Startups to present cutting-edge new ideas to more than 700 investors in hopes of taking their businesses to the next level
BERKELEY, CA / ACCESSWIRE / February 4, 2020 / Berkeley SkyDeck, UC Berkeley's startup accelerator, will host its Demo Day on Tuesday, February 4, featuring 23 innovative startups from around the world in the focus areas of AI, biotech/medtech, blockchain, enterprise, consumer, hardware, robotics, and more.
Berkeley SkyDeck's current cohort teams are from all over the U.S. as well as 11 different countries. Each company received $100,000 from the Berkeley SkyDeck Fund, access to mentorship from expert advisors, a tailored program of 50 workshops, and access to free and discounted services in preparation for pitching more than 700 investors on Demo Day.
"I'm constantly in awe of the depth of talent and inspiring technology that come through accelerator program," said Caroline Winnett, Executive Director, Berkeley SkyDeck. "Our founders strive to be change agents and push the boundaries of technology, bringing fresh approaches to real problems in the world. We are proud to see our founders pitch an audience of well-respected investors on Demo Day."
Named by Forbes as one of the top five university accelerators, Berkeley SkyDeck's program and reputation has grown substantially in the past few years with the number of applications they receive from startups doubling since the last cohort. To date, SkyDeck has nurtured more than 340 companies in their program and helped them connect to the network of 510,000 Berkeley alumni throughout Silicon Valley and the globe to reach customers, partners, and other experts.
Noteworthy startups that have participated in SkyDeck's accelerator program include Lime, a scooter and bike rental company recently valued at $1 billion; Kiwibot, building robots for last-mile delivery; and Chirp Microsystems, which was recently acquired by TDK.
For more information visit Berkeley SkyDeck at skydeck.berkeley.edu.
Accredited investors and media interested in attending can email [email protected] or register here for the official Fall 2019 Cohort Demo Day.
The Berkeley SkyDeck Demo Day includes the following startups:
ANAFLASH is developing area/energy efficient analog AI MAC IP for always-on battery-powered edge IoT devices. The key differentiators of their analog MAC IP solution are its flexibility in real-time weight update and its scalability in advanced technology while consuming much less area and power in standard CMOS process.
AppearMe redefines litigation management for solo lawyers, law firms and legal departments by offering a marketplace for attorneys to outsource key legal tasks in real time to other attorneys and litigation support providers. AppearMe is the world's leading marketplace for offering cost-saving, single as well as volume/bundled transactions, flexible and just-in-time legal representation. With 4300 active users and increasing monthly revenue, AppearMe has established a strong market fit and raised more than $900,000 in seed funding.
Buck.ai helps small businesses create a more efficient customer experience, tackle repetitive tasks, and increase profitability by using robotic process automation tools combined with conversational AI that automate the human process of customer scheduling, service delivery, and accounting operations.
C. Light is a neurotech and AI company utilizing a 10-second retinal scan to quickly and objectively assess neurological health. Neurological healthcare, including failed drug development, is a $2 trillion annual burden to the global economy and is the fastest-growing segment of healthcare costs around the globe. Based on market demands, C. Light is initially focusing on multiple sclerosis to guide medication selection and to monitor disease progression, with data collection underway in concussion and Alzheimer's to de-risk future market expansion.
Coreshell Technologies is catalyzing the transition to electric transportation and renewable energy by solving the key degradation issue in all rechargeable batteries. Their nanolayer thin-film coating is uniquely capable of seamlessly fitting into existing manufacturing while producing the step change needed in the capacity, safety and cost of batteries.
Cura Therapeutics is developing the next wave of immunomodulating therapies for the immuno-oncology market. Their platform treats a wide range of solid malignancies with their patented technology that harnesses cytokines and immune receptors to create multi-functional proteins with potent anti-cancer properties.
Elin.ai is the ai-driven people officer. Elin provides data-driven leaders with real-time insights into their team's engagement and productivity based purely on their communication in Slack, Zoom and/or GSuite. No surveys needed anymore.
Led by a veteran biopharma team, Facile Therapeutics has qualified for a hard-to-get government award that will non-dilutively fund 85 percent of the cost to get to clinical proof of concept (PoC) to show that Ebselen, a drug de-risked for human safety, will be effective in preventing a recurrence of Clostridium difficile infection, a disease that impacts 500,000 people each year and kills as many people annually as die from prostate cancer.
Flux Technology is a material science company enabling the decarbonization of fossil fuels during the energy transition. Flux has developed a breakthrough composite membrane material for gas purification which can efficiently remove carbon dioxide from natural gas. Compared to conventional membrane materials, Flux offers its natural gas processing customers a 5.4X reduction in product loss, a 52 percent reduction in CAPEX, a 58 percent reduction in OPEX, and 95 percent CO2 purity for permanent sequestration. This platform technology can be used for natural gas processing, biogas upgrading, olefin/paraffin separation, and hydrogen purification applications.
Go360 is creating a new paradigm in transportation by offering a comfortable, reliable on-demand ride hailing service in luxury shared vehicles. We geofence and provide dynamic pooling on the routes where we operate, which means the maximum pick up time is 5 minutes and maximum trip time is 10 minutes. The geofence in combination with pooling enables us to reduce ride cost and trip time dramatically. By pooling riders traveling in the same direction, we also increase the vehicle utilization and reduce the cost of the fare on a per rider basis.
