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Basic Needs: Products and Services
Consumer Goods
Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, Southern US
PlantSwitch is a biopolymer compounding company with breakthrough, proprietary cellulose-based technology that allows them to reduce the cost of biopolymers by up to 40% while increasing their sustainability, accessibility, and mechanical properties. They are currently launching their first commercial production facility and are raising an $8MSeries A to support this launch. The company's products are made from renewable resources, such as cornstarch, sugarcane, and other plant-based materials. These materials are chosen for their ability to break down more quickly and safely in the environment than conventional plastics. PlantSwitch aims to lead the movement towards a more sustainable future by providing viable alternatives to single-use plastics and promoting a more environmentally conscious lifestyle.
Beverage
Greater Los Angeles Area, West Coast, Western US
Zen Beverage offers Zenwtr, vapor-distilled alkaline water bottled in recyclable ocean-bound plastic. ZenWTR is on a mission to help reduce the amount of plastic polluting the world’s coastal environments. Each ZenWTR bottle is made from up to five plastic bottles rescued from coastal environments.
Nutrition
Washington DC Metro Area, East Coast, Southern US
Territory Foods is a chef-prepared meal delivery service that creates nutritionist-approved menus tailored to support various dietary preferences and regional market tastes. Its fresh, healthy, ready-to-eat meals are designed by in-house culinary professionals and nutrition experts, prepared by a dedicated team of chefs, and powered by aproprietary algorithm that informs personalized menu variety at scale. Its boredom-proof rotating menus feature a wide variety of freshly-made artisan meals per week that are responsibly sourced, always free of refined sugars, and made without ingredients that contain gluten and dairy. Menus can be customized to meet dietary templates such as Vegan, Vegetarian, Whole30, and Keto, taking the guesswork out of navigating and committing to healthy eating.
Territory Foods launched in 2011 and is headquartered in Arlington, VA.
Nutrition
Greater New York Area, East Coast, Northeastern US
Mezcla produces plant-based protein bars to provide snack alternatives. Its first product, the Puff-Crispy, replaces the traditional slab-style protein bar with an innovative, crunchy texture developed from puffed pea protein. The company's products use soy, dairy, and gluten-free ingredients to produce protein bars in various flavors such asvanilla, cocoa peanut butter, and hot chocolate to let customers enjoy a delicious and convenient snack that is also packed with protein and nutrients.
Beverage
Greater New York Area, East Coast, Northeastern US
Nguyen Coffee Supply is an award-winning roaster and the first specialty Vietnamese coffee company in America importing and roasting in Brooklyn, New York. Founded in 2018 by 1st generation entrepreneur-activist Sahra Nguyen, the company's mission is to increase economic advancement for Vietnamese farmers through specialty coffee production,while building a diverse and inclusive coffee culture for all. We believe Vietnamese robusta is the future of specialty coffee and sustainable farming.
Energy
Glendale, California, United States
Beyond Limits is an Industrial and Enterprise-grade AI technology company that covers the full range of Artificial Intelligence, purpose-built for the most demanding sectors, including energy, utilities, and healthcare (as well as finance). Beyond traditional artificial intelligence, Beyond Limits has developed powerful Cognitive AI that unifies human knowledge with machine learning techniques. Its technology provides decision makers with efficient, reliable guidance and clear, understandable recommendations for everyday operational challenges to the most complex, mission-critical situations. Customers use Beyond Limits AI to drastically boost operational insights, improve operating conditions, enhance performance at every level, and ultimately increase profits as a result.
Immigration
Greater Miami Area, East Coast, Southern US
OKY builds technologies that help immigrants to improve their lives, connecting families and sending value home efficiently. The Company's products enable people to participate in the digital economy, connecting and sharing goods and services with friends and family through the OKY App, or at more than 6,000 thousand retail locations acrossthe US. OKY built the first retail digital marketplace in Latam consisting of 600 brands with more than 15,000 physical stores across 6 countries where you can redeem products. Our direct-to-consumer solution brings an innovative alternative for cross-border value transfer at a fraction of the cost of traditional alternatives. OKY operates through four sales channels: the OKY App, the OTC retail network, local Rewards & Incentives, and a Resellers API.
OKY's innovative embedded finance solution is serving a multi-billion TAM, expanding the financial product offerings that operators currently provide. Our products complement the offerings of existing traditional cross-border remittances operators, driving much higher profitability and emotional value as compared to remittances. Our API integration is deployed on partners' native customer journey, providing an opportunity to monetize customer acquisition on a multi-billion dollar market. There are no incremental customer acquisition costs, thus raising average revenues per user, while keeping customers longer. Ultimately, our exclusive marketplace complements existing offerings driving superior economics and increasing customer lifetime value.
