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Yesterday, enterprise tech accelerator Alchemist announced a fresh $2.5 million in venture capital funding. Today, it presented its latest cohort of startups, 19 in total, to a jam-packed audience of investors.

Alchemist invests $36,000 in companies with a revenue stream that come from enterprises, not consumers, with a bent toward technical founders. Its 20th cohort included a mental health startup, a construction tech business, a fintech company and more. Here’s a quick look at the startups that just completed its six-month program:

Cruz Foam: Makes compostable packaging “from the ocean for the ocean.” Instead of using finite petroleum-based materials, Cruz Foam transforms waste into a structural foam that is at-home compostable. The startup counts Pepsi among its first customers. Cruz Foam is working with the beverage maker on a sustainable packaging project.

Bobly: Gathers real-time information that helps businesses better understand their customers through a gamified software product.

DeepBench: The MIT tech startup’s software enables companies to create their own network of knowledge experts, with a mission to “unlock the world’s knowledge by reducing the cost of finding and matching experts.”

dumpling: Empowers gig workers to run their own “highly personal” grocery delivery businesses. Dumpling says they make $8 in revenue on each order and is active in 24 states. The startup is led by Nate D’Anna, the former director of corporate development at Cisco.

Ejenta: Allows health providers to remotely monitor patients from their homes using technology developed by NASA intended to monitor astronauts. Ejenta is currently working with health providers across the U.S. Ejenta charges health providers a per patient, per month subscription fee that’s 100 percent reimbursable by Medicare.

IoTrek: Leverages artificial intelligence and IoT to improve the productivity of construction job sites. The startup says it has raised $500,000 in funding so far from European and Indian investors.

AirBoard: Developer of “the world’s most powerful drone” for the agricultural industry. AirBoard’s drone is the size of two Toyota Prius cars and will focus initially on automated agtech pesticide spraying.

Walrus Security: Founded by Michael Walfish, a former professor of computer science at New York University, Walrus Security ensures digital payments are transferred safely. Walrus has already landed backing from some high-profile angels, including Alex Roetter, the former SVP of engineering at Twitter and the president of Kitty Hawk.

Insera Health: Developer of a voice-enabled app that collects a patient’s medical history to improve medical encounters. Insera says this improves the experiences for patients and doctors, with better communication and outcomes.

Laava Tech: Decreasing energy consumption for indoor farmers with proprietary LED lighting and a Light as a Service (LaaS) business model.

Oberon Global: Helps conduct and manage compliant token sales. Oberon provides a secure investor onboarding platform for funds, as well as companies raising money under Regulation D 506(b) and 506(c).

Autify (formerly known as Behivee): Automates software testing with artificial intelligence.

PenguinSmart: Initially focused on the China market, PenguinSmart provides an AI-assist rehab support service for speech and language therapy. The startup is led by Amy Kwok, a speech-language pathologist.

Rosalyn Inc: A proctoring platform that uses AI and computer vision to make exams secure and scalable. The startup says it reduces overhead and lets companies scale up their certification process while reducing fraud.

Gridline AI (formerly known as Solisite): Helps property owners turn roofs from liabilities into assets by reducing roofing costs and generating additional income for commercial real estate.

Tangent: Is using AI to provide high-quality content for marketing campaigns. The AI-enabled platform develops personalized images for the fashion e-commerce industry. Expects $600,000 in revenue by the end of Q4 2019.

Foresight Mental Health: Delivers end-to-end mental healthcare with a tech-enabled platform that develops treatment plans, provides a real-time tracker of symptoms and more. The company plans to open a brick-and-mortar location in San Francisco in 2019.

Bitesize: A B2B messaging platform that lets companies speak directly with customers via SMS.

Digify: A document security service that provides insights and protection to users sharing documents online.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2Ta0hAN

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After spending eight months in an immigration facility in the United States, Abimael Hernandez made the tough decision to return to Mexico.

He had spent 14 years in Florida and was leaving behind his wife and three children to return to Mexico so he could go through the process of returning to the United States legally.

Hernandez didn’t want to live in fear of being pulled over by police; he longed to own a car in his name and he didn’t want his immigration status to be illegal any longer.  

Upon his return to Mexico, Hernandez had worked in construction, call centers and sold CDs before finally being given an opportunity that made a return to the United States less appealing. Hernandez now works as a software developer at Ignite Commerce in Mexico and has integrated well into the country that he at first struggled to identify as home.

Hernandez’s struggle to adjust and adapt to life in a new country mirrors that of other migrants who are returning to Mexico. And ongoing U.S. government attempts to put an end to the DACA program instituted under President Barack Obama, an initiative which protected as many as 800,000 unauthorized migrants that had come to the United States as children, are pushing many others along the same path.

