Technology

Alchemist Accelerator, a startup incubator which focuses on enterprise companies, held a demo day yesterday for its 22nd batch.

Each company got 5 minutes to tell a theater full of investors who they are, what they&re building, and why they might be the best to build it. We saw companies working on everything from industrial robotic vacuums, to platforms for healthcare facilities, to AI-driven money lending platforms.

Couldn&t be in the room, but want to know which companies debuted? Heremy notes on all twenty two teams, in the order in which they presented:

1) Cresance: Uses AI to cut cloud operating costs, using their algorithms to detect wastage. Companies are spending $200B on the cloud in 2019; Cresance estimates that this will go up to $500B in 3-5 years.

2) Bridgefy: Building mobile apps that continue to work when the userown internet connection is unavailable. Their framework allows apps to fall back to a Bluetooth mesh network made up of other nearby users. Founder Jorge Rios says they&ve signed over 12,700 license agreements in four months, with Bridgefyown messaging app seeing 140,000 downloads in four weeks (largely driven by a surge in users during the Hong Kong protests.) Was introduced to the stage by Twitter co-founder and Bridgefy investor Biz Stone.

3) Synapbox: Helps brands determine how their image/video content will perform, and tells them what they can do to improve performance. Founder Cristina De la Peña says the company is projecting an ARR of over $1 million, with the company making $60k in August and $85k in September.

4) Teleon Health: A software platform for senior care facilities. Their first product is a HIPAA-compliant staff communication platform that allows staffers to easily reach each other, access and discuss patient data, and send scheduling updates.

5) Particle: AI insights for commodity markets (like cobalt, or platinum), constantly scanning &over one million highly relevant data points each day& for things like weather disasters, local conflicts, etc. $1M in revenue in 2019, and predicts that they&ll triple that in 2020.

6) Pristēm: Steam cleaning in a portable box. Meant to be a dry cleaning alternative for offices, hotels, apartments, etc. Hardware license + monthly subscription. The companyco-founder says they have letters of intent from Marriot, Hyatt, and other hotel chains. Company name is pronounced like &Pristine& mashed up with the word &steam&.

7) EveraLabs: An at-home, mail-in kit which the company says allows for stem cell collection from urine. The idea would be to collect stem cells when you&re young for use in case of health issues later.

8) testRigor: Produces autonomous &human-level& testing for software in development. Currently seeing a $200k ARR, forecasting $300k in the next 30 days. Co-founder Artem Golubev says testRigor is already talking with 26 companies, including GrubHub, stockX, and Genentech.

9) Spectrum CannaLabs: Faster, accurate, and dedicated testing for legal cannabis products. In many states, all legal cannabis products must be tested for things like residual pesticides, funguses, heavy metals, and foreign materials prior to distribution— but Spectrum says the labs are overrun.

10) Gritwell: A platform meant to connect practitioners like dietitians, nutritionists, and naturopaths to patients with chronic health conditions. The company is initially focusing on patients with Lupus, later expanding to other autoimmune diseases.

11) Green Light Labs: A marketing platform meant to convince users to switch to electric vehicles. Their MyGreenCar and MyFleetBuy apps analyze your trips while you drive, calculating how much different cars might cost you (or your company) to run. Currently has $1.3M in contracted revenue.

12) Friendly Robots: Autonomous vacuums for the cleaning industry — think Roomba, but bigger, built for large/complicated commercial spaces, and with dramatically improved autonomy. CEO Xiao Xiao previously worked at Apple, designing and building things like the odometry/motion sensing algorithms for the Apple Watch.

13) Bludot: A cloud-based platform for helping city governments oversee and analyze the growth of its local businesses, tying into data like licensing/permitting and providing a place for the city to communicate with the owners. They&ve currently completed a pilot program with one mid-size city.

14) Coolso: A muscle-sensing, wrist-worn device for controlling devices with gestures. Initially focused on industrial use cases. Co-founder Jack Wu says their solution is cheaper to build but more stable than alternative approaches like Thalmic Labs& Myo or Leap Motion.

