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From yeast-grown cannabinoids to project management software to consumer apps looking to gauge opinions on college campuses, a wide variety of spaces was represented on the second day of pitches from Y Combinator’s Summer 2018 class.
As we noted yesterday, B2B software and services was the biggest vertical with 30 percent of the 132 startups falling into that slice of the categorical pie. Healthcare-related startups were close behind with 28 percent. Here’s the full breakdown if you’re curious.
Aerospace: 3%
Agriculture: 1%
Automotive: 2%
B2B Software and Services: 30%
Blockchain: 5%
Consumer Goods and Services: 9%
Consumer Media: 7%
Education: 3%
Fintech: 6%
Government: 1%
Healthcare: 28%
Industrial: 1%
Real Estate and Construction: 4%
Below is an exhaustive look at the group of 59 startups that presented today. We swear you’ll feel like you were actually there at the Computer History Museum watching the presentations alongside us. Also, if you’re thirsty for more of the latest picks from one of Silicon Valley’s premiere accelerators check out our list from Day 1.

Mental Happy is an employee gifting service that assembles what it calls a Cheerbox. Taking sham expressions of care for laboring office drones to the next level, Mental Happy throws out the flowers and ditches the dumb office knickknacks in favor of positive messaging and things they reckon employees can actually use, including food, wellness gifts, and personalized notes. The average price for one of these bundles of joy? $59 on average. Some people are buying, too. The young company says it has already generated $50,000 in sales over the last two months.

With a service that already holds $10 million in assets from thousands of clients, Titan is setting itself up to stand above other consumer-facing fintech offerings. The company is an asset manager that’s building, managing, and explaining its investment theses for normal investors. The company takes its customers through their portfolio using in-app video and other illustrative tools to make understanding strategies easier — and investing with the company more transparent.

The cost of childcare is one of the biggest financial burdens American families face, and though there’s up to $30 billion in government money available for childcare in the U.S. each year, it’s locked up in flexible spending accounts that are so complicated that 90 percent of that funding goes unused.
Kinside wants to help by automating the claims process. It also serves as a childcare management tool, letting parents pay their care providers with a Venmo-like feature, while making it simpler for companies to offer childcare benefits that can help attract talented employees. The company, which launched just six weeks ago, says it plans to target employers with more than 20 employees, which is a big market. There are more than 620,000 such businesses in the U.S. As for the total addressable market Kinside sees itself chasing, it’s $2.8 billion.

Travel and experience marketplace Fixers pitches experiences ranging from yoga retreats to trail running weekends and music festivals that are curated by the locals in-the-know. It’s designed to help travelers discover and book trips they couldn’t find anywhere else. The company has seen $1.7 million in sales in 8 months, with 7,000 activities booked, and the company hasn’t spent a dollar on marketing. The founders assert that millennial travelers are primarily motivated by experiences, rather than destinations. Entrepreneurs like yoga teachers are running businesses and retreats and making money on Fixers.

With a founding team including some of the leading luminaries in the field of biologically inspired engineering (including George Church, Pamela Silver, and Jeffrey Way from Harvard’s Wyss Institute) 64-x is engineering organisms to function in otherwise inaccessible environments. Chief executive Alexis Rovner, herself a post-doctoral fellow at the Wyss Institute, and chief operating officer Ryan Gallagher, a former BCG Consultant, are looking to commercialize research from the Institute around accelerating and expanding the ability to produce functionalized proteins and sequence-defined polymers with diverse chemistries.

Papa’s slogan is “grandkids on demand.” To solve the problem of loneliness, Papa connects college students with senior citizen homes. College students are matched with seniors to help them with tasks related to transportation and technology, but mainly the goal is to provide companionship for people who are at risk of loneliness. The founders assert that loneliness puts the country’s more than 50 million seniors at risk for health problems like Alzheimer’s; indeed, Medicare covers Papa through a UPMC health plan because of the more widely accepted belief that socializing well into one’s golden years is a critical component to living a healthier life.

Unhappy employees cost money, but Tall Poppy thinks it can keep more of them in place by providing an educational toolkit to those who are being harassed, a kit that teaches them how to lock down their online presence and manage incident response properly.
The brainchild of Leigh Honeywell, a security specialist, the startup grows out of the work that Honeywell has been doing to hunt down trolls in online communities since 2008, including at Slack, where she protected colleagues who’d been targeted by outsiders by starting, first, with strengthening their otherwise vulnerable personal accounts, then targeting sites where bad actors congregate.
Tall Poppy not only works with customers to educate them how to protect themselves but also to make them aware of the laws in each state that they can use to protect themselves and punish their attackers. Meanwhile, for $150 a seat per year, its software is comparable to other risk management tools.
Read more about Tall Poppy here.

AnchorUSD is a stable cryptocurrency backed one-for-one by the US dollar. The founding team wants to be the trusted reserve currency of the crypto financial system. They are aiming to develop a service that will provide the most trusted, stable storage of value on the blockchain.
Tether is not trusted, but since there’s no other option it has become the medium of exchange. Anchor wants to replace Tether. It’s built on Stellar and has become the official partner of Stellar, which means they’re cheaper, faster and safer. Transaction costs plus interest on float. The founder claims to have solved Stripe’s scaling problems and the other worked on growth at Facebook.

Ixora’s technology wants to do nothing more than enable the creation of photorealistic environments for any kind of visual entertainment, and it says it can do this a heck of a lot more cheaply than big studios.
According to Ixora, major film studios produce 100 blockbuster films each year that feature than 1,000 CGI shots — each costing them roughly $10,000 a pop. Its software can do the same for next to nothing, Ixora says, and it can do it within “hours.” If that pitch isn’t compelling enough, consider beyond movies that TVs, games, and VR experiences are all beginning to require movie-level graphics. With rich photorealistic environments becoming the norm across the entertainment industry (witness “Game of Thrones” and “The Jungle Book” as just two examples), Ixora could be catering to a sizable market for a long time to come.
Image: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch
Collecting and identifying photo identification becomes a breeze with Berbix, a company that’s aiming to make what amounts to Stripe for identity verification. The company has developed an integration with its software so that companies can cut costs and deter fraud. Founded by two former product and engineering leaders for trust and safety at Airbnb, they’re trying to build identity verification for all kinds of peer-to-peer marketplaces and online platforms, which they see as a $10 billion opportunity (at least).

Dataform is building software to help the data teams that spend 80% of their time preparing and formatting the data they need to conduct analyses, create dashboards or perform machine learning functions. The company has built toolkits that help collect and manage that data so it can be used (This post was updated to clarify Dataform’s business and url).

