“You’ll notice we have many more startups that aren’t in the traditional software category,” said Y Combinator President Sam Altman at the start of its Winter 2016 Demo Day 1. While once upon a time YC was known for legions of social and marketplace apps no one needed, it’s branched out. Now Silicon Valley’s top accelerator features tons of hardware, engineering, alternative energy and enterprise startups, too.
The afternoon began with a moment of silence for Andy Grove, former Intel CEO and beloved business mentor, as well as the victims of this morning’s terrorist attacks in Brussels.
Y Combinator President Sam Altman
The house at YC’s Demo Day was packed — more than anyone expected, it would seem. A few chairs short, millionaires from around the world could be seen sitting on the floor to watch startup after startup strut their stuff — many of them for the first time.
The big theme of the day was profitability. In the past, YC startups have highlighted their growth, downplaying profitability as some saw it as a sign that they were shooting too small or not reinvesting enough. But due to the market correction, VCs are more keen on startups that can become sustainable faster and won’t need endless funding to succeed. Today, many startups mentioned that they were already profitable, would be in several months, or were in specific markets where you don’t account for money spent trying to expand.
Yet Altman told us that investment was “hotter” today than he’s ever seen it, with VCs aggressively pushing to invest on the spot. For the last year, he says YC has been telling startups to raise less and get to profitability faster in anticipation of a frosty fundraising climate. Yet now he believes the correction “hasn’t trickled down yet” but maybe will by next Demo Day. Altman also mentioned that the $1 billion Cruise self-driving tech acquisition has bolstered investors’ interest in hard-tech companies.
Sixty-three companies launched in all today, with 3 of them being noted as “off the record” in advance (that is, they’re a bit too early-days for media coverage; as always, we’ve honored that request). Here’s a look at the 60 we can talk about.
The companies from Day 1:
Nurx – Uber for birth control:
Getting birth control can be quite difficult — one needs to have a means of getting to a doctor and be comfortable speaking with a doctor about it. With Nurx, you pick a birth control and one of their doctors writes the prescription and ships it directly.
MagicBus – Google shuttles for everyone:
Commuting between cities and suburbs can be a pain. MagicBus tries to be the best of both worlds — affordable and fast. MagicBus vehicles can fit up to 14 people and guarantees riders few stops. The transportation between cities to suburbs market is $1 trillion, according to the company. MagicBus says it is growing 50 percent month over month, with 48 percent of riders using the service every day. Read more about MagicBus on TechCrunch here.
Paystack – Online payments for African businesses:
Despite solid Internet penetration, most payments in the 180 million-person country of Nigeria are done offline. Paystack lets businesses accept payments via credit card, debit card, money transfer and mobile money on their websites or mobile apps. The integration takes just 30 minutes, rather than 3 weeks, and reduces the payment process from 7 steps to 2 steps. Paystack costs businesses $0.50 plus 1.9 percent for local cards and 3.9 percent for international cards. By unlocking online payments, Paystack could help African businesses thrive with the next generation of customers.
Tovala – Smart oven with a companion subscription meal service:
This is a set-and-forget smart oven that can automatically cook meals “to perfection.” When you put one of their tech-enabled meals into their oven, it knows the exact timing/temperatures required to cook your meal. They also have a subscription plan that sends ready-to-cook meals to your door. They have raised $240,000 on Kickstarter.
Redspread – Development software:
Downtime costs companies a lot of money — about $26.5 billion in lost revenue, to be exact. As it turns out, human error is the biggest cause of downtime. That’s where Redspread, which builds collaborative deployment tools, comes in. Redspread launched three weeks ago.
Gecko Robotics – Industrial safety inspections done by robots:
U.S. power plants spend $15 billion a year doing safety inspections of their industrial infrastructure. But these inspections can take seven days, with plants losing $1 million a day in business, and they’re dangerous. Gecko Robotics has designed its own safety inspection robot that can climb walls and do dangerous jobs fast and cheap. For $50,000 to $100,000, it can do a 7-day inspection in just a single day, while collecting more data and not putting lives at risk. Gecko expects to be profitable this year and plans to expand to adjacent industries soon. The startup is driven by a desire to eliminate the tragic stories of safety inspectors falling to their their deaths.