Nutrition
New York, New York, United States
Yummly enables its users to search for recipes by ingredient, diet, allergy, nutrition, taste, calories, fat, price, cuisine, time, course, and source. The Yummly app is available for iPhone, iPad, Android, and Windows. Yummly, Inc. was founded in 2009 and is based in Redwood City, California.
Agriculture
Kirkland, Washington, United States
Aigen is connecting farmers to breakthrough technologies, decarbonizing agriculture, and improving human and planetary health. The company is developing an autonomous, solar-powered robotics platform that manages plants without the chemical inputs that undermine soil's carbon storage potential by bringing alternatives to conventional practices, allowing farmers to regenerate soil health and deal with the global agriculture manual labor shortage.
Assistive Technology
La Jolla, California, United States
Called a Godsend by The New York Times, Aira is on a mission to make the world accessible anywhere, anytime. They provide on-remand, remote visual interpretation services for the blind and low vision community. Download the app, press a button and your phone's camera streams a live video to one our highly screened Visual Interpreters.
Agriculture
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
Bloomfield Robotics has continuous ai inspection that digitalizes the health and performance of every plant from seed to harvest. It is to help growers precisely, efficiently, and affordably assess every plant. Their technology is an innovative, easy-to-use, and cost-effective combination of ground-based image capture and deep learning-based processing.
Child Care
San Francisco, California, United States
Bobbie is a baby formula delivery startup that sells direct-to-consumer and offers a subscription service to parents across the US. It exists to build a parenting culture of confidence, not a comparison, where every parent is supported in the feeding choice that is right for them and their baby. Bobbie's formulation complies with all FDA regulations, is created with pasture-raised milk from Organic Valley farms, and is the only infant formula to receive the Clean Label Project's Purity Award as well as Pesticide Free Certification.
Real Estate
San Francisco, California, United States
Bungalow is a residential real estate platform that provides renters with a more convenient, flexible, and communal living solution. It utilizes existing housing supply by signing long-term leases with homeowners, and offers multi-bedroom homes in some of the most desirable neighborhoods in cities throughout the United States. Bungalow offers private bedrooms with handpicked housemates in beautifully furnished homes across seven major cities. Each home comes furnished and includes wifi, utilities, housekeeping, and monthly community events for members. Andrew Collins and Justin McCarty founded Bungalow in 2016. Its headquarters is in San Francisco in California.
Energy
San Francisco, California, United States
Camus'™ grid orchestration platform empowers electric utilities with real-time grid awareness, day-ahead forecasting, coordinated control of distributed energy resources, and long-term planning insights. Utilities use Camus'™ platform to predict and proactively manage local network capacity, right-size infrastructure investments, and reliably serve new loads. Leveraging world-class technology expertise, Camus is helping utilities navigate the transition to a fully electrified, zero-carbon future.
Employee Benefits
San Francisco, California, United States
Cocoon is a leave management software that uses first-of-its-kind technology to take the work out of leave. We partner with employers like Carta, Khan Academy, and Benchling to support their people through life'™s most pivotal moments'”from having a baby to caring for a loved one to focusing on personal health. The process of taking and managing leave is often confusing, arduous, and stressful for everyone involved. Cocoon automates the complexities of compliance, claims, and payroll so People teams can focus instead on caring for their people. Founded in 2020 by former Stripe and Square employees, Cocoon is backed by Index Ventures, First Round Capital, and other prominent technology investors.
Digital Marketing
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Cooler Screens is a developer of interactive digital displays to replace glass doors in store aisles. The platform enables consumers to enjoy simplified access to relevant information to make decisions that best fit their budgets, taste, and health preferences. Retailers can increase sales by offering shoppers a better, personalized experience at the advertising. For consumer product companies, Cooler Screens is providing a new platform to build brand awareness, market their products at the point-of-sale, and improve visibility with real-time analytics. Arsen Avakian, Glen Tullman, and Jamie Koval co-founded the company in Chicago, Illinois in 2017.
Assistive Technology
San Francisco, California, United States
Electric Sheep is a technology company that is developing AI for the physical, outdoor world. They are building robots with an AI brain, doing for the physical world what ChatGPT did for language. Their approach combines Sim2Real techniques and the data + reinforcement learning from their deployed fleet of robots within their large-scale landscape services business. ESR acquires and transforms traditional, commercial landscape services businesses through the use of AI and robotics. They deliver cutting-edge tech and workflows while staying grounded with an in-field perspective, building products that speak directly to the needs of landscaping professionals. With robots performing mundane, repetitive tasks, the human workforce will be freed up to focus on more creative tasks such as landscaping or environmental health. In running their own service business, ESR has created a sandbox for reinforcement learning at scale, for their deployed fleet. This is their moat and right to win.
