20 Startups Showcase Next Big Ideas at Berkeley SkyDeck’s Spring 2019 Demo Day

Startups to present cutting-edge new ideas to more than 700 investors in hopes of taking their businesses to the next level

Berkeley, Calif. – May 9, 2019 —Berkeley SkyDeck, UC Berkeley’s premier accelerator, will host its Spring 2019 Demo Day on May 14, featuring 20 innovative startups from around the world in the focus areas of AI, AR/VR, health tech, consumer software, robotics, and more.

Berkeley SkyDeck’s current cohort teams are from all over the U.S. as well as 10 countries and four continents.  Each company received $100,000 from the Berkeley SkyDeck Fund as well as more than $500,000 in free and discounted services, and intensive mentorship from advisors as they prepare to pitch more than 700 investors on Demo Day.

“We are thrilled to present our new batch of companies who are building technology which positively impacts people around the world,” said Caroline Winnett, Executive Director, Berkeley SkyDeck. “I’m so proud of our startup companies. They have worked extremely hard to get where they are today and are excited to officially pitch their ideas before hundreds of top investors. This is an exceptional opportunity to get a peek at the future of technology.”

Berkeley SkyDeck provides resources unavailable at any other accelerators, such as connections with top advisors from the Bay Area business communities and access to UC Berkeley’s research facilities, computing resources, lab space, and more. With SkyDeck’s help, startups are able to effectively leverage the network of 500,000 Berkeley alumni throughout Silicon Valley to reach customers, partners, and more.

Since Berkeley SkyDeck was founded in 2012, more than 300 companies have participated in the accelerator program. Noteworthy SkyDeck startups include Lime, a scooter and bike rental company recently valued at $1 billion; Kiwi Campus, building robots for last-mile delivery; and Chirp Microsystems, which was recently acquired by TDK.

For more information visit Berkeley SkyDeck at http://skydeck.berkeley.edu/.

Accredited investors and media interested in attending can email SkyDeck@berkeley.edu to request an invitation.

The Spring 2019 Berkeley SkyDeck Demo Day will include the following startups:

Artivive

Artivive is creating an entirely new medium for artists around the world through augmented reality. Their AR platform and app is currently used by museums on three continents.

Concha Labs

Motivated by the founder’s personal experience, Concha Labs is creating a direct-to-consumer service that will bring hearing aids to tens of millions of Americans who suffer from symptoms of hearing loss every day without seeking professional help. 

DeepScribe

DeepScribe is developing the holy grail for physicians: an AI-powered scribing service that passively records and understands a patient’s visit, generates a clinical note, and then seamlessly injects it into the EHR system in real time at the conclusion of the patient’s visit.

DevSpace

Kubernetes has become the new standard for ensuring scalability, reliability, and portability of applications. DevSpace turns any Kubernetes cluster into a powerful developer platform which enables dev teams to build cloud-native software more quickly. Tech teams leverage DevSpace Cloud to create, manage and share secure development and testing environments and use the open-source tool DevSpace CLI to accelerate building, deploying and debugging applications.

Dough

Dough is a fintech startup offering the first digital wallet targeting Gen Z.  By giving parents the tools they need to manage their children’s spending, Dough will be the payments platform of choice for an entire generation of users. 

DocuVision

DocuVision is building a personal data management platform for organizations.

Whether it’s customer support emails, scanned invoices, or chat transcripts, businesses of all sizes can use DocuVision’s AI-powered solution to automatically detect and take action on personal data. From redacting names, social security card numbers, and other unstructured sensitive data, to redesigning your workflows to be privacy first, DocuVision is enabling a world where all companies are ‘private by design.’

Empowerly

Empowerly has built a tech-enabled service for personalized college and career counseling, making it available to the masses via a customizable subscription plan. Using the vast array of data accumulated from over 10,000 users and growing, Empowerly is able to match students of any background with the right counseling at any stage in their lives.

Grovf

Big data applications are a critical part of any modern enterprise, with many enterprise data centers relying on hundreds of thousands of servers constantly running operations across terabytes of data. Grovf has designed FPGA-based hardware accelerators that dramatically improve the speed of applications which rely on compute-heavy operations. 