Kisan Network – Marketplace for Indian farmers:
This is an online marketplace for farmers in India to sell directly to institutional buyers, which the team says is a $200 billion industry. The farmer — say a potato farmer — uploads details of his harvest. A buyer — like, say, a potato chip maker — finds them potatoes on their marketplace and purchases them.
Outschool – Class marketplace for homeschoolers:
Learning can come in many different ways, especially outside of the classroom. Outschool is a class marketplace for homeschoolers that offers classes and field trips for kids around topics like anatomy, space and photography. This week alone, Outschool says it’s on track to sell $14,000 worth of classes.
Cover – Get insurance by taking a photo:
Getting insurance can be a hassle, but with Cover, you just take a photo of your car, home, pet, jewelry, speedboat or race horses. Right now, Cover farms out these leads to other insurance companies and is collecting $190,000 per month in referrals fees. But next it’s getting licensed to sell insurance directly so it can keep all the commissions, which amount to a $22 billion per year market in the U.S. By making insurance buying mobile, Cover could recruit a new generation of customers focused on convenience.
Rappi – Grocery delivery in Columbia:
Rappi aims to be a combination of Instacart and Postmates for Latin America. It charges customers a 70 cent fee for delivery, while paying delivery people roughly $2/hour — a generous and competitive rate for the area, according to the company’s Latin American founders.
Toymail – Mobile phones built for kids:
Ninety-five percent of kids under the age of 10 in the U.S. don’t have cell phones, but parents want to stay in touch with them. They just don’t want kids playing on their phones too much or contacting strangers. So Toymail, which sold $10 million-worth of an alarm clock that runs away from you, has built plush doll toys that are actually phones. Kids can use them to send voice messages to their parents, other family members or friends with Toymail phones. Selling hardware to these kids could be a $3 billion business, but Toymail is planning an app store full of games, stories and educational apps that it will sell, too. Amazon is already signed up as a developer. Toymail could make buying a cell phone for your toddler safe. Read more about Toymail on TechCrunch.
Chatfuel – Chatbot platform:
Connecting with your followers and fan base in meaningful ways continues to be a challenge for businesses. With Chatfuel, those looking to build and engage an audience can use the native interface to create bots that help facilitate conversations. More than 130,000 bots have been created on the platform. Publishers, like TechCrunch and Forbes, can build on Chatfuel and deploy to any messengers. To date, Chatfuel sees more than 1 million daily active users.
Read more about Chatfuel on TechCrunch here.
Varden Labs — Self driving shuttles for private campuses:
These are self-driving shuttles (sort of like big golf carts) for private campuses like colleges and company headquarters. They have paid pilots ongoing at six college campuses. Their shuttle costs $50,000 per year to operate. Its three founders met while majoring in engineering at the University of Waterloo.
Stitch — Slack for doctors:
Messaging platforms are taking off in just about every industry. Stich is a healthcare messaging platform for healthcare, doctors, nurses, social workers, pharmacists and others. It’s HIPPA-compliant and integrates with electronic health records. It’s growing 40 percent month over month with more than 400 organizations already signed up for Stitch. The secret to the growth, they say, is the focus on nursing homes, rehab facilities, pharmacies and urgent care centers. Stitch claims it has a lot of engagement, with users spending 8 hours a day on it, and sending 20 messages each per day. Read more about Stitch on TechCrunch here.
Focal Systems – Smart shopping carts:
Focal Systems has designed an indoor positioning system that is said to be 14X more accurate than iBeacons and 20X cheaper. The startup retrofits old shopping carts with a camera phone and their positioning system so the carts know where they are in the store. The phone can help shoppers navigate the store and show contextual, targeted ads right as they pass by the advertised product on the shelf. Focal Systems’ demos have shown they can raise revenue by $100,000 per month. The company charges $2,500 per month per store and splits the ad revenue with the store 50/50. It already has a deal lined up with Safeway grocery stores that could bring in $66 million in a year. Walking through brick-and-mortar stores feels stuck in the past. By updating the experience with indoor positioning and screens, it could get easier and much more lucrative for merchants.