Grido is building a decentralized network of charging stations for vehicles and swappable batteries in the micro-mobility industry. They're live in three cities internationally and working with most of the major micro-mobility companies in the U.S. and Latin America. Grido provides a 25 percent or more reduction in cost and a 17 percent increase in uptime to micro-mobility companies.
Founded by a team of experienced CV/ML/robotics engineers, Hayden AI has developed a multifaceted AI-powered data platform to support smart and safe city applications such as traffic law enforcement. As part of this platform, our mobile vision-based solution is deployed in a city's existing transportation fleet and private vehicles to collect real-time data generating insights that create significant revenue opportunities and drastically improve traffic safety and efficiency.
HEROTECH8 delivers 10 times the security performance for high-security facilities. Our aerial patrol solution - a drone-in-a-box system - enables scalable, fully-automatic deployment, recovery, and recharging of a drone without the need for an on-site pilot, providing continuous and effective surveillance in a way that traditional security cannot.
Powered by 3D technology, iDentical offers a unique solution that any family dentist can easily provide - a drill-free dental implant. It's a non-invasive, faster treatment for patients, and a new, high-margin revenue stream for family dentists. As the first drill-free dental implant company in the United States, we project $150 million in annual revenue in five years.
Lastbit is a financial service layer built on top of the bitcoin lightning network (LN) - a complex P2P network that enables seemingly instant bitcoin transactions - aiming to advance the mass market adoption of bitcoin. Lastbit users can seamlessly purchase and transact with bitcoin on LN to make instant P2P settlements and real world retail payments, facilitated by real-time conversion and just-in-time funding of debit cards issued by one of the world's largest payment networks.
LOVO helps the human voice scale infinitely. Individuals and enterprises can instantly create high quality voice content, from audio ads and digital marketing contents to audiobooks and e-learning courses. LOVO's human-like AI voices can deliver subtle emotions and emphases, thereby reducing the need for creators to go through the difficult and expensive process of hiring voice actors.
Interactions between consumers and brands on digital channels (social media, chat, and email) are increasing at a rate of 52 percent year over year. Stip uses AI and automation to empower customer care agents to be three times more productive while maintaining high-quality human interactions with the customer. The solution reduces support costs by 67 percent and response time by 80 percent while increasing customer satisfaction.
STYCKR is the most comprehensive and versatile solution for risk management and operational readiness of physical assets, ensuring visibility, traceability and control across their entire life cycle. A SaaS platform provides business intelligence applications, which enables immediate actionable insights and responsive controls. This unique end-to-end risk management platform is fed by active self-powered devices deployed on vast fleets of assets to secure, locate, monitor operational conditions, and to point out malicious users and fraudulent networks. The devices embed their unique, proprietary in-house energy harvesters.
Access to precision cancer medicine relies on correctly isolating cancer cells from a biopsy, a difficult task with existing methods. SynderBio has developed a patented cell separation technology, unlocking the potential of genomic sequencing for cancer diagnostics, single-cell sequencing, and broader life science applications.
Upswot empowers marketing automation systems and relationship managers at financial institutions with actionable insights from the accounting, CRM, eCommerce software (92+ integrations) that their SMB clients already use. Upswot (on-prem/private cloud) retrieves, cleans, structures, analyses, and continuously re-assesses this crucial alternative data, helping banks to sell 15 percent more in a highly-engaging and supportive way.
Vectorly's technology compresses video up to 50 times while actually improving quality, and is especially effective for computer-generated video such as animations, e-sports and video-conferencing. Video platforms like YouTube or Netflix can use Vectorly's API service or directly license the core technology to compress their videos, cutting cloud costs while simultaneously improving video quality and load times.
WhatElse helps sales and account teams prepare for customer meetings in less than 60 seconds. All the research and critical information one needs about the customer from all the applications used by an enterprise is made available in a one-page mobile-based view on demand. With better context of recent email communications, CRM data, notes, LinkedIn, company data, and the people and news about the company of a prospect/customer easily accessible in a one-page summary - before, during and after meetings and calls - sales and account managers in organizations are able to close more deals, confidently.
XCloud is a NetOps (network operations) SaaS that helps customers significantly improve the efficiency of daily operations at mission-critical open networking-based datacenter networks by abstracting away specifics and complexities of network device administration; offering instead simple cloud-style and modern DevOps workflows. The secret sauce is a set of proprietary algorithms which safely automate 90 percent of network engineers' daily routines and empower them to grow their businesses quickly without failures.
ABOUT BERKELEY SKYDECK
Berkeley SkyDeck is a top global accelerator. Named by Forbes in January 2019 as one of the top five university accelerators, SkyDeck is UC Berkeley's startup accelerator and a joint program of the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, the College of Engineering, and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research. SkyDeck combines the hands-on mentorship of traditional accelerators with the vast resources of its research university. Participating startups have access to SkyDeck's 250 advisors, 60 industry partners, and a network of more than 510,000 UC Berkeley alumni. For more information, see skydeck.berkeley.edu.
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SOURCE: UC Berkeley SkyDeck