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Hormona wants women to track their ‘hormonal health’ with at-home testing • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 19, 2022Posted in Battlefield, battlefield 2022, Biotech & Health, Disrupt, Hormona, hormone tracking, StartupsNo Comments

Quantified health activity is all around us these days, as scores of people use mobile sensing technologies to keep an eye on their well-being by tracking their steps, workouts and even how long and deep they sleep — so why shouldn’t women who cycle (as in menstrual cycle) track monthly changes to their hormone levels? London-based femtech, Hormona, which is pitching its hormone tracker in the Startup Battlefield at ZebethMedia Disrupt, hopes to encourage people with periods to do just that: Add hormone-monitoring to their quantified health mix. Today it’s announcing the launch of its app in the U.S. after a period of early testing with “a few thousand” women in Europe (it’s been beta testing in Sweden). The 2019-founded U.K. startup has already spent a couple of years in R&D developing an easy-to-perform, proprietary at-home hormone test to underpin a forthcoming monthly subscription business that will enable users of its (freemium) app to pay to regularly test and report their hormone levels. In the near future, in return for “roughly” $40 per month (for the subscription package which includes a supply of self tests), paying users will get feedback on whether they’re inside or outside the normal hormonal range for women their age — and suggestions for treatments if something looks amiss. That’s for starters. Hormona’s overarching goal, as is often the case with femtech startups, is to encourage a critical mass of users to get on-board with a mission to help plug the data gap that persists around women’s health (as a result of medical research being historically skewed towards male biology) — by agreeing to pool data for research aimed at improving understanding of the roles hormones play in areas like fertility and the menopause. (This side is of course optional: Hormona confirms that any studies it engages in involving user data will be consent-based, i.e. requiring the user to opt their information in.) Jasmine Tagesson, COO at Hormona pitches as part of ZebethMedia Startup Battlefield at ZebethMedia Disrupt in San Francisco on October 18, 2022. Image Credits: Haje Kamps / ZebethMedia “As of now, there isn’t enough data around hormonal health and it’s really affecting every single woman in different stages of her life so it’s a very important topic that we really need to spend more time to do more research and understand,” says Hormona CEO and co-founder, Karolina Lofqvist, ahead of today’s on stage pitch at the Startup Battlefield in San Francisco. “With this test we can really help women to figure out if they have irregular cycles, if they’re going to have problems getting pregnant or if they’re going into menopause,” she continues. “Our full solution is really on hormonal health — and follow[ing] a woman from her first cycle all the way to her last.” “We are hoping that with the data [users opt in] we can do more studies around how women are affected by their hormones, how different connections and different levels between hormones can be connected to hormone related issues such as PCOS [polycystic ovary syndrome] or — eventually, perhaps — endometriosis as well, even if it’s not a direct hormonal issue. But PCOS for sure, and infertility and menopause,” she adds. “There are a lot of things that are connected to your hormones that are currently understudied that we are very excited to do more studies and bring more awareness around.” The startup has raised a total of $1.5 million in early backing from three VC firms so far: SFC Capital and Nascent Invest, as well as Techstars — after going through the latter’s LA accelerator program earlier this year. Cycling through hormone testing Hormona’s at-home hormone tests — which are lateral flow, urine-based tests for (initially) three separate hormones (FSH; progesterone; and estrogen) — will be available from Q1 next year, per Lofqvist, starting in the U.S., with a European launch to follow later. That means, for now, its (free-to-download) app is essentially a general resource that provides information about the function of different female hormones. As tests become available, it’s also designed to funnel users towards regular self-testing (and paying a subscription) to unlock personalized hormonal insights once the testing component of the business launches early next year. “In the app today you can start to understand what is supposed to happen with your hormones and then when the test is available women can confirm that what is supposed to happen is actually happening,” says Lofqvist, going on to explain that subscription users will be testing roughly one hormone per week (using a separate test per hormone) and doing this at home — “without the need for a lab”. The three hormones it’s selected for testing were picked because they’re “connected to so many different issues that we women go through”, she says, adding that they may add tests for more hormones in the future — with testosterone and cortisol being two others of potential interest. The initial batch of hormone tests are performed by users as three separate tests, rather than being bundled onto a single test strip. This is because Lofqvist says that certain hormones need to be tested on certain days to properly understand how levels are changing throughout the cycle. “You don’t test your estrogen on the same day as you test your FSH,” she notes, adding of the individual test dates: “It’s based on our algorithms telling when your estrogen and FSH is supposed to be at the highest or lowest level.” App users need to provide Hormona with some information about themselves (such as their age) and about their cycle (e.g. regular or irregular; and its length) in order that it can calculate personalized testing dates. Lofqvist confirms these dates “can vary a bit” depending on what the user’s goal and age is. While she tells us the overall accuracy of its hormone tests is “on par” with an at-home blood test. “We’ve spent the last two years in order to evaluate antibodies to give us as good result

Staax thinks peer-to-peer payments can onboard a new generation of stock investors • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Battlefield, battlefield 2022, Disrupt, Fintech, investing, Staax, StartupsNo Comments

