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Turning music into a powerful brand asset.

Feed.fm

AIR

FOUNDER: Dorian Kieken & Fabrice Condominas

FOUNDED: 2017

INNOVATION: Training humans and AIs to collaborate and learn together

HQ: Montreal

  • AIR team photo

AIR provides a training platform for humans and AI agents to collaborate, learn and grow together. Using entertainment to engage users in rich, two-way interactions allows them to tackle challenges that are too complex for traditional reinforcement learning, such as AI assistants for people with cognitive disorders or AI-assisted crisis management tools to name a few.

VISIT: AIR

Ascend

FOUNDER: Sean Knapp

FOUNDED: 2015

INNOVATION: Putting the power of big data in the hands of business people

HQ: Palo Alto

By now, every industry has woken up to the power of big data: leveraging complex, voluminous data sets to gain valuable market insights and optimize customer offerings. Ascend puts the power of big data analytics directly in the hands of business people, obviating the need to hire and manage data scientists and data engineers as intermediaries. Think Siri for big data.

VISIT: Ascend

Bench

FOUNDERS: Ian Crosby, Jordan Menashy, Pavel Rodionov & Adam Saint

FOUNDED: 2012

INNOVATION: Outsourced bookkeeping with intelligence

HQ: Vancouver

Bench is North America’s largest bookkeeping service. By pairing intuitive software with a team of dedicated bookkeepers, Bench gives small businesses affordable access to quality financial insights and tax-ready financials. Since launching out of Techstars NYC in 2012, Bench has raised $53 million in funding to date and for the past two years has been among the top 30 fastest growing tech companies in North America, according to Deloitte.

VISIT: Bench

Compaas

FOUNDER: bethanye Blount & Lisa Dusseault

FOUNDED: 2016

INNOVATION: Compensation intelligence platform

HQ: San Francisco

  • Compaas founders

From decades of experience leading tech teams, the founders of Compaas knew that the hardest problems they faced were people-problems. After talking with hundreds of HR professionals, founders, and legal experts, they learned that they weren’t alone. They built Compaas to provide proactive insights and analytics about employee compensation, without tedious spreadsheets. Compaas Rewards provides a secure and seamless workflow backed by valuable analytics.

Compensation matters. It’s also one of the hardest problems facing companies.

VISIT: Compaas

Concentric

FOUNDER: Karthik Krishnan, Shankar Subramaniam & Madhu Shashanka

FOUNDED: 2018

INNOVATION: Using AI to help enterprises secure their high value data

HQ: San Jose

  • Concentric

Concentric was founded to help enterprises solve the massive and ever-growing data security challenge they face around being able to discover, monitor and protect the high volumes of sensitive data — e.g. documents with PII, sensitive IP, confidential information, financial statements — that are continuously being generated. The Concentric solution uses innovative AI techniques to easily identify, monitor and protect sensitive content without requiring customers to write complex rules that need prior knowledge of what constitutes high value content or placing the burden on end users to perform that function. In short, a SMART and EASY button to secure what an enterprise most worries about protecting — Its Data.

VISIT: Concentric

Create and Learn

FOUNDER: Jessie Jiang, YZ Qiu

FOUNDED: 2017

INNOVATION: Bringing cutting-edge technology learning to K-12 students

HQ: Silicon Valley

Create & Learn delivers next generation of Computer Science Education to students K-12. Students learn a broad spectrum of state-of-the-art technologies such as AI and Data Science, with a strong focus on connecting with the real world and developing creativity and critical thinking skills. The delivering platform also addresses the top challenges in the wide adoption of CS education in K-12, leading to breakthrough opportunities.

VISIT: Create and Learn

Feed.fm

FOUNDERS: Jeff Yasuda, Eric Lambrecht & Lauren Pufpaf

FOUNDED: 2012

INNOVATION: Digital music marketing

HQ: San Francisco

Feed was founded by music lovers who know that music delivers authentic connections and who are committed to leveraging music in a fundamentally new way for business results. Feed.fm works with leading brands to deliver uniquely curated media experiences that drive commerce and boost brand engagement. The Feed plug and play media solutions have helped clients double their app user retention rates and drive 2X visit-to-purchase conversions.

