Startups to Watch — Global 2020
While you can expect to meet over 300 exhibitors on February 11–12 at our 2020 Global Conference in Silicon Valley, we thought we’d give you a closer look into some of this year’s Accelerate cohort. Below we highlight 7 fantastic startups whose groundbreaking solutions are already disrupting their respective industries.
DUCKT — Grind Accelerate
Logistics/Transport
Istanbul, Turkey
www.duckt.app
Micromobility is booming: since 2017 last mile solutions have been disrupting urban life. According to McKinsey, in 2030 it will become a $400 billion industry with 30 million new vehicles looking for charging and parking solutions. DUCKT is a micromobility solutions company dedicated to building the largest network of electric charging, storage, and service stations for EVERY e-bike and e-scooter. The company’s docking stations will be installed in dedicated micromobility areas, parking spaces, and privately held businesses throughout major cities and markets around the world.
DUCKT’s solution consists of a patented plug and play docking device and connecting adapter that fits almost all e-scooter models in the market today with charging stations. This enables smart cities and businesses to better connect with the on-demand micromobility economy. They’re also developing a proprietary mobile application that will interface with docking stations and provide available locations as well as real-time e-vehicle availability of not only partnered rideshare, but all platforms. DUCKT provides: dashboard & reporting UI, MDS compliant data, seamless cloud platform with API connectivity.
GIMI — Growth
Finance
Stockholm, Sweden
www.gimitheapp.com
Gimi is a neo-bank for children, teens, and their parents (imagine Snapchat of finance, but with a financial literacy twist). It’s fintech with a mix of gamification, social and education, aiming to equip children with financial literacy. Gimi wants to equip the next generation with financial superskills. Gimi’s vision is widespread financial wellbeing, thriving individuals, and prospering societies.
Gimi has one app for children and one for their supporters. Both come in either a free version or a premium version. The free app is not connected to real money (it’s a digital piggy bank that cannot be used to pay with), and the premium app has real money. Gimi Premium also comes with the Gimi Card, a prepaid Mastercard, designed for children.
70% of their card users are children under the age of 11! In the app, children can also chat with Piggy, their pixel mascot, the smart financial advisor. Every month, Piggy does more than 30,000 chat sessions with children. Today, Gimi has been downloaded more than 1.2M times all over the world and is visited by more than 120,000 users every month.
MY PERSONAL THERAPEUTICS — Grind Accelerate
Biotech
London, United Kingdom
mypersonaltherapeutics.com
At least one out of three people reading this summary have or will have cancer. Current treatments will help only 50% of them to reach ten years survival after diagnosis. Every tumour has unique genetic origins, ergo, to develop efficient cancer treatments for every person is crucial to look at them as individual cases. My Personal Therapeutics designs a personalized solution for each patient by analyzing their tumours and creating an analogous genetic copy of them inside fruit flies. These flies, which develop the patient’s tumour and serve as their avatars, are then used to explore therapeutic options.
To accomplish this, they first employ up-to-date deep DNA sequencing technology to identify all the oncogenic mutations driving the individual cancer. Next, they use unique genetic tools to engineer in the fly’s genomes the same mutations leading to tumor formation. Finally, they create an army of 400K avatars for every patient and using robotic platforms they treat them with thousands of drugs and drug combinations until they find the most effective treatment targeting each specific tumour.
Their Personal Discovery Process identifies highly precise combinations of FDA-approved drugs to target an individual patient’s tumour. All recommended treatment combinations will include a cancer drug and one or more non cancer drugs, making treatments less toxic and more affordable. They are integrating AI and predictive modeling to enable rapid personalized drug treatment recommendations.
CLIMATE TRADE — Grind Accelerate
Environmental Services
Valencia, Spain
www.climatetrade.com
ClimateTrade is a Blockchain platform for carbon footprint offset, green financing, and sustainable investment and has been created to disrupt the traditional carbon markets.
Thanks to the blockchain technology, their platform allows them to eliminate intermediaries and therefore save up to 30% of the offsetting costs. It has fully automated performance permits to reduce the transaction process time by more than 300%. As these are peer-to-peer transactions, they ensure that the original developer of the mitigation project receives the money directly, tracing the entire process and making transparency one of our most distinctive features.
They aim to create an ecosystem where all people and companies can easily and safely offset their carbon footprint by investing in sustainable projects with the highest certified quality standards.
INDORSE — Growth Accelerate
HR & Employee Engagement
Singapore, Singapore
https://indorse.io
Indorse is a skills validation platform which helps candidates validate their tech skills and helps companies match with better candidates. They’ve built, from the ground up, a distributed community of expert software developers who conduct code review on candidates’ code. This is done in an anonymous and randomized fashion, which reduces the unconscious bias associated with hiring and recruiting processes. Each of these experts gets rewarded for their activity on the platform.
As of Jan 2020, more than 5,500 candidates have been evaluated on Indorse, and the expert community has finished ~25,000 code reviews in total. In return, they have disbursed more than USD 100k in rewards to these experts.
EVOLVE ENERGY — Grind Accelerate
Utilities
San Francisco, United States
www.evolvemyenergy.com
Evolve Energy uses AI and ML to enable their customers to actively reduce their carbon footprint while also saving up to 40% off of their electricity costs.
They monitor the type of electricity (wind, solar, gas, coal, diesel) that powers the grid in real time and know the emissions intensity of the grid as it changes. Through their app, they’re able to connect the grid to their customer’s smart devices (such as smart thermostats) and simply shift their customers use to cleaner times of the day, enabling true carbon reduction. Because renewable energy bids into wholesale markets at low prices, this also means that the cheapest hours of the day are now also the cleanest. They help their customers automatically use less electricity when “dirty” fuels are powering the grid and consequently help them save money!
Spraoi — Grind Accelerate
Finance
Philadelphia, USA
https://spraoi.ai
The insurance industry has spent decades and billions of dollars focused on policy and claims administration transformation. However, these investments have merely automated process and not optimized outcomes or better engaged customers (e.g. agents, policyholders). Early applications of machine learning were initially focused in the Property and Casualty space, but Spraoi’s focus has been on the Life and Annuities and Voluntary Benefits providers.
Spraoi’s insurance specific machine learning platform, Barrel, incorporates model building, ETL and data pipeline capabilities to enable carriers to automate the handling of the data issues confronting them in building and managing models (e.g. missing, erroneously entered data) to generate insights in a scalable fashion. Spraoi offers a growing catalogue of machine learning solutions across the value chain. For example, Kwikcover is Spraoi’s customer experience portal platform. It offers a plug and play digital experience with microservices integration architecture that enables interoperability to legacy infrastructure and delivery speed.
We’re super proud to have these types of companies exhibiting at Global 2020 and honored to see them disrupting impactful industries like sustainable energy, carbon offsetting, and cancer treatment. Be sure to check them all out, along with the other 46 amazing Accelerate companies you can meet at Global 2020 on February 11–12 in Redwood City.
