Y Combinator unveiled one of its most impressive startup
batches to date yesterday, featuring big ideas in medicine, finance, and
marketplaces. After carefully watching the demos, speaking with
founders in the class, and querying prestigious investors about their
favorites, TechCrunch has compiled this list of the top 10 startups of
the 47 that launched at Winter 2015 YC Demo Day 2.Here they are, in no particular order:
Campus Job – Helps college students find part-time jobs and internships.
Students fill out a profile, see jobs they’re qualified for, and can
quickly apply. 1300 companies are already paying Campus Job to connect
them to its 100,000 students across 2200 colleges.
Why we picked it: College kids don’t just want another
public profile to maintain, they want results — in this case a job.
Campus Jobs fills an obvious need, already has strong traction.
LinkedIn’s sign-up-and-pray-for-a-job-offer isn’t
Seed – An online bank for small businesses.
Seed uses your data to pre-qualify you for loans rather than make you
hunt for them. It has a revenue share in place with a banking partner
that handles the traditional stuff. It recently released its banking API
and will launch its software client soon.
Why we picked it: Choosing a loan can be a life-changing
decision that’s confusing to navigate. By acting as a guide and ally,
Seed could save people tons of money on loans, and keep a healthy chunk
of those savings.
Atomwise – Software For Drug Discovery.
Atomwise predicts potential drug cures with the use of supercomputers,
artificial intelligence and a specialized algorithm that runs through
millions of molecular structures, potentially reducing the cost and time
involved in making new drug discoveries. Most drug research takes
months or years and millions of dollars. Atomwise utilizes AI and
machine learning to enable research that costs thousands of dollars and
takes just days.
Four months ago it launched a search to find existing
medicines to fight Ebola. Two of the drugs predicted by Atomwise could
potentially be used to cure Ebola. According to the startup they cost
less than $1000 and 1 week to find.
Why we picked it: Pharmaceutical companies spend billions
trying to discover new drugs. Whether it charged a licensing fee for its
technology or monetized its discoveries directly, Atomwise could make a
fortune while making us healthier.
Meadow – Medical Cannabis Delivery.
In simple terms, you push a button and get marijuana. Meadow is
experiencing 20% weekly growth with a 56% monthly retention rate. Like
many of the on-demand medical marijuana delivery apps available, Meadow
does not own or touch the marijuana. It builds the software for
delivery, point of sale, and inventory management for dispensaries. This
is a $2.7 billion market. It is poised to grow to over $11 billion by
2019. “Who knew marijuana would be so profitable,” co-founder David Hua
told the packed YC Demo Day audience.
Why we picked it: Meadow isn’t just another cookie-cutter
weed delivery service. It ranked high with us because its building
backend management and point-of-sale systems specifically for marijuana
dispensaries. That and its professional, by-the-books approach could
help cement Meadow into the future of cannabis.
Notable Labs – Personalized Cancer Treatment.
Drug combinations have been very successful in fighting disease, but
there are too many possible combinations to test on any single patient.
Notable Labs instead takes a sample of a patient’s tumor to their lab,
runs drug combination experiments to find out what works, and gives a
report back to the patient’s doctor. This exposes it to less FDA risk,
and cuts out big pharma companies that sell patented drugs.
Why we picked it: As life spans lengthen, cancer becomes a
more common killer, yet testing treatments on live patients can be
dangerous and expensive. Bringing technology to cancer treatment
protocols could increase survival rates, and who wouldn’t pay to keep
their family healthy?
Akido Labs – A Standard API For Healthcare.
Akido Labs wants to unlock health care data the way Clever unlocked
educational data. It sells to hospital vendors that normally have to
create endless custom integrations for each hospital’s backwards system.
Akido sits between the two, standardizing the data coming out of the
hospitals so its easy to build on for the vendors. Akido’s technology
could make building medical software cheaper and easier, creating a
platform that brings better health to everyone.
Why we picked it: The costs from healthcare inefficiencies
are downright disgusting. Patients end up footing the bill for the
archaic data architecture of their hospitals. Not only could Akido earn
money by inserting itself as a simplifying layer between hospitals and
vendors, but it could become an entrenched platform for healthcare
software development.
