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What it does: Most startups often find it challenging to manage their business due to a lack of permanent address. As a result, they lose their mail and packages and often fail to deposit checks on time. Stable overcomes this problem by providing a virtual mailroom and address for startups that help them manage their business and its activities worldwide. With Stable, a company gets a unique address that they may use to engage with vendors, the government, and the IRS. 

Stable also digitizes and manages physical mail. It helps scan and upload physical mails and forward any packages worldwide. It also stores the packages for up to 30 days and deposits received checks on behalf of the startup. 

How it started: Stable is the idea of two talented individuals, Sara Ahmad (CEO) and Collin Pham (CTO).

Sarah graduated from Northwestern University, followed by experience in many different organizations, such as LifeLink and Hazel Technologies. She also launched an app, HotPlate, in 2016, gaining lots of experience in UX engineering. 

Collin Pham is also a graduate of Northwestern University with prior work experience in Splitzee, AGC Partners, and Granular. Both the founders launched Stable in Delaware for businesses located in the area. This has helped them to support businesses in the region and get these startups a permanent address. 

Other than its strong leadership team, Stable is also backed by top-tier investors. The list includes Jack Altman from Lattice, Holly Liu from Kabam, and Chris Erickson from Apartment List. 

How it works: As of now, Stable has created 1000 plus addresses for different modern companies. It does so by establishing a permanent address for the company's headquarters, so management becomes convenient. Stable also provides the facility of the virtual mailbox. 

A virtual mailbox secures all packages and mail before delivering them to an address. Stable scans the physical mail received for quick viewing and then forwards it as required. The platform also delivers all mail to a permanent address and categorizes all scanned files and documents using smart tagging. 

Stable is well-integrated with many tools such as Slack and Dropbox. This enables users to push or forward documents in a most used tool or application. 

The platform gives its customers a user-friendly and intuitive dashboard. The dashboard lets startups view their business address conveniently and explore an amazing and well-organized website. 

There are mailbox automations as well. These features save time by allowing companies to put their mail on autopilot.  

Teams can receive all the mail directly on Slack for seamless collaboration. Further, there is an open and scan automation feature for automatic scanning and opening mail. Custom automations are also available to design powerful workflows using modern integrations and APIs. 

Why it's interesting: One of the great qualities of Stable is that it empowers businesses by helping them to get their permanent address. It also provides them with an identity to manage their mail and packages from anywhere in the world. 

Stable believes in providing virtual experiences to all its customers, enabling them to overcome challenges that may arise through distances. Stable is pretty convenient to use. The platform doesn't create any complications and provides services to even those who lack experience in building a virtual identity.

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What it does: Masref provides a trustworthy Swiss bank account to people in distressed economies. Many distressed countries have high inflation rates and untrustworthy banking systems. In such places, it’s tough to keep money safe from fraud or theft. With Masref, they can store their money safely in a trustworthy bank account that is denominated in US dollars.

How it started: Masref is the idea of three individuals, Amer Baroudi, Edward Yee, and Abdallah AbuHashem. Amer is a Syrian-born finance and policy expert. Before he founded Masref, Amer was the co-founder of many award-winning companies and had built many properties in Europe. 

Edward is a Singapore-based entrepreneur and the CFO of Masref. Abdallah is Masref’s CTO and has worked in many tech companies in the USA before moving to the UK. All the three founders met in Oxford and shared ideas on how to build a global financial system. 

They collectively aim to revolutionize how people use and save money in poor economies and make essential financial services accessible for everyone. They also aim to build a future that supports inclusivity.  

How it works: Individuals in countries such as Sudan, Lebanon, Zimbabwe, or Argentina prefer to save money in USD to avoid hyperinflation. But unfortunately, local banks in these places are often untrustworthy, so Masref provides a highly regulated and safe bank account in Switzerland that accepts incoming and outgoing transfers in USD. This account can be accessed through the phone, making it convenient to send and receive money.

Why it’s interesting: In today’s fast-paced world, Masref aims to revolutionize the financial systems and encourages people to move out of economies that may do them no good. Masref seeks to help people keep their money safe, so they can use it to make a difference in their lives. 

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What it does: Henry trains future software developers and data scientists in Latin America tuition-free. It also helps them find tech jobs in exchange for a share of their future income. Classes and other activities are 100% online and live. It offers candidate searches from within its alumni rolls to prospective employers free of charge.

How it started:  Co-founders Martin Borchardt (CEO), Luz Borchardt (VP of Marketing), Leonardo Maglia (CTO), and Manuel Barna Ferres created Henry to provide technology education to people in Latin America. They saw a demand for technical workers but not enough coding or technology programs to train people for those jobs.

