Our 12 favorite startups from Y Combinator’s S20 Demo Day: Part 2

Figma for filmmakers, TikTok for English learners and a cryptocurrency twist that actually makes sense?

After 197 pitches, Y Combinator’s Demo Day for its Summer 2020 cohort has concluded. While the fanfare, run-ins and fortune cookies were missing in this virtual session, it was still exciting to see and hear founders from 26 countries pitch their passions. Of course, some opted for a more quiet route, raising millions before the two-day pitch session even kicked off.

Members of the Summer 2020 class drew attention from nearly 2,400 investors across the world. For those who didn’t tune in, no worries: here’s our write-up of the companies that presented yesterday.

Participating startups spanned a number of sectors: we saw companies in the future of work, sustainability, no-code, consumer, edtech and delivery solutions. Several entrepreneurs aimed big at e-mail, small at socks and straight at Shopify’s recent success.

While TechCrunch reporters aren’t in the business of cutting checks or predicting success, read on to learn about the 12 startups that stuck out to us for a variety of reasons (apart from their Zoom backgrounds).

CarbonChain

Jonathan Shieber

CarbonChain may be the company that times the carbon market correctly. Now that the European Union and other regions are taking a serious look at penalizing businesses that fail to reduce carbon emissions, a service that provides accurate accounting for a company’s carbon footprint will be increasingly valuable.

And if the company can add marketplace and offsetting services on the back of its assessments, then its proposition becomes even more valuable. But what really makes CarbonChain stand out is the rigor with which it approaches its measurements.

The company uses independent software tools to make a digital twin of the carbon-emitting assets in a company’s business and claims that it can determine the emissions footprint of operations down to a cup of coffee (it also has models for the carbon footprint of heavy industrial equipment in the world’s most polluting industries).

For the world to address its carbon emissions, companies must understand their contribution to the problem. CarbonChain could be an invaluable tool in that effort.

Jumpstart

Natasha Mascarenhas

Jumpstart wants to help international founders come to the United States and start businesses. It helps businesses form a U.S. bank account to access services needed to build startups, like Stripe, PayPal and others. But beyond that onboarding process, Jumpstart also handles confusing details that could otherwise stump first-time founders, like filing U.S. tax returns, navigating compliance regulations and staying up to date on bookkeeping. Jumpstart even helps you end your company, if you need to.

Startups that serve startups is a common trend, but as the United States continues to crack down on immigration policies, Jumpstart’s focus feels political in a fascinating way. The regtech startup could help underrepresented, immigrant founders access key information on starting a business in the United States at a faster speed. By taking the onus off of founders to navigate thorny regulations, Jumpstart could effectively become a part of an international startup’s suite of must-have services, right up with AngelList or Carta.

Jumpstart has already attracted more than 1,200 companies to its platform and is profitable.

Afriex and Dapi

Alex Wilhelm

I keep closer tabs on the fintech world than I’d like to admit, so I was enthused to hear pitches today from a few startups that just might be onto something. The first was Afriex, which is using a somewhat recent technological twist on cryptocurrencies to facilitate cross-border money transfers, namely stablecoins.

One issue with buying bitcoin and sending it to someone to avoid fees is that the cryptocurrency is famously volatile, making it a poor tool for remittances and other cross-border monetary transfers. Stablecoins, on the other hand, could be a great proxy for the same effort. And if Afriex can leverage USD-backed stablecoins to move money, it can probably execute transfers quickly and with limited fees.

Afriex could help lots of folks save money by avoiding expensive transfer fees, and make crypto cool again in a single stroke!

And then there was Dapi, another API-focused fintech play. In the shadow of the giant Plaid exit, fintech API plays are not hard to find, though they can still prove pretty neat. Dapi provides both a payment API (wire payments from inside your app, in short) and a data-focused API (see if your customers have money, we think) to developers.

All of that is cool, sure, but cooler is that the company is already generating $0.4 million in ARR. For a Y Combinator Demo Day-stage company, that’s a lot. So, the product must be doing something right, given its market uptake.

Dapi, please let me know when you hit $1 million ARR.

Backlot

Lucas Matney

Building a Figma for video seems to be low-hanging fruit for startups hoping to capitalize on the latest workplace tooling trends for creatives. The real challenge is doing more than simply porting Adobe Premier or Final Cut to a web app and adding collaboration tools.

There have been plenty of entrants, with several even in this YC batch, but I think Backlot is the most interesting, and is far more opinionated about filmmaking itself and how people collaborate. Its video-editing tool pushes the filmmaking itself rather than post-production edits into the software, relying on rich 3D environments that create a stage rather than relying solely on costly green-screen environments. The software goes for $130 per seat per month; not cheap, but a bargain when compared to existing processes.

Quell

Greg Kumparak

COVID-19 makes going to the gym scary, but home gym equipment can take up a ton of space and is often abandoned after a short while. If you’re anywhere near any of the ongoing wildfires, meanwhile, even going outside for a run seems like it could do more harm than good.

As proven by the fact that Nintendo’s Ring Fit Adventure was impossible to find for months (without paying 3x the retail price), people are open to the idea of turning to video games for fitness right now. And as proven by the surge in demand for Peloton in recent months, consumers are willing to pay a monthly subscription to keep their digital fitness content fresh.

Quell mashes the two ideas together. They’ve built a vest with built-in resistance bands that allow you to play combat-heavy games, pairing it with a monthly subscription plan that will allow them to expand the range of content over time.