STILT – Loans for non-US students and working professionals:
After coming to the U.S. as educated, legal citizens, Stilt’s founders realized how difficult it was for immigrants to get loans due to a lack of U.S. credit history. Stilt focuses on providing loans for them: $431K of loans so far, $60K of which has been paid back, with 0 percent defaults to date.
PetCube – Dropcam for pets:
People are obsessed with their pets and want peace of mind that they’re okay when left alone at home. In the last 15 months, PetCube has made $2.5 million revenue selling its home camera for pet owners. In total, the company has sold 20,000 units at a retail price of $199. PetCube sells its product in more than 400 stores, including Nordstrom, Best Buy and Brookstone, with over half of its sales coming from retail. This year, PetCube is launching a subscription service, as well as launching a connected treat dispenser. Read more about PetCube on TechCrunch here.
Goodybag – Easy catering for offices:
Goodybag makes it simple to order food for your office, a $30 billion a year market in the U.S. But rather than mess with low-margin on-demand delivery, Goodybag simply facilitates the ordering. It’s earning about 10 percent on transactions, giving it $5.5 million in annual revenue run rate, of which it keeps $600,000. The startup has already made its Austin market profitable and can hit break-even in 6 months as it expands to new cities. With 93 percent retention and $350 shopping carts (10X that of consumer food ordering), Goodybag has found a part of the food ordering market that can actually earn money.
StyleBee — On-demand beauticians:
Blowouts, makeup and men’s haircuts on demand. Pick a job and tell them where you are, and they send a vetted stylist to you. Sixty percent of StyleBee customers use it once a month. They’ve hit a $1 million run rate in the past 12 months in SF alone, with margins of around 35 percent per job. Read more about StyleBee on TechCrunch here.
Airmada — Drone automation platform:
Automated ground stations for drones, built by Armada, are designed to replace expensive, human operators. Armada ground stations house, charge and launch drones for various types of missions. It’s first deployment is in the Panama Canal, where it delivers parcels from the port to ships for just $300.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DI9rqu_J5U8
Revl – Stabilized action camera:
GoPros aren’t getting that much better year after year, so fewer people feel like they need to buy the newest one. But Revl has addressed the biggest problem with action cameras — stabilization. It combines physical and digital stabilization to make its footage extra smooth. Revl also offers automatic editing software so you can share your best moments without having to sit down at a computer for boring manual video editing. The $10 billion action camera market is growing 22 percent every year, but Revl could make it accessible to people who aren’t good at photography or editing. Revl is now on Indiegogo where it’s sold $70,000-worth in the last 4 days. Read more about Revl on TechCrunch.
Poppy – On-demand babysitters:
On-demand babysitters, all handled over SMS. This month, they’ll handle roughly 500 babysitting appointments — with all growth happening by word-of-mouth, and at a current rate of about 50 percent per month. They currently have 40 vetted sitters available in the Seattle area.
UnnyWorld – A mobile League Of Legends clone:
The multiplayer desktop dueling game League Of Legends has hit 27 million daily active users and earns $1 billion a year. UnnyWorld wants to bring a similar game to mobile. It’s designed for short sessions of around 5 minutes so gamers can play on the go. And rather than a keyboard, players can cast spells and coordinate complex attacks with finger gestures. Built by a 12-person squad that’s been together for 5 years, UnnyWorld’s team has already built games with a total of 5.4 million downloads. It’s beta see users playing for 30 minutes per day on average, and the global launch is planned for September. While cloning popular games might not be prestigious, bringing the League Of Legends experience to mobile could be quite lucrative.