Sher Butt, a former lab directory at Steep Hill, saw that cannabinoids were as close to a miracle cure for pain, epilepsy and other chronic conditions as medicine was going to get. But plant-based cannabinoids were costly and produced inconsistent results. Alongside Jacob Vogan, Butt realized that biosynthesizing cannabinoids would reduce production costs by a factor of ten and boost production 24 times current yields. With a deep experience commercializing drugs for Novartis and as the founder of the cannabis testing company, SB Labs, Butt and his technical co-founder are uniquely positioned to bring this new therapy to market.

RevenueCat helps developers manage their in-app subscriptions. It offers an API that developers can use to support in-app subscriptions on iOS and Android, which means they don’t have to worry about all the nuances, bugs and updates on each platform.
The API also allows developers to bring all the data about their subscription business together in one place. It might be on to something, though it isn’t clear how big that something is quite yet. The nine-month-old company says it’s currently seeing $350,000 in transaction volume every month; it’s making some undisclosed percentage of money off that amount.
Read more about RevenueCat here.
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
HeyDoctor is the online prescription service for a growing of startups and services that are pitching medications and prescriptions online. Working with these companies, HeyDoctor can prescribe and refill prescriptions for medicines ranging from birth control, hair growth or replacement, urinary tract infection treatments, lab work and much more.
The company envisions creating an alternative medical record platform that’s open and accessible to patients and portable among on-demand providers. Already, more than 125,000 primary care visits have been conducted on the platform in the last 6 months. Last month, it made $105,000 in revenue, and it says that number reflects 22 percent growth month over month.

Or Arbel, the former chief executive and cofounder of YO, is back with a new company that’s a bit more sophisticated in its goals and complicated in its execution. Arbel is one of the co-founders of the new Y Combinator-backed startup Anima, which allows designers to convert design to code, automatically.
Using the tool, Arbel and his team — individuals who are culled from the engineering and design ranks of Google, Apple, and Amazon –estimate that development teams can save weeks of work, eliminating crosstalk between designers and developers. It has some early believers, too. According to Arbel, Netflix, Google, and Amazon are already using its tools, for which it plans to charge $500 per seat per year.

Influencers of the world are uniting on mobile app, ShopWith, which allows shoppers to browse virtual storefronts and aisles alongside their favorite fashion and beauty creators and YouTubers. Users can see exactly what products those influencers have featured and can buy them without ever leaving the app. It’s a free download and hours of commercially consumptive fun.
It’s like the QVC model, but for GenZ shoppers whose buying habits are influenced by social video content on YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat. The company revealed that one beauty influencer made $10,000 within five hours, using the ShopWith platform. The founders are former product managers with experience building social commerce products at Facebook and Amazon.

ZiffyHomes is bringing the co-living model popularized in the U.S. to millennials in India. With a clutch of managed, co-living, furnished apartments already in its portfolio, ZiffyHomes is already serving more than 2,000 young Indian professionals and seeing $2.2 million in annual revenue from the three Indian cities in which it operates. But it has ambitions to cater to up to 60 million more people across the country who fit into its target demographic, and given that it takes 20 percent of the rent paid, you can see how its revenue could grow quickly.
The company has competition, of course. It compares itself to WeWork, yet WeWork itself is making major inroads in India. Another, smaller competitor, a Mumbai-headquartered startup called Awfis meanwhile announced $20 million in new capital last month. But given the relative newness of this model to India and the size of the addressable market, this opportunity looks like a solid one to us.

Reformer Therapeutics is developing a pipeline of drugs for many diseases, with an emphasis on deadly triple negative breast cancer that is currently treated with an outdated toxic chemo. Their breast cancer drug is called Reformer 1 and targets cells that cause cancer to spread. The drug has proved safe in human clinical trials, and the team is starting a 3 year FDA trial. The founders met working together at Science Exchange.

Indonesia is a country in a transition, with a growing class of individuals with assets to invest yet who, financially, don’t meet the bar set by many wealth managers. Enter Ajaib, a newly minted startup with the very bold ambition of becoming the “Ant Financial of wealth management for Indonesia.” Why the comparison? Because China was in the same boat not long ago — a country whose middle class had little access to wealth management advice. With the founding of Ant Financial nearly four years ago, that changed. In fact, Ant now boasts more than 400 million users.
China is home to nearly 1.4 billion, compared with Indonesia, whose population of 261 million is tiny in comparison. Still, if its plans plan out to charge 1.4 percent for every dollar managed, with an estimated $370 billion in savings in the country to chase after, it could be facing a meaningful opportunity in its backyard if it gains some momentum.

Creating animated emojis made from real photos, Emojer just might be the most fun you can have with a camera. The company’s software uses deep learning algorithms to detect body parts and guides users in creating their own avatars with just a simple photo take from a mobile phone. It’s replacing deep Photoshop expertise and animation skills with a super simple interface. The avatars look very similar to Elf Yourself, a popular site that let you paste your friends’ faces on dancing Christmas elves that went viral every year at Christmastime. Founders have PhDs in machine learning and computer vision.

Snark AI helps companies rent GPUs that aren’t in use. It’s one way to potentially reduce the cost of that GPU over time, which may be a substantial investment initially but could produce a meaningful return over time while it isn’t in use. How it works broadly: The startup matches the proper amount of GPU power to whatever a team needs, and then deploys it across a network of distributed idle cards that companies have in various data centers.
Snark’s approach can also ostensibly make “deep learning” run faster. In fact, its founders say the company is already working with five companies (which, okay, fine, could well be other startups in its cohort) to make their research cycles ten times faster.
Read more about Snark AI here.

Urinary tract infections are highly uncomfortable and distracting and worse, often become more advanced, fast. It’s long been the case that treatment has required a doctor visit. But as of last month, a young San Francisco-based startup called Scanwell Health began selling directly to consumers the first time and, for now, remains the only FDA-cleared urine testing app that allows someone to test their urine at home using a paper test strip and a camera phone. (Its app uses sophisticated color metrics to analyze the strip and determine what’s what.)
Little wonder there’s some demand for the product. Company founder Stephen Chen said the company sold out of its kits – – 2,000 of them — as soon as they became available. Note the kits cost $5. A consultation to Scanwell to confirm the results — it relies on outside physicians — costs customers another $25
Read more about Scanwell Health here.

The scooter craze is hitting Latin America and Grin is greasing the wheels. The Mexico City-based company was launched by co-founder Sergio Romo after he and his partner realized they weren’t going to be able to get a cut of the big “birds” on the scooter block in the U.S. (as Axios reported). Romo and his co-founder have already lined up a slew of investors for what may be the hottest new deal in Latin America. Backers include Sinai Ventures, Liquid2 Ventures, 500 Startups, Monashees and Base10 Partners.