Hardware is tough, so it’s worth noting that it’s still pretty early days for Quell. They’re right in the middle of a Kickstarter campaign, where they’ve smashed through their $32,000 goal, raising more than $250,000 with over a month left to go. But if they can get this thing out into the world and provide a steady stream of intriguing content, I definitely think they’ll find a following.

LSK Technologies

Lucas Matney

Theranos threw quite the wrench into Silicon Valley’s dreams of miniaturizing labs into desktop solutions, but COVID-19 has brought a renewed push to realize the vision of a device that can bring reliable testing into new environments.

LSK Technologies is building a “lab in a box” to test for infectious diseases. Founders Seray Cicek and Livia Guo both hold Master’s degrees in pharmaceutical sciences with focuses in synthetic biology.

The company is quick to state the limits of early devices, noting that they are only for research purposes at this point, but the startup says it’s currently running Zika virus field trials in Latin America while also looking at how they can bring their computer vision-based approach to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic. They’ve seen over $100,000 in pre-orders to date, the founders note.

Piepacker

Devin Coldewey

Piepacker — no, I don’t get the name either — is a platform where a handful of friends can get together and play retro games together with built-in video chat. It has dozens of licensed games already and more coming.

I wasn’t initially taken by Piepacker, but over the next few minutes, I thought about how in fact I had wanted this exact thing many times and found existing platforms wanting: Discord, Steam, Twitch, even just setting up a video call while playing Switch together all feel lacking.

On the other hand, my friends and I had a blast playing the games on Houseparty and Bunch, even though they kind of suck! What I want is to be playing something with friends who have to go through a minimum of rigmarole. Piepacker seems to offer that, and if it’s pulled off right, it could be the go-to app for a socially distanced crew that on some nights wants to do more than sip beers and stare at the screen.

Thinking about this as a new video platform or a new gaming platform is the wrong way around, I think. What’s needed is virtual replacements for real-life activities, if such a thing is possible. Sitting on the couch playing some game with buddies is surprisingly difficult to recreate, and I’ve had little success myself. I’m hoping Piepacker will be the answer.

Virtually

Natasha Mascarenhas

Virtually sells a white-label product for anyone interested in starting a fully virtual school. The startup essentially threads together several platforms schools are already leaning on for remote education (Zoom, Slack, Airtable), integrating with payment options popular in edtech such as ISAs, and selling an enterprise product.

Virtually coins itself as a “Shopify for online schools” and is founded by Ish Baid, a former Facebook engineer.

This startup sticks out because it is thinking big, and in some ways, boring. Edtech startups often pitch around a singular flashy feature instead of a product, but Virtually sits more in the back-end plumbing space, which will be key if there is a rise in online schools or digital universities following the coronavirus pandemic.

Virtually is not alone in the market of helping schools make digital transformations, so it needs to identify customers who want to experiment with adding online programs but don’t have the time or bandwidth to develop them internally.

Intelline

Devin Coldewey

Diesel generators aren’t exactly cutting-edge, but that just means there’s lots of room for improvement. Intelline is making a new generator that it claims operates with 40% better fuel efficiency than current models.

But it’s also a forward-facing piece of hardware that can (with minimal or no modifications) be adapted for use with biofuels and low- or no-emissions synthetic fuels. I think this is crucial because it’s not just dragging a currently irreplaceable 20th century tech into the 21st, it’s preparing that tech for its next transition as well.

There’s a lot of effort being focused on abandoning the old and shifting to an entirely new system, but that’s not always possible, especially in industries with very specific and sometimes extreme needs. It’s valuable to take stock of what’s fulfilling these needs and be smart about how to change it without disrupting processes and supply chains that billion-dollar businesses will rely on for years to come.

Sure, things like diesel generators don’t have a place in the fantasy city of the future, but even if that fantasy becomes a reality (a big if), they’ll still be needed all over the globe in situations futurists have neglected to learn or care about.

LiYFE

Natasha Mascarenhas

LiYFE is looking to take a slice of the telemedicine market by zeroing in on a specific condition: breast cancer. The startup works with patients throughout their treatment by providing second-opinions on diagnoses, nutrition coaching or connections to services. It even provides pre-cancer screenings and referrals. With telemedicine feeling noisy, especially now, I admire the startup’s focus from the start on one of the most common diseases afflicting women.

But LiYFE’s true magic could be its co-founders, Sherry Chen and Lily Tang. Tang is a breast cancer expert who worked as a medical physicist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, a premier hospital and research institution where she created a satellite radiation oncology clinic. Chen is an engineer who was previously a technical lead at AQR Capital Management, a global investment firm.

Vena Vitals

Devin Coldewey

I read a lot of research papers and there are a few things that seem to pop up year after year but never seem to actually become practical. One of them is flexible, wireless, durable, cheap vitals monitors.

That seems to be what Vena Vitals has created, and while details are lacking, I trust that the due diligence at YC would quickly dispense with the theoretical or limited types I’ve seen written up year after year. So assuming this thing actually works, it could be a huge step forward in medical care.

These little stickers monitor blood pressure and presumably some other adjacent measures that can be derived from that, are easily applied, are flexible, cost $10 to manufacture and sell for $50.

Removing a wire or machine in any given hospital or operating room is invaluable for lots of reasons, and while the cost makes it unlikely to be used for every patient, it could become a staple for certain situations, and as the price drops, the use cases multiply.

I’ve been burned before, however, and I’d want to see some studies and learn about the shortcomings of this device if I’m to get more than cautiously interested. Hopefully Vena Vitals will soon have things like a website and published papers so my interest can graduate to excitement.