For the people facing an increasingly hostile environment for migrants who choose — or are forced — to return to Latin America, little support awaits.

What tends to lie in store for these deportees and returnees in Mexico is usually low-paying service employment. For those with an undocumented status especially, no collateral in Mexico leads to problems in accessing finances, whilst having spent the majority of their lives in the United States, barriers in the Spanish language mean some returnees fail to be accepted into the Mexican education system. 

Though there are some government initiatives aimed at supporting deportees by providing shelter and food, this usually bilingual cohort is prone to unemployment, as well as the mental struggle assigned to the frustrations of reintegrating into a country with which many can’t identify.

It is the hardship of reintegration that inspired the foundation of Hola Code, the only Mexican startup of its kind that currently runs in the country. Founded by CEO Marcela Torres just last year, Hola Code is coined as hackers without borders and is a startup that offers a coding bootcamp for migrants, ensuring that this young generation, new to Mexico, does not slip under the radar.

Geared at supporting the integration of deportees, the startup is prepping Mexicans to enter into a high-demand sector through an intensive five-month software development training program that gives the students qualification, even though many have started from scratch.

‘‘We don’t know of any social enterprises or even regular startups that are actually tackling migration in Mexico,’’ Torres recently told TechCrunch. Although migration and deportations continue to make headlines, it appears that Hola Code might be the only Mexican startup trying to do anything about it.

Backed by San Francisco-based Hack Reactor, the Mexican organization costs nothing until graduates have secured a full-time job, and pays their students a monthly stipend without any bureaucratic red tape.

Collectively venturing into Mexican society with peers in a similar position, most Hola Code students also don’t plan to return to the United States and want to use their skill set in the ever-growing Mexican tech ecosystems. For former student Hernandez, he remains grateful for the support network that Hola Code became for him.

‘‘If Mexico had more opportunities like Hola Code I think returnees would definitely think about not going back to the United States and other countries,’’ he said.

The question now remains as to how international policies will continue to affect Latin American families in the future.

‘‘You create the program in the hopes that one day that you will run out of work,’’ CEO and co-founder Marcela Torres ambitiously explained.

MISSION, TX – JUNE 12: A Central American immigrant stands at the U.S.-Mexico border fence after crossing into Texas on June 12, 2018 near Mission, Texas. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is executing the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy towards undocumented immigrants. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions also said that domestic and gang violence in immigrants’ country of origin would no longer qualify them for political-asylum status. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

The bittersweet reality is that Hola Code has, in fact, blossomed within the past year, with now more than 400 monthly applications from Mexicans and Central American migrants that are seeking refuge in the country. Although the organization celebrates the achievements of their alumni, who tend to quickly ascend into well-paid tech jobs across Mexico, the coding bootcamp is never short of work, and is now looking to open an office in Tijuana to be closer to the border.

The journey for the startup’s female founder, one of a small number of women in Mexican tech leadership, has also not been an easy feat.

‘‘It’s very difficult for a woman that has designed a business plan and has ideas to be taken seriously,’’ Torres explains. ‘‘It took me a long time to find the original investors that would believe in my idea and in my capacity, as well, to run the organization because this is the first startup that I have executed.’’

The cultural burdens that still exist in Mexico is a reality that deters many women from entering into the entrepreneurial scene within the country. From finding investors to promoting an idea, it is the issue of being taken seriously that is most effective at stalling Mexico’s female entrepreneurs.

‘‘I think that it’s important for younger women to start seeing us out there trying to take risks and thinking that they can do it as well. Even if they’re not successful, that it’s something that is available and achievable for them.’’

Confronted by her own hurdles in becoming the tech leader of Hola Code today, however, her organization does much more than just in-depth coding. From encouraging young Mexican women to leap into business and tech, to helping each student find a job, Torres speaks of the hope, security and routine that every Hola Coder gathers as they become immersed in Mexican life through this community.

‘‘Helping them navigate the expectations of how to start a career in tech is one of the things that we work on and therefore it means that they develop the right skill set, and once they finish the program, to be able to successfully jump into big areas such as banking.’’

MCALLEN, TX – JUNE 12: Central American asylum seekers wait for transport while being detained by U.S. Border Patrol agents near the U.S.-Mexico border on June 12, 2018 in McAllen, Texas. The group of women and children had rafted across the Rio Grande from Mexico and were detained before being sent to a processing center for possible separation. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is executing the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy towards undocumented immigrants. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions also said that domestic and gang violence in immigrants’ country of origin would no longer qualify them for political asylum status. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

Former student Miriam Alvarez is now a software engineer for SegundaMano. Growing up in the United States, Mexican Universities did not accept her U.S. documents and she too began working in a call center before hearing about the project, applying just days before the application deadline. ‘‘It’s OK to not know everything, but you should always be open to trying new things and learning something new,’’ Alvarez said, speaking of the broader messages that Hola Code delivers.

