We’ve reached the end of Y Combinator’s biggest Demo Day, which saw more than 300 companies pitching back-to-back over eight hours.
Earlier, we highlighted some of the companies that caught our eye in the first half of the day. Now we’re back with our favorite companies from the second half. From a marketplace to help you resell formalwear to a startup that offers self-driving street cleaners, it’s quite the mix.
Our favorite companies from Y Combinator’s W21 Demo Day: Part 1
If you’d like to browse all of the companies from this batch YC has a catalog of publicly-launched W21 companies here.
Terra
Heading into this particular demo day, I had my eyes peeled for startups focused on delivering services via an API instead of offering managed software. Happily, there have been a number to dig into, including Pitbit.ai, Bimaplan, Enode and Terra.
Terra stood out to me because it solves a problem I care deeply about, namely fitness data siloization. My running data is stuck in one app, biking data in another, and my weight-lifting data is stuck in my head, though I doubt Terra has an API for that interface quite yet.
What Terra does is permit fitness app developers to better connect their services, which permits the sharing of data back and forth. Presenters likened their startup to Plaid — a popular thing to do in recent quarters — saying that what the fintech startup did for banking data, Terra would do for fitness and health information.
Getting developers to sign on will be tricky, as I presume all of the apps I use in an exercise context would prefer to be my main workout home. But I don’t want that, so here’s hoping Terra realizes its vision.
— Alex
AgendaPro
Calling itself “Shopify for beauty and wellness” in Latin America, AgendaPro wants to help small businesses in the region book customers online and collect payments.
The company’s idea isn’t as radical as some companies that we heard from today — Carbon capture! Faster drug discovery! — but the company did share several metrics that made us sit up. First, AgendaPro has reached $152,000 in MRR, or just over $1.8 million in ARR. And representatives shared that its gross margins are 89%. As far as software margins goes, that’s pretty damn good.
The startup has more than 3,000 merchants using its service at the moment, and it claims that there are more than four million businesses that it could service. If AgendaPro can get software and payments revenues from even a respectable fraction of those companies, it will be a big, big business. And who doesn’t love vertical SaaS?
— Alex
Atom Bioworks
One of the holy grails of biochemistry is a programmable DNA machine. These tools can essentially “code” a molecule so that it reliably sticks to a specific substance or cell type, which allows a variety of follow-up actions to be taken.
For instance, a DNA machine could lock onto COVID-19 viruses and then release a chemical signal indicating infection before killing the virus. The same principle applies to a cancer cell. Or a bacterium. You get the picture — and it looks like Atom Bioworks has something a lot like this.
Having published its results in Nature Chemistry (not a journal that prints nonsense), the company is now working towards commercializing a COVID-19 test that costs 27 cents, as well as detection and destruction of other virus and cancer cells. Atom Bioworks said it expects an emergency use authorization from the FDA in June, soon after which it plans to generate $110 million (!) in sales.
We’ve heard of attempts along these lines, and nothing has panned out into the panacea everyone hopes for, but Atom’s effectiveness on COVID-19 alone makes it worth noting — and anything else is just cherry after cherry on top.
— Devin
Forcyte
Another unusual angle into biotech, Forcyte is less about chemistry and molecular biology than the actual physical phenomena experienced by cells. This is a difficult thing to observe systematically, and we’ve seen companies try to address it with hardware before (e.g., Venneos, which did not survive).
Forcyte’s system uses a micropatterned surface to observe individual cells and watch specifically for contraction and other shape changes. Physical constriction or relaxation of cells is at the heart of several major diseases and their treatments, so being able to see and track it will be extremely helpful for researchers.
The company has positioned itself as a way to test drugs at scale that affect these properties and claims to have already found promising compounds for lung fibrosis. Forcyte too has published in Nature, and the $2.5 million SBIR award it received from the National Institutes of Health makes for a serious vote of confidence — they don’t hand that money out to just anyone.
— Devin
Pickle
Pickle creates footnotes and takeaways from phone and video calls. Using artificial intelligence, the startup extracts insights that could help a company better serve its customers. Its natural language processing algorithms currently integrate with Zoom, Zapier and HubSpot.
The sell here is that sales teams could perform at a higher level if they had more thorough information about their customers. Currently, Pickle has 26 customers who generate $12,000 in monthly recurring revenue.
To me, this is the next sorely-needed step in live-transcription tools. Think of a company like Otter.ai (which I use on a daily basis) getting a huge lift by being able to offer a summary of sorts from your meetings. Another startup I talked to recently, Spot, is trying to do something similar for walking meetings between managers and direct reports, but Pickle stands out for the customer base it is starting with currently.