Trac – Simple timing for track teams:
People collectively spend billions of dollars a year around races; $2 billion goes to race tracking. That’s where Trac comes in. Trac wants to make it easy for any and every race to offer professional-caliber timing at an affordable price. Trac provides chips for runners to place on their shoes, and the time-tracking hardware for the race host to place at the finish line.
WorldCover – Crop insurance for the developing world:
500 million farmers around the world are at the whimsy of the weather; if it doesn’t rain, their crops don’t grow and they don’t make money. WorldCover insures farmers in developing regions; they use satellites to measure rain fall, and pay out automatically based on the rain data.
SOUNDBOKS – Powerful outdoor battery-powered speakers:
Rocking an outdoor party required lots of expensive equipment, technical knowledge and set up time. But SOUNDBOKS is a single, portable suitcase-style speaker that can make dozens of people dance outdoors. It’s practically unbreakable, and has a 60-hour battery that can be swapped out. In the last 20 days, SOUNDBOKS has sold $600,000 worth of its speaker via crowdfunding with a 55 percent margin; it will ship in April. Next, it will release a smaller Jambox-sized competitor, and a bigger Elemental line that it claims can power events for thousands of people. Sonos fixed the same problem for wireless indoor audio and became a billion-dollar revenue business. The outdoor audio market is growing 39 percent annually because people love gathering offline with their friends. If SOUNDBOKS can live up to its hype and can blast music all day long on the go, it could capitalize on the shift to the experiential culture.
MailTime – Lighweight mobile email client world:
Email sucks. MailTime is an email messenger that’s trying to make email suck a little bit less by making it as simple as text messaging. MailTime displays your emails as conversations instead of threads. To date, MailTime has seen 100,000 daily active users and is the No. 1 independent email app in China. It’s also gearing up to integrate with the top messenger in China, which has over 200 million users. Next year, MailTime will be preloaded onto the phones of one of the largest smartphone makers in the world. Read more about MailTime on TechCrunch here.
Restocks – Push notifications for the fashion obsessed:
Restocks tells “superconsumers” when certain sought-after brands (Supreme, Yeezy, etc.) go up for sale. Users tell Restocks which brands they like, and Restocks monitors a wide array of sites. They charge users $25 per month.
Castle.io – Behavior-based security:
Passwords are easily stolen, but it’s hard for hackers and bots to replicate a real user’s behavior pattern. Castle tracks the behavior of users on its clients’ websites and apps, and can revoke access from those who are acting suspicious. For example, on an e-commerce site, real users might browse several items before adding something to their cart and checking out. But a hacker would add a ton of items and instantly try to check out, but Castle could block them. Castle now has 150 deployments, protects 400,000 users and is growing 35 percent each week. Each new user it protects also teaches it more about the difference between legitimate behavior and the sketchy patterns displayed by hackers.
Acre Designs – Affordable, modern zero-energy homes:
We’ve seen very little innovation in the home space, and Acre Designs wants to change that by making it easy to build net-zero homes that produce their own power. Last year, Acre Designs built two prototypes and secured deposits for six homes worth $2.9 million. Acre Designs sells the kits for $250,000, and makes a 12 percent margin. Builders can then sell the homes for $400,000. Read more about Acre Designs on TechCrunch here.
VINEBOX – Glass-by-glass wine delivery:
Vinebox delivers wine “by the glass.” Rather than delivering full bottles that a user might not like, subscribers receive three individual single-serving containers of wine. They’ve been shipping for 3 months, and have sold ~17,000 glasses. Subscribers can turn around and purchase wines they’ve found they like through the Vinebox app.
MeterFeeder – Lets old parking meters accept credit cards:
There are 4.5 million parking meters in the U.S. and 90 percent of them only accept coins. MeterFeeder lets cities cheaply upgrade to a system where citizens can pay for parking with a credit card through an app that uses GPS to tell where they are and what to charge. Parking enforcement officers get a tablet they can use to quickly check license plates to see if people have paid through MeterFeeder, and it costs 1/10th of other smart meter systems. And since it gets more people to actually pay for parking rather than risk a ticket, cities earn 30 percent more in parking revenue even as they issue less tickets people hate. MeterFeeder gets a 15 percent cut of all payments, is growing 18 percent per week, now has 3,000 meters in the system and just signed a $1 million annual deal with Pasadena, California. The U.S. parking market was $30 billion last year, and MeterFeeder could bring it into the mobile era. Read more about MeterFeeder on TechCrunch.