The overwhelming lessons that all Hola Code’s alumni praise is how the bootcamp delivers more than just coding, but also important life skills that allow for the transition to Mexico to be easier. Through reasoning and problem solving, many are grateful for the structure and direction that Hola Code provides Mexicans new to the country.

Though many of their students had joined Hola Code feeling “American,” the values that the group provides adds to the larger picture of Mexico’s growing tech scenes.

‘‘The biggest challenge for the tech sector in the country is access to human capital and the second one is retaining the talent.’’ By fine-tuning the country’s coding talent pools with bicultural young developers that speak English, Spanish and also JavaScript, the organization contributes to growing tech hubs such as Tijuana, Guadalajara and Mexico City, which are increasingly gaining global attention.

Hola Code is one of just a few life-changing organizations filling the gap in an immigration story that is seldom covered by the media.

Providing social mobility to people that have been forced to return through education, employment and exposure to tech pioneers, Hola Code’s alumni are spreading the message of integration through education far and wide across the globe.

As long as the fragility of migration continues to be tested, however, Torres and her team have work to do in their mission to produce Mexico’s next pioneering coding generation.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2Mr9ZMB

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When we think of the AI platforms that are shaping how we use voice to interact with phones, home devices and other services, we tend to think of Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google and Microsoft’s Cortana. But there are other players that may prove to have a compelling value proposition of their own. Sherpa.ai, a voice assistant out of Spain that also provides predictive recommendations with a focus on the Spanish language, today is announcing that it has expanded its Series A by $8.5 million to $15 million as it passes 5 million active users of its app.

Investors include Mundi Ventures, a Spanish VC fund focused on AI, and Alex Cruz, the chairman and CEO of British Airways.

In a still-heated tech climate where startups are raising tens and sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars in rounds that sometimes happen only months apart, Sherpa’s Series A has been a comparatively slow burn: the startup first announced a Series A of $6.5 million nearly three years ago.

Apart from the fact that European startups do tend to raise and spend more conservatively, Xabi Uribe-Etxebarria, the startup’s founder and CEO, says that it chose to extend this Series A now while it’s still working on closing its Series B for later this year, which will be in the region of $20 million, which will include new investors and likely more detail on how it plans to evolve the business.

“We’re announcing several agreements with big OEMs in the next few months,” he said. “I spoke with our investors and they thought it would be better to get a small amount of capital now to launch those deals to use the momentum to get a better valuation on our Series B.”

The company is already working with Porsche to bring its assistant and recommendation service into its vehicles, and Uribe-Etxebarria said future partnerships, along a similar B2B2C model, will be with “other automakers, telcos and other device manufacturers of smart speakers and PCs.” From what I have heard, Sherpa has been approached by a number of others that have been building voice assistants, as well as the companies building the hardware and other objects that will be housing them. Uribe-Etxebarria would not comment, except to say that he is under NDA with several companies.

“Sherpa.ai has experienced tremendous growth and is poised to become the most advanced conversational and predictive AI OS in the industry,” said Rajeev Singh-Molares, partner at Mundi Ventures and former president of Alcatel-Lucent Asia-Pacific, in a statement. “Sherpa has shown phenomenal potential and amazing growth since the first close of the Series A. By increasing our investment in this company, we are able to accelerate Sherpa.ai on its journey.”

Scale isn’t everything

At a time when Amazon’s Alexa alone has passed the 100 million-mark in terms of devices that have been sold that are powered by its voice assistant, and Google, Microsoft and Apple appear to be quickly playing catch-up by integrating into a number of third-party and their own devices themselves, Uribe-Etxebarria says he believes Sherpa stands apart from these for a couple of reasons.

One is the spectre of competition, and possibly the history of how things played out in mobile, where carriers really lost their way with users and value-added services with the rise of apps.

“The companies we are working with don’t always want agreements with companies that also compete with them,” he said. “Take the telco we’re working with. It has its own video and music offerings, its own retail operation. At the end, they would be competing with the likes of Apple or Amazon, so they don’t want to give them access to their users. Car manufacturers might feel the same way.”

The second reason, he says, has to do with Sherpa’s technology.