Mutiny helps business-to-business, software-as-a-service companies present a message that’s customized to each visitor on their website.
For example, when you visit the homepage of Mutiny customer Amplitude, things like the customer testimonials and the call to action will change depending on the size of your company. As for the size of the opportunity that Mutiny is chasing by helping its customers personalize theirsites? It claims it’s $5 billion.

LemonBox is a startup that lets Chinese consumers buy U.S. health products at affordable prices. Today, it allows Chinese consumers to buy LemonBox-branded daily vitamin packs.
Further down the line, the goal is to expand into more specific verticals, including mother and baby, as well as beauty. It could even move beyond e-commerce with services like consultations with dietary experts.
Read more about LemonBox here.

Osh’s Affordable Pharmaceuticals is a public benefit corporation connecting doctors and patients with sources of low-cost, compounded pharmaceuticals. The company is looking to decrease barriers to entry for drugs for rare diseases. Three weeks ago the company introduced a drug to treat Wilson’s Disease. There was no access to the drug that treats the disease before in Brazil India or Canada. It slashes the cost of drugs from $30,000 a month to $120 per month. The company estimates it has a total addressable market of $17 billion. “Generic drug pricing is a crisis, people are dying because they can’t get access to the medicine they need,” says chief executive Alex Oshmyansky. Osh’s might have a solution.

Ubits is Lynda.com for Latin America. Ubits offers corporate training classes in Spanish for topics like leadership, sales and Microsoft Excel. Currently, there are no good options available in Spanish, the second most common language in the world. Ubits has 1000 videos on 80 online courses. They have 75 customers including Citi, Dow, Nestle, BNP Paribas, who pay on average $9K a year. They have $700K in ARR, growing 40 percent month over month.There are 40 million office workers in Latin America. They charge $50 per employee per year.

Cryptocurrency projects can crash and burn if developers don’t predict how humans will abuse their blockchains. Incentiveai has built artificial intelligence simulations that test not just for security holes, but for how greedy or illogical humans can crater a blockchain community.
Crypto developers can use the service to fix their systems before they go live. They can either pay Incentivai to audit their project and produce a report, or they can host the AI simulation tool like a software-as-a-service. Already, the company — founded just two months ago — says it’s seeing $250,000 in revenue from three paying customers, including market forecasting startup Augur, which is perhaps best known for orchestrating the first ICO on the ethereum network.
Read more about Incentiveai here.

Toybox is pitching a software service that lets designers communicate changes to developers on any website without ever having to write a line of code. The changes are noted as CSS edits for developers, so the quick fixes can be implemented easily. It reduces the need for communication between designers and developers over minor changes to images or visuals and can significantly speed up production, the company said. The company has picked a $180 price point per seat. They have 400 active users after launching four weeks ago.

Using a network of 7,000 tutors, Turkish test-prep app Kunduz is building a service that the company argues is ten times cheaper and faster than traditional tutoring options. Like its U.S. counterpart, Toot, Kunduz users take a picture of a problem using the app, and then it links the studen with a tutor. Students looking for help typically get an answer in 10 minutes, according to the company, which says that one-third of the questions asked are “repeat” questions and thus can be answered within seconds without the help of a human. Launched in Turkey first, Kunduz has already answered 3 million questions in its home market, where its addressable market is in the $2.4 billion range. Next up, it says, is India.

The current system for making meat is broken. The Good Food Institute, a non-profit promoting meat alternatives and clean meat, is operating as a think tank and accelerator for the plant-based and clean meat sector. It’s designing curriculum for colleges across the country. It currently has 350 entrepreneurs in its ecosystem. And it’s launching a conference around clean meat and plant-based meat. The organization is trying to boost portfolio growth in the plant-based substitute and clean-meat space, and it’s consulting with venture firms that are looking at investing in the industry.

Plus-size women have limited clothing options even at the largest retailers like Nordstrom and Macy’s. While a majority of American women fall into the plus-size clothing category, 100 million women are constrained to shopping for a very small percentage of options. And Comfort wants to solve the supply problem. To do this, the founders, two former Harvard classmates, are building a direct-to-consumer fashion brand with stylish, minimalist offerings for plus-size women, including tunic shirts and an apron dress. It’s very early days for the brand, but since launching in recent weeks, they’ve seen $25,000 in sales.

Doctors in emerging markets will have access to an artificially intelligent clinical assistant if the founders of Bot M.D. have their way. The company has developed a bot that can provide answers to questions about drugs, drug interactions and diseases, while also transcribing dictated case notes. For any doctor with a smartphone, Bot M.D. could be their downloadable, affordable, and scalable way to improve patient care in places where the help is sorely needed. The data it gleans from these interactions could prove lucrative, too. As the company notes, pharmaceutical companies shell out $3 billion a year to understand their doctor-customers. If it can be repository for them, it can potentially garner a percentage of that spend.

OKCredit helps small and mid-size businesses in India — the world’s largest base of SMBs — which extend $500 billion of credit to consumers every year…on paper. OKCredit digitizes their transactions and records payment, reducing the burden of these businesses that are currently maintaining and accounting paper account books.
It appears to have struck a chord. Already the company is working with 15,000 businesses, and it hasn’t spent any money on marketing it says. As for the need it’s addressing, it says it’s a $300 billion market.

No need to caveat this Emptor. Helping local companies find facilities and maintenance providers like janitors, landscapers and HVAC repair technicians, Emptor bills itself as a Thumbtack for the enterprise and includes a machine learning system that will classify spending and provide recommendations for cost reductions.
That kind of offering could be music to hospitals’ ears. Many hospitals lose money, and those that don’t see margins on average of just 2.6 percent, says the company. Things are poised to grow worse for them, too, owing to a regulation passed in 2015 that could reduce spending on hospital services by up to $250 billion by 2030, according to a study published last year in Health Affairs. If Emptor can give them a way to control their operating expenses and improve their margins, everyone wins.

Put simply, Dinesafe wants to ensure that outbreaks of food poisoning will be a thing of the past. Foodborne illnesses sicken 48 million people, and kill roughly 3,000 people in the U.S. alone each year. Through its website iwaspoisoned.com, the company allows for user-generated reports of food poisoning to detect outbreaks in real time. In fact, the company says it predicted that Chipotle would have food safety issues prior to its spate of outbreaks earlier this year.
The company has 25,000 consumer subscribers and offers data services, surveillance, benchmarking and industry analytics to corporate customers and 280 public health agencies. The service is helpful for restaurants, too. If they want to stay ahead of these trends, they need this data. No wonder 16 restaurant chains are already signed up for the service.

Providing payment fulfillment services for businesses that still use old line payment mechanisms like checks, wire transfers or automated clearing houses, Modern Treasury wants to save companies time and money. Acting as a Stripe for non-credit card transactions, the company offers a way for businesses to swap out the homegrown infrastructure and excel spreadsheets they were using to manage payments.