Monit

Monit is a baby tech company focused on facilitating the healthy growth of babies. Monit has built a sensor that detects pee and poo separately and provides instant notifications to parents so they can understand optimal timing for changing a diaper. The company launched in Korea four months ago and has already grossed more than $1 million in revenue and has partnered with Kimberly Clark to launch the brand “HUGGIES powered by MONIT” in the US and Mexico.

Obviously AI

Obviously.AI enables rapidly-growing businesses without a dedicated data science team to predict customer behavior from their existing structured data, simply by asking questions in plain English: “Which of my users are likely to churn?”, “Who is likely to buy again?”, “What do our best customers have in common?”. All of this, in a matter of minutes – no programming or machine learning experience required.

Ottometric

The auto industry today is delivering Level 1 to Level 3 autonomous capabilities that the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) has called out as sub-par. Ottometric is focused on moving validation to the 21st century – scalable SaaS tools that meet the challenge of safer driver assistance features today and be ready for full autonomy tomorrow.

Pow Genetic Solutions

Pow is bringing the fab/foundry model to the growing synthetic biology market. Pow is a UC Berkeley spin-out, combining the operational expertise from these government labs with commercial-facing industry experience. Pow’s unique competitive advantage comes from its patented approach for “continuous operation,” allowing unprecedented efficiencies in yield / cost.

Route Reports

Although computer vision algorithms have advanced tremendously, the vast majority of users around the world are unable to leverage them; users are often tied to legacy CCTV / IP surveillance cameras or concerned about privacy. Route Reports has built purely edge-based IoT solutions that will allow them to service this huge market, starting with the billion-dollar public transit vertical.

Spext

Audio content is exploding in podcasts/audio books, and even enterprise communications are increasingly relying on the creation of auditory content. Spext lets anyone create engaging hearing content in minutes. It looks like a Google Doc and unlike traditional music software – users can edit the audio at any location using the auto-generated transcript; simply type in words, and they are synthesized in the speaker’s voice.

Squishy Robotics

A spin-off of UC Berkeley research with NASA, Squishy Robotics makes robots that can be safely airdropped from drones or helicopters. Squishy Robotics’ technology saves lives, reduces risks, and improves the effectiveness of emergency response teams.

SuperAnnotate

Based on the founder’s Ph.D. thesis work, SuperAnnotate has the world’s fastest pixel-perfect image annotation tool. This allows the creation of labeled image training sets far superior to existing bounding-box based approaches, critical for improving machine learning models.

Telos.AI

People naturally communicate, think, and explain visually, yet doing it effortlessly and digitally is still a big pain. Telos is a visual communication tool that is as easy to use as a whiteboard and as powerful as a company search engine. Visual documents made in Telos are living documents that become the focal point for visual collaboration throughout the entire project lifecycle.

Wavelength

Wavelength is creating a platform to make driving safer and capitalize on inefficiencies in the auto insurance industry. Their first product, Wavelength Driving Score, is an objective measurement of drivers’ ability to drive safely. Unlike conventional auto insurance companies’ sole reliance on telematics and demographic data, the Wavelength’s driver score system incorporates vision-based sensors and edge AI processing technology to provide unique driving insight for accurate risk assessment.

Workep

The future of work increasingly requires the collaboration of multiple teams across multiple enterprises, but existing project management tools like Asana and Microsoft Project are no longer able to keep up. Workep has deployed a powerful project management tool designed for the new collaborative world, integrating novel features like multi-project / multi-user time tracking, and much more.

ABOUT BERKELEY SKYDECK

As UC Berkeley’s largest official startup accelerator, Berkeley SkyDeck is a joint program of the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, the College of Engineering, and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research. With funding backed by private investors including top Silicon Valley VCs like Sequoia and Mayfield, SkyDeck combines the hands-on mentorship of traditional accelerators with the vast resources of its research university. This holistic partnership is coupled with SkyDeck’s unique accelerator program to create a powerful environment for startups from around the world. Participating startups have access to more than 190 advisors, 30 industry partners, and access to more than 500,000 alumni who connect SkyTeams to the expertise and capital they need to launch and grow their world-changing innovations. Recent cohort graduates have seen exceptional success in leveraging these resources to successfully raise follow-on investment from institutional investors.  For more information, see http://skydeck.berkeley.edu/.