Startups

Here are all 20 companies from Alchemist Accelerator’s latest Demo Day

Comment

Image Credits: Alchemist Accelerator

Alchemist Accelerator is back with another Demo Day — its 29th Demo Day overall, and the latest in the series to be entirely virtual.

As an enterprise-focused accelerator, Alchemist primarily works with companies that in turn work with other companies. These companies might have consumer-facing bits — but generally, their main drivers are building the things that help others build the things, or improve the things, or sell the things.

Alchemist’s Ravi Belani also shared plans to announce some news during today’s Demo Day, including that:

  • They’ve raised $2 million from German chemistry company BASF. While that may seem a bit random, Alchemist has been spinning up a number of partnerships as part of “AlchemistX“, wherein Alchemist helps large companies (like NEC, LG and Siemens) and governments run accelerator programs to spin internal R&D efforts into new companies.
  • They’ve hired Ian Bergman, previously a director for Microsoft for Startups (Microsoft’s arm for coaching entrepreneurs and providing startups with free tools), as a partner and head of Product for AlchemistX.

Alchemist’s Demo Day is scheduled to start at 10:30 AM Pacific. It’ll be all virtual, so you can tune in to that on YouTube right here. Below, a quick list of the companies presenting — plus a snippet on what they’re doing as I understand it:

eCommerceInsights.AI: Uses AI to scan reviews about your brand/products, find the common threads and turn them into “actionable insights.”

Wilab: Data analytics for 5G networks, meant to help predict energy/bandwidth needs and shorten outages.

Image Credits: Booke

Booke.AI: An AI assistant for bookkeepers. Syncs with things like QuickBooks and Xero to automate repetitive client communications and categorize transactions.

Covision Quality: ML/computer vision-powered system for finding defects in plastic or metal parts during manufacturing.

Grandeur Technologies: Pitching itself as “Firebase for IoT,” they’re building a suite of tools that lets developers focus more on the hardware and less on things like data storage or user authentication.

Deriskly: Uses AI to hopefully keep you from getting sued, monitoring and flagging risky communications and “emerging legal disputes with customers, employees and other stakeholders” across emails/social media/etc.

Image Credits: LongGood

EVAGo Medtech: Kinect-style movement-detection mashed up with physical rehabilitation, allowing therapists to help patients from afar. Especially helpful during the pandemic, when there are risks involved with having patients travel or having additional people come into a care center.

JSight: An “open source API” standard meant to automatically keep your team’s API documentation up to date.

PAL: A system for helping families with children with autism find qualified caregivers and use wearables/data to improve care.

Revire: Helps companies build AI-powered internal tools, providing machine learning models and UI components to help them analyze their data.

Seabird Apps: A no-code platform for quickly building mobile community apps (with features like messaging, agendas, announcements, etc.) for groups like your neighborhood, school clubs and volunteer orgs.

Slingshot: Where sports scouts might look for prodigies in basketball or football, Slingshot looks for prodigy coders, building a database of talented young developers that companies might want to hire.

Tellus Technologies: Plant-based plastic alternative. “It is completely biodegradable, quickly compostable, and sustainably sourced,” they write.

Werbot: A way to more easily and securely share access to development servers. Users get access to all their servers with a single sign-on, and admins can go back and replay each server session to figure out who broke what.

Kanari AI: Training speech recognition models to better recognize different dialects of the same language.

Portals: A platform meant to help content creators give their fans a home (and, of course, help those creators find new ways to make money).

Asynos: Low-cost sensors for tracking individual items as they go through the supply chain, to prevent loss/waste.

 

Image Credits: Qummy

Qummy:  An automated oven meant for places like small cafes, bars and gas stations to help them sell meals when kitchen space might be next to nil. Meals are stored frozen — you scan a QR code on the package, toss the whole package into the oven and it handles the heating and timing.

Watts Battery: A big, stackable backup battery for your home. Only need a bit of power in an outage? Grab one. Need more power to keep things like big appliances running? Get three or four of them and just stack them on top to chain them together and provide more juice.

Aratar: This one is still a bit under wraps, but it’s in the crypto space and the company’s website describe itself as an “index coin.”

More TechCrunch

A data protection taskforce that’s spent over a year considering how the European Union’s data protection rulebook applies to OpenAI’s viral chatbot, ChatGPT, reported preliminary conclusions Friday. The top-line takeaway…

EU’s ChatGPT taskforce offers first look at detangling the AI chatbot’s privacy compliance

Here’s a shoutout to LatAm early-stage startup founders! We want YOU to apply for the Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. But you’d better hurry — time is running…

LatAm startups: Apply to Startup Battlefield 200

The countdown to early-bird savings for TechCrunch Disrupt, taking place October 28–30 in San Francisco, continues. You have just five days left to save up to $800 on the price…

5 days left to get your early-bird Disrupt passes

Venture investment into Spanish startups also held up quite well, with €2.2 billion raised across some 850 funding rounds.

