Our favorite startups from YC’s Winter 2022 Demo Day, part 2

Image Credits: TechCrunch/Bryce Durbin

And that’s day two in the books!

TechCrunch once again spent much of the day watching a parade of startups present as part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 cohort, Demo Day part two. Yeah, that’s a mouthful. But we did learn quite a lot.

You can find all our coverage here, but what matters is that themes are emerging from the YC milieu. Southeast Asia is a huge startup target, with a host of business models building for its population. Fintech was, again, a huge category of work around the world.

There were also a few surprises. Frankly, we expected more crypto (web3? blockchain?) companies to be in the mix. And while there were a number of API-first startups, there were fewer than we might have guessed. That said, we don’t know the precise monetization method of every software startup that pitched, so we could be undercounting.

As always, to cap off the day, we’ve picked a few favorites from the day’s presentations. Every TechCrunch reporter has their own set of interests and topic areas, so we’re not endorsing any particular company or declaring winners. Instead, they are faves, the companies that caught our eyes as the most interesting. A big thanks to Devin Coldeway, Mary Ann Azevedo and Christine Hall for contributing.

If you need more on demo days, Equity has you covered. And with that, we can get started!

Our favorite startups from YC Winter 2022, day two

The following list is in no particular order. Companies’ websites and authors’ Twitter profiles are linked.

Christine Hall: DimOrder

• Details: DimOrder, a Hong Kong-based company founded in 2019, is developing a restaurant point-of-sale system for Southeast Asia. Its technology enables those in the food and beverage industry to accept online payments, market to customers, order food from suppliers and receive short-term loans.
• Why it’s a fave: Restaurant tech is big right now, and there is a lllloooootttt of funding going into this space. DimOrder is bringing in $183,000 monthly recurring revenue and growing 13% month over month. As the daughter of a former hotel chef, I watched my father make his food ordering lists on a legal pad and call them in. I believe systems like this would have given him that time back to focus on other things.

Alex Wilhelm: Andi

• Details: Described as “search for the next generation,” Andi set itself up as a Google competitor. Good. It’s been a little insane how few startups have tried to take on the search incumbent; after all, Google makes so much money it has managed to fund a multibillion-dollar pet-project program for years and investors have yet to balk! Andi claims 31,000 monthly active users, up some 360% on a month-over-month-basis.
• Why it’s a fave: Using “GPT-3 like” models to build its search tool, Andi is not like Bing, a product that is similar to Google. Instead, the company’s product today is a chatbox-like interface where you ask questions and get answers. This is a big part of how I use search today, with Google acting as my weather forecaster, lightweight calculator and more. Precisely how much of Google’s product Andi will compete with in time isn’t clear from this juncture, but the company is tackling a legit huge problem space. Hell yeah.

Devin Coldeway: Micro Meat

• Details: A new cultivated meat company — yes, another, but this one is focusing on volume from the start, with a claimed 1000x improvement on throughput compared to others out there.
• Why it’s a fave: I’m a big proponent of cultivated meat, since livestock is so unbelievably damaging to our planet. But it seems like no company plans for scaling from the start, instead focusing on taste or similarity to existing meats. Who cares if it’s only 95% similar to ground beef if you can make 100 tons a day! It’s just going in Hamburger Helper anyway. So I’m hoping Micro Meat’s claims actually pan out … this is an aspirational fave.

Alex Wilhelm: Theneo

• Details: A software service that claims to use AI to help customers automatically generate API documentation.
• Why it’s a fave: The company wants to help its customers create “Stripe-like” API documentation. That may sound niche, but Stripe is well-known in tech circles for having great docs. Why does that matter? Because if you sell to developers, you really do want to make sure that your marketing page (API documentation) is up to snuff. Think about the services and companies out there working on startup marketing. This is like that but for developer-first companies. Also with more and more startups choosing to build APIs over other products, the market for Theneo is only scaling. (And once it has a good number of customers, product expansion seems like a strong possibility.)

Christine Hall: BeU

• Details: BeU is an on-demand food delivery service in Africa that will not only bring you food from local restaurants, but also make door-to-door food deliveries. The company touts itself as “the No. 1 food delivery service in Ethiopia” and plans to expand its services into new markets.
• Why it’s a fave: First, I LOVED founder Hao Zheng’s pitch. It’s clear she is targeting Rappi, throwing a few jabs in that BeU is already growing 20% faster than Rappi did when that company was in YC. She aims to be the super app for Africa in five years, and with the company’s 72% month-over-month growth (also something she points out is faster than Rappi), I don’t doubt that she can accomplish that.

Alex Wilhelm: Avocademy

• Details: Avocademy is a UI/UX — user interface, user experience — bootcamp that charges $2,000 for an eight-week course. Yes, the bootcamp boom is behind us, but Avocademy claims some $360,000 in monthly revenue, which is a lot.
• Why it’s a fave: The startup not only reported eye-catching traction, but also features a focus on helping underrepresented groups into the UI/UX space, which is to say the technology market. That’s great and something that many companies have failed to do, even wealthy corporations that could do more. Here’s a startup that, it appears, has strong business traction and is changing the ratio!

Devin Coldeway: Fleetzero

• Details: A fleet of electric cargo ships powered by swappable shipping container batteries.
• Why it’s a fave: I wrote this company up already (see below!), and I think it has a lot of separate innovations and insights going for it. The smaller ships fit in smaller ports, where there are also nearby locations to store and charge the batteries, and the bigger the fleet, the more efficient it is. It sounds like it might actually happen!

Alex Wilhelm:  Amal Invest

• Details: An investing app aimed at the Muslim market.
• Why it’s a fave: Most fintech apps aimed at particular demographics feel like their TAM is a bit small for their aspirations. That isn’t the case with Amal Invest. The company wants to help Muslims invest in things that don’t run afoul of their faith. More simply, it helps users put their funds into things that halal. I dig this. First, I haven’t heard of another startup doing it and the idea feels somewhat obvious, which means that Amal Invest could be sitting on a gusher. And, two, I am big on fintech helping groups of people that are left out of the current financial world find more inclusion in it. This nails the idea.

Mary Ann Azevedo: digiventures

Note: This is a startup from the first day that Mary Ann got to write up today!

• Details: Buenos Aires-based digiventures was founded in 2018, so it’s had a few years to build some traction. The SaaS startup says it enables banks in Latin America “to digitize their loan origination and account opening process.” Specifically, it helps banks and other financial institutions to first get digitized. In Latin America especially, many still lag in this respect. The startup then works with them to acquire new customers as well as originate new loans and open new accounts digitally, working with them early in their lifecycle.
  
• Why it’s a fave: As consumer demand for more digital financial services has increased, so has the need for the type of infrastructure that digiventures is providing. Impressively, without much funding, the startup says it is live with 30 clients, including seven banks in nine countries. Frankly, this kind of traction is not typical of companies participating in Y Combinator cohorts and it definitely caught my attention.
  

There were so many other neat companies: Livedocs was cool. Hyperbeam was neat. Heptabase? We can see a huge market for that company. Janani is a good idea, and Joon was another standout. Charge Robotics sounds like a cool way to move to more renewable power, more quickly. Kable has a name that made us laugh and is building on what TechCrunch considers to be fertile ground. Spinach.io has a great name. Voize is something that we can see our friends in healthcare using, provided there aren’t data privacy issues. Impossible Mining is going to impact geopolitics if its model works. You get the idea.

But that is enough for the day. Now, onto other things!