VISIT: Feed.fm

Humble Dot

FOUNDER: Will Goto & Macgill Davis

FOUNDED: 2017

INNOVATION: Making it easy for managers to collect, organize, and share team updates

HQ: San Francisco

EXITED: 2020

  • Humble Dot

Knowledge workers and managers hack several tools (email, shared documents/spreadsheets, messaging tools) in an attempt to make high-level team updates more efficient. Since these tools are not specifically designed around update processes, they become difficult to manage and require a lot of manual work. Humble Dot is a tool specifically designed around the update process that helps managers and team members be more efficient with updates.

VISIT: Humble Dot

Kueski

FOUNDER: Adalberto Flores Ochoa

FOUNDED: 2013

INNOVATION: First online-only lender in Mexico

HQ: Guadalajara

Kueski is the largest online-only payday lender in Mexico. Users apply for a small loan on-line, specifying how much money they need and when they would like to pay it back. Kueski’s machine learning risk engine assesses a loan application within seconds. Upon approval, a wire transfer is made instantaneously. In a market where 85% of citizens don’t have access to credit, Kueski is enabling a individuals, families and small businesses to leverage short-term loans.

VISIT: Kueski

Liftoff

FOUNDERS : Mark Ellis, Phil Crosby & Harry Robertson

FOUNDED: 2012

INNOVATION: Transitioning commoditized mobile install market to high-value, mobile engagement

HQ: Palo Alto

Exited: 2022

Liftoff is a full-service mobile app marketing and retargeting platform that uses post-install data to run true CPA-optimized user acquisition and retention campaigns. With Liftoff, campaigns are optimized to drive actions beyond the install, like booking a hotel, subscribing to a service, or making a purchase. Liftoff placed 2nd in engagement in front of Facebook and Twitter and just behind Google adwords.

VISIT: Liftoff

Ockam

FOUNDER: Matthew Gregory & Mrinal Wadhwa

FOUNDED: 2017

INNOVATION: Ockam’s open source developer tools make it simple to send trustful end-to-end encrypted messages between connected devices and cloud services

HQ: Remote-first / San Francisco

  • Ockam founders Matthew Gregory and Mrinal Wadhwa

Ockam is an open source tools company that empowers developers to build trusted IoT systems with easy-to-use tools, processes, and protocols. Using Ockam it’s simple to interconnect hardware at the edge with software services in the cloud.

VISIT: Ockam

Omnee

FOUNDER: Annie Hu, Andy Zheng & Alex Fan

FOUNDED: 2018

INNOVATION: Predictive analytics for the outdoor audience

HQ: Mountain View

  • Omnify

Our mission is to generate predictive insights about audience behavior in the real world so our clients can give their customers the best-possible experiences. Serving CIOs, CROs and Chief Digital Officers, we install a network of sensors in indoor locations such as shopping centers, to provide a level of audience analytics and measurement that until now has only been possible in the digital world.

VISIT: Omnee

Other Machine Company

FOUNDERS : Danielle Applestone, Saul Griffith & Michael Stochosky

FOUNDED:  2013

INNOVATION: Democratizing digital manufacturing

HQ: San Francisco

EXITED: Bantam Tools, 2017

Other Machine Company (OMC) is at the forefront of the digital desktop manufacturing movement: the future is small-batch, ultra-customized, and on-demand. Like at HP and Apple, OMC transforms industrial tools into consumer products and aims to put them in every home and business. OMC is full-stack, with an ecosystem of computer-controlled hardware, software, marketplace, and community that enables everyday people to directly harness the power of modern manufacturing.