For better or for worse, Robinhood helped inspire a new generation of investors to enter the stock market. Now that investing is cool again, upstarts like Staax, which pitched today at ZebethMedia Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield, are finding new ways to cash in on its cachet, particularly among young people. Nikki Varanasi, Staax’s founder and CEO, was managing an $800 million fund-of-funds at McKinsey when she began to take notice of the lack of resources available to aspiring investors who wanted to get comfortable with the process. “When I looked at my friend group, who was still shy to invest or didn’t know where to start, I saw this huge gap when it came to institutional investing versus everyday people. There were resources on the market, like Robinhood, or whatever it is, but I think at the end of the day, there are still a lot of barrier points for the everyday, beginner investor to get in,” Varanasi told ZebethMedia. Her initial idea was to gift her friends shares of stock — a thoughtful gesture, she hoped, that could help them kickstart their investing journeys. Oftentimes, the barriers to investing are logistical, she explained. Once someone gets paid, there are a number of different, cumbersome steps they have to go to through in order to invest that money. “Because of the disposable income left in apps [like Venmo], it takes over a week to transfer to your bank and then to your brokerage. So for a lot of people, they just leave their money in there and they don’t invest it and that takes a hit with inflation,” Varanasi said. When Varanasi realized there wasn’t an existing platform that could help her send stocks directly to her friends, thus helping them bypass the onerous aforementioned process, she decided to build it herself. Staax is the result of her efforts, alongside her two co-founders, COO Lucy Yang and CTO Victoria Yang. Staax operates like a full-service brokerage in that its users who sign up open an investment account on its platform. They can buy and sell shares much like they could on Robinhood or Fidelity, Varanasi explained. What sets Staax apart, though, is that it allows for peer-to-peer payments in stock. Nikki Varanasi, CEO and founder at Staax pitches as part of ZebethMedia Startup Battlefield at ZebethMedia Disrupt in San Francisco on October 18, 2022. Image Credit: Haje Kamps / ZebethMedia “We want to turn assets into payments, because we believe that payments haven’t had a lot of evolution in the last 10 years,” Varanasi said. New users who sign up for Staax link the new brokerage account to their bank account and make a list of their top five preferred stocks to receive. Senders can’t gift shares of stock that aren’t on their recipients’ top five lists, which helps prevent unwanted transactions, alongside a feature that lets a recipient choose if and when to accept a stock gift. I asked Varanasi how the platform handles stock price movements that occur between when the shares are sent and when the recipient accepts them. She explained that the sender could gift someone a share priced at $10 each, for example, which would come out of the sender’s bank account in the form of cash. Then, if that share went up in price to $12, let’s say, the recipient could either accept the gift and would be on the hook for the extra $2, which would come out of their own bank account, or they could choose to accept the $10 in cash rather than in stock. For the sender, this system helps them avoid having to purchase the stock and sell it before sending it to the recipient in the form of cash. “What happens on Staax is we avoid taxes for the sender, because we use a ledger system based on cash on the back end, so you don’t need to own the stock to send it,” Varanasi said. According to Varanasi, the main use cases for Staax outside of gifting tend to be social, such as a friend paying back another friend for buying them coffee, but doing so in stock instead of cash. Staax’s co-founders, Nikki Varanasi, Lucy Yang and Victoria Yang. Image Credits: Staax “It’s not large amounts of money you need to stress about and it’s in the market, but it accumulates over time. And so [as an investor] you’re really in it for the long term strategy,” Varanasi said. It’s still early days for the company, which has raised $2 million in pre-seed funding since its founding in 2020. Its investors include Techstars and Western Union, which invested through an accelerator program for fintechs that Staax took part in, as well as VC firms Lightspeed, Harlem Capital and Hustle Fund as well as angel investor Litquidity (of finance meme account fame). Staax is still figuring out its path to monetization, though taking payment for order flow (PFOF) from market makers who execute trades on behalf of other companies’ users is a likely candidate, Varanasi said. It’s the same process Robinhood uses to make money while keeping its product free for users, but has attracted scrutiny from both customers and regulators. Varanasi said she isn’t worried PFOF will be banned in the U.S., because regulators have been talking about doing so for years but haven’t cracked down. Still, she drew a distinction between her plan to monetize Staax and Robinhood’s implementation of the same system. “We are exploring ways to make revenue on the back end through the trades, but in the most ethical way, because we know that PFOF can be controversial, especially when given to the wrong third party,” Varanasi said. In addition to PFOF, Staax is also exploring charging some users a fee for premium content from influencers and creators who partner with the startup as well as potential B2B partnerships down the line. Ultimately, Staax’s growth depends on its ability to build community because the social component is integral to getting users

DigestAI’s 19-year-old founder wants to make education addictive • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Battlefield, battlefield 2022, digestai, Disrupt, edtech, Robotics & AI, StartupsNo Comments

