Meet the teams: Accelerate 2019

We are incredibly excited to announce the teams who made it to the culminating event of Accelerate 2019. If you’re not yet following us on Instagram, make sure to do so — that’s where we’ll be announcing this year’s winners!

In alphabetical order:

• AeroShield: AeroShield manufactures a super-insulating nano-glass material for use in energy efficient windows. AeroShield windows are up to 40% more insulating than traditional double-pane windows, but with only a 10-20% increase in cost. This brings state-of-the-art thermal comfort, durability, and energy savings into homes without the prohibitive price-tag.

• Bandhu: Bandhu enables low wage workers to make more insightful migration decisions by offering choices of bundled housing and employment.

• BidLogic: BidLogic is an AI-powered SaaS Platform for the aerospace & defense industry with a total addressable market of $500M/year. BidLogic applies data science to predict future sales opportunities for private companies while also providing a “readiness pulse” to the Defense Department to ensure military logistics levels are ready for any world event, including disaster response and humanitarian relief operations overseas.

• Delta Band: Delta Band is a strength training wearable that automatically detects what exercise you’re doing, and counts your reps. By making workout tracking 50x faster, we help lifters stay motivated by visualizing their progress over time, and guide them towards success with personalized data-backed training plans. By optimizing workout generation and logging, Delta Band will be the first to expand the $24B fitness wearables market to include millions of eager lifters, trainers, and coaches.

• DUO: DUO is building LatAm's next generation of B2B financial services for SMEs. We'll start by issuing a corporate card paired with a data analytics dashboard to empower new business owners with visibility and control of their spendings. Credit limits will be dynamic and tied to cash balances held by each client. DUO’s card will generate credit history, and have all the features wanted in a corporate card. The data collected will then allow DUO to offer the adequate financial products SMEs need to grow.

• Elemen: Elemen provides effective & personalized skincare solutions for everyone who loves beauty. By integrating scientific skincare knowledge with state-of-the-art algorithms, we are building an AI system that can understand your own skin condition and concerns, design the most effective ingredients and formulate products that directly cater to your needs. Elemen will save you from the excessive efforts and money wastes for finding the right skincare and make your own beauty simpler than ever.

• Encora (Pitch 2018 Audience Choice Award!): We are creating a wearable wristband that stops hand tremors and is autonomously adaptable to each user.

• Hikma Health: Hikma Health was founded on the principle that every patient deserves personalized care, no matter where they are. We create customized data systems for healthcare providers to improve outcomes for millions of refugee patients. We started with the support of the MIT Media Lab Refugee Learning Accelerator, and are growing driven by our shared vision to empower our patients and physicians with Hikma – healing wisdom.

• HINTS: Following the 2016 US presidential elections and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, there has been an uproar of concern over the spread of fake news. Current industry solutions involving human-powered labeling and natural language processing (NLP) are slow, expensive, and inaccurate. HINTS, our company, offers a patent pending network propagation and analysis machine learning solution that is able to automatically halt the spread of fake news across any medium, including text, audio, and video.

• Horagen: The development of autonomous vehicles can potentially save millions of lives, but is hampered by the lack of appropriate LiDAR sensors that can map the world around them. Horagen is building the next-generation LiDAR that is technologically superior to any sensor on the market or in development today. Through our patented technology, we will enable cars, robots, and drones to see the environment and usher in an autonomous future.

• Loro, co: Based in Boston, MA, Loro, co is an early-stage startup that is developing a smart companion robot for a wheelchair user named “Loro.” Loro empowers its users with increased independence and connectedness by enhancing their vision, communication, and safety. Loro, co. was founded in 2018 by a diverse team of engineers, designer, and entrepreneurs, allowing us to create a holistic and user experience-focused product.

• LifeBlocs: LifeBlocs endeavors to reinvent the donation value chain for bone marrow, blood, and organs globally by utilizing blockchain technology. In doing so, it aims to reduce the number of lives lost as a result of inefficiencies in the donation and matching processes. Moreover, LifeBlocs strives to increase the number of donations amongst the population.

• Lucy Homecare: Lucy is a marketplace where seniors and their families can list their homecare needs and are matched with homecare providers by our proprietary scheduling algorithm. That means seniors have a simpler search process, better choices, and lower costs, while providers see higher wages, more flexibility, and better fitting clients.

• MedMap: MedMap is a web based artificially intelligent tool for medical professionals designed to use research-backed statistical medical knowledge to support evidence-based clinical decision making. It is a software-as-a-service for medical residents, paid for by medical residencies as a yearly per-user subscription.

