Y Combinator got so big, it had to split its Demo Day in two. During today’s second wave we saw a variety of promising biotech, marketplace, enterprise, and financial tech startups. Yesterday we chronicled 50 consumer, B2B, developer, and hardware companies.
With bigger and bigger batches, the on-stage pitches are getting more bombastic as YC’s startups compete for attention. Yet this batch seemed like one of the strongest in years. After some batches around 2013 that included startups that felt more like niche features, YC is now backing big dreams for the future of medicine, money, and even marijuana.
Here’s a quick look at all 50 of the startups that presented on the record. Click through the linked descriptions to read TechCrunch’s full writeups on the companies.
Campus Job – Helps college students find part-time jobs and internships. Students fill out a profile, see jobs they’re qualified for, and can quickly apply. 1300 companies are already paying Campus Job to connect them to its 100,000 students across 2200 colleges.
Seed – An online bank for small businesses. Seed uses your data to pre-qualify you for loans rather than make you hunt for them. It has a revenue share in place with a banking partner that handles the traditional stuff. It recently released its banking API and will launch its software client soon.
NextTravel – Zenefits for travel. 75% of corporate travel is still inefficiently booked by humans because companies want control over spending and policies. NextTravel eliminates this with a self-serve front-end for employees to book travel, and a backend open to managers who can track spending and prevent abuse.
TheMidGame – Helping brands advertise through social media influencers. TheMidGame works with brands to find them social media stars that are relevant to their customers. Influencers connect all their social accounts to a dashboard, receive source materials from which to create content, post stories that naturally pimp the brand, and are measured by the sales they generate. TheMidGame pays the influencers and keeps a cut.
eBrandValue – Real-Time Nielsen Ratings For Brands. eBrandValue measures success of brand marketing and can predict sales by analyzing social signals from customers on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other channels. For example, it was able to track liquor brand Diageo’s sales with 70% accuracy a month before the company got those sales figures by looking at what people were saying about its beverages.
Standard Cyborg – 3D-Printed Prosthetics. Medical prosthetics like false legs are expensive since they’re hand-made. Standard Cyborg’s founder paid $23,000 for his prosthetic leg and it can’t go in water. But Standard Cyborg can 3D print water-proof prosthetic legs that are sold for just $800. Next, it wants to build a much wider range of prosethetics.
Rescue Forensics – Digitally Combatting The Child Sex Trade. Law enforcement doesn’t have the expertise or technology to track online listings of child sex slaves. Rescue Forensics helps index these criminal listings to aid authorities with tracking victims so they can be rescued, and gathering evidence for presecuting crooks. Its customers already include the FBI, Department Of Homeland Security, DOJ, and LAPD. Next, the startup wants to fight drug trafficking and terrorism recruitment.
Lumi – Put Your Logo On Anything. Lumi’s website lets you drag-and-drop your logo onto any type of product, from t-shirts and consumer products, to vehicles and walls. With 70% margins, it’s already profitable, and the startup cites how predecessors in branded merchandise like Zazzle and Teespring were underestimated at first. Everyone is starting their own business, and everyone needs help getting their brand out their.
Underground Cellar – Buy On-Demand Wine And Get Free Upgrades. Wine makers don’t want to offer discounts because it teaches buyers they’re worth less. Underground Cellar helps them boost sales by offering free upgrades like bigger bottles, rarer vintages, or autographed packaging. This hooks conumers, leading Underground Cellar to have already racked up $1.2 million in revenue. Eventually, it wants to dig into other luxury verticals.
Spire – Wearable Breathing Tracker. Respiration fluctuations are a key signal of health problems, but they’re tough to monitor. Spire has developed a low-cost, accurate respiration sensor, and the infrastructure to turn data into health recommendations. It wants to give early warnings about big health problems and build its sensors into everyday objects and clothing. For now, its wearable can let you know if you’re stressed or have been sitting too long.
AnalyticsMD – Air Traffic Control For Healthcare. Inefficiencies in how hospitals manage resources lead to huge wastes of money. An empty operating room costs $5000 per hour, despite a long-waiting list of people needing surgery. AnalyticsMD uses machine learning to monitor, predict, and optimize how hospitals work.
Smarking – Enterprise SaaS For Parking. Companies in the parking market price their services and staff purely based on intuition, leaving money on the market. Smarking’s system lets them accurately track supply and demand so parking lots can optimize their businesses and boost revenue. While it might seem boring, parking is a massive market with no modern analytics infrastructure.
20n – Producing Valuable Chemicals From Genetically Modified Organisms. Pharmaceutical companies spend huge sums producing specialty chemicals. 20^n uses software to predict what genes can be used to genetically modify organisms so they naturally produce these valuable chemicals. It’s already invented a way to produce acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol. It’s also figured out a way to decrease one valuable chemicals price by 2 million times. 20^n now has over $1.7 million in contracts from DARPA and a massive cosmetics company, and is eyeing a wide array of chemicals for production.