Spanish startups reached €100 billion in aggregated value in 2023, consolidating the country’s position as a midsize European tech ecosystem

Featured Article

Onyx Motorbikes was in trouble — and then its 37-year-old owner died

James Khatiblou, the owner and CEO of Onyx Motorbikes, was watching his e-bike startup fall apart.  Onyx was being evicted from its warehouse in El Segundo, Los Angeles. The company’s unpaid bills were stacking up. His chief operating officer had abruptly resigned. A shipment of around 100 CTY2 dirt bikes from Chinese supplier Suzhou Jindao…

1 hour ago
Onyx Motorbikes was in trouble — and then its 37-year-old owner died

Featured Article

Iyo thinks its gen AI earbuds can succeed where Humane and Rabbit stumbled

Iyo represents a third form factor in the push to deliver standalone generative AI devices: Bluetooth earbuds.

1 hour ago
Iyo thinks its gen AI earbuds can succeed where Humane and Rabbit stumbled

Arati Prabhakar, profiled as part of TechCrunch’s Women in AI series, is director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Women in AI: Arati Prabhakar thinks it’s crucial to get AI ‘right’

AniML, the French startup behind a new 3D capture app called Doly, wants to create the PhotoRoom of product videos, sort of. If you’re selling sneakers on an online marketplace…

Doly lets you generate 3D product videos from your iPhone

Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, has raised $6 billion in a new funding round, it said today, in one of the largest deals in the red-hot nascent space, as he…

Elon Musk’s xAI raises $6B from Valor, a16z, and Sequoia

Indian startup Zypp Electric plans to use fresh investment from Japanese oil and energy conglomerate ENEOS to take its EV rental service into Southeast Asia early next year, TechCrunch has…

Indian EV startup Zypp Electric secures backing to fund expansion to Southeast Asia

Last month, one of the Bay Area’s better-known early-stage venture capital firms, Uncork Capital, marked its 20th anniversary with a party in a renovated church in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood,…

A venture capital firm looks back on changing norms, from board seats to backing rival startups

The families of victims of the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas are suing Activision and Meta, as well as gun manufacturer Daniel Defense. The families bringing the…

Families of Uvalde shooting victims sue Activision and Meta

Like most Silicon Valley VCs, what Garry Tan sees is opportunities for new, huge, lucrative businesses.

Y Combinator’s Garry Tan supports some AI regulation but warns against AI monopolies

Everything in society can feel geared toward optimization – whether that’s standardized testing or artificial intelligence algorithms. We’re taught to know what outcome you want to achieve, and find the…

How Maven’s AI-run ‘serendipity network’ can make social media interesting again

Miriam Vogel, profiled as part of TechCrunch’s Women in AI series, is the CEO of the nonprofit responsible AI advocacy organization EqualAI.

Women in AI: Miriam Vogel stresses the need for responsible AI

Google has been taking heat for some of the inaccurate, funny, and downright weird answers that it’s been providing via AI Overviews in search. AI Overviews are the AI-generated search…

What are Google’s AI Overviews good for?

When it comes to the world of venture-backed startups, some issues are universal, and some are very dependent on where the startups and its backers are located. It’s something we…

The ups and downs of investing in Europe, with VCs Saul Klein and Raluca Ragab

Welcome back to TechCrunch’s Week in Review — TechCrunch’s newsletter recapping the week’s biggest news. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. OpenAI announced this week that…

Scarlett Johansson brought receipts to the OpenAI controversy

Accurate weather forecasts are critical to industries like agriculture, and they’re also important to help prevent and mitigate harm from inclement weather events or natural disasters. But getting forecasts right…

Deal Dive: Can blockchain make weather forecasts better? WeatherXM thinks so

pcTattletale’s website was briefly defaced and contained links containing files from the spyware maker’s servers, before going offline.

Spyware app pcTattletale was hacked and its website defaced

Featured Article

Synapse, backed by a16z, has collapsed, and 10 million consumers could be hurt

Synapse’s bankruptcy shows just how treacherous things are for the often-interdependent fintech world when one key player hits trouble. 

2 days ago
Synapse, backed by a16z, has collapsed, and 10 million consumers could be hurt

Sarah Myers West, profiled as part of TechCrunch’s Women in AI series, is managing director at the AI Now institute.

Women in AI: Sarah Myers West says we should ask, ‘Why build AI at all?’

Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world…

This Week in AI: OpenAI and publishers are partners of convenience

Evan, a high school sophomore from Houston, was stuck on a calculus problem. He pulled up Answer AI on his iPhone, snapped a photo of the problem from his Advanced…

AI tutors are quietly changing how kids in the US study, and the leading apps are from China

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje‘s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Well,…

Startups Weekly: Drama at Techstars. Drama in AI. Drama everywhere.

Last year’s investor dreams of a strong 2024 IPO pipeline have faded, if not fully disappeared, as we approach the halfway point of the year. 2024 delivered four venture-backed tech…

From Plaid to Figma, here are the startups that are likely — or definitely — not having IPOs this year

Federal safety regulators have discovered nine more incidents that raise questions about the safety of Waymo’s self-driving vehicles operating in Phoenix and San Francisco.  The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration…

Feds add nine more incidents to Waymo robotaxi investigation

Terra One’s pitch deck has a few wins, but also a few misses. Here’s how to fix that.

Pitch Deck Teardown: Terra One’s $7.5M Seed deck

Chinasa T. Okolo researches AI policy and governance in the Global South.

Women in AI: Chinasa T. Okolo researches AI’s impact on the Global South

TechCrunch Disrupt takes place on October 28–30 in San Francisco. While the event is a few months away, the deadline to secure your early-bird tickets and save up to $800…

Disrupt 2024 early-bird tickets fly away next Friday