When Quddus Pativada was 14, he wished that he had an app that could summarize his textbooks for him. Just five years later, Pativada has been there and done that — earlier this year, he launched the AI-based app Kado, which turns photos, documents or PDFs into flash cards. Now, as the 19-year-old founder takes the stage for Startup Battlefield, he’s looking to take his company, DigestAI, beyond flashcards to create an AI dialogue assistant that we can all carry around on our phones. “If we make learning truly easy and accessible, it’s something you could do as soon as you open your phone,” Pativada told ZebethMedia. “We want to put a teacher in every single person’s phone for every topic in the world.” Quddus Pativada, founder at DigestAI pitches as part of ZebethMedia Startup Battlefield at ZebethMedia Disrupt in San Francisco on October 18, 2022. Image Credit: Haje Kamps / ZebethMedia The company’s AI is trained on data from the internet, but the algorithm is fine-tuned to recall specific use cases to make sure that its responses are accurate and not too thrown off by online chaos. “We train it on everything, but the actual use cases are called within silos. We’re calling it ‘federated learning,’ where it’s sort of siloed in and language models are operating on a use case basis,” Pativada said. “This is good because it avoids malicious use.” Pativada said that this kind of product would be different from smart assistants like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa because the information it provides would be more personalized and detailed. So, for certain use cases, like asking for sources to use in an essay, the AI will pull from academic journals to make sure that the information is accurate and appropriate for a classroom. Despite running an educational AI startup, Pativada isn’t currently in school. He took a gap year before going to college to work on his startup, but as DigestAI took off, he decided to keep building instead of going back to school. Growing up, he taught himself to code because he loved video games, so he wanted to make his own — by age 10, he published a “Flappy Bird” clone on the App Store. Naturally, his technological ambitions matured a bit over time. Before founding DigestAI, Pativada built a COVID-19 contact tracing platform. At first, he just made the app as a tool for his classmates — but his work ended up being honored by the United Arab Emirates’ government. Image Credits: DigestAI So far, the outlook is good for the Dubai-based company. Pativada — who says he feels skittish about the CEO label, and prefers to think of himself as just a founder — has raised $600,000 so far from angel investors like Mark Cuban and Shaan Patel, who struck a deal on Shark Tank for his SAT prep company, Prep Expert. How does a 19-year-old in Dubai capture the attention of one of thee most well-known startup investors? A cold email. Mark, we apologize if this admission makes your inbox even more nightmarish. “I was watching a GQ video of Mark Cuban’s daily routine,” Pativada said. “He said he reads his emails every morning at 9 AM, and I looked at the time in Dallas, and it was about 9 AM. So I was like, maybe I should just shoot him an email and see what happens.” While he was at it, he reached out to Patel, whose educational startup has done over $20 million in sales. Patel hopped on a video call with the teenage founder, and by the next week, he and Cuban both offered to invest in DigestAI. “We raised our entire round through cold emails and Zoom,” Pativada told ZebethMedia. “It sort of helped because no one can see how young I look in person.” Before he decided to eschew college altogether, Pativada applied to Stanford and interviewed with an alumnus, as is standard in the admissions process. He didn’t end up getting into the competitive Palo Alto university, but his interviewer, who works at Stanford, did end up investing in his company. Go figure. “Our goal is to work with universities like Stanford,” Pativada said. The company is also targeting enterprise clients. Currently, DigestAI works with some U.S.-based universities, Bocconi University in Italy, a European law firm and other clients. At the law firm, DigestAI is testing a tool that allows associates to text a WhatsApp number to quickly brush up on legal terms. In the long term, DigestAI wants to create an SMS system where people can text the AI asking for help learning something — he wants information to be so accessible that it’s “addictive.” “That is what AI is — it’s almost the best version of a human being,” Pativada said.

Mother Honestly’s new commerce offering aims to give employees more freedom when it comes to caregiv • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Battlefield, battlefield 2022, Commerce, Disrupt, Fintech, Mother Honestly, StartupsNo Comments

Being a working parent is challenging. Being a working mother, according to many studies, is extra challenging. Many mothers have had the unfortunate experience of having to choose between their careers and children as the balancing act of both can be overwhelming. Factor in aging parents and the number of women who are caregivers for multiple people is greater than ever. To address this, Blessing Adesiyan launched Mother Honestly. Today, the company reaches more than 1 million working parents, caregivers, employers and business leaders. It has generated about $1 million in revenue since inception. And while its initial focus was on working parents, it has broadened its scope to help caregivers of all kinds — regardless of gender. Now, to further extend its reach, Mother Honestly is presenting a new commerce offering at ZebethMedia’s Startup Battlefield. Adesiyan had her first child while she was in college and remembers taking her daughter with her to an internship she had at one multinational corporation. Upon graduating, she started immediately working with Fortune 100 companies such as PepsiCo, DuPont, BASF and Cargill. Once she got into the workforce, she poured herself into her work while managing her caregiving responsibilities, and concluded early on it was “not designed” for her — “a single mother, a black woman that was a chemical engineer who really wanted to remain ambitious.” She knew she wasn’t the only working mother who felt that way, so she created multiple Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) within those companies around parents and caregiving. A bit scarred from her first foray into the corporate world, Adesiyan admits she was actually “terrified of having more kids” without her career being “solid.” Eventually, she had her second child nine years after giving birth to her first. All of the feelings she had when starting her career began coming back — the recognition of a lack of a reliable and affordable care infrastructure, a lack of support from her supervisors and having to spend a small fortune flying her parents back and forth from Nigeria to take care of her children when she had to travel for work. “I eventually ran out of money, and couldn’t keep flying them back and forth,” Adesiyan recalls. The straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak, was when she was consulting for a large chemical company and was asked to travel to Morocco. She called her then-boss, asking if the company could provide a stipend toward meeting some of her caregiving obligations. Her boss’s response, Adesiyan told ZebethMedia, shocked her. “He told me it was important that I keep my professional and personal life separate, and that a male colleague had been doing this for 10 years and had never asked for that kind of support,” she recounts. “So I said, ‘No offense, my colleague is a white man with a stay-at-home wife who subsidizes the cost of care.’” Two weeks later, Adesiyan had landed another job, but she was still angry at the thought that she was “making millions of dollars” for a company which “thought it was too much to support” her caregiving needs. She added: “I was out of the country two weeks at a time, and I was a single mom, an immigrant with no real network to support me.” In frustration, Adesiyan turned to Instagram to ask others how they were effectively managing work and family. “People started sending DMs and videos, and she had amassed about 10,000 followers in three months,” Adesiyan recalls. That turned into a conference in Detroit that had hundreds of attendees from all over the country. And by 2018, Mother Honestly — a startup that Adesiyan says was “somewhat of an external ERG” — was born. The website was initially built to offer content and community to caregivers who needed support. “I wanted to support mothers holistically in balancing their careers and personal lives, and I wanted them to do it honestly without comparing themselves to others,” she recalls. “It became clear that only a parent could actually solve this problem holistically, so I like to think of our product as ‘built by mothers, for everyone.’” By 2020, Adesiyan left her job in engineering to focus full time on her venture. Current customers include Indeed, Care.com, Splendid Spoon, Bobbie, Nanit and more. Past customers include Lincoln, Google, JP Morgan Chase, Bright Horizons, Pacira and others. Bootstrapped since inception, Mother Honestly has thus far made money primarily from brand partnerships with the likes of Indeed, Care.com and Splendid Spoon, doing things like co-creating content for employee caregivers together. The natural evolution of Mother Honestly has led to the creation of something Adesiyan believes has been missing, but is crucially needed, in the workforce: a Work-Life Wallet. Mother Honestly will make money by charging a fee to provide the wallet that would give employees the freedom to spend on things such as caregiving or medical travel. Mother Honestly would serve as a middleman, either denying or approving the expenses based on predetermined categories so that employees would have privacy and not have do disclose personal details to their employers. For Adesiyan, widespread adoption would be a dream come true. “Employers, instead of wasting millions of dollars away at EAP (Employee Assistance Programs) that employees don’t use, can redirect their cash into the hands of their employees via our Work-Life Wallet, which they can customize who gets how much and over what time period,” she said.