Leena AI is building HR bots to answer questions for employees instantly. The bots can be integrated into Slack or Workplace by Facebook, and they’re built and trained using information in policy documents and back-end systems.
Some of of the questions and answers are pretty standard, covering things like vacations and expense reports. But Leena AI also uses natural language processing to understand a company’s unique terminology or just the unusual ways someone might ask those questions.
Read more about Leena AI here.

Abacus Protocol allows any company to tokenize both fungible and non-fungible assets (like commodities, equities, or debt) and automate their compliance demands — like know your customer, SEC registration exemptions and securities restrictions. These functions happen not just at the time of issuance but also on every secondary transaction or transfer of the security token. Using the platform, companies can take advantage of the benefits of tokenizations, making assets more liquid and simplifying bookkeeping without needing to hire a dev team.

HappiLabs is a virtual lab manager, spanning topics from biotech and brain research to robotics. It’s already working with 26 labs across the country, helping them buy everything from beakers to gloves to specialized machines in a cost-effective way.
Founder and CEO Tom Rugins is a former Ph.D. student and lab manager himself, and he said he was taken aback at how far behind scientific purchasing was from the rest of the retail world.
Read more about HappiLabs here.

Federacy has a mission to make bug bounty programs available to even the smallest startup. The idea is to make it free and simple for startups to set up bug bounties.
For now, the co-founders are vetting every researcher they bring on the platform. While they realize this approach probably won’t be sustainable forever, they want to control access while they build out the platform.
Read more about Federacy here.

The youngs in Gen Z love to take quizzes and companies love selling to the youngs in Gen Z. Those two truths have the team behind College Pulse salivating about the opportunity they see for their business. Using the company’s service, students can poll their community to find out what’s going on around their campus. Queries range from finding the correlation between sexual activity and GPA, to what’s the most popular spot to get a malt around town. Already active on 33 college campuses around the country, the company is profitable from selling its access to a much-envied audience of open wallets. Founded on Dartmouth’s campus, the company sees a future in an ad-supported content delivery platform for folks who want to know.

Tackling a $765 billion problem of healthcare waste Medinas Health is giving hospitals an easy way to resell their used and surplus medical equipment and supplies. The company has already raised $1 million for its marketplace to help healthcare organizations buy and sell equipment. With a seed round led by Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s Sound Ventures, and General Catalyst’s Rough Draft Ventures fund, the company is also working to lower costs for cash-strapped rural health care centers.

OpenPhone has been working on an app to make it easier to get and use a business phone number. You don’t need a second phone, you don’t need to get an expensive solution designed for big teams.
After downloading the iOS or Android app, you can get a second phone number for $9.99 per month. It can be a local or a toll-free number in the U.S. or Canada. You can also port an existing phone number and get rid of your second phone.
Read more about OpenPhone here.

iLabService is a Chinese laboratory monitoring, management and automation service. They use sensors to monitor lab equipment and alert you when something is wrong. They are currently tracking 1500 pieces of equipment. There are 300,000 labs in China using 25 million pieces of equipment. They charge 200 million for the equipment per year, creating a $5 billion market opportunity in China. The founders spotted this massive unmet customer need while working at ThermoFisher.

The Splish app pops content into video loops of between 1-5 seconds. Photos can be uploaded too, but motion must be added in the form of an animated effect of your choice. So basically, nothing on Splish stays still.
While wobbly, content on Splish is intended to stick around, rather than ephemerally pass away (à la Snaps). The idea is that sharing stuff on Splish is a bonding experience; part of an ongoing smartphone-enabled conversation between mates, rather than a selectively manicured photoshoot. In fact, the startup has quickly zeroed in on teens, primarily because unlike adults who take vacation photos and capture dinner outings that they post to social media, teens “don’t have anything to do,” so it tells them what to post. (These “cues” can include suggestions like that users film themselves chugging hot sauce, for example.) Teens apparently like the idea. Launched six weeks ago, the company says the average user opens the app four times a day. It isn’t disclosing how many users it has attracted so far.

CowryWise wants to bring the benefits of algorithmically managed investment platforms to Africans across the continent. Taking a page from the Betterment and Wealthfront playbooks that have been popularized in the U.S., CowryWise enables young, high net-worth Africans to invest their money more intelligently — with the machine learning tools previously available only to large financial services institutions.

Radix Labs wants to be the operating system for laboratories. Organizing lab equipment in a networked fashion could have a dramatic impact on research and development. Today, lab equipment is like maniframes in the 80s, where each device needs to be programmed separately. Running experiments serially can reduce the time it takes to come up with results, letting biologists automate their labs and experimentation to mimic the mass production of manufacturing.

Last year, Indian businesses sent 180 billion SMS messages to customers, 60 percent of which was spam according to the team at Kyte. The company’s AI-powered SMS inbox looks to ditch the spam and organize transactions notes as well as coupons for Indian users into a cleanly designed hub. The inbox decluttering startup is growing 13 percent week over week as it looks to capture the 300 million smartphone users in India.
Image credit: Li-Anne Dias, Crunchbase News.
Hypcloud is building a real estate development financing platform in Germany. The team is hoping to distinguish what they’ve built by enabling more collaborative and efficient negotiation times through a more streamlined workflow that will hopefully give customers quicker access to financing partners. Using the web-based software, clients can negotiate with up to 5 banks at the same time to get better terms.

Miru built an AR app that shows users what any piece of furniture will look like in their home. The Miru app places items in your living space using a computer vision pipeline that lets you pull items from any retailers website. Ikea has similar services, but only for their own catalogue of products. Furniture visualization is a 6.5 billion market, but that’s just the beginning. While using Miru’s visualization service, the app can map your home and gather data for future home projects like painting and flooring.

Klarity wants to automate parts of the contract review process by applying artificial intelligence, specifically natural language processing. It offers a subscription cloud service that checks contracts in Microsoft Word documents, making suggestions when it sees something that doesn’t match up with the playbook checklist.
The product then generates a document, and a human lawyer reviews and signs off on the suggested changes, reducing the review time from an hour-plus to 10 or 15 minutes.

The founding team from precision medicine startup Simpatica Medicine is back with SF17 Therapeutics, a precision medicine analytics platform providing monitoring for pediatric rheumatologists for life-threatening conditions. The technology enables pediatricians to match patients with the right treatment regimen or regimen changes if a course of treatment isn’t working. That same platform is also being used to demonstrate drug discovery capabilities that can identify targets for new drug compound development.