Employee Benefits
Denver, Colorado, United States
Elevate is an automated, AI-powered, API-enabled benefit account platform built for account administrators'”benefit platforms financial institutions, health plans, and TPAs'”to modernize consumer benefits. Elevate's all-in-one, ultra-reliable technology supports HSAs, FSAs, and HRAs and is depended on by thousands of employers and hundreds of thousands of American workers and their families.
Employee Benefits
Palo Alto, California, United States
Espresa is the world'™s first Culture Benefits® platform that includes a suite of integrated tools with a modern digital experience that people love. Supporting HR and people teams, Espresa drives workplace culture through employee experience and engagement programs such as rewards and recognition, employee resource groups, wellbeing and fitness, challenges and achievements, reimbursements and allowances, and meetups and event scheduling. Discover how Espresa makes heroes out of HR teams while engaging people, wherever they are. Espresa is headquartered in Palo Alto, California. Learn more at Espresa.com The company was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in Palo Alto, California.
Nutrition
Emeryville, California, United States
Finless Foods provides cellular-agriculture technologies to create accessible plant-based and cell-cultured seafood alternatives. Finless Foods offers a variety of food choices that cater to different tastes and dietary requirements. They provide consumers with responsibly produced food items to help them expand their daily eating habits while also contributing to a more sustainable future and promoting better ocean health.
Business
New York, New York, United States
Frame AI is the customer feedback intelligence engine that powers winning CX with automatic sentiment, effort, and actionable themes extracted from every customer interaction in every channel. Learn how leading companies like Fastly, NVIDIA, and Oscar Health use Frame AI to activate needle-moving customer feedback at www.frame.ai.
Employee Benefits
Laguna Niguel, California, United States
Fuel50 is the AI-powered Talent Marketplace that delivers internal talent mobility and workforce reskilling. With hyper-personalized AI and a deeply embedded commitment to diversity and inclusion, Fuel50 mobilizes your talent. Fuel50'™s ethical AI matches your people to opportunities in real-time, automatically maps your workforce architecture, and provides deep data insights for predictive talent and workforce planning. Over 70 organizations around the globe saw immediate impact since deploying Fuel50, with up to 65% increase in lateral movement, 35% increase in internal recruitment, and 60% reduction in employee churn. Fuel50 powers the workforce of the future.
Agriculture
Bethesda, Maryland, United States
Gardyn develops cutting-edge technologies to grow large quantities of nutritious and tasty produce at home. Gardyn develops high density, intelligent, plug-n-play Gardyns for the vertical cultivation of top-quality produce anywhere, all year, and in any climate. Their smart, indoor micro-gardens and farms improve lifestyle, health, and the environment by providing tasty, affordable, nutritious greens and fruits without sacrificing design, space, or resources. It was started by FX Rouxel in 2018 and is based in Bethesda, Maryland, United States.
Employee Benefits
Houston, Texas, United States
GoCo.io offers software that helps businesses simplify their human resources systems. The software solution includes hiring and onboarding procedures, a centralized system to record and organize all employees'™ documents and data, payroll integration, benefits selection processes, personal records database, and more. GoCo.io Inc was launched by Nir Leibovich, Jason J. Wang, and Michael Gugel in 2015 and is based in Houston, Texas.
Energy
Walnut Creek, California, United States
Gridware provides a grid monitoring system of sensors and software for the power distribution grid. The system centers around a low-cost hardware platform that is easily and permanently deployed to power poles. The platform detects and predicts faults that ignite wildfires, expedites repairs during a power outage, and helps utilities demonstrate risk reduction to regulators through comprehensive asset health profiles.
Employee Benefits
New York, New York, United States
Intenseye builds an AI-powered HSE platform that helps the world'™s largest enterprises to scale employee health and safety across their facility footprints. Using the latest breakthroughs in computer vision, Intenseye empowers health and safety teams to monitor their facilities 24/7, receive real-time violation notifications, and operationalize their rapid response procedures. High-performance software and IP-networked cameras unlock 24/7 automated inspections and real-time event notifications for the first time. Intenseye does not capture personally identifiable information from the visual data that we process. We exist to scale worker safety and protect their privacy. Processing real-time streams of video data to rapidly identify anomalous events and create analytics for HSE teams to improve is uniquely enabled by machine learning and computer vision. Intenseye is a rapidly growing technology company that is backed by world-class venture capital firms focused on enterprise software and artificial intelligence.