Code analysis tool AppMap wants to become Google Maps for developers • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in AppMap, Battlefield, battlefield 2022, Disrupt, Security, software development, StartupsNo Comments

In December 2021, a vulnerability in a widely used logging library that had gone unfixed since 2013 caused a full-blown security meltdown. The 10/10-rated Log4Shell flaw in Log4j, an open source logging software that’s found practically everywhere, from online games to enterprise software and cloud data centers, claimed numerous victims from Adobe and Cloudflare to Twitter and Minecraft due to its ubiquitous presence. It was described by security experts as a “design failure of catastrophic proportions,” and demonstrated the potentially far-reaching consequences of shipping bad code. Boston-based AppMap, going through ZebethMedia Disrupt Startup Battlefield this week, wants to stop this bad code from ever making it into production. The open source dynamic runtime code analysis tool, which the startup claims is the first of its kind, is the brainchild of Elizabeth Lawler, who knows a thing or two about security. Prior to founding AppMap, she founded DevOps security startup Conjur, which was acquired by CyberArk in 2017, and served as chief data officer for Generation Health, later acquired by CVS. After selling two companies into large enterprises with lots of legacy software, Lawler witnessed firsthand how developers were struggling to understand the systems they were tasked with improving, and finding it difficult to deliver fast and secure code in complex microservices and cloud applications. “It’s surprising to me that people have a mental model of how things work that is actually disconnected from how it actually works,” Lawler tells ZebethMedia. “When we don’t know how our software works, we’re making best guesses when we write code.” Image Credits: AppMap That led to the creation of AppMap, which was built on the simple idea that developers should be able to see the behavior of software as they write it so they can prevent problems when the software runs. Unlike static analysis tools that don’t show runtime information, AppMap — which was built from the ground up over a three-year period — runs within the code editor to show developers which components are communicating with which components, at what throughput and latency, at what network speed and whether there are any errors between them, enabling developers to get actionable insights and make improvements quicker than before. All of this is done within an interactive code editor extension, which AppMap designed with the help of comic book artists and musicians in order to make it as easy to use and intuitive as possible. “I’m a data scientist, so I know how overwhelming data can be,” said Lawler. “Google Maps has elegantly shown us how maps can be personalized and localized, so we used that as a jumping off point for how we wanted to approach the big data problem.” To coincide with ZebethMedia Disrupt, AppMap is launching three new features: the ability to share and collaborate with other engineers; performance analysis that alerts developers when code changes will impact performance and scalability; and security analysis that can identify software runtime code issues within a developer’s code editor before they commit their code, be it leaking customer data and secrets into log files or missing or improper authentication or authorization. “We can see the kinds of issues that are now the rising OWASP Top 10. Static issues have gone down in prevalence because we have good scanners for them, but what we don’t have great scanners for are these dynamic issues that are design in nature. If you look at the CWE Top 25, almost half of these are code design issues.” As it’s based on open source, which is evident from the startup’s community-sourced approach to changing its product and adding new features, AppMap is free for developers to use. “We don’t believe you should be charged for self-awareness in programming,” Lawler said. “If we’re going to integrate with your GitHub and we have to provide some background functions or storage, then those are paid services.” Image Credits: AppMap AppMap, which is a seed-stage VC-backed pre-revenue startup, currently has more than 20,000 customers — a figure that’s growing by 20% every month — with developers at IBM, NASA, Sonos and Salesforce using its product. It’s also growing its team, which is made up of employees that have coded at some point in their career and hold deep DevOps, automation, cybersecurity and test-driven development experience. Kevin Gilpin, AppMap’s technical co-founder, describes his career highlight as delivering “build your vehicle online” pages for Ford. Though it only launched in 2021, the startup’s vision goes far beyond preventing developers from shipping bad code. “We spend a lot of time and energy instrumenting things that are downstream of our application, but we’ve never instrumented the creative process. We’ve never really watched people think, design and create in this way. I think that by having observability data in that moment, it’s going to open up a lot of opportunities. As AppMap evolves, I’d like to think about how this gets even bigger than performance analysis and becomes more of an assistive technology in that realm.”

