SkyDeck adapted to the pandemic with a robust, remote program so 21 startups are now ready to take their companies to the next level
BERKELEY, CA / ACCESSWIRE / September 15, 2020 / Berkeley SkyDeck, UC Berkeley's startup accelerator, today hosts its Demo Day featuring 21 innovative global startups specializing in a wide range of industries including AI, enterprise software, robotics, health, bioscience, and consumer solutions. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this is the first time SkyDeck's Demo Day will take place virtually.
In fact, instead of coming together in the Bay Area, this cohort is the first that ever participated in the entire accelerator program remotely from their home locations -- around the U.S. and around the world from such countries as Armenia, Canada, Chile, India, Israel, Russia, Taiwan, and Turkey.
"This year has been one like no other with many challenges, and I could not be more proud of our startups for their grit, determination, and perseverance to succeed," said Caroline Winnett, Executive Director, Berkeley SkyDeck. "Major challenges force us all to be even more innovative and creative in the way we problem-solve. We definitely saw this in our founders."
"We recognized early on that startup founders would be concerned about their ability to fundraise while COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc on the economy. To ensure our startups would have a leg up, we doubled down and have been working even more closely with them to ensure that they are getting strong access to top tier investors that care about what they are building," said Chon Tang, Founding Partner of the Berkeley SkyDeck Fund.
Even though the 2020 cohort worked remotely, the teams continued to have the opportunity to work with the advisors and UC community, building the special relationships SkyDeck is known for. Additionally, SkyDeck's program expanded with even more workshops.
Each startup received $105,000 from the Berkeley SkyDeck Fund and access to free and discounted services in preparation for pitching more than 900 investors on Demo Day. Plus, as the first-ever virtual Demo Day, teams will have the unique opportunity to share their ideas on the world's stage with attendees from across the globe tuning in.
The Berkeley SkyDeck September 2020 Demo Day includes the following startups:
3rdiTech provides Custom CMOS Design Company with state-of-the-art image sensors. They develop specialized ASICs for advanced ISR applications including NIR sensors and extremely large format sensors. Their capability extends to developing customised payloads using their proprietary sensors. Among other projects, they have also delivered custom-designed sensors to the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). They are a Government of India recognized startup and a recipient of the Defense Innovation Start Up Challenge award from the Ministry of Defense, Government of India.
4D Sight is a deep video monetization platform, currently focused on esports and sports verticals. Using computer vision, they can insert sponsorship assets into live videos on the fly with no game engine or camera integration. Currently, they work with tier 1 gaming and sports content creators including Activision Blizzard, Fox Sport, Ubisoft, UFC and Epic Games.
Adereso is helping retailers from around the world unlock the voice of the customer, by giving enterprises the tools to understand and interpret the growing universe of digital conversations. They currently provide market-leading customer service solutions for mid and large retailers in Latin America who wish to gain the most insight into their customer base. They do this by applying the latest AI technology to present that data to operation teams in real time. The result is improved operations, customer satisfaction, and reduced costs. They currently have more than 60 corporate customers in six Latin American countries.
AESOP Technology reduces medication errors using machine learning run on more than 2 billion prescriptions. They do this by providing decision support and reporting that flags inappropriate prescriptions, where the medications prescribed do not match the diagnosis, age, and gender of the patient. They also supply a medication and diagnosis suggestion engine that is being used to support intelligent workflow tools inside Electronic Patient Record systems.
AHEAD's mission is to develop AI-enabled diagnostic and clinical decision solutions for blood cancer management. Their leading product AHEAD-flow is the fastest, fully automated triage tool for immunoprofiling clinical exam data analysis, more than 100 times faster than other available options.
AimHub is an AI Development Environment and collaboration platform for AI. They are building a platform to host software 2.0 projects and enable collaboration for those projects, with the goal of forming communities to dramatically accelerate AI development. The underlying technology is an open source, super-fast version control and storage for AI experiments.
Axent Biosciences is a pre-clinical stage biotechnology company developing next-generation stem cell therapies to address unmet medical needs in human diseases and disorders. Spun out of professor David Schaffer's Lab at UC Berkeley, Axent's platform technologies in stem cell manufacturing and implantation leverage 20+ years of stem cell expertise and 10+ years of biomaterials engineering to overcome major bottlenecks in the clinical development pipeline to efficiently provide high quality stem cell therapeutics to large populations of patients in need.
Blings helps companies communicate more efficiently with their users through personalized videos. Blings has developed a ground-breaking video technology that offers, for the first time, a scalable and automated method to connect with each user on a personal level. The videos run on a unique Edge Computing technology, creating videos "on-the-fly," allowing companies to communicate dynamic data in real time. Personalized videos are presented through an interactive and engaging experience, with no additional cost for amount or frequency. Blings gives brands full control over campaigns, enabling real-time alterations, A/B testing and detailed analytics that help ensure all campaign goals are met.