DroneBase
– On-Demand Drone Services. Customers push a button, and DroneBase
dispatches a local drone pilot with their own drone to come capture
imagery, video, maps, and analysis for any project, like construction or
infrastructure management. This lets big commercial clients avoid
buying drones, employing pilots, or paying suppliers. DroneBase’s
service can significantly undercut satellites, planes, and helicopters,
while getting companies better data faster.
Why we picked it: Drones can do industrial jobs that are
typically expensive, slow, and dangerous. The problem is that the drones
themselves are complicated. DroneBase could democratize commercial
drone usage, giving businesses the cost-saving benefits without the
hassle.
MashGin
– Self-Checkout Via Machine Vision. MashGin’s brick-and-mortar checkout
kiosk uses cameras to machine vision scan objects and instantly ring
them up. You just put your items, like and apple or a can of soda, into
the kiosk that looks like a MakerBot box with no maker inside. It
recognizes what they look like without user input or bar codes, and you
can swipe your card to pay and leave. MashGin’s two-person team from
Facebook and Bell Labs could change any business that relies on human
vision. And it’s just received a letter of intent for $50 million a
month of services from a major retailer.
Why we picked it: MashGin could replace legions of
cashiers at a wide variety of brick-and-mortar retailers, but its
potential goes far beyond groceries. An enormous number of jobs where
people identify or quality check items via sight could evolve to instead
use machine vision.
Bonfire – Full-Service Request For Proposal Management – $3 trillion is spent each year through the
Request For Proposal (RFP) system. When a business needs to buy
something that costs over $50,000 they get RFP bids from potential
supplies, and have to decide which to go with. That clumsy comparison
process can take months. Bonfire manages all the RFPs for a business,
determining which offer is best, and informing the buyer. Bonfire is
currently selling its service for $5,000 a year to large companies and
governments, but envisions an even bigger business in intelligence about
what buyers and suppliers should do based on the data it gleams.
Why we picked it: Anyone who deals with RFPs knows they’re
a nightmare, yet it’s how an jaw-dropping amount of money moves around.
By centralizing and standardizing how proposals are vetted, Bonfire
could get smarter and smarter about decision-making with time.
Eventually, it might be able to tell businesses which supplier to use
before they’ve even asked for bids.
EquipmentShare – Airbnb for Construction Equipment.
Trillions of dollars of construction equipment sits idle all the time.
75% at any given time. EquipmentShare lets contractors rent out their
idle equipment, and the startup keeps 20%. It can undercut traditional
equipment renters by 30% where contractors spend an average of $900,000 a
year. EquipmentShare could make it more affordable for smaller
independent contractors to buy or rent the equipment they need, and help
them create sustainable side businesses renting their cherry-pickers
and cement-mixers.
Why we picked it: Peer-to-peer rentals and the sharing
economy have proven to be enormously lucrative in housing and
transportation. Construction could be the next place where efficient
allocation of peer-owned resources takes a huge chunk out of an old
business.
Honorable Mentions
Transitmix – Software To Run Cities.
Major cities still use paper to route bus systems. Transitmix provides
city planners with software that helps route the transportation system.
It has signed contracts with 20 major cities in the U.S. and Canada. The
software works with any city in the world by using demographic data and
cost analysis to help cities make better decisions. It has a 60 day
sales cycle with a $1 million run rate. The company says it has a $4
billion opportunity to build the software to run cities.
Why we picked it: Congestion in cities is only getting
worse, yet local governments move too slowly and clumsily to adapt their
transit systems for changing needs. For a price, Transitmix could equip
cities with the efficient technology they need to reduce traffic and
save tax payer dollars.
20n – Producing Valuable Chemicals From Genetically Modified Organisms.
Pharmaceutical companies spend huge sums producing specialty chemicals.
20^n uses software to predict what genes can be used to genetically
modify organisms so they naturally produce these valuable chemicals.
It’s already invented a way to produce acetaminophen, the active
ingredient in Tylenol. It’s also figured out a way to decrease one
valuable chemicals price by 2 million times. 20^n now has over $1.7
million in contracts from DARPA and a massive cosmetics company, and is
eyeing a wide array of chemicals for production.
Why we picked it: 20n encapsulates the evolution of Y
Combinator from more niche consumer products that might just be features
to huge hard science ideas. We’ll have to wait and see if their
chemical-producing organisms can capably produce valuable chemicals, but
these more moonshot-style startups deserve just as much buzz as the
next photo sharing app.