Anthill connects frontline workers to company resources through text messaging • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Anthill, Battlefield, battlefield 2022, Disrupt, Enterprise, StartupsNo Comments

If the pandemic has made us completely rethink the way we work, that we — the swath of workers at home in pajamas popping into meetings on Zoom — leaves out a massive chunk of the workforce that continues to show up for work in-person, every time. As knowledge workers explore the intricacies of the virtual office, frontline workers from a cross-section of critical industries still lack the basic tools they need to do simple tasks like switching shifts, asking HR a question or seeing when their next paycheck arrives. “This workforce can’t be overlooked, there is a business imperative right now…[and] there is a really exciting opportunity to create more paths to the middle class,” Anthill co-founder and CEO Muriel Clauson told ZebethMedia. Clauson and Anthill co-founder and CTO Young-Jae Kim met in a PhD program for industrial and organizational psychology at the University of Georgia. Through their shared academic research interests, they identified what Clauson described as a “massive gap” in the communication between frontline, deskless workers and their employers — a gap that workers frequently fall into, to everyone’s detriment: [There are] 2.7 billion people globally, who never sit at computers to do their jobs. So they never worked from home over the pandemic and they never will because they can’t actually do their job that way. So most often folks think of manufacturing, distribution — basically anybody who’s out there working with their hands on the field on the floor. These folks do not use software, and especially work software, they just in general do not and the reason being is they’re not sitting at computers, they’re not going to use something on a desktop. They’re probably not using email [and] they probably don’t even have an email address. And they’re also increasingly not downloading or using apps on their phone — or they don’t even have a phone that you can use an app on. For employers who manage an in-person workforce, attrition is a huge issue. Many workers aren’t necessarily fluent in the language of their workplace and face other barriers to connecting at work, creating turnover issues when they’re not able to communicate effectively. Anthill, which pitched on the Startup Battlefield stage at Disrupt, offers a non-app way for employers to communicate with workers — and vice versa — through text messages, the one sure-fire platform that reaches everybody and doesn’t let anyone fall through the cracks. “We knew as researchers if we wanted these folks to talk to us and stay in our studies we had to text them,” Clauson said. “And so we are super bullish on technology that meets people where they are, works within the fiber of how they already work and live their lives, and doesn’t force them to learn a new suite of technologies.” The idea is to give workers a way to access any information they could need — pay schedules, contact with a manager, taking a sick day — all through text message. And a way on the employer side to automate as much of that as makes sense, all while offering a full portal of resources without forcing people to download apps or jump through hoops that not everyone can manage. In the interest of making access to those resources more equitable, Anthill automatically translates its services into more than 100 languages — a feature that could also help employers retain workers who might be alienated by the lingua franca of the workplace. “A lot of us have family members who have not been able to participate in benefit adoption or knowing how to have any kind of outside of work community through their employer around all those critical things like tax season and schedules and just the basics — because language was a barrier,” Clauson said. “There’s a lot of folks who can work in English, but that doesn’t mean it’s their preferred language and it doesn’t mean that’s going to be the language that they can most successfully navigate their ability to work.” Anthill plans to focus on a handful of core industries out of the gate, including manufacturing, distribution (think Amazon warehouses) and agriculture. Kim and Clauson also see opportunities for connecting deskless workers with employers in retail and healthcare, but observe that those areas have a bit more tech already than some other sectors. “We really focused on individual-level needs [and] what they actually need is communication,” Kim told ZebethMedia. “Those workers, they actually need very simple things, but they need the answer right away,” Kim told ZebethMedia. While some employers have gone the route of using chatbots and apps, Anthill lets managers save recent answers to commonly asked questions and personalize the resources in a way that more tech-focused solutions might overlook. It’s probably difficult for knowledge workers or big tech companies to imagine, but Clauson says that the two modes of communication that Anthill replaces most frequently are AM radio followed by an old-fashioned corkboard. “We do try to stay focused within industry verticals. So we’re very focused right now on manufacturing workers inside of plants or distribution workers in distribution centers or truck drivers,” Clauson said. “That’s where we saw the biggest pain points and that’s where we’re focused first.” Anthill first opened in alpha in late 2020, with paid pilots and a beta version of the product the following year. The company launched a full version of the platform in 2022 and currently operates in over 300 job sites in the U.S., with global contracts in the pipeline slated for 2023. According to the company, large employers trying out Anthill often do a test run with a single distribution center or a cluster of regional sites and scale up from there. They can buy Anthill on a per-user, per-month basis, making it relatively straightforward to scale the platform up and out if it’s a good fit. The services are opt-in, not required, but Kim and Clauson have observed swift adoption that travels by word of

Circular Genomics uses RNA to stop depression meds being a guessing game • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Battlefield, battlefield 2022, Biotech & Health, circular genomics, Disrupt, rna, StartupsNo Comments