Outvote wants to make grassroots-style campaigning easier and more personal, with the launch of an app that allows people to text their friends with reminders to vote.
While today there are a lot of tools for voter outreach, many of those operated by well-known organizations like MoveOn involve people opting in to receive texts from the group in question. Outvote is different because it’s a tool that helps individual voters reach out to their own personal acquaintances, family and friends. The idea, says its founder, is to learn which of one’s friends and associates are not voting, then pressure them to get to the polls.

Curebase is aiming to run clinical trials faster and cheaper than anyone else via software that reduces recruitment times, automates manual steps, and lets drug companies distribute their trials to clinics. Considering that clinical trials are logistical nightmares, often coordinated across dozens of locations, any solution sounds like an improvement, and Curebase’s “clinical trial marketplace” says that already, three deals are expected to generate $175,000 in revenue that should help it convince more customers of the merits of its software and full-service support.

OneGraph is a GraphQL service that aims to connect the world wide web’s SaaS APIs and help customers build integrations way quicker than is currently possible. OneGraph has support for than a couple dozen APIs including Stripe, Salesforce, GitHub and more.

DreamCraft is a platform that lets video game modders create and monetize games without writing code. The company says game modding is a $4 billion industry, but that modders generally don’t make any money because they simply don’t own the original games. On DreamCraft, modders will be able to create new games, while keeping 70% of the revenue and gaining the freedom to host these titles. The co-founders hail from Google and EA, and want to build the platform that will act as the app store for game modders.

Using the Lightning Network to perform trustless, peer-to-peer swaps, SparkSwap is looking to build a new way to trade cryptocurrency pairs like Bitcoin and Litecoin without depositing assets on an exchange.

ExceptionAlly aims to help parents understand, organize and communicate all the info around providing care and education for a child with special needs, from autism to Down Syndrome.
The first step is education: Based on information provided by the parent, the startup’s platform assists the parent in understanding both the condition itself, what they can expect from a school, and what their rights are (like whether their kid merits a front-row seat or how often teachers are sharing reports on a child’s progress). It can also help parents collaborate with schools and teachers to create individual education plans.
Beyond education planning, ExceptionAlly has plans to replace the costly financial and healthcare planning experts who often cost these same parents upwards of $10,000 a year. How big a business the startup can create is an open question, but we love the idea of parents no longer needing a lawyer or other pricey professional to negotiate on their behalf of their child.
Read more about ExceptionAlly here.
Congratulations if you’ve made it this far, you’re pretty informed on the latest batch. Stay tuned a bit later for a rundown of our favorites from today’s group of startups.
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Fintech startup Revolut is launching a new premium card. As the name suggests, subscribing to Revolut Metal gives you a metal card as well as additional perks compared to Revolut Premium.
In addition to the new card and existing premium benefits, you can claim cash back on all spending in the currency of your choice. It can be EUR, USD, BTC or ETH, as Revolut supports fiat currencies and a handful of cryptocurrencies.
Don’t expect to break the bank, as you’ll only receive 0.1 percent in Europe. In other words, when you spend €1,000, you’ll receive €1. But if you often travel outside of Europe, it could be a good deal, as you’ll receive 1 percent in cash back outside of Europe.
Every time you use your Revolut card, the company gets a fraction of the card processing fee from MasterCard or Visa. Card processing fees are much lower in Europe, that’s why Revolut can’t give you back more money in Europe.
Revolut Metal customers also get a higher ATM limit and can withdraw up to €600/£600 without any fee. Premium users can only withdraw up to €400/£400 for free as a comparison. Finally, you can access a concierge service to book hotels, flights or restaurants if you’re a Metal subscriber.
Revolut Metal costs €13.99 per month or €135 per year (£12.99 per month or £120 per year). The basic premium subscription costs €7.99 per month or €82 per year (£6.99 per month or £70 per year). You’ll need to pay many, many things with your Metal card to cover the price difference.
So it’s clear that Revolut is targeting people who want to look cool with a metal card. It has a brushed metal look, a tiny Revolut logo in the top right corner and your name in the bottom left corner. It works with contactless card readers.
Revolut is following N26’s path and becomes the second challenger bank that offers a metal card. But the two companies have a different approach. Revolut’s card is slightly cheaper, and N26 focuses on partner offerings from WeWork, Hotels.com or Drivy.
Revolut sent an email yesterday saying that Metal is currently limited to existing Premium subscribers. The company only has 10,000 cards for now, so it could take a bit of time before you get your card.
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A new app called HiHello is taking aim at business cards. While plenty of apps in the past have tried to kill the business card, they never achieved critical mass. Mainly, this is because most required that both parties — the business card holder and recipient — have their app installed. HiHello is different. Instead of forcing everyone to download its app, it simply generates a QR code that can be scanned by anyone with a modern smartphone.
HiHello specifically takes advantage of the fact that today’s smartphones now have QR code readers built in — users no longer need to download a separate QR code scanner app to exchange information over this format.
On iPhone, you can use the native iOS Camera app to scan QR codes. And on Android, Google Lens (a part of Google Assistant) offers similar functionality. (Although this should really be in its camera, too, ahem.)
What this means is that when a HiHello user wants to share their contact information with another person, all they need to do is have the recipient scan the QR code the HiHello app generates. The recipient doesn’t have to download or install anything, and is able to quickly save the contact information right into their phone’s address book.

HiHello also allows you to create different types of cards with different information on them.
For example, you could have one card for your business, one for your side hustle and one for personal connections. This way, you can keep some of your information private, as needed.
You could create a card without your cell number for those contacts you didn’t want to be able to reach you by phone; or you could create a card with your virtual number (e.g. a Skype line or Burner) for dating prospects. You could create a card with your home address, cell and personal email for your family and friends. Or you could make one with your office address, work email, fax and office line for business contacts. And so on.
The idea for the app comes from K9 Ventures founder Manu Kumar, who along with co-founder and Caltech and Columbia alum Hari Ravi, and a small team of fewer than half a dozen, has been working on the app following the release of iOS 11, which introduced the QR code reader functionality in the native camera app.
Kumar, in particular, has been trying to solve the problem of business cards for years. In 2009, he co-founded CardMunch to turn business cards into digital contacts. The company was sold to LinkedIn a few years later, but LinkedIn abandoned it and shut it down.
“LinkedIn…failed to recognize the potential for what this could do for them, and in a typical big company fashion proceeded to ruin and eventually kill the product,” Kumar wrote in a blog post about HiHello’s launch. “Yes, I’m still peeved,” he added. (So are we.)
Kumar also noted that another problem with business cards is that people have to carry around different ones to represent their different roles or jobs.
“The information you choose to share with someone is often dependent on the context in which you are meeting that person,” he said.
To address this issue, HiHello allows users to create multiple cards with different information on them, which can be shared via the QR code scan in person, or sent out via text message or email — without exposing the email or phone number tied to your phone.