When the company launched several years ago, voice-based personal assistants were still relatively new, and all the biggies were launching in English. These days, they all have Spanish versions, so this is no longer a unique selling point. (Of the company’s 5 million users, between 80-90 percent of those are using Sherpa’s Spanish content.) And even if it were, Sherpa’s basic speech recognition and text-to-speech are powered by third-party technology, which Uribe-Etxebarria calls “commodities.”

What is more unique, he says, is the company’s predictive recommendations, which is built in-house by his team of natural language and other AI specialists. It covers more than 30 different specialist categories, spanning areas like automotive, entertainment, news, travel and so on, and analyzes 100,000 parameters per user to be able to predict what information a user needs before a question is even asked, whether it’s news or whatever it is that you first do with your phone when you wake up, which emails you will need to see first or what you might want to know when you arrive at a particular location.

“This is what our competitors are very interested in,” he said. “We are at least two or three years ahead of others on this front.”

Sherpa had a significant boost across the Spanish-speaking world when Samsung hooked up with the company to preload the app on all of its devices sold across those countries. That changed after Samsung launched Bixby, its own assistant, but Uribe-Etxebarria said that their partnership is not quite over yet.

“We are still speaking because Bixby can be improved a lot,” he said.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2B0bOfb

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News is exhausting. Mexican murders are sky-high. Ebola is ravaging the eastern Congo. China is erasing an entire culture of Islam from its Western hinterlands. That news — negative and intense though it is — can easily occlude the many positive, longer term stories that are fundamental drivers of the world. Africa is reaching new levels of prosperity. Violence around the world is in retreat. Famine is down, a lot.

These trends are present, but getting high-quality data around them and correctly interpreting them can be challenging. How do you piece all these disparate threads together and start to make sense of the whole?

Enter Our World in Data. The non-profit startup, which started as a research project at Oxford University, builds datasets on human progress around the world and then uses visualizations and deep, clear explanations to allow people to grok exactly what’s happening as well as how to think about it.

Our World in Data is backed by YC in its current batch, and is one of three non-profits this cycle (we profiled another one of them, Upsolve, which is helping consumers file for bankruptcy). The portal has been receiving about a million users per month and two citations a day in major newspapers, and the team is hoping to scale those metrics up as part of the YC program.

Max Roser, the founder and program director, officially organized the firm as a non-profit a few weeks ago, but has been working on it with a team of researchers over many years. “It began kind of slowly as a research project in around 2012,” he said. It was “a fairly small-scale project in the evenings and weekends in the beginning and got bigger and bigger over time.”

He points out that the progress we have seen in human society has happened at a blistering fast rate. “Even in today’s richest and happiest places, the changes have happened very recently. […] Just two hundred years ago, a huge majority of the population lived in extreme poverty.”

Roser sees an opportunity to revolutionize how academic research is disseminated with Our World in Data. “Our mission is to get research out of institutions,” he explained. “We come from this millennium-old institution with University of Oxford … and they have published research in exactly the same way since the invention of the printing press. […] In the communication of research, we haven’t adopted the technologies available with the internet at all … and we are trying to bring these two worlds together.”

Hannah Ritchie, a researcher with the project who holds a PhD in GeoSciences from the University of Edinburgh, said that “our top priority is reaching as many people as we can” and she sees the project becoming the “really credible go-to reference.”

Our World in Data may not be a conventional startup, but it is hitting a thesis close to home here. Arman and I have been doing a dive into the world of societal resilience startups – companies that are trying to protect humanity from itself by building self-healing systems, improving the climate, making our traffic more on time, improving the speed of construction and much, much more. But before we can do all that, we first need to understand what’s even going on with our world in the first place, and that is where Roser, Ritchie and the rest of their research team here can be hugely helpful.

Share your feedback on your startup’s attorney

We want to help startup founders work with attorneys who are right for them. My colleague Eric Eldon wrote a piece today describing our methodology and a little bit more of why we are doing this project.

We have had hundreds of founders give us their recommendations. If you have worked with a great early-stage startup attorney that you recommend, let us know using this short Google Forms survey and also spread the word. We will share the results and more in the coming weeks.

Stray Thoughts (aka, what I am reading)

Short summaries and analysis of important news stories

Startup socialism with capitalist characteristics

Robert P. Baird does a great job describing the rise of Jacobin, the socialist magazine startup that has become a linchpin in leftist politics. It’s a story of a college founder who hustled his way to financial independence and growth. From the article:

Sunkara, for his part, told me that there’s no contradiction between his entrepreneurial enthusiasm and his socialist ideals. “The market logic of creating a publication,” he says—attracting readers, getting them to subscribe, finding competitive advantages that will keep them on the rolls—“is politically pure.”