Business
Santa Monica, California, United States
Involve is a customer intelligence platform that uses artificial intelligence to help businesses accelerate growth from existing data. It organizes all customer data and interactions in a single dashboard to quickly predict customer health, stop customers from leaving, and expand them to increase revenue.
Nutrition
Austin, Texas, United States
Journey Foods is a bold, machine learning-powered software platform for food companies. The company builds enterprise technology that improves product monitoring and development for CPG companies, ingredient suppliers, and manufacturers. With a focus on saving companies money and time, Journey Foods' tools accelerate innovation to improve their decision-making and operations with AI nutrition and supply chain insights embedded in integrative software. Journey Foods IO software enables food companies to quickly grow from new ideas, or new improvement, to commercialization by configuring desired consumer preferences, generating improved product formulations through ingredient tagging, receiving automated compliance and supply chain insights on nutrition and sustainability indicators, and seamless integrations to global ERP tools. The JourneyAI industry 4.0 solution gives management teams significantly faster data to make better strategic decisions and increase the ease of monitoring products for the 3 trillion dollar packaged foods market. The Journey Foods database retains an extensive and standardized database to extract data from millions of ingredients for algorithms to dynamically analyze and methodically recommended optimized portfolio recommendations based on pricing, supply chain, and nutrition parameters. To date, the company has established a database comprised of over 1 billion ingredient insights and learnings from our in-house prototyping product '˜Journey Bites'™.
Energy
San Francisco, California, United States
Founded in 2014, Kevala is a data and analytics company that specializes in delivering actionable grid intelligence. We help decision makers at the forefront of decarbonization predict and plan for a more robust, environmentally sustainable, effective, and safe grid with our cloud-based data analytics and visualization platform. Kevala leverages deep subject matter expertise across the entire energy value chain to expand insights from our platform, accelerate workflow integration, and position results to lead to successful strategic outcomes. Kevala is trusted by governments, utilities, and industry with the most sensitive critical infrastructure, market, and address-specific electric consumption and production data. We are a team of scientists, engineers, and energy wonks, inspired to usher in a cleaner future for the energy economy. Kevala's founder, Aram, worked in the heart of these emerging technologies and energy markets as an economist '” and saw a clear path to an electrified world served by a more robust, environmentally sustainable, and effective power grid that took full advantage of new distributed energy and storage and revealed ways to best integrate this with the current, evolving reality. The principle of creating a better future by mapping mutual energy sources and systems is the foundation for everything we do.
Energy
Somerville, Massachusetts, United States
LineVision provides electric utilities with the real-time monitoring and analytics needed to secure the future of the grid. LineVision'™s patented non-contact sensors collect critical information to unlock additional capacity on existing lines, provide insight into conductor health, and detect anomalies and risks. LineVision'™s platform is rapidly deployed at scale without the need for scheduled outages, live line work, or specialized installation equipment. LineVision is helping our utility partners around the world lead the energy transition by increasing the capacity, resilience, and safety of the grid. For more information visit: www.LineVisionInc.com
Child Care
New York, New York, United States
Little Spoon is the fastest growing baby and kids food brand in the US. On a mission to make parents'™ lives easier and kids healthier, we are bringing the future of kids food to the modern parent through a first-of-its-kind platform of products delivered straight to your door. From first bites through the big kid years, Little Spoon is the go-to for junk free baby food, finger foods, toddler and kids meals, on-the-go lunches, snacks and smoothies. In just five years, we'™ve amassed a loyal and engaged community that fuels our growth and plays a vital role in everything we do. As a direct-to-consumer brand, we have become the #1 online destination for kids food and have delivered more than 35 million meals to hundreds of thousands of families nationwide. Learn more at LittleSpoon.com and find us on Instagram at @LittleSpoon.
Child Care
Boise, Idaho, United States
Lovevery is an early learning platform that offers a stage-based system of information for parents and products for children. The platform also offers educational play products and toys designed by child development experts for stage-based learning. Lovevery's stage-based information and play products are designed by child development experts, and have won awards from TIME Magazine, Fast Company, Red Dot, and Parents''‹ Choice. The company is backed by Maveron, GV, Reach Capital, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and Collaborative Fund.