Prevoty

FOUNDERS: Julien Bellanger & Kunal Anand

FOUNDED: 2013

INNOVATION: Next generation Web app security

HQ: Los Angeles

Prevoty, a next generation web application security provider, is pioneering a new approach to securing web applications. Prevoty eliminates the top OWASP threats by validating inputs, queries and tokens. Prevoty’s proprietary technology reduces the time and cost to develop secure applications by embedding security libraries and plugins. Top technology, media, retail and financial organizations use Prevoty for its technical efficacy, ease of use and flexibility. Prevoty protects over half a billion unique users.
VISIT: Prevoty

Remot3.it

FOUNDERS: Ryo Koyama, Mike Johnson & Doug Olkein

FOUNDED: 2008

INNOVATION: Securing IoT devices

HQ: Palo Alto

Remot3.it cloud services connects industrial IoT device users to remot3.it enabled devices from anywhere on internet, reducing the expense and hassle of infield provisioning and maintenance. Patented Remot3.it technology allows any internet service or device to become privately and securely accessible from the internet, even behind firewalls or over mobile carrier networks.
VISIT: Remot3.it

Sourcery

FOUNDERS: Na’ama Moran & Peretz Partensky

FOUNDED: 2012

INNOVATION: Bringing internet efficiencies to the professional food supply chain

HQ: San Francisco

Sourcery is bringing internet efficiencies to ordering and accounts payables for wholesale food buyers and suppliers. Currently, most of the transactions in the $220B byzantine foodservice industry are handled by phone calls, fax machines and paper invoices. Sourcery is creating the web standard for data and transactions in the food supply chain. By bringing transparency and efficiency to this market, Sourcery is democratizing access to high-quality foods and organizing a gold mine of data in the process.
VISIT: Sourcery

True Anthem

FOUNDER: Chris Hart

FOUNDED: 2008

INNOVATION: Machine learning social marketing

HQ: San Francisco

By providing social content distribution, True Anthem helps the world’s most prominent media companies drive revenue via social media. True Anthem increases publisher’s social reach, engagement, and traffic by automatically identifying and sharing their best performing content. True Anthem’s sophisticated automation helps publishers reach more people with less effort.
VISIT: True Anthem

Vidora

FOUNDERS: Abhik Majumdar, Alex Holub & Phil West

FOUNDED: 2012

INNOVATION: Digital content customized by AI

HQ: San Francisco

Exited: 2022

Vidora was founded with the belief that interactions between humans and computers can and should evolve using the power of artificial intelligence. The Vidora platform enables any company to dynamically adapt website and app layouts, menus, text, and content uniquely to each individual without requiring any engineering work. Founders are engineers, PhDs, and experts in human­computer interactions from Stanford, Berkeley, and Caltech. The technology helps media and commerce companies like Yahoo!, News Corp, and Panasonic increase engagement and revenue.
VISIT: Vidora

VORSTELLA

FOUNDER:  Matt Stump and Avinash Mandava

FOUNDED:  2017

INNOVATION:  Automated cloud migration and ML-powered optimization

HQ:  San Francisco

EXITED: 2020

  • Vorstella

Major corporations are finally breaking away from hosting mission critical databases and monolithic applications in their own data centers and migrating to the cloud and service based applications.  VORSTELLA automatically sets up cloud applications and operates them for customers, then uses machine learning on system-wide data to continually tune and optimize performance better than human experts can.

Wizeline

FOUNDER: Bismarck Lepe

FOUNDED: 2013

INNOVATION: Revolutionizing product development

HQ: San Francisco

Wizeline transforms how business build technology products. Through advanced analytics that leverage engagement data, the SaaS intelligent platform enables business to focus their product strategy on the opportunities with the highest return and accelerate their time to market. Our goal is for all companies to one day use Wizeline to decide which products to build and market.

VISIT: Wizeline

Zippin

FOUNDER: Krishna Motukuri & Motilal Agrawal

FOUNDED: 2016

INNOVATION: The next generation of checkout-free technology enables retailers to quickly deploy frictionless shopping in their stores

HQ: San Francisco

  • Zippin

Zippin has developed the next generation of checkout-free technology enabling retailers to quickly deploy frictionless shopping in their stores. Its patent-pending approach uses AI, machine learning, and sensor fusion technology, to create the best consumer experience. Zippin’s vision is to banish checkout lines and self-scanners for good, so shoppers can zip in and out with their purchases.

VISIT: Zippin
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