QueueHop – Tags for self-checkout:
Waiting in line is the worst, and, it turns out that on average Americans spend two years of their lives waiting in lines. Enter QueueHop, a self-checkout app for retail stores. QueueHop transforms traditional tags into RFID tags to detect whether an item has been purchased. As a shopper, all you do is scan, pay and leave. If you haven’t paid, the tag will set off an alarm as you’re trying to leave the store. QueueHop launched a pilot one week ago and has 11 retailers on board.
Wakie — Phonecalls with strangers:
Set a topic… get a phone call from a stranger. Wakie connects people within about 10 seconds, and currently has around 100,000 weekly active users. Their money model focuses on those who want to practice a new language, charging those users for premium subscriptions. At a deeper level, they’re a machine learning company — they analyze the contents of phone calls (and the preceding requests) to better match users. Read our previous coverage of Wakie here.
Function Of Beauty – Personalized beauty products:
Americans spend $6 billion a year on shampoo and conditioner, but are frustrated because they can’t find the product that matches their preferences and hair type. Function Of Beauty asks customers a set of questions, then its machines fill bottles with a unique combination of ingredients, and even prints the customer’s name on the bottle. There are over 300 million permutations of Function Of Beauty’s product, and it earns a 50 percent margin on its average $30 order. The startup is growing 45 percent each month, had $20,000 in sales last month and will be net profitable in 5 months. Next, it wants to move into other beauty products, using personalization to provide next-level satisfaction. Read more about Function Of Beauty on TechCrunch.
LendEDU – Kayak for educational loans:
The student-loan industry is a big business in the U.S., and a lot of students are in debt. At LendEDU, a marketplace for student-loan refinancing, the goal is to save graduates thousands of dollars by helping them find low-interest rate loans. Since launching six months ago, LendEDU has seen 50 percent net monthly revenue growth. This month, LendEDU is on track to reach $50,000 in monthly revenue and achieve profitability. Read more about LendEdu on TechCrunch here.
Enflux – Clothes that record workouts:
Enflux aims to do 3D capture of workouts without requiring a camera. With the data provided by sensors within the (machine-washable!) clothes, they’re able to analyze form and pacing. After opening up pre-orders around 2 weeks ago, they’ve sold over $85,000 worth of clothing. Read our previous coverage of Enflux here.
Prompt — Chatbot platform
Messaging apps are where people spend their time, and chatbots let them interact with businesses there. Prompt is a chatbot building platform that lets businesses build a chatbot in 15 minutes with 15 lines of code. It can then be deployed instantly to Slack, Line, WeChat, SMS, and soon Facebook Messenger. Prompt’s platform includes authentication, payment processing, language flexibility, and analytics. Prompt gets paid for every message sent, but doesn’t have to pay carrier fees like Twilio does with SMS. That gives Prompt a 95% gross margin. Prompt is already working with Uber, Nest, Yelp, and Dominos. Prompt sees chatbots as successor to apps, and wants to be the universal development platform where they get built. Read more about Prompt on TechCrunch.
Able Health – Software to get doctors paid for quality care
Under the affordable care act, one third of medical group’s are held financially accountable for how healthy their patients are. With Able Health, the goal is to make it easier for medical groups to get paid for making their patients healthier. Within two months of launching, Able Health brought on its first enterprise customer, which signed a $100,000 contract.
Shypmate — P2P shipping for Africa:
Getting a pair of Nikes from the US to Africa would cost over $200 in shipping fees; Shypmate uses inbound travelers to deliver the same items in 5-10 days for around $20 — you just meet the traveler at the airport to get your package. “And yes,” says founder Chisom Ebinama “it’s legal. Very, very legal.” Read our previous coverage of Shypmate here.