Brightflow is democratizing finance by bringing enterprise-level automated cash flow tools and financial insights to small and mid-sized businesses. Their initial product is an automated cash flow forecast tool that provides visualizations around cash flow, burn-rate, and cash runway for Shopify and Amazon e-commerce businesses. Their ultimate goal is to create an autonomous finance platform that liberates entrepreneurs from hours of lonely work in Excel by automating financial analysis and backing it with insights, giving entrepreneurs more time to run their businesses with empowered decision making that was previously only available to the enterprise. Brightflow's focus is on three aspects of a CFO: financial/cash visibility, financial/cash monitoring, and cash optimization.
Dispatch Goods is a reverse logistics company accelerating reusable systems to offer an alternative to single-use packaging in food delivery and takeout.
Hermes Robotics performs autonomous street, parking lot and airport sweeping as a service, with a focus on slow speed use cases.
ImmunoMind is pioneering AI-driven drug development with single-cell precision. They bring immunology and AI together to democratize precision medicine and provide a comprehensive landscape of the immune system with an unprecedented level of resolution. Their AI platform leverages single-cell immunogenomics technologies for precision drug development in cancer, autoimmune and orphan diseases, automating and accelerating the discovery by up to 50 times.
Kura Technologies is an augmented reality hardware company developing the most advanced headset in the industry. Kura's AR system outperforms all known competitors across all features: field of view, brightness, transparency, depth of field, and size. This extraordinary technology is providing major solutions for enterprises.
Ontopical is focused on extracting business intelligence from public government content, as it pertains to risks and opportunities for those working in the private sector. They use machine learning to focus narrowly and rigorously on expediting valuable data out of messy unstructured content, to get real-time intelligence into the hands of their enterprise clients at the speed demanded by business.
Organos' mission is to exploit their unique combination of organ-on-chip technology and computational models to enable the pharmaceutical industry to do better, safer, faster, and cheaper drug development.
Root Applied Sciences provides early warning of airborne pathogens to farmers and pest control advisors so they can make informed decisions, spraying fungicides when the pathogen is present instead of all the time. Root's fully automated, in-field sensors send pathogen alerts directly to a phone or dashboard, providing farmers with the information they need, hassle-free.
StudyFree is an online platform connecting students with international opportunities worldwide without financial stress. StudyFree has already helped 32,000 students to make their dreams come true and awarded more than $4.1 million in scholarships and grants.
syGlass is a scientific image visualization, analysis and communication system in virtual reality that allows seamless rendering of volumetric data (such as CT, MRI, 3D microscopy) in its true 3D form and in 4D movies. syGlass is utilized by scientists at more than 100 research institutions worldwide to find objects and patterns in data they otherwise would not find and speed image quantification by an order of magnitude. Described as the Zoom for science due to its collaboration tools, syGlass is revolutionizing how scientists communicate their work.
Wing AI
Wing is the only on-demand assistant service that learns about its users and leverages AI to improve and automate its service, at a price point that is affordable to the mass market. The core of the business is to take over tedious tasks and menial work from people to enable them to focus on more meaningful activities. While there are many applications to Wing's "do engine," the team currently offers an AI-powered virtual assistant service for small businesses. Combining a novel no-code design interface with advanced NLP / NLU techniques, even complicated tasks can be automated at minimal cost.
Xoba is building the next generation of enterprise search by intelligently aggregating information across an entire organization and allowing users effortlessly to find it. Xoba makes it easy to find, discover, and share information with your team across work applications (Google, Microsoft, Atlassian, Box, Asana, and more).
ZHealthEHR is an all-in-one practice management software: EHR, scheduling, text reminders, patient check-in, SOAP note templates, patient reviews, managed billing and much more. The software is geared toward wellness providers including chiropractors, massage therapists, physical therapists, mental health practitioners, acupuncturists, yoga studios, salons and spas, etc.
ABOUT BERKELEY SKYDECK
Berkeley SkyDeck is UC Berkeley's global startup accelerator. Named by Forbes as one of the top five university accelerators, SkyDeck combines hands-on mentorship with the vast resources of a top-ranked research university. SkyDeck is the only accelerator that provides funding for its startups via a public-private partnership, providing returns directly back to UC Berkeley via the Berkeley SkyDeck Fund, a dedicated investment fund supported by top institutional VCs like Sequoia and Mayfield. Participating startups have access to SkyDeck's 370 advisors and mentors, 50 industry partners, and a network of more than 510,000 UC Berkeley alumni. To date, SkyDeck startups have raised more than $1.2 billion in aggregate. For more information, see skydeck.berkeley.edu.
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SOURCE: Berkeley SkyDeck