GrubMarket – Online Farmer’s Market. GrubMarket provides on an online marketplace where consumers can buy food straight from farmers. GrubMarket then picks up the food and delivers it. By cutting out the wholesalers, distributors, and grocers, GrubMarket can take a big margin while making food cheaper and paying farmers more.
CribSpot – College Rental Marketplace. It’s tough for students to manage the college housing rental process, as listings are fragmented across sites, and rentals require paper leases and handwritten checks. CribSpot aggregates the best college rentals, and lets students pay for them directly through the site. By charging a small fee to help students find and book rentals (something landlords sometimes do already), CribSpot plans to grab a chunk of the $25 billion US student housing rental market.
KickPay – A Marketplace For Buying And Selling Invoices. It takes the average invoice 48 days to get paid, depriving businesses of the cash they need to operate. KickPay lets individual investors buy up these invoices at a slight discount, getting businesses capital instantly. Investors see liquidity within two months and can make a double-digit percentage return. The market for KickPay is already huge, with $300 billion in invoices bought each year through a terrible interface full of contracts and paperwork.
Notable Labs – Personalized Cancer Treatment. Drug combinations have been very successful in fighting disease, but there are too many possible combinations to test on any single patient. Notable Labs instead takes a sample of a patient’s tumor to their lab, runs drug combination experiments to find out what works, and gives a report back to the patient’s doctor. This exposes it to no FDA risk, and cuts out big pharma companies that sell patented drugs.
Pretty Instant – On-Demand Event Photography. Pretty Instant can get you an event photographer in under 24 hours. Its technology can identify who is in a photo and send it to them so they share it, getting both the client and Pretty Instant more impressions that turn into inbound sales leads.
VetPronto – On-demand Veterinarian House Calls. Pets and their owners hate going to the vet’s office. But VetPronto can make getting healthcare for pets both easier and cheaper by bringing the veterinarian to the sick pet’s home. This eliminates overhead and scheduling costs, while letting your furry best friend stay put.
Akido Labs – A Standard API For Healthcare. Akido Labs wants to unlock health care data the way Clever unlocked educational data. It sells to hospital vendors that normally have to create endless custom integrations for each hospital’s backwards system. Akido sits between the two, standardizing the data coming out of the hospitals so its easy to build on for the vendors. Akido’s technology could make building medical software cheaper and easier, creating a platform that brings better health to everyone.
DroneBase – On-Demand Drone Services. Customers push a button, and DroneBase dispatches a local drone pilot with their own drone to come capture imagery, video, maps, and analysis for any project, like construction or infrastructure management. This lets big commercial clients avoid buying drones, employing pilots, or paying suppliers. DroneBase’s service can significantly undercut satellites, planes, and helicopters, while getting companies better data faster.
MashGin – Self-Checkout Via Machine Vision. MashGin’s brick-and-mortar checkout kiosk uses cameras to machine vision scan objects and instantly ring them up. You just put your items, like and apple or a can of soda, into the kiosk that looks like a MakerBot box with no maker inside. It recognizes what they look like without user input or bar codes, and you can swipe your card to pay and leave. MashGin’s two-person team from Facebook and Bell Labs could change any business that relies on human vision. And it’s just received a letter of intent for $50 million a month of services from a major retailer.
Labdoor – Quality-Tested Online Marketplace For Supplements. The FDA doesn’t test supplements, and Labdoor says 79% of supplements fail quality control. Labdoor does its own testing so it can tell you what’s actually in Centrum or Muscle Milk even if the labels are wrong. The startup believes that user reviews aren’t enough to convince people what health products to buy, so it wants to be the quality control for everything important.
Bonfire – Full-Service Request For Proposal Management – $3 trillion is spent each year through the Request For Proposal (RFP) system. When a business needs to buy something that costs over $50,000 they get RFP bids from potential supplies, and have to decide which to go with. That clumsy comparison process can take months. Bonfire manages all the RFPs for a business, determining which offer is best, and informing the buyer. Bonfire is currently selling its service for $5,000 a year to large companies and governments, but envisions an even bigger business in intelligence about what buyers and suppliers should do based on the data it gleams.
EquipmentShare – Airbnb for Construction Equipment. Trillions of dollars of construction equipment sits idle all the time. 75% at any given time. EquipmentShare lets contractors rent out their idle equipment, and the startup keeps 20%. It can undercut traditional equipment renters by 30% where contractors spend an average of $900,000 a year. EquipmentShare could make it more affordable for smaller independent contractors to buy or rent the equipment they need, and help them create sustainable side businesses renting their cherry-pickers and cement-mixers.