15) Crelytics: A software platform for lenders with AI-driven risk assessment and fraud detection, and a customizable decision engine. Currently seeing $100k+ in ARR.

16) LEAD: A platform meant to help companies &develop an amazing workplace culture& by matching employees based on interests and professional backgrounds and getting them together every 1-4 weeks for coffee, lunch, or virtual check-ins. Ties into existing software like Slack and Google Suite.

17) Celly.ai: AI-powered microscopy diagnosis. Strap an iPhone to a microscopelens with their optical adapter, and Cellyneural networks can help analyze blood smears, starting with blood cell counts.

18) Blushup: Marketplace and appointment booking solution for beauty retailers (like L&oreal/Lancome). Company founder Monique Salvador says only 37% of beauty retailers currently use online booking solutions.

19) Modality.ai: Analyzes video of a user (recorded while they interact with an on-screen avatar) for facial movements and speech patterns to evaluate changes in neurological diseases. Intended to make clinical drug trials for these conditions more efficient thanks to standardized/objective data.

20) Chowmill: Faster, easier meal ordering for enterprises for things like group meetings and events. Enter info like dietary preferences, favorite cuisines, and budget, and Chowmill automates much of the remaining process away. Founded Mubeen Arbab says the company is currently seeing gross margins of roughly 40%. In January they saw 25k in revenue; by August, that was up to $118k.

21) Yaydoo: Procurement automation for companies, making things like negotiation and recurring orders more efficient. Projecting a $1.2M ARR

22) SmartBins: Smart dispensers for bulk products at the grocery store. Works with existing bulk bins. The customer uses the bulk bin as normal, and SmartBinsystem automatically calculates how much product was pulled from the bin and has a label/tag printed for them at a nearby kiosk. Company co-founder David Conway say they&ve already got a sale agreement with the company that makes 100% of the bulk bin fixtures on the market. Brands and retailers get a dashboard with item-by-item purchasing analytics.

Aicha Evans, CEO of self-driving startup Zoox, is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco in just two short weeks.

Evans came on board to Zoox earlier this year following the unexpected firing of co-founder and former CEO Tim Kentley-Klay in August. At the time of the announcement, Zoox co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson told TechCrunch he and the board of directors believed &that to take the company through the next stage and to scale the company, we thought finding someone with executive and operational experience would be helpful to the company.&

Thatwhere Evans came in. Before joining Zoox, Evans served as Intelchief strategy officer. Evans spent 12 years at Intel, where she was responsible for leading the companytransition from a PC-centric business to a data-centric one. She also served as a general manager in the communication and devices group. Her first day at Zoox was February 26.

In California, Zoox has a permit to participate in the stateAutonomous Vehicle Passenger Service pilot, which means Zoox can transport passengers with a safety driver behind the wheel, but not charge those passengers.

Zooxplan is to publicly deploy autonomous vehicles by 2020 in the form of its own ride-hailing service. The cars themselves will be all-electric and fully autonomous.

Evans joins other notable speakers including Will Smith and Ang Lee, Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson, SnapEvan Spiegel, and Marc Benioff. You can check out the agenda here.

Hear more about Zooxplan from the CEO herself at Disrupt SF. You can snag your tickets here.

Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a weekend newsletter that dives into the weeknoteworthy news pertaining to startups and venture capital. Before I jump into todaytopic, letcatch up a bit. Last week, I profiled an e-commerce startup Part - Parcel. Before that, I wrote about Stripegrand plans.

Remember, you can send me tips, suggestions and feedback to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or on Twitter@KateClarkTweets. If you don&t subscribe to Startups Weekly yet, you can do thathere.

Startup Spotlight: Landline

Some startups build space ships that will one day send us all to Mars, others put their time and energy into improving 350 year old infrastructure.

Landline, the operator of a bus network in the Midwest, is one of the latest companies to raise venture capital. The business has closed a $3.85 million round led by Los Angeles firm Upfront Ventures, with participation from Mucker Capital and Matchstick Ventures. The company is actually based out of LA, too, but has completed its initial launch in Minnesota, where theregreater demand for short-term bus travel.