— Natasha
PingPong
2020 was the year of enterprise video calling, namely Zoom, but as remote work brought about more remote teams, syncing up across geographies became more challenging.
PingPong aims to lean on Gen Z social video trends as it builds out an enterprise product focused on short video messages. The app is an asynchronous video platform especially designed for remote-first product teams, which combines short video and audio chat messages with screen sharing to keep teams connected without drowning in direct messages.
The service costs $100 per user per year and can connect to Slack to keep messages all neat and tidy.
— Lucas
Hermes Robotics
Autonomous vehicles have been two to three years away from widespread use for a decade or so, and they’re still two to three years away. But tech that isn’t quite ready for highway speeds may yet be more than sufficient for a few niche applications.
Hermes Robotics has found one of those uses in street-cleaning vehicles, and as usual, the best indicator that a company has the right idea is it seems obvious in retrospect. Street-cleaning trucks travel slowly along clearly demarcated lines and schedules and have pretty straightforward exception and failure cases. And they’re probably really boring to drive!
It’s a perfect opportunity for automation and Hermes is offering retrofitting services, which seems way more likely to work, given that cities and waste-management companies have already invested in fleets. Hermes Robotics already has a few customers; once it gets a foot in the door here, I doubt if Uber Cleans or whatever is going to displace them.
— Devin
Clay
“Figma for 3D design,” they say.
I’m generally numb to “X for Y”-style descriptions, but damn, that one makes sense.
Figma has rapidly taken over the 2D design world, allowing designers to more quickly collaborate and give feedback on each other’s work. It’s proven particularly popular during the pandemic; it’s hard to pick someone’s brain when they’re miles away in their own house instead of two desks over. Figma lets users mind-meld on a design without sending files back and forth.
It’s hard to imagine that the same concept wouldn’t work brilliantly for 3D, where most tools are wildly complicated and the files huge and kludgy… and where many artists have spent the last year getting used to working from home.
Clay is currently in private beta.
— Greg
LightTwist
LightTwist wants to take the virtual production concept used by shows like The Mandalorian (a real actor performs in front of a virtual/rendered set that moves with the camera) and make it feasible for at-home creators.
Video of the actor is captured via an iPhone app, then uploaded to the cloud for processing and rendering. To see what the end result looks like, watch the demo above.
It’s still early, but it’s damned cool and it’s something I can see a company like Unreal or Unity snatching up quick. LightTwist was founded by Vikas Reddy, who previously founded Occipital (a company that was working on spatial computing/portable 3D room scanning before just about anyone) and RedLaser, the super-early barcode scanning app acquired by eBay in 2010.
— Greg
Power Router
A lead comes into your Salesforce dashboard. Who on your sales team should it go to?
Using a simple visual editor, Power Router lets you build rules to automate the assignment process and route those leads to reps faster based on traits like region, deal size, holidays, and whether or not there’s an existing relationship. If a rep goes on vacation, mark them as away and their leads are automatically rerouted to the next person in line. They’re not on vacation, but taking too long to respond? Bam, reassigned.
When deals can be lost because a sales team took too long to respond, it makes sense to automate as much of the process as possible. Power Router lets customers do it with their own set of rules, without any code to maintain.
Charging $15 to $35 dollars per user per month depending on the features needed, the company says it’s seeing an ARR of $200k with over 30 teams onboarded.
— Greg
Gradia Health
Information transfer, whether it’s best practices before a colonoscopy or getting a list of local OB-GYNs, needs to be modernized between doctors and patients, and Gradia Health is trying to lead the effort.
The startup helps clinics improve outcomes by sending patients personalized information and reminders before and after medical appointments. Gradia Health has booked $150,000 in ARR and hopes to help the 230,000 clinics in the United States find a better way to communicate with patients.
This is yet another startup that is incentivizing doctors to prioritize outcomes instead of visits, a model otherwise known as value-based care.
— Natasha
Queenly
While Queenly, which helps consumers of all ages and sizes rent and sell dresses, is often compared to Rent the Runway, the formalwear marketplace likens itself to another startup: StockX. Already profitable, Queenly reached $97,000 in GMV in March.
One bit about this startup that makes it more like StockX than Rent the Runway: it doesn’t physically store inventory, which helps it reduce real estate and shipping costs. Instead, the company relies on customers to use the platform like a marketplace and exchange dresses directly with each other. This tactic has helped Queenly build an inventory that surpasses Macy’s and Rent the Runway.
One metric that stands out about this startup is that it found product-market fit during a pandemic, when most people are living day-to-day in sweatpants. In an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, co-founders Trisha Bantigue and Kathy Zhou said that they had half a million in sales last year.
— Natasha
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