HiHello has also made it easy to find the right card quickly through its iOS and Android widgets that let you choose which card you want to share with just a tap.
The app is straightforward to set up and use. You’re first walked through a form where you enter your basic contact information to get started, and can then proceed to customize the different card types like “work” and “personal,” for example. You also can just choose to share your phone or email. (See above photo).

When someone scans the QR code, it launches a website hosted on hihello.com where there’s a link to save the information directly to their phone’s contacts. This link can be sent in other ways right from the QR code screen as well, thanks to buttons at the bottom for “Message” and “Mail.”
The new app is the first step in a bigger vision the company has for contact and relationship management, Kumar notes.
Palo Alto-based HiHello, a team of five, is backed by Kumar’s K9 Ventures. The app is a free download on iOS and Android.
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Talla is taking aim at the customer service industry with its latest release, an AI-infused knowledge base. Today, the company released version 2.0 of the Talla Intelligent Knowledge Base.
The company also announced that Paula Long, most recently CEO at Data Gravity, has joined the company as SVP of engineering.
This tool combines customer content with automation, chatbots and machine learning. It’s designed to help teams who work directly with customers get at the information they need faster and the machine learning element should allow it to improve over time.
You can deploy the product as a widget on your website to give customers direct access to the information, but Rob May, company founder and CEO says the most common use case involves helping sales, customer service and customer success teams get access to the most relevant and current information, whether that’s maintenance or pricing.
The information can get into the knowledge base in several ways. First of all you can enter elements like product pages and FAQs directly in the Talla product as with any knowledge base. Secondly if an employee asks a question and there isn’t an adequate answer, it exposes the gaps in information.
Talla Knowledge Base gap list. Screenshot: Talla
“It really shows you the unknown unknowns in your business. What are the questions people are asking that you didn’t realize you don’t have content for or you don’t have answers for. And so that allows you to write new content and better content,” May explained.
Finally, the company can import information into the knowledge base from Salesforce, ServiceNow, Jira or wherever it happens to live, and that can be added to a new page or incorporated into existing page as appropriate.
Employees interact with the system by asking a bot questions and it supplies the answers if one exists. It works with Slack, Microsoft Teams or Talla Chat.
Talla bot in action in Talla Chat. Screenshot: Talla
Customer service remains a major pain point for many companies. It is the direct link to customers when they are having issues. A single bad experience can taint a person’s view of a brand, and chances are when a customer is unhappy they let their friends know on social media, making an isolated incident much bigger. Having quicker access to more accurate information could help limit negative experiences.
Today’s announcement builds on an earlier version of the product that took aim at IT help desks. Talla found customers kept asking for a solution that provided similar functionality with customer-facing information and they have tuned it for that.
May launched Talla in 2015 after selling his former startup Backupify to Datto in 2014. The company, which is based near Boston, has raised $12.3 million.
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Braavo, a startup that provides financing to mobile app developers, is announcing that it has raised $6 million in Series A funding.
The might not seem like much compared to the $70 million that Braavo announced raising last year, but that was debt financing, used to loan money to developers. This new round is equity financing, used to fund Braavo’s own operations and growth.
Co-founder Mark Loranger told me Braavo was founded in 2015 in response to the “new dynamics” of mobile app businesses. And it’s worked with developers including Verv, Fanatee and Pixite.
“The data is there to create ways to provide financing to companies that otherwise would have to raise more [venture funding] and dilute themselves,” Loranger said.
For its first financing product, Braavo looks at Apple App Store and Google Play data, specifically the amount of money already earned by an app but not yet paid out. It can then provide an advance on some of that revenue.
Loranger described Braavo’s newer product as “more exciting” and “more data-driven.” It looks at user acquisition, user engagement and revenue, projecting how revenue would grow if a developer had more money for user acquisition — and then it can provide debt financing for that growth.

Braavo gets paid back as “a fixed percentage of future earnings,” Loranger said, so its incentives are aligned with the developers: “We only make our money back as they earn more revenue in the future.” And if app revenue doesn’t grow as anticipated, that just means Braavo gets paid back more slowly.
“We’ve never, ever lost a dime,” he said.
The company is also announcing the launch of a new analytics product that will allow businesses to track key metrics like the lifetime value of their customers.
Loranger said this will be available for free to anyone to anyone with a “revenue-generating mobile app business.” Rather than charging for the product directly, the goal is to “create more success for mobile app business that may end up qualifying for funding.”
The new round brings Braavo’s total equity financing to nearly $8 million. It was led by e.ventures, with participation from SWS Venture Capital (founded by Green Dot CEO Steve Streit) and Shipt CEO Bill Smith.
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IoT devices currently lack a standard way of applying security. It leaves consumers, whether business or individuals, left to wonder if their devices are secure and up-to-date. Foundries.io, a company that launched today, wants to change that by offering a standard way to secure devices and deliver updates over the air.
“Our mission is solving the problem of IoT and embedded space where there is no standardized core platform like Android for phones,” Foundries.io CEO George Grey explained.
What Foundries has created is an open and secure solution that saves everyone from creating their own and reinventing the wheel every time. Grey says Foundries’ approach is not only secure, it provides a long-term solution to the device update problem by providing a way to deliver updates over the air in an automated manner on any device from tiny sensors to smart thermostats to autonomous cars.
He says this approach will allow manufacturers to apply security patches in a similar way that Apple applies regular updates to iOS. “Manufacturers can continuously make sure their devices can be updated with the latest software to fix security flaws or Zero Day flaws,” he said.
The company offers two solutions, depending on the size and complexity of your device. The Zephyr RTOS microPlatform is designed for smaller, less complex devices. For those that are more complex, Foundries offers a version of Linux called the Linux OE microPlatform.
Diagram: Foundries.io
Grey claims that these platforms free manufacturers to build secure devices without having to hire a team of security experts. But he says the real beauty of the product is that the more people who use it, the more secure it will get, as more and more test it against their products in a virtuous cycle.
You may be wondering how they can make money in this model, but they do it by charging a flat fee of $10,000 per year for Zephyr RTOS and $25,000 per year for Linux OE. These are one-time prices and apply by the product, regardless of how many units get sold and there is no lock-in, according to Grey. Companies are free to back out any time. “If you want to stop subscribing you take over maintenance and you still have access to everything up to the point,. You just have to arrange maintenance yourself,” he said.
There is also a hobbyist and education package for $10 a month.
The company spun off from research at Linaro, an organization that promotes development on top of ARM chips.
To be successful, Foundries.io needs to build a broad community of manufacturers. Today’s launch is the first step in that journey. If it eventually takes off, it has the potential to provide a consistent way of securing and updating IoT devices, a move which would certainly be welcome.
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Semmle, a startup that originally spun out of research at Oxford, announced a $21 million Series B investment today led by Accel Partners. It marked the second time Accel has led an investment in the company.
Work-Bench also participated in the round. Today’s investment brings the total to $31 million.
Semmle has warranted this kind of interest by taking a unique approach to finding vulnerabilities in code. “The key idea behind our technology is to treat code as data and treat analysis problems as simple queries against a database. What this allows you to do is very easily encode domain expertise, security expertise or any other kinds of specialist knowledge in such a way it can be easily and automatically applied to large amounts of code,” Pavel Avgustinov, Semmle co-founder and VP of platform engineering told TechCrunch.
Screenshot: Semmle
Once you create the right query, you can continuously run it against your code to prevent the same mistakes from entering the code base on subsequent builds. The key here is building the queries and the company has a couple of ways to deal with that.
They can work with customers to help them create queries, although in the long run that is not a sustainable way of working. Instead, they share queries, and encourage customers to share them with the community.
“What we find is that the great tech companies we work with have the best security teams in the world, and they are giving back what they created on the Semmle platform with other users in an open source fashion. There is a GitHub repository where we publish queries, but Microsoft and Google are doing the same thing,” Oege de Moor, company CEO and co-founder explained.
In fact, the Semmle solution is freely available to open source programmers to use with their applications, and the company currently analyzes every commit of almost 80,000 open source projects. Open source developers can run shared queries against their code or create their own.
They also have a paid version with customers like Microsoft, Google, Credit Suisse, NASA and Nasdaq. They have relied mostly on these strategic partners up until now. With today’s investment they plan to build out their sales and marketing departments to expand their customer base into a wider enterprise market.
The company spun out of research at Oxford University in 2006. They are now based in San Francisco with 60 employees, a number that should go up with this investment. They received an $8 million Series A in 2014 and $2 million seed round in 2011.
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What Robinhood did to democratize buying individual stocks, Titan wants to do for investing in a managed portfolio. Instead of being restricted to rich accredited investors willing to pour $5,000 or even $500,000 into a traditional hedge fund that charges 2 percent fees and 20 percent of profits, Titan lets anyone invest as little as $1,000 for just a 1 percent fee on assets while keeping all the profits. Titan picks the top 20 stocks based on data mined from the most prestigious hedge funds, then invests your money directly in those with personalized shorts based on your risk profile.
Titan has more $10 million under management after quietly spinning up five months ago, and this week the startup graduates from Y Combinator. Now Titan is ready to give upscale millennials a more sophisticated way to play the markets.