For many people who live with depression, medication is an important part of managing the condition. But knowing which will work for you can be a difficult months-long process. Circular Genomics claims its new form of genetic testing can identify which medications will work for a patient in a fraction of that time. As some of our readers no doubt already know — depression affects hundreds of millions, after all — finding the right medication is basically a crap shoot. Your provider picks one that they think meets your needs, then slowly ramps up the dose over a month or two, and if it doesn’t work, ramps it down again and tries a new one. If you’re lucky, the first one works; if not, it could be many months before you find a working dose — if it isn’t a resistant condition. And all that time you’re living with inadequately treated depression, possibly even exacerbated by the disruptive process of a constantly shifting drug regimen. Circular Genomics, which presented today as part of the Startup Battlefield at ZebethMedia Disrupt, is taking aim at this huge problem with a new testing method that relies on a molecule in our body we’ve known about for decades but only recently started paying attention to: circular RNA. DNA, as we all know, encodes our genes using a base code; when it’s time to actually make things, that code is processed and it produces RNA, which more directly describes the proteins that will eventually be created, but is much easier to read than either DNA or the proteins themselves. The problem with RNA is that it degrades quickly, more or less by design: the ends of each strand are reactive and the whole thing starts getting unraveled by enzymes within a few hours. But sometimes those two ends join and form “circular RNA”: the same molecule, but it lasts much, much longer. “Circular types were discovered 5-10 years ago; we’ve known they existed since the 70s, but until deep sequencing technologies advanced we were never able to pull them out of the data,” explained Circular Genomics co-founder and president Alexander Hafez. “The stability increases substantially, you go from 18-24 hours to a week.” This matters because if you want to know what’s going on in the brain, RNA expression is your best bet — but you can’t extract it directly, and by the time blood carries it out of the brain, it’s already started to fall apart. DNA and protein analysis aren’t much help either. But with the advent of new sequencing tools, that’s all about to change. “Circular RNA is the first reliable biomarker that lets us look at brain conditions,” Hafez said. Depression is the first target, in particular what type of medication would likely work best for a person. The company has undergone two clinical studies so far: “We used blood samples, and got an idea of class response — for example, whether they would respond to an SSRI or not. Then we did another where we were able to look at whether a patient would respond to Zoloft specifically.” (Zoloft is a commonly prescribed antidepressant.) Having a starting place for what medication is mostly likely to work cuts out a huge amount of unnecessary care: not just the meds themselves but appointments, paperwork, insurance scuffles, risk of hospitalization, and so on. The all-inclusive cost of 6-12 months of care as someone works through the options is considerable, and that’s without reckoning with the more subjective costs of the process. Hafez did say that circular RNA is rapidly expanding its presence in the biotech world. “When we first started the company, there weren’t a lot of publications available; now it seems like every week there’s an article about how they’re useful biomarkers for cancers and other things.” Circular Genomics has a few patents pending, though, and are holding onto a some of the IP, like the actual identification process — this isn’t something anyone can just do with a sequencer and a bit of free time. The company is currently working on getting additional clinical testing done so the product can be confidently brought to market. But there are other applications on the horizon as well. Hafez said that they may also have located biomarkers for depression itself — something that could be immensely helpful. “Our society has a big stigma around depression diagnosis,” and mental illness in general, he said. But if depression, like so many other conditions, could be shown on a simple blood test, it would help remove that stigma. People who have trouble accepting depression as the cause of their or another’s experiences — or stubborn insurance companies, for that matter — may find a + sign on a blood test more convincing. Of course that opens the door to requiring biological markers as proof of mental illness, but we can cross that bridge when we get there. In the meantime the company is still working out the best way to get the technology in patients’ hands. At first it may be an optional test not covered by insurance, with a cost around $1,000. Obviously that’s not accessible to everyone, but like many new approaches not yet qualified for reimbursement, there are grants and other offsets that can be brought into play if the benefits are substantial.

Omneky uses AI to generate social media ads • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Battlefield, battlefield 2022, Disrupt, Media & Entertainment, Omneky, Social, StartupsNo Comments

Meet Omneky, a startup that leverages OpenAI’s DALLE-2 and GPT-3 models to generate visuals and text that can be used in ads for social platforms. The company wants to make online ads both cheaper and more effective thanks to recent innovations in artificial intelligence and computer vision. Omneky is participating in Startup Battlefield at ZebethMedia Disrupt 2022. While many fields have been automated in one way or another, creating ads is still mostly a manual process. It takes a lot of back and forth between a creative team and the person in charge of running online ad campaigns. Even when you manage to reach a final design, the new ads might not perform as well as expected. You often have to go back to the drawing board to iterate and create more ads. Omneky aims to simplify all those steps. It starts with a nice software-as-a-service platform that centralizes all things related to your online advertising strategy. After connecting Omneky with your accounts on Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Snapchat, the platform pulls performance data from your past advertising campaigns. From this analytics dashboard, you can see how much you’re spending, how many clicks you’re getting, the average cost per click and more. But it gets more interesting once you start diving a bit deeper. Omneky lists your top-performing and worst-performing images and text used in your ads. Customers can click on individual ads to see more details. Omneky automatically adds tags to each ad using computer vision and text analysis. The result is a dashboard with useful insights, such as the dominant color you should use, the optimal number of people in the ad and some keywords that work well in the tagline. This data will be used to generate new ads. Customers write a prompt and generate new visuals using DALLE-2. Omneky also helps you with those prompts as it also uses GPT-3 to generate prompts based on top-performing keywords from past campaigns. Customers then get dozens of different AI-generated images that can be used in online ads. Similarly, Omneky can generate ad copy for the text portion of your ads. If you have a strong brand identity, Omneky can take this into account. On the platform, customers can upload digital assets and historical ads so that the platform acts as the central repository. “Customers can upload the brand guidelines, the font, the logo. All of this is integrated into our AI to generate content that is on brand,” Omneky founder and CEO Hikari Senju told me in a call before ZebethMedia Disrupt. Of course, some images and text don’t work well for one reason or another. That’s why Omneky doesn’t run any ad campaign without the customer’s approval. Team members can add comments, provide feedback and request approval from the platform directly. As soon as customers approve a new ad, it is automatically uploaded and displayed on social platforms — Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Snapchat. After that, you are back to square one. You can track the performance of your new ads from the analytics dashboard, iterate and improve your ad performance. The company charges a subscription fee that varies depending on the number of integrations with social platforms that you want to use. Omneky’s long-term vision expands beyond advertising. There’s a lot of data involved with online ads, that’s why it’s easy to automate some of the steps needed to run an online ad campaign. But the startup thinks it could apply the same methodology to other products, such as AI-generated landing pages. If you extrapolate even more, it’s clear that AI-generated content will cause a revolution in the martech and adtech industries — and Omneky plans to participate in that revolution. Image Credits: Omneky