Public Safety
San Francisco, California, United States
Pano offers hardware and software technology solutions for fire professionals to detect threats. Pano provides tools to the government, utilities, insurers, and private landowners in order to mitigate wildfire threats and protect lives, property, and the environment. Pano is a unified enterprise solution that combines cutting-edge hardware, artificial intelligence, and software.
Augmented Reality
San Francisco, California, United States
Proxy designs and builds privacy-first, human-led identity technologies. Proxy provides a smartphone-enabled digital identity that enables the user to authenticate and interact with all devices. Products include Proxy ID, Proxy Health, and Proxy Access in addition to a suite of next generation hardware that enable credentialed access to be secure, private, and contactless. Proxy is on a mission to empower every person on the planet with a unique identity signal they own and control. The signal, emitted from a smartphone, allows people to securely authenticate to any device or service, similar to a universal single-sign-on for the physical world. Today, large enterprises like Vornado, Cloudflare and the Empire State Realty Trust enable their employees, contractors, visitors, and tenants to use their Proxy for frictionless access through secured doors, elevators, and turnstiles, and to create personalized experiences throughout the workplace. With Proxy, users own their identity and have complete control over their privacy and personal data. Proxy has been named to Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies of 2020, Forbes' The Next Billion Dollar Start-up, and CNBC's Upstart 100 list in 2019. Denis Mars is the CEO of Proxy, which he co-founded with CTO Simon Ratner. Mars and Ratner believe that technology should empower humans, rather than make humans beholden to it. They believe that technology should be used to make our everyday experiences in the physical world frictionless. The company was founded in 2016 and is based in San Francisco, California.
Automotive
Austin, Texas, United States
SIERA.AI helps industrial operations increase the productivity and safety of their industrial vehicles (e.g., forklifts, tow tractors, cranes etc.) with a SaaS dashboard to digitize compliance paperwork, monitor equipment health, and track safety violations by harnessing data from AI-enabled sensors. SIERA.AI operates in North America and and serves customers across a wide range of industries including manufacturing, transportation, wholesale and retail trade, logistics, utilities and energy, government, and food and beverage.
Pet
New York, New York, United States
Smalls is a direct-to-consumer pet food company that produces human-grade and fresh food for cats. The company's cat food is prepared with human-grade ingredients and offers customized kits as per the cat's nutrition needs, enabling pet owners to get healthy and fresh food directly at their doorstep. It offers variants such as chicken and beef, freeze-dried chicken, and turkey and duck. In 2017, co-founders and best friends Matt Michaelson and Calvin Hughes headquartered the company in New York, New York.
Agriculture
Boulder, Colorado, United States
Sunday is a subscription lawn care service startup that provides nutrient and soil health plans for garden and lawn care. It incorporates the use of customized planning using climate, soil, and satellite data to deliver gardening and lawn maintenance-related products and services, allowing gardening enthusiasts and lawn owners to design and maintain their lawns in a convenient and hassle-free manner. It was founded in 2019 by Coulter and Trent Lewis in Boulder, Colorado.
Beverage
Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Super Coffee provides pods, grounds, creamer, espresso, and coffee. They allow consumers to directly buy goods or services from a seller over the Internet using a web browser. The company was created to target health-conscious consumers seeking sugar-free bottled beverage.
Child Care
Los Angeles, California, United States
Upwards is a technology-driven care solutions company with a mission to make care accessible to all families and empower the caregivers who provide it. Upwards brings together families, care providers, employers, and governments to create new care avenues in real-time and utilizes a data-driven approach to enhance the supply and capacity of the care system. Upwards matches families with caregivers equipped to meet their unique needs and connects families with the resources they need to afford care, whether through government subsidies or workplace benefits. To learn more, visit upwards.com.
Child Care
San Francisco, California, United States
Winnie is a marketplace for child care built on powerful data systems and backed by a trusted community of parents and providers. Parents use Winnie to discover high-quality local daycares and preschools and learn all about their programs including detailed descriptions, photos, tuition information, licensing status, availability data, and more. Child care providers use Winnie to fill their open spaces, build their wait lists, and get support and resources to run their business efficiently. The company was founded in 2016 and is based in San Francisco, California.
Agriculture
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Yard Stick measures soil carbon. Scientists and farmers alike know that climate-friendly agricultural practices have the potential to remove atmospheric CO2 at gigaton/year scale. When these practices are adopted, more carbon is stored in soils, improving soil health and fighting climate change. But significant measurement challenges have held soil carbon efforts back - until now. By reducing the cost of soil carbon measurement by 90%+, Yard Stick will dramatically expand the opportunities for evidence-based regenerative practices to simultaneously improve ecosystem health, increase farmer income, and combat climate change.
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