This startup is hot. It refused to disclose its funding, likely in hopes of not tipping off competitors and incumbents to the opportunity it’s chasing. But it’s the buzz of YC, with several partners already investing their own money through Titan. When you consider Stanford-educated free stock-trading app Robinhood’s stunning $5.6 billion valuation thanks to its disruption of E*Trade, it’s easy to imagine why investors are eager to back Titan’s attack on other financial vehicles.
“We’re all 28 to 30 years old,” says co-founder Clayton Gardner about his team. “We want to actively invest and participate in the market but most of us who don’t have experience have no idea what we’re doing.” Most younger investors end up turning to family, friends or Reddit for unreliable advice. But Titan lets them instantly buy the most reputable stocks without having to stay glued to market tickers, while using an app to cut out the costs of pricey brokers and Wall Street offices.
Titan co-founders (from left): Max Bernardy, Joe Percoco, Clayton Gardner
“We all came from the world of having worked at hedge funds and private equity firms like Goldman Sachs. We spent five years doing that and ultimately were very frustrated that the experiences and products we were building for wealthy people were completely inaccessible to people who weren’t rich or didn’t have a fancy suit,” Gardner recalls. “Instead of charging high fees, we can use software to bring the products directly to consumers.”
Titan wants to build BlackRock for a new generation, but its origin is much more traditional. Gardner and his co-founder Joe Percoco met on their first day of business school at UPenn’s Wharton (of course). Meanwhile, Titan’s third co-founder, Max Bernardy, was studying computer science at Stanford before earning a patent in hedge fund software and doing engineering at a few startups. The unfortunate fact is the world of finance is dominated by alumni from these schools. Titan will enjoy the classic privilege of industry connections as it tries to carve out a client base for a fresh product.
“We were frustrated that millennials only have two options for investing: buying and selling stocks themselves or investing in a market-weighted index,” says Gardner. “We’re building the third.”

Titan’s first product isn’t technically a hedge fund, but it’s built like one. It piggybacks off the big hedgies that have to report their holdings. Titan uses its software to determine which are the top 20 stocks across these funds based on turnover, concentration and more. All users download the Titan iOS or Android app, fund their account and are automatically invested into fractional shares of the same 20 stocks.
Titan earns a 1 percent annual fee on what you invest. There is a minimum $1,000 investment, so some younger adults may be below the bar. “We’re targeting a more premium millennial for start. A lot of our early users are in the tech field and are already investing,” says Gardner.
For downside protection, Titan collects information about its users to assess their risk tolerance and hedge their investment by shorting the market index 0 to 20 percent so they’ll earn some if everything crashes. Rather than Titan controlling the assets itself, an industry favorite custodian called Apex keeps them secure. The app uses 256-bit encryption and SSL for data transfers, and funds are insured up to $500,000.

How have its bets and traction been doing? “We’ve been pleasantly surprised so far,” Gardner beams, noting Titan’s thousands of clients. It claims it’s up 10 percent year-to-date and up 33 percent in one year compared to the S&P 500’s 2 percent year-to-date and 22 percent in one year. Since users can pull out their funds in three to four business days, Titan is incentivized to properly manage the portfolio or clients will bail.
But beyond the demographic and business model, it’s the educational elements that set Titan apart. Users don’t have to hunt online for investment research. Titan compiles it into deep dives into top stocks like Amazon or Comcast, laying out investment theses for why you should want your money in “the everything store” or “a toll road for the Internet.” Through in-app videos, push notifications and reports, Titan tries to make its users smarter, not just richer.
With time and funding, “Eventually we hope to launch other financial products, including crypto, bonds, international equities, etc.,” Percoco tells me. That could put Titan on a collision course with Wealthfront, Coinbase and the recently crypto-equipped Robinhood, as well as direct competitors like asset managers BlackRock and JP Morgan.