Y Combinator is an initial funder of Henry. The company's subsequent $10 million Series A round was co-led by Kayyak Ventures and Seaya Cathay. It also included Dila Capital, Amarena and Eduardo della Maggiora, Matías Woloski, Accion Venture Lab, and Draper University.

How it works: Students apply online for the Henry Boot Camp. They do not need prior experience in coding, and they can opt to take a prep course with an introduction to software development. During their training at Henry, students spend over 800 hours coding. They also spend time creating real-world projects. 

Henry also provides a one-on-one career support system for its students. They learn how to write resumes, interview effectively, and other skills that help them get jobs. 

The company trains students in technical skills such as Javascript, HTML, SQL, and CSS. Henry's students also learn to use tools such as Slack, Zoom, Trello, Scrum, and Agile Methodologies. Graduates are ready for several jobs, including full stack developer, front end developer, web developer, software developer, back end developer, and mobile developer.

Employers interested in hiring Henry graduates send specifics about the job titles and types of candidates they are looking for. Henry assigns these companies to job placement teams. These interested companies can access Henry graduates' training and resume information and can interview candidates. Potential employers do not have to pay for this service. 

Each month, Henry sends prospective employers who have signed up a list of candidates ready for immediate employment. The company fully vets each of the candidates before sending along their information. Companies that hire Henry graduates to work remotely can save money over paying US or European workers.

Why it's interesting: Henry is the first 100% live online technology academy in Latin America. Their Income-Share Agreement model means students can start with only a computer and an internet connection. This model helps students in remote parts of Latin America and students who don't have a lot of resources get the training they need for sound technology jobs.

LinkedIn and Microsoft's study showed that over 10 million technology jobs will be available in Latin America by 2025. However, in Colombia alone, a talent deficit to fill tech jobs is already over 65%.

Henry has more than 5,000 students and has placed graduates in jobs at companies including Mercado Libre, Santander, Lenovo, Globant, and Accenture. They have helped fill positions in the United States, Europe, and Latin America.

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What it does: Peoplebox helps startups adopt objectives better and receive coaching to create effective OKRs (Objective and Key Results). The platform integrates all primary work tools and displays all the goals on a singular dashboard to identify any issues in real time.

How it started: Peoplebox is the idea of two smart individuals, Alagu Muthuraman and Abinav Chugh. Abhinav is a mechanical engineer who became an entrepreneur when he first launched his startup in Dublin in 2008. Alagu is a mechanical engineer who started his career with Yahoo and later moved to the Bay area to start his own venture.

Alagu and Abhinav met in 2014 when they joined a health-tech startup. This was a hyper-growth venture that grew from 250 to 3000 employees within 2.5 years.

Since both individuals were in the leading team, they saw all the execution and scaling challenges that the startup faced. They realized that technology could overcome these challenges. And this thought led them to start Peoplebox in the last few months of 2018.

How it works: Peoplebox helps solve the most significant issues of companies that wish to scale. It overcomes the problems such as poor strategy execution and misaligned teams. It helps customers run their meetings using customized dashboards, narratives, KPIs, and charts. It allows leaders to save time from creating narrative and progress templates and integrations.

Peoplebox also integrates all the primary work tools and allows every team member to track their KPIs and goals. It also provides a singular view of the company’s progress and strategies, so everyone knows its performance.

Also, Peoplebox helps startups view and identify red flags. It does so by highlighting everything on a single dashboard. It links with apps such as Slack for smooth adoption of OKR using minimal effort.

Why it's interesting: One of the top challenges companies face during their growing stage is maintaining an aligned system that works at a reasonable execution speed. As a company grows, implementing new strategies and keeping all teams informed is often a task most leaders fail at.

Startups are often under tremendous pressure to achieve growth and success within a few years. Using technology like Peoplebox help reduce the hurdles that often lead to mismanagement of goals.

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What it does: Array Labs uses clusters of small radar satellites, all working together, to collect many images of a single location from multiple angles. These clusters can collect enough sharp, clear perspectives with a single pass to create high-resolution 3D imagery. This approach is efficient, cost-effective, and able to cover large areas in short periods of time. This technology can be used to create 3D images of any type of terrain, even bustling metropolises, under any weather conditions. The people at Array Labs believe this technology will revolutionize how surveys of the earth are done from space and change how we view our world.