• Mily.Care: Mily.Care will become the leading platform for immigrants to access healthcare solutions for their loved ones in their country of origin (as an entry point to the remittances market).

• Novo Space (Pitch 2018 Grand Prize Winner!): Novo Space provides high performance electronics for the new space age. Using a modular ecosystem of electronics, Novo's products can give satellite manufactures 200x more processing power and save 50% on development time and 50% on total costs.

• O2Map: O2Map develops clinical oxygen sensors to enable personalization of radiation therapy for cancer patients. Personalized radiation dose planning will improve patient outcomes and survival in populations that respond poorly to the current stand of care.

• Painting with Data: Painting with Data is a collaborative, web-based spatial data visualization, and analysis platform suitable for all users. We disrupt the spatial analysis by allowing users to perform advanced data analysis by visually manipulating the map without the need to operate with a database. The software introduces a visual programming language and a data-marketplace. Our platform enables everyone to harness data to provide intelligence to decision-making without the need for specialized knowledge.

• Poppins: Poppins is an online platform that provides parents with fast and easy access to search and book temporary child care at local licensed daycares.

• Precavida (Pitch 2018!): Precavida is a digital matching platform that connects uninsured patients to healthcare providers with unfilled availability. Through our platform, patients can be triaged, compare doctors, and make affordable appointments as early as the same-day. Providers can fill unbooked appointments, making their private practices more profitable. Through this matching system, Precavida is able to decrease wait times from 1 month to less than 1 week, and increasing Doctors revenues by 20%.

• Qtech: Long-lasting Qtech air filter as a replacement of HEPA. Simply switch to Qtech to save 50% or more.

• Quantifai: Automatic data science for non-technical people. Instead of flooding data scientists with requests, Quantifai users can perform the most important data science tasks themselves — within seconds, code-free.

• RiskBoard: RiskBoard is a digital tool that harnesses artificial intelligence and big data to identify and contextualize human rights and political risks across global supply chains and investments. It draws on social and public media to identify political and human rights incidences that may affect your organization's interests across geographies and provides complementary information to help you interpret the incidences.

• StethX: StethX offers the first affordable digital stethoscope, allowing patients to record and share their heart and lung sounds from home. By putting a stethoscope in the home of every patient we enable the wave of telemedicine, providing a crucial diagnostic tool that gives every family better access to quality healthcare.

• Swipe: Our mission is to expand financial inclusion to the credit invisible. The Swipe App records cashless transactions in real-time, and is a tool to preempt card fraud, manage money, and analyze aggregate behavioral spending patterns to glean insights about a credit invisible consumer's credit worthiness. The insight is called Swipe ID - a self-sovereign credit ID that a consumer can control, monetize, and privately share with FIs to enhance credit visibility.

• TTT Pharmaceuticals: Multiple Myeloma is a deadly incurable cancer that afflicts over 200 thousand patients worldwide and has an expected 5 year survival rate under 50%. We have a novel pharmaceutical that has been shown in preclinical studies to be over 3-fold more effective than the leading Multiple Myeloma therapies.

• Velaron (Pitch 2018!): Shrimp farming - a $45 B global industry - is challenged by poor environmental and social practices. Yields have fallen as diseases kill 40% of shrimp. Disease control is limited by the vastness of shrimp farms which cover hundreds of hectares and are hard to monitor. Velaron maps water quality across farms in real time. We plan to sell the data, analytics, and management system to farmers as a monthly app-service, helping them de-risk their operations and increase yields and disease resilience.

• Viridis RS: Viridis RS enables smallholder farmers to increase their productivity through a comprehensive risk management system by monitoring the farm through aerial imagery and providing insurance protection and early warning of pest and diseases. With our technology, we will enable farmers to optimize the long-term health of their land and increase their yields and profits. With improved crop health, we want to promote poverty alleviation and reduce the negative environmental impacts of farming on a global scale.

Looking back: Pitch 2018

As we get ready to announce the winners of Accelerate 2019, we wanted to take a look back at the first competition of this cycle and remember all of great teams that competed. You’ll notice some of the came back for Accelerate!

Pitch 2018 Grand Prize Winner: Novo Space

Audience Choice Award Winner: Animo

Finalists:

• Agrilink

• Animo

• Bare Bear

• Buddy

• Chord

• Cogentis Therapeutics

• Iamus Technologies

• Insolate Energy

• Instacam, Inc.

• LEAF Systems

• Luvabloom

• Novo Space

• Precavida

• Retired Talent

• Riopto

• Velaron

• Viridis

• Waters of Life