Landline isn&t just a few buses with startup branding. Founder and chief executive officer David Sunde tells TechCrunch a ride on Landline is booked through its partner airline Sun Country Airlines. A traveler pays Sun Country one fixed price to get them from the bus pick-up point to their final destination. The goal is to help those who live far distances from airports save money and to make the experience of busing more enjoyable.

&Itall meant to be at the level of reliability that you would expect from an air carrier,& Sunde tells TechCrunch. &We don&t want people who get on the bus to be surprised or upset — we want it to be a seamless experience … The perception of bus travel in the U.S. is negative. A big part of our mission is to get people comfortable on buses again as a viable alternative to air travel in certain markets.&

For those of you wondering, have these people ever heard of Greyhound? Landline says they wont compete with Greyhound because of the more than 100-year-old transportation businessfocus on long-haul trips. Landline will specifically focus on connecting those in rural communities to airports, particularly regions where there aren&t already bus routes that conveniently access the airport. Can&t say I&m particularly bullish on this one but the startup is very early and transportation is a massive market ripe for disruption.

&Our vision is completely integrated multi-modal travel,& Sunde added.

IPO Update

WeWork has delayed its IPO following questions surrounding its corporate governance and the ultimate value of the company. The co-working business says it expects to go public by the end of the year. Airbnb, for its part, filed a press release this week confirming its plans to go public in 2020. We don&t know much about the companyplans, but we wouldn&t be too surprised to see the home-sharing decacorn pursue a direct listing.

Postmates, the popular food delivery service, raised another $225 million at a valuation of $2.4 billion in a round led by the private equity firm GPI Capital this week. The financing brings Postmates& total funding to nearly $1 billion. The company filed privately with the SEC for an IPO earlier this year. Sources familiar with the companyexit plans say the business intends to publicly unveil its IPO prospectus this month.

To discuss the companyjourney to the public markets and the challenges ahead in the increasingly crowded food delivery space, Postmates co-founder and chief executive officerBastian Lehmann willjoin us onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt on Friday October 4th. Don&t miss it.

VC Deals

• WordPress parent company Automattic secures $300M
• Stripe nabs another $250M at a $35B valuation
• Ginkgo Bioworks raises capital at a $4B valuation
• Vianai raises $50M seed to transform machine learning
• Built Robotics raises $33M for its self-driving construction equipment
• HappyOrNot nabs $25M for its customer satisfaction terminals
• Groww, an investment app for Indian millennials, raises $21M
• Online personal shopping service Lookiero gets $19M
• Indian startup Digi-Prex raises $5.5M seed
• @Thingtesting, a business that began as an Instagram, gets seed capital

Learn from top VCs at TechCrunch Disrupt

A whole lot of VCs will be joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt.

We&ll have a16z general partners Chris Dixon, Angela Strange and Andrew Chen for insight into the firmlatest activity. Seed investor Charles Hudson of Precursor Ventures and Redpoint Ventures general partner Annie Kadavy will show up to give founders tips on how to raise VC. Y CombinatorMichael Seibel and Ali Rowghani will join us with advice on how to get accepted to their respected accelerator.

Plus, GVDavid Krane, Sequoia general partner Jess Lee, FloodgateAnn Miura-Ko, Aspect Ventures& Theresia Gouw, Bessemer Venture Partners& Tess Hatch, Forerunner Ventures& Eurie Kim, Mithril CapitalAjay Royan and SOSVArvind Gupta will be on deck to comment on the respective fields.

Disrupt SF runs October 2-4 at the Moscone Center in the heart of San Francisco. Passes are available here.

#EquityPod

This week, the lovelyAlex Wilhelm and I welcomed Kleiner Perkins& Mamoon Hamid, known for his investments in Slack, Figma, Cameo and more, to riff on upcoming IPOs and debate the scalability of D2C brands. Listen to the episode here or watch us on YouTube.