How it started: Array Labs was founded by Andrew Peterson in 2019. In 2021 he brought on Jose Isaac Robledo to round out the team and improve the business model. Andrew brings to the table a love of space and exploration and a deep understanding of Aerospace Engineering. Jose has a sharp business sense, and a history of helping struggling or startup companies create business models that have gotten them financially strong and on the path to future success. Together, Andrew and Jose are the dynamic duo that will fuel Array Lab's success in the early years and future. 

How it works: The engineers and scientists at Array Labs have created a system of small satellites, known as CubeSats, that can take enough images in a single pass to create accurate 3D images of the surveyed area. This is much more efficient than the previous method of making multiple passes and waiting for the images to be collated and synched. This technology allows them to cover thousands of miles in a single pass. They can deliver accurate 3D images of any place on earth within hours. These accurate real-time images are an invaluable resource for many industries and governments worldwide. 

Traction: Array Labs is currently collaborating with a select group of customers through their pilot program. This experimental program allows the customers to give valuable input into the program's functionality. The users are also asked to compare the 3D results from Array Labs to those offered by the alternatives. 

Why it’s interesting: In addition to having ample real-world applications applicable to the military, insurance companies, oil and gas industry surveyors, and climate studies, Array Labs believes that creating an accurate 3D map of the world will provide benefits to all populations of the world. 

The potential educational opportunities alone are exciting. Imagine teaching a classroom of kids about the environment of an area and being able to pull up an accurate and scaled 3D model of the site. Imagine a geophysicist being able to visualize the changes he sees happening on his meters and gauges. These images can give an accurate and large-scale reading on ocean levels and glacier melt, providing untold benefits as the world tries to understand the effects of climate change. 

Array Labs is not looking to change the world, just our ability to see it clearly and accurately in real-time.

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What it does: Ruffo simplifies the process of submitting foreign transaction documents by giving users the chance to sign and notarize such documents online via their laptop, computer, or smartphone. For instance, if an individual wants to purchase real estate abroad, they can forgo traveling internationally or procuring the services of a foreign attorney and use Ruffo's platform instead. Ruffo will generate the necessary documents, connect the user with a notary, and obtain the proper government certifications. It will ensure that the user signs and sends in legally valid documents so they can acquire their desired property.

How it started: Nelson Muñoz, Noe Branagan, and Luis Pellerano are Latin American immigrants who bonded over their shared experience of buying and selling property overseas. All three were well aware of the problems that arose during the buying and selling process, including paying for flights to sign relevant forms, dealing with intermediary bureaucracy, and dissecting complicated international payment policies. To solve these problems and make

the cross-border transaction process flow more smoothly, they launched Ruffo. Before starting the company, Muñoz was an associate at the venture capital organization DVx Ventures as well as a researcher at the MIT Office of Innovation. Branagan was an engineering manager at the financial services company Nubank, and Pellerano was an associate attorney at the law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett.

How it works: Ruffo is a digital platform that makes cross-border transactions remote. It is ideal for people who want to buy or sell property abroad. The platform serves as an all-in-one for those who do not want to go through the hassle of flying internationally or utilizing a consulate. It generates the documents required to complete the transaction. It also provides remote notarization services via video-conferencing and e-signature features. The notarization process on Ruffo is quick and secure. First, users will review and sign their required documents. Then, they will verify their identity by uploading identification pictures and responding to questions about their personal history. They must get 80% of the questions correct to move on to the final stage. The final stage involves meeting virtually with a notary who will ultimately sign and place a digital seal on the required documents.

Why it's interesting: This company has tremendous potential. In the aftermath of the pandemic, many people are seeking remote avenues in both their personal and professional lives. More and more people are working online, and a growing amount of people are purchasing items such as food and clothing online. It is fair to say that a critical mass of the U.S. will not want to fly to another country just to sign some documents. They would not want to go through the process of flying because many countries have enacted vaccination requirements or travel restrictions. Ruffo provides individuals an efficient and effective way to buy and sell property abroad. The company could grow exponentially in the years to come since many Millenials and Gen Zs prefer online interactions over in-person ones according to their social interactions.

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What it does: Airhart is a company that makes safe, innovative, and simple aircraft controls that can help anyone fly easily. A throttle and stick design allows users to direct their airplanes during takeoff, landing, and flight without any effort.  

How it started: Airhart is the creation of Brendan Quinn and Nikita Ermoshkin. Brendan Quinn is a software engineer and a specialist in embedded systems and low-level software. Nikita Ermoshkin is a system and electrical engineer with extensive experience in mechanical, software, and electrical engineering. 

When they both met at Cornell, Nikita worked as an avionics system and

integration engineer at Space X and Brandon worked on the M1 at Apple. They lead a project to create unmanned and