“If we fast-forward 10 to 20 years in the future, millennials will have inherited $10 trillion, and at this rate they’re not equipped to handle that money,” says Gardner. “Financial management isn’t something taught in school.”
Worryingly, when I ask what they see as the top threats to Titan, the co-founders exhibited some Ivy League hubris, with Gardner telling me, “Nothing that jumps out…” Back in reality, building software that reliably prints money is no easy feat. A security failure or big drop could crater the app’s brand. And if its education materials are too frothy, they could instill blind confidence in younger investors without the cash to sustain sizable losses. Competitors like Robinhood could try to swoop in an offer managed portfolios.
Hopefully if finance democratization tools like Titan and Robinhood succeed in helping the next generations gather wealth, a new crop of families will be able to afford the pricey tuitions that reared these startups’ teams. While automation might subsume labor’s wages and roll that capital up to corporate oligarchs, software like Titan could boost financial inclusion. To the already savvy, 1 percent might seem like a steep fee, but it buys the convenience to make the stock market more accessible.
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According to a report by the American Cancer Society, an estimated 266,120 women will be newly diagnosed with breast cancer in the United States this year and (according to a 2016 estimate) can expect to pay between $60,000 and $134,000 on average for treatment and care. But, after hundreds of thousands of dollars and non-quantifiable emotional stress for them and their families, the American Cancer Society still estimates 40,920 women will lose their battle to the disease this year.
Worldwide, roughly 1.7 million women will be diagnosed with the disease yearly, according to a 2012 estimate by The World Cancer Research Fund International.
While these numbers are stark, they do little to fully capture just how devastating a breast cancer diagnosis is for women and their loved ones. This is a feeling that Higia Technologies‘ co-founder and CEO Julián Ríos Cantú is unfortunately very familiar with.
“My mom is a two-time breast cancer survivor,” Cantú told TechCrunch. “The first time she was diagnosed I was eight years old.”
Cantú says that his mother’s second diagnosis was originally missed through standard screenings because her high breast density obscured the tumors from the X-ray. As a result, she lost both of her breasts, but has since fully recovered.
“At that moment I realized that if that was the case for a woman with private insurance and a prevention mindset, then for most women in developing countries, like Mexico where we’re from, the outcome could’ve not been a mastectomy but death,” said Cantú.
Following his mother’s experience, Cantú resolved to develop a way to improve the value of women’s lives and support them in identifying breast abnormalities and cancers early in order to ensure the highest likelihood of survival.
To do this, at the age of 18 Cantú designed EVA — a bio-sensing bra insert that uses thermal sensing and artificial intelligence to identify abnormal temperatures in the breast that can correlate to tumor growth. Cantú says that EVA is not only an easy tool for self-screening but also fills in gaps in current screening technology.
Today, women have fairly limited options when it comes to breast cancer screening. They can opt for a breast ultrasound (which has lower specificity than other options), or a breast MRI (which has higher associated costs), but the standard option is a yearly or bi-yearly mammogram for women 45 and older. This method requires a visit to a doctor, manual manipulation of the breasts by a technologist and exposure to low-levels of radiation for an X-ray scan of the breast tissue.
While this method is relatively reliable, there are still crucial shortcomings, Higia Technologies’ medical adviser Dr. Richard Kaszynski M.D., PhD told TechCrunch.
“We need to identify a real-world solution to diagnosing breast cancer earlier,” said Dr. Kaszynski. “It’s always a trade-off when we’re talking about mammography because you have the radiation exposure, discomfort and anxiety in regards to exposing yourself to a third-party.”
Dr. Kaszynski continued to say that these yearly or bi-yearly mammograms also leave a gap in care in which interval cancers — cancers that begin to take hold between screenings — have time to grow unhindered.
Additionally, Dr. Kaszynski says mammograms are not highly sensitive when it comes to detecting tumors in dense breast tissue, like that of Cantú’s mom. Dense breast tissue, which is more common in younger women and is present in 40 percent of women globally and 80 percent of Asian women, can mask the presence of tumors in the breast from mammograms.

Through its use of non-invasive, thermal sensors EVA is able to collect thermal data from a variety of breast densities that can enable women of all ages to more easily (and more frequently) perform breast examinations.
Here’s how it works:
To start, the user inserts the thermal sensing cups (which come in three standard sizes ranging from A-D) into a sports bra, open EVA’s associated EVA Health App, follow the instructions and wait for 60 minutes while the cup collects thermal data. From there, EVA will send the data via Bluetooth to the app and an AI will analyze the results to provide the user with an evaluation. If EVA believes the user may have an abnormality that puts them at risk, the app will recommend follow-up steps for further screening with a healthcare professional.
While sacrificing your personal health data to the whims of an AI might seem like a scary (and dangerous, if the device were to be hacked) idea to some, Cantú says Higia Technologies has taken steps to protect its users’ data, including advanced encryption of its server and a HIPAA-compliant privacy infrastructure.
So far, EVA has undergone clinical trials in Mexico, and through these trials has seen 87.9 percent sensibility and 81.7 percent specificity from the device. In Mexico, the company has already sold 5,000 devices and plans to begin shipping the first several hundred by October of this year.
And the momentum for EVA is only increasing. In 2017, Cantú was awarded Mexico’s Presidential Medal for Science and Technology and so far this year Higia Technologies has won first place in the SXSW’s International Pitch Competition, been named one of “30 Most Promising Businesses of 2018” by Forbes Magazine Mexico and this summer received a $120,000 investment from Y Combinator.
Moving forward, the company is looking to enter the U.S. market and has plans to begin clinical trials with Stanford Medicine X in October 2018 that should run for about a year. Following these trials, Dr. Kaszynski says that Higia Technologies will continue the process of seeking FDA approval to sell the inserts first as a medical device, accessible at a doctor’s office, and then as a device that users can have at home.
The final pricing for the device is still being decided, but Cantú says he wants the product to be as affordable and accessible as possible so it can be the first choice for women in developing countries where preventative cancer screening is desperately needed.
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The Movado Group, which sells multiple brands, including Lacoste, Tommy Hilfiger and Hugo Boss, has purchased MVMT, a small watch company founded by Jacob Kassan and Kramer LaPlante in 2013. The company, which advertised heavily on Facebook, logged $71 million in revenue in 2017. Movado purchased the company for $100 million.
“The acquisition of MVMT will provide us greater access to millennials and advances our Digital Center of Excellence initiative with the addition of a powerful brand managed by a successful team of highly creative, passionate and talented individuals,” Movado Chief Executive Efraim Grinberg said.
MVMT makes simple watches for the millennial market in the vein of Fossil or Daniel Wellington. However, the company carved out a niche by advertising heavily on social media and being one of the first microbrands with a solid online presence.
“It provides an opportunity to Movado Group’s portfolio as MVMT continues to cross-sell products within its existing portfolio, expand product offerings within its core categories of watches, sunglasses and accessories, and grow its presence in new markets through its direct-to-consumer and wholesale business,” said Grinberg.
MVMT is well-known as a “fashion brand,” namely a brand that sells cheaper quartz watches that are sold on style versus complexity or cost. Their pieces include standard three-handed models and newer quartz chronographs.
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