My Top Six Picks from YC S19 Demo Day 2
A few weeks ago I wrote about my first “unicorn” angel investment, and last week I provided my top six picks of the 84 companies that presented during Demo Day 1. To complete this exercise, here are my top six picks from YC S19 Demo Day 2 (and here’s the Techcrunch article listing all 82 startups from Demo Day 2).
Disclaimer: I may have already, and reserve the right to in the future, invest in any of these companies. This should not be construed as investment advice. Any information below is from a public source: the aforementioned Techcrunch article, the companies website, or publicly available news articles.
Arpeggio Bio: the “debugger for cell biology”
As a software engineer, if you took away my debugging tools, this would be my reaction (except replace the printer with my laptop).
From that perspective, Arpeggio as a value-prop is a slam dunk — providing computer science-like debugging tools to scientists that have historically been forced to iterate in black-box-like conditions == profit.
I firmly believe that the life sciences and computer sciences disciplines will merge from where it is today (a barely-overlapping Venn Diagram) into a cross-discipline where one can hardly exist without the other. Arpeggio fits squarely into that thesis.
Gmelius: transforms Gmail into workspaces
This is one of the biggest startup opportunities hiding in plain sight. Gmail has 1.4B users (as of 2018), but it really sort of operates like a somewhat bare-bones utility service (albeit one that has more users than the population of China), and the space is ripe for someone to come along and build additional tools and services on top of it to provide second-level use cases (for Gmelius, that would be a help desk, project management, or task management tools). As the TechCrunch article mentions, they already have 100K DAU and $180K MRR, so they’re already in a pretty good place.
Vahan: AI-based messaging platform to match job seekers with employers in India
A major part of angel investing boils down to two questions: why this, and why now. Vahan has some very good answers to those questions: the gig economy is booming, but the underlying infrastructure required to power that economy (ie. recruiting) is lacking and eventually those companies will have to become much more efficient to achieve profitable unit economics. Enter Vahan, which provides an AI-driven approach to provide that service (recruiting for the gig and on-demand economy) at scale. Bonus: as noted on their website, super angel Gokul Rajaram is an investor.
Tensil.ai: builds custom chips optimized for customer’s TensorFlow models
As a software engineer, I tend to look at everything through the lens of a developer, and so even though Tensil is obviously a hardware startup, it makes intuitive sense to me that a startup with the right technical talent should be able to build custom chips tailored to specific machine-learning models that outperform one-size-fits-all GPUs. And if they can pull that off, then the market opportunity provides enormous asymmetric upside.
Dover: an automated hiring platform
I tend to avoid recruiting platforms like the plague, both because there are just so many of them, and also because as a developer I (like all other devs) get a fair amount of recruiting emails every week, and tend to ignore them. But Dover’s platform seems unique, and appears to provide personalized outreach at scale / on an automated basis, and that seems like a winning combination. Let’s not overthink this, some services (think Tinder’s swiping UI) provide that combination of ease of use + value-add so that it “just works” and I think there’s a good chance Dover is providing that in the recruiting space.
Mindset Health: app-based hypnotherapy for IBS, anxiety and depression
I would never have predicted that Calm (meditation app) would become a unicorn. With the benefit of hindsight, and having listened to much smarter investors explain their reasons for investing (for example, the rise of social media has also led to greater instances of depression and anxiety), Mindset solves a similar acute problem where we are living in an increasingly over-medicated and anxious world and I think it’s safe to say that those suffering are looking for alternatives, and Mindset can be one of those companies that “does well by doing good”.
Others: It’s almost impossible to pick from a YC batch because there are too many good startups. It’s like trying to pick your favorite superheroes from Avengers Endgame, there’s no right answer. That said, Percept.ai (AI support agent to automate away support tickets), Narrator (data science platform in a box), FeaturePeek (workflow tools for front-end reviews), Embrace (mobile app testing), Rejuvenation Technologies (life-extending technologies), Wren (carbon offsetting platform aimed at consumers), Midtype (backend-in-a-box aimed at front-end devs) and Boost Biomes (commercializing microbiome technologies) all looked super-intriguing too, and I’m sure I didn’t even mention several startups that are liable to become the next decacorn and make me look stupid.
Anyways, hope you enjoyed this article! I’ll be doing some unicorn case studies for my next piece, please subscribe below to get it delivered directly to your inbox!