UpLabs – Instant access to design and engineering resources
When designers and developers build something, they don’t reinvent the wheel. They cobble togetehr resources from UI kits, plugins, and pre-made assets. The problem is finding them with traditional Google Search. UpLabs has built a community of 250,000 users curating these resources. If a business needs to make a payment form, they can grab the graphics, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS for the form straight from UpLabs’ 18,000 curated resources. Search on its platform is up 7X from 12 weeks ago and is growing 20% per week, and its quarter-million users are spontaneously hosting meetups around the world. Next, it wants to move into providing lucrative web development and app design services. UpLabs could the be the future of efficient development thanks to its human-curated archive of how to do things right. Read more about UpLabs on TechCrunch.
Stealth Worker -Hire security experts
Here’s a crazy stat: there’s about $90 billion in unclaimed salaries in the cybersecurity market. There are currently one million open jobs for cybersecurity experts, but it’s difficult to find the right people to fill them. Since launching three months, Stealth Worker’s marketplace for cybersecurity experts has facilitated $114,000 in job bookings, is growing at 105% monthly and is already profitable.
Deako — Smart light switches:
Sells smartswitches to new home builders, as opposed to selling to consumers. Currently has agreements for $750,000 worth of purchase orders across 9 different builders. They focus on selling easily upgradeable “dumb” switches to home builders, then upsell interested new homeowners on the smart upgrade.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voJ2g6_Y-OM
Magic Instruments – A guitar anyone can learn to play in minutes
90% of people who try to learn guitar quit because it’s difficult to learn the 300-year old user interface of vibrating strings. Magic Instruments has built a guitar where you can play chords with one finger. It builds musical intelligence into the software in the guitar so anyone can play songs with just sight-reading. Guitar Hero sold $6 billion worth of fake guitars that don’t even play real music. Magic Instruments thinks it can earn even more selling its $299 guitar and $6 per month subscriptions to content like chords and lyrics of popular songs. It’s launching on Indiegogo on April 18th.
Chitter — College social network:
A live feed for a user’s college, but with a weird twist: top posts are 100% anonymous, but comments use your real identity.
Thunkable – Weebly for mobile apps:
Building native, mobile apps should be simple for anyone, according to Thunkable. That’s why it has created a drag-and-drop tool for building native, mobile apps. The cloud-based tool features templates, real-time testing and easy deployment to the Google Play store. Thunkable currently has over 90,000 users who have built over 200,000 apps.
Read more about Thunkable on TechCrunch here.
Instabug — Support kit for mobile apps:
An easy-to-add SDK for a mechanism that allows app users to contact support without leaving the application. Used by Lyft, Soundcloud, BuzzFeed, Shyp, and more. Read our previous coverage of Instabug here
Hykso – Fitbit for boxing and MMA athletes:
Hykso creates sport sensors for boxers to track the types of punches thrown, how many the boxer has thrown and how fast they’ve thrown them. The Hysko sensor fits on the wrist and comes with an app to show boxing analytics. So far, Hysko has sold $80,000 worth of devices, which it’s selling for $150 a pair.
Landed —
Buying a home today is hard — particularly if you don’t have wealthy parents who can help you with that down payment. Landed helps teachers buy homes by raising debt-free downpayment funds from student’s parents; parents provide money for the down payment in exchange for equity in said homes. They also work with companies and affinity networks.
CareSkore – CRM for hospital follow-ups
The Affordable Care Act forces hospitals to pay when their lack of follow-up care leads to preventable readmission of patients. Right now, these readmissions cost hospitals $36 billion per year. But CareSkore’s system helps hospitals make follow-up calls to the right patients at the right time and ask them the right questions to catch complications before they spiral into expensive health problems. CareSkore found the hospitals it demoed with saw a 42% reduction in readmissions. It sells its CRM prodcut for $500,000 per year per hospital, creating a $10.8 billion annual market that’s suddenly appeared because of the Affordable Care Act. CRM has helped businesses make more money, now it’s going to make patients healthier.
