problem, solution and growth, the TechCrunch crew has collected our own favorites based on how likely a company seems to succeed and how impressed we were with the creativity of their vision. For each entry, one staffer made the call that the startup in question was among their favorites.
We’re not investors, so we’re not pretending to sort the unicorns from the goats. But if what you need is a digest of some of the day’s best companies to get a good taste of what founders are building, we have your back. (Update, 8.25: click the link directly below for the second day, too).
ZipSchool and Hellosaurus
The next wave of edtech startups is entering a market that demands a better remote-learning solution for younger learners. But that’s the obvious product gap, one that is already being tackled by the biggest names in the booming category.
The non-obvious product-market deficit is how teachers, also impacted by the pandemic, are searching for new ways to interact with students. Teachers are collaborating and cross-pollinating on successful lesson plans that work across stale Zoom screens, so why not monetize that same content?
The trend of teachers transitioning into creators is why ZipSchool and Hellosaurus stood out to me from today’s Demo Day.
ZipSchool and Hellosaurus are bringing the creator economy to edtech by giving teachers who already post content to TikTok and YouTube a monetizable platform.
Both startups take a Sesame Street-style approach to online learning by mixing education and entertainment in one fell swoop. In Hellosaurus’ case, it provides young creators a way to monetize content that would otherwise live free on YouTube. So far, the contracts it has landed already opens them up to more than 50 million families, it claims. For ZipSchool, live online classes are taught over Zoom on topics ranging from dinosaurs to space.
I’m bullish on these platforms because they treat teachers like creators instead of people who simply log onto Zoom and do a job from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. It’s unlikely that both startups will win. But, aggregating an economy of teacher/creators could be a lucrative data set down the road.
Image: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch
Jika
As a platform, Shopify simultaneously feels both poised for unbundling and duly ripe for platform integrations. Perhaps these are just more side effects of its quick ascension to the top of small business e-commerce solutions. Nevertheless, there’s still plenty of room for the smallest sellers to lean more on the platform to help them rake in revenues.
Jika is an A/B testing platform specifically focused on helping Shopify sellers optimize pricing for products and services. Small businesses are a massive business sector and as more storefronts push online for the first time due to the pandemic, there’s a big opportunity for automated tools to help them rethink their business’ core assumptions.
Bikayi and Decentro
Early on in the day, it was clear that India and Southeast Asia were going to be a focus for a number of startups presenting. Given recent geopolitical tensions between India and China and the United States and China, India’s rising mobile internet market and the recent scramble from companies around the world to pour money into Reliance Jio, it was perhaps not a surprise to see such attuned attention to the country.
A few names stood out quickly, including Bikayi and Decentro. Here’s a bit more on why they caught my attention:
- Bikayi is building Shopify for India. The recent returns of Shopify, even as Amazon and Walmart have prospered in the West, shows that markets with incumbent e-commerce players can support e-commerce platforms aimed at giving smaller retailers their own stores, as in India, which is divided by Flipkart and Amazon. If Bikayi can reach similar market share to Shopify’s reach in North America, it’s going to be huge.
- Decentro wants to build Plaid for India, which makes good sense. Banking APIs don’t sprout from the ground, they need to be built, and the fintech boom will have as much play in India as other markets, we reckon. So why not Decentro, in the middle, making money as people move their funds around?
Past the pair of them there were a number of startups focused on the Indian healthcare market, including Farmako Healthcare (digital health records) and MedPiper Technologies (hiring of health professionals in the Indian market). It will be exciting to see if there are as many India-focused startups tomorrow when there’s another huge cohort to parse through.
Image: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch
ChatPay
2020 was the year Substack ate Medium, but what comes next for the creator/subscriber relationship? As creators flock to create paid newsletter networks, there’s the question of how creators can monetize the types of interactions that take place on Twitter and have more direct relationships with super fans via exclusive chat groups.
ChatPay is building a startup in this same world, though it’s focusing on domain experts in Latin America, helping them monetize WhatsApp channels they use to coach users about various topics. The app handles membership in the groups as well as payments, support and affiliate referrals.
Rally
When the pandemic hit, lots of folks wound up in interminable Zooms or Hangouts trying to foster some sort of camaraderie to patch over what we’d lost by zeroing-out our social lives. The Zooms fizzled over time, at least if your friend group is anything like our own.
Rally wants to improve upon the video chat model with breakout rooms that still keep you connected to the ambient noise from others that might be able to provide a more relaxing — and maybe realistic? — digital environment for human connection. Whether its model is truly better — and how it may monetize long-term — aren’t clear. But a video service aimed at friends instead of corporate meetings sounds great to us.
Glimpse
Building stuff is hard — and once it’s done, getting it in front of customers can be even harder. Meanwhile, keeping the stuff in a rental property in working order and up to date can be time-consuming and expensive.
Glimpse mashes these two problems together into one new idea.
Glimpse turns short-term rental housing into marketing channels, allowing brands to pay property owners to install the brand’s stuff (like D2C mattresses, furniture, art, etc.). Client brands receive what is basically an extended demo with a potential buyer, the homeowner gets help furnishing their place (and gets paid) and renters get to use what should be newer, nicer gear during their stay. The company says it currently has around 1,000 properties across North America on its platform.
I’ve totally bought something (a coffee grinder I’d probably have never tried otherwise) after using it for the first time in an Airbnb, so this one makes sense to me.
Arist
Devin Coldewey
Arist does employee-training courses for things like safety and racism, but entirely via text — no 1990s-looking slideshows or corny dramatizations. They claim it’s faster and has a higher completion rate than traditional courses.
As someone who’s had to sit through numerous training videos of varying quality, I’d try out just about any alternative to these clunky, outdated platforms. Doing it all via text on my phone seems like a great option, and one that fits into my existing processes better. Plus it’s easy and unobtrusive to ping me during working hours to finish a course rather than making me log in to a whole platform.
Adyn
To make contraception less of a black box, Adyn is building a test to help women in the United States figure out which birth control method is the best fit for their bodies. Users can take a test and based on their genetic and hormonal profiles, the startup will give them a recommendation. In addition, the startup will connect customers to specialists.
Adyn is a test designed to prevent birth control side effects. It launched 3 weeks ago: pic.twitter.com/4MJmi1f7d8
— natasha mascarenhas (@nmasc_) August 24, 2020
Founder Elizabeth Ruzzo has a PhD in genetics and genomics from Duke University. Ruzzo has also led a research project at UCLA and Stanford that used genetic sequencing to identify 25 new autism genes. Adyn is a startup she started based on a problem she faced herself.
Adyn is tackling both the lack of conversation and the dearth of information around contraception, a gap that disproportionately impacts low-income households. Sex education, despite being funded publicly, still has a long way to go before it becomes accessible to all. I welcome private efforts to make it better.
Vitable
Devin Coldewey
Employer-provided health insurance is a privilege many people lack, but those employers can’t always afford such services. Vitable provides a basic service that leans on nurse practitioners and telehealth, providing some crucial healthcare support for a fraction of the price of full employer-managed insurance.
Any company looking to get health benefits to living-wage workers is worth looking closer at, in my opinion. I prefer something like this to walk-up clinics, because this also provides catastrophic insurance and you deal with it more like a regular modern healthcare provider. It’s not good that we need a solution like this, but I’d rather have a $50 bare-bones plan for people just getting by than have it be entirely ad hoc or via Medicare.
Want our Day 2 picks from YC S20 demo day? Click here.