NXgenPort aims to detect early signs of infection in cancer patients before symptoms arise • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Battlefield, battlefield 2022, Biotech & Health, Disrupt, NXgenPort, StartupsNo Comments

Meet NXgenPort, a Saint Paul, Minnesota-based startup that’s looking to remotely monitor cancer patients in between doctor visits using a port catheter. NXgenPort, which presented today at ZebethMedia Disrupt Startup Battlefield, is building an implantable chemo port that features added sensors and remote connectivity functions. The port combines chemo-port efficacy with sensor technology to measure and remotely monitor early onset of complications by reporting and tracking patient response over the course of their treatment. The goal of the port is to alert physicians to signs of infection, reduce hospitalizations and gather important physiological data to improve patient outcomes. NXgenPort is the brainchild of CEO and co-founder Cathy Skinner, who came up with the idea for the port based on her own experience after her father passed away from cancer 20 years ago. His diagnosis sent Skinner on a course to work in the oncology space and become a cancer exercise specialist. In 2016, she was working with a breast cancer patient and noticed that her condition had worsened from the last time Skinner saw her. The patient went to her doctor and learned that the medication she was taking to fight the cancer was also damaging her heart. “When she was telling me the story, I saw that she had an implanted chemo port in her chest for the drug, and I wondered, how come we couldn’t know sooner that the drug was damaging her heart,” Skinner told ZebethMedia in an interview. “I always knew that I had a good idea, but I needed a team to build around it.” That’s when NXgenPort COO Rosanne Welcher, PhD and CTO Mohamed Ali MD, PhD came into the picture. In 2019, Skinner was at a conference at Harvard and sat next to Welcher for lunch and the two began discussing their professions. Once Skinner found out that Welcher was a scientist with 25 years of experience working in cancer diagnostics and leadership, she shared her idea for the NXgenPort. Skinner and Welcher then formed the company in May 2020 and filed a non-provisional patent with an attorney in Utah. Their attorney had hired Ali to create drawings of the product for the patent, after which Ali shared his interest in the product and joined their team with his expertise in rehabilitative science and cardiac care. The NXgenPort is embedded with micro electronics and a battery. The device has optical sensors going through the catheter. Once the port is implanted in the chest and the catheter goes through a patient’s heart, the device captures images of blood cells and then compresses the data and sends it to the cloud, after which it is analyzed via machine learning. Skinner notes that cells are differentiated by their size and composition, so the company has trained the algorithm to count the different cells and then provide trends as to whether blood cells are changing in a good or bad way. “With the chemotherapy port being implanted and then with us embedding with technology for remote patient monitoring, we’re able to detect changes in red blood cells and white blood cells, cardiac output and vitals,” Skinner said. “Right now, if a patent needs to determine if they are eligible for their next chemo appointment, they have to drive to the clinic and get their blood tested. And if their blood cell counts are off, they’re ineligible and have to drive back home. We’re monitoring remotely and showing trends over time and seeing if the data shows signs of infection, if patients need to come in early for a blood transfusion or if chemo needs to be rescheduled.” NXgenPort is still in the process of receiving FDA approval, so the company can’t test on humans yet. The startup is going into animal testing this year, and is starting with swine. Skinner says the startup anticipates human testing to begin toward the end of 2025. “It’s a very hard and ambitious thing that we’re seeking to do by taking optical sensors that are used in labs to count cells, miniaturizing them and having them be activated in blood flow,” Skinner said. “So we’re facing some important challenges, but at the same time, when we accomplish this, it’s going to completely change how cancer patients are monitored. The timing when we come to market in 2025 will be well-suited because Hospital at Home models will be more mature and we’ll be ready to integrate.” In terms of funding, the startup closed a pre-seed round in March 2022 that included investment from the co-founders’ friends and family, mHUB accelerator and Edward-Elmhurst Health Ventures. NXgenPort is in the midst of raising a $4 million seed round, but is currently unable to disclose the lead investor. The company’s Series A investment round, which Skinner says will consist of $10 million, will occur in 2023. As for the company’s business model, Skinner says the startup will look at licensing the technology to port manufacturers, pharmaceutical manufacturers and virtual clinic trial companies. The NXgenPort itself will cost a bit more than a standard port, which is usually priced at around $270. In addition to the hardware, the startup will have a subscription model for its software that will collect and analyze results for physicians. Skinner says the software will be priced at around $40 or $50 per month and will be payable to the hospitals administering the ports. Although the startup is currently focused on cancer, Skinner says the startup aims to turn into an umbrella company with different product lines in the future. The startup sees opportunities in having implanted devices with optical sensors collecting patient blood counts and heart function in dialysis, cardiac care and veterinary care.