SnapEDA – Electronic design automation site:
If you wanted to make a smartwatch or drone, you’d have to spend days creating the digital model for each chip on your circuit board. With SnapEDA, an electronics parts library, all you do is download the model, and then drag and drop it into your design. Already, companies like Nest, Google, Boeing, General Electric and Sony are using SnapEDA and they’re downloading thousands of models every month. SnapEDA costs $1,200 a year for a subscription.
Read our SnapEDA coverage here.
Zenysis — Data systems for developing country goverments:
Data infrastructure in the developing world is a mess. That means even when they have the money and man-power to distribute vaccines or recover from a large scale emergency, they don’t know where to start or how to manage the projects. Zenysis offers data management systems for developing nations, and is now in a $1 million pilot program with the Ethiopian government. Zenysis found all the fragmented data on vaccinations, got 100% of it integrated, and made the distribution process efficient. With 150 developing nations plus big organizations like the Gates Foundation as potential customers, Zenisys could make a profit while preventing the next Ebola crisis.
Skymind — Open source deep learning software:
Skymind builds an open source deep learning engine for enterprise Hadoop users, providing AI-driven solutions for things like fraud detection, product recommendations, and facial recognition. They’ve built Deeplearning4J, a set of deep-learning algorithms for Java developers.
AlphaFlow – Schwab for real estate investing:
AlphaFlow wants to make it easy for real estate investors to build and manage their portfolios across P2P platforms. It lets you browse deals from across the industry, find good investments and create deal alerts. Currently, AlphaFlow has 850 investors managing over $80 million in investments on the platform.
HaloLife – Online funeral planning
7,000 people die a day in American, and their families spend $21 billion a year on their funerals, burials, and cremations. But there’s no way to book this online or get any price transparency. That forces families to visit funeral providers in person, and puts them at risk of getting ripped off or making a bad decision in haste. Halolife lets families select the service they want and where they want it, and the startup finds them the optimal funeral provider and price. It takes 7.5%, which means it has a $1.5 billion annual market opportunity. Funerals shouldn’t be a time for frustrating shopping. Halolife makes planning a goodbye for a loved one peaceful.
Lynks — Efficient import ecommerce for countries that lack it:
“E-commerce in Egypt sucks!” says Lynks’ Egyptian founder — citing import product markup of over 2x. Lynks lets Egyptian customers paste in shopping links for any US site, and handles all customs and shipping logistics and explains all involved fees up front.
Secful – Smart API defense:
A lot of businesses these days depend on some sort of API. With Secful, businesses can prevent API attacks in real-time through custom-tailored security. Secful is an automated solution that can detect any abnormal activity within your API and identify the hacker profile.
Truebill – Manage your subscription payments:
Many people forget the subscriptions they’re paying for, and don’t know how they could save money by switching between different providers. Truebill makes it easy to manage your media, digital content, and physical good subscriptions. You connect you back account or credit card, and it shows you everything you’re paying for on a recurring basis so you can instantly cancel ones you don’t want. The average user cancels at least one subscription, leading to hundreds of dollars in savings. Truebill plans to use its data on rates, subscription lengths, and why people cancel to make recommendations on subscriptions and collect referral fees. For example, it could suggest you cancel ComCast cable and sign up for Netflix, Hulu, and HBO GO. The average number of subscriptions people pay for has doubled from 5.5 to 11 in the last 18 months as more businesses use recurring billing to rack up reliable revenue. It already has 10,000 users. Truebill puts the power back in the hands of the subscriber. Read more about Truebill on TechCrunch.
Streamup — Live Stream Video and Chat Platform:
Streamup gives pro-grade live editing tools and advanced chat controls to encourage them to livestream their own shows — things like cooking programs, or fan Q&As with bands. They have 22mm monthly active users.
MineralSoft – Mineral rights software: MineralSoft provides automated revenue management for minerals like gas and oil. Since launching its enterprise product in January, MineralSoft has brought in $12,000 in monthly recurring revenue.
