Announcing the Startup School 2019 Grant Recipients

by Steven Pham12/27/2019

As part of our efforts to further support founders in Startup School, we awarded $15,000 in equity-free grants to the most promising companies to go through the course. The quality (and quantity!) of founders who participated in Startup School this past year made the grant selection process a tough one.

Congratulations to the following startups* for their impressive progress over the 10-weeks of Startup School!

Arula
Sydney, Australia
Creates breast prosthesis for women who’ve had mastectomies due to breast cancer.

bamya
Tel Aviv, Israel
An online marketplaces and business tools for non-restaurant chefs. These chefs are busy solo entrepreneurs — bamya helps them avoid distractions to focus on their cooking.

Blockcast
Berkeley, CA
Blockcast is an intelligent caching optimizer designed for network operators running on satellite links to enable high-quality internet video streaming services at a much lower cost.

Cabtreks
Calgary, Alberta
Lowest cost last-mile delivery solution by grouping offers within schedules, coupled with mobile sorting facilities to make this possible.

Circles
Bangalore, India
Social payments platform that lets users discover and share credit cards, settle debts, and track payments within trusted circles of friends and family.

Civica Digital
Monterrey, MX
A software platform to access public services online, helping citizens interface any government procedure anywhere.

Class Engine
Denver, CO
Class activity management platform for operators of children’s activity programs and a marketplace where parents can go to find their services.

Dayra
Cairo, Egypt
An app to send money from your bank account to anyone in Egypt with a phone number. Transfers are instant and 10x cheaper than any alternative.

DeWaste
Berkeley, CA
A service which takes images of food waste and uses an image analysis model to figure out what food is wasted and report back the data. This data is used to reduce waste and food costs.

Divjoy
Portland, OR
Divjoy speeds up React development. Choose everything you need in your project (auth, payments, analytics, etc), pick a nice template, then export a high-quality codebase you can keep building on.

elgo
Paris, France
Tools to help product teams and marketing teams at software companies to create video content easily and regularly. Elgo helps them plan, structure, script, record and edit videos.

FarmTest
Stanford, CA
Software that automates on-farm performance testing, so farmers can confidently know which inputs and services pay off on their own fields.

Horizon
San Francisco, CA
Designed to make interactions as fast as possible, yet, powerful calendar app that encourages people to plan, explore what might be worth adding to your plans and follow what was planned.

Kanary
Chicago, IL
Ways for individuals to save time finding, removing, and monitoring their online information.

LittleHippo
Manhasset, NY
Products designed to help parents better take care of their kids, including a room monitor and sleep trainer alarm clock.

LuxBalance Lighting Limited
Hong Kong
Bio-centric lighting system and lighting algorithms for biological impact (e.g. to help young banana plants grow 30% faster and better). They offer Light as a Service (LaaS).

Mishka Therapeutics
Livermore, CA
Exosome based therapeutics modeled after the exosomes secreted by hypothalamus stem cells that have been shown to increase lifespan in laboratory mice by 10%.

Multitudes
Auckland, NZ
Multitudes measures team interactions using passive data from GitHub and provides recommendations to improve retention and team performance.

n8n.io
Berlin, Germany
Free Zapier/Tray.io alternative (Apache 2.0 with Commons Clause). It can be self-hosted, easily extended, and also used with internal tools.

Napo, Inc.
Valletta, Malta
A conversational platform for businesses within the catering and hospitality industry to help automate their facebook messenger conversations and reservations by means of chatbots.

oneprocdash
San Francisco, CA
A SaaS tool enabling engineers to easily manage, monitor, and orchestrate jobs and services hosted in the cloud.

Passbox
Miami, FL
Passbox is your digital safety deposit box. It’s built to store important data to be shared with people you trust only if something happens to you.

Pie
Atlanta, GA
The mobile browser that magically lowers your phone bill using search ad revenue.

Raincoat
Puerto Rico
Raincoat creates insurance policies that pay instantly after natural disasters. They do this by automating the pricing, triggering, and payout process.

RallyCoding
San Francisco, CA
Hybrid between Udemy + Leetcode. Students given a custom curriculum based on how much time they have per week to study, then work through video courses and practice interview questions.

Safepay
San Francisco, CA
Safepay is building tools and APIs for businesses in Pakistan that make it easy to accept digital payments.

SANDORAS
Bangalore, India
NLP model assessment and data augmentation platform.

Scope
London, UK
Tools to help companies operating in the healthcare space to leverage AI technology.

Soraban
San Francisco, CA
Soraban is building an affordable tax advisor for the self-employed.

SquidBio
Waterloo, Canada
Software tools for synthetic biology, starting with a DNA sequence management and sharing platform (GitHub for DNA).

Sympatic
Chicago, IL
Managed container services for secure and audited runtime over health data. Sympatic is cloud-based trusted broker software for healthcare data.

Tagai
New York City, NY
Tagai is the fastest and most accurate way to tag customer support tickets and get new insights.

TeamJoy
San Francisco, CA
A marketplace for managers and teams to organize team events, outings, and celebrate peoples life events such as work anniversaries and birthdays.

Tribo
Bogota, Colombia
Tribo is a plug-in that automates sales triage so your sales team only interacts with qualified leads.

Versed AI
Cambridge, UK
SaaS for the extraction of business intelligence from natural language text. They focus on the automatic extraction of supply chain maps from Web documents.

Vessel Health
Mountain View, CA
All of your medical data, all in one place, automatically.

Vizitor
Chandigarh, India
A smart visitor management application which secures the whole check-in & check-out process of guests at your work-places.

VShoot
San Jose, CA
A mobile application that allows people to take photos for one another remotely, in virtual photoshoots, as if they were standing right in front of each other.

Wealth42
Bangalore, India
A robo-advisor app that does goal-based financial planning. The app gamifies personalised investment objectives which helps build a habit of saving. This steers wealth creation.

What’s In My Jar
London, UK
WIMJ tells you if a skincare product works. It helps you create an effective skincare routine based on your goal, budget & lifestyle, just as in a consultation with a human cosmetic dermatologist.

Zenner
Tel Aviv, Israel
Fully automated travel rebooking with a focus on flight delays, cancellations, and missed connections. Disruptions are automatically solved without additional cost or time-consuming human interaction.


Startup School’s Winter 2020 8-week course will launch on January 20, 2020, and you can sign up to participate here.

*Some grant recipients requested anonymity as they had not publicly launched yet. These companies are not listed here.

Author

  • Steven Pham

    Steven is the Online Community Director at YC. Previously, he built and ran Startup School, YC's free online course for startups, and worked on Special Projects at YC.