Announcing the ZebethMedia Startup Battlefield 20 companies on the Disrupt Stage • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Battlefield, Disrupt, Startup Battlefield, Startup Battlefield 200, Startup Battlefield 2022, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

We’re positively thrilled that Startup Battlefield is live and in person at ZebethMedia Disrupt 2022. In a new era of the legendary startup competition, ZebethMedia editorial hand selected 200 startups, out of thousands of applicants, to comprise the Startup Battlefield 200. The top 20 companies will pitch on the Disrupt Stage. Startup Battlefield Finalists are famous for their success. Come watch these companies compete for the Disrupt Cup and $100,000 equity-free grand prize. Disrupt runs Tuesday through Thursday, October 18-20 in San Francisco.. The agenda is packed full of the heavyweights of the industry hashing it out on stage stage with ZebethMedia Editors. Newsmakers, luminaries and founders will take the stage to share insights and breaking news. For 2022, ZebethMedia reworked Startup Battlefield, and we’re thrilled with the response. For the first time, ZebethMedia hosted this curated cohort of founders at ZebethMedia Disrupt, providing special programming and trainings in advance of and during the event. The top companies will follow in the footsteps of Startup Battlefield legends on the Disrupt Stage. With over 900 alumni participating in the program, Startup Battlefield Alumni companies raised over $13B in funding with 124 successful exits (IPOs or acquisitions). Starting today, the top 20 companies will pitch on the Disrupt Stage for six minutes followed by a six minute Q&A with our expert panel of judges. These all-star VCs include folks like Peter A Boyce ll (Stellation Capital), Aileen Lee (Cowboy Ventures), Ulili Onovakpuri (Kapor Capital), Lo Toney (Plexo Capital) and Milo Werner (The Engine) to name just a few. ZebethMedia Disrupt Stage Schedule for Startup Battlefield Tuesday, Oct 18, Disrupt Stage Semi-Finals (Session 1): 10:50 am – 12:00 pm Semi-Finals (Session 2): 2:30 pm – 3:40 pm Wednesday, Oct 19, Disrupt Stage Semi-Finals (Session 3): 10:55 am -12: 00 pm Semi-Finals (Session 4): 2:40 pm – 3:45 pm Thursday, October 20, Disrupt Stage Finals: 1:00 pm – 2:15 pm Winner Announced: 4:10 pm Without further ado, let’s check out the companies and their respective sessions: Advanced Ionics (Session 4): Advanced Ionics has developed a new class of electrolyzer that enables green hydrogen production that’s cost competitive with cheaper fossil-fuel based hydrogen production. Ally Robotics (Session 3): Starting with a low cost, reliable, easy to teach and smart robotic arm, we develop and manufacture robotic systems that are designed to work alongside people. Anthill (Session 1): Anthill, a machine learning-enabled HR service center that builds solutions for the desk-less workforce, formed in 2020 to disrupt the internal communication stumbling blocks most companies experience when providing information to the 80% of global employees who don’t sit at a desk — all through text messaging. AppMap (Session 1): AppMap elevates the developer experience by providing continuous observability mapping and runtime quality feedback in the code editor to improve software performance, stability and security. Betterdata (Session 4): BetterData technology makes data sharing instant for data/AI teams by converting real data into synthetic data that looks, feels and behaves the same. As synthetic data belongs to no real individual, privacy laws do not apply, and it can be shared globally with 100% compliance while also unlocking data licensing/monetization opportunities. Circular Genomics (Session 1): Circular Genomics is a venture-backed startup company developing precision diagnostics utilizing circular RNAs as biomarkers to provide personalized care for patients with psychiatric and neurological disorders. Digest.ai (Session 2): Digest.ai is building an experience around a collaborative knowledge database to accelerate discovery and education. Hormona (Session 2): Hormona is building an end-to-end solution targeting hormonal health with our innovative hormone test that allows women to quantitatively measure their hormone levels from the comfort of the home without the need for a lab. Incooling (Session 3): With a mission to cool down the planet one server at a time, Incooling has adapted the unique properties of phase change cooling and created next-generation 2 phase cooling servers dedicated to achieving the data center industry’s full potential. Intropic Materials (Session 4): Intropic Materials addresses the plastic waste problem, making self-degrading products that can be composted or perfectly recycled. Kayhan Space Corp (Session 4): A coordinated and autonomous satellite collision detection and avoidance solution for satellite operators. Labby (Session 4): Labby is a hardware and optical AI startup born out of MIT, building next-generation mobile sensing technology for the dairy industry to provide fast, accurate and affordable milk-testing solutions and deliver instant results on milk composition and quality information. Minerva Lithium (Session 3): Direct Lithium extraction technology. Mother Honestly (Session 2): Mother Honestly is building a community-powered care infrastructure for employers and employee caregivers to flourish at home and in the workplace. Nat4bio (Session 3): Nat4Bio develops naturally-sourced and clean-labeled coatings that protect fruit and vegetables from spoilage. NxGen Port (Session 1): NXgenPort is addressing an unmet need in cancer care by remotely managing patients between chemotherapy visits with a Digital Health Platform and an implanted Smart Port with intravascular cytometry sensors. Omneky (Session 1): Omneky utilizes state-of-the-art deep learning to personalize experiences across all digital channels. Reverion Gmbh (Session 3): Reverion manufactures highly efficient power plants for carbon negative electricity generation and energy storage. Staax (Session 2): Staax enables peer-to-peer payments via fractional shares of stock, creating transparency and a social network around investing. Swap Robotics (Session 2): One hundred percent electric robots for grass cutting on solar sites (1,000+ acres) and snow plowing on sidewalks.