Is Surveillance Capitalism a thing?

Nicholas Carr wrote a deep dive review for the LA Review of Books of Shoshana Zuboff’s hot new book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.” There has been a ton of discussion triggered here, particularly in light of France’s record $57 million fine against Google over GDPR violations earlier this week, and Carr wrote what is probably the best review and context piece available. Still, the question to me remains the same: does anyone actually care that their devices monitor them? Judging by device and services sales, I think much less than privacy advocates appreciate.

Why are investors still investing in Apple’s supply chain?

Bloomberg has an interesting conundrum to discuss: why are investors still standing behind companies like Han’s Laser Technology Industry Group Co., which have seen huge valuation losses over the slowdown in iPhone sales? It’s a bit of a complicated story, but basically investors still believe that high-end manufacturing will drive excess profits even in a chaotic, slower growing, and competitive world. An interesting discussion worth reading.

What’s next & obsessions

• I have a lot of short books on my desk to read.
• Arman is reading Never Lost Again by Bill Kilday, a history of mapping at Google and beyond.
• Arman and I are interested in societal resilience startups that are targeting areas like water security, housing, infrastructure, climate change, disaster response, etc. Reach out if you have ideas or companies here <danny@techcrunch.com>

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2TaOXV0

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Despite its “unsexy” reputation, the logistics industry is attracting massive investment from venture capitalists.

With a fresh $97 million in Series C funding, NEXT joins a fleet of heavily funded logistics platforms, including Flexport, Huochebang and Convoy. The company, which connects shippers and carriers through an online marketplace, raised the capital from Brookfield Ventures, with participation from Sequoia Capital and logistics solutions provider GLP. NEXT declined to disclose the valuation or whether its latest financing included debt.

In 2018, global logistics startups collected more than $6 billion in VC funding, nearly double the $3.2 billion invested in the space the year prior, according to PitchBook. A significant portion of the 2018 capital went to Chinese ventures at about 40 percent. U.S. logistics businesses raised 19 percent, or about $1.2 billion, across 114 deals.

“The logistics space is under more pressure than ever before — with more shipments coming into our ports than drivers and warehouses have the capacity to manage,” NEXT co-founder and chief executive officer Lidia Yan said in a statement.

NEXT was founded in 2015 by Yan and her husband Elton Chung. The round brings the business’s total raised to $125 million, including a $21 million round in January 2018.

Headquartered in Lynwood, California, NEXT plans to use the investment to fill 150 positions in 2019, as well as complete the launch of Relay, a new service targeting the “systemic congestion” at shipping ports.

“NEXT continues to address the critical issues that face logistics management in the U.S. — from the nationwide driver shortage to congestion and operations at our busiest ports,” Sequoia partner Omar Hamoui said in a statement. “We’ve been impressed with NEXT’s ability to execute, and the introduction of Relay proves they have the team and expertise to continue innovating in ways that will ease the pain points of carriers and shippers.”

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2T8AF7x

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Despite its “unsexy” reputation, the logistics industry is attracting massive investment from venture capitalists.

With a fresh $97 million in Series C funding, NEXT joins a fleet of heavily funded logistics platforms, including Flexport, Huochebang and Convoy. The company, which connects shippers and carriers through an online marketplace, raised the capital from Brookfield Ventures, with participation from Sequoia Capital and logistics solutions provider GLP. NEXT declined to disclose the valuation or whether its latest financing included debt.

In 2018, global logistics startups collected more than $6 billion in VC funding, nearly double the $3.2 billion invested in the space the year prior, according to PitchBook. A significant portion of the 2018 capital went to Chinese ventures at about 40 percent. U.S. logistics businesses raised 19 percent, or about $1.2 billion, across 114 deals.

“The logistics space is under more pressure than ever before — with more shipments coming into our ports than drivers and warehouses have the capacity to manage,” NEXT co-founder and chief executive officer Lidia Yan said in a statement.

NEXT was founded in 2015 by Yan and her husband Elton Chung. The round brings the business’s total raised to $125 million, including a $21 million round in January 2018.

Headquartered in Lynwood, California, NEXT plans to use the investment to fill 150 positions in 2019, as well as complete the launch of Relay, a new service targeting the “systemic congestion” at shipping ports.

“NEXT continues to address the critical issues that face logistics management in the U.S. — from the nationwide driver shortage to congestion and operations at our busiest ports,” Sequoia partner Omar Hamoui said in a statement. “We’ve been impressed with NEXT’s ability to execute, and the introduction of Relay proves they have the team and expertise to continue innovating in ways that will ease the pain points of carriers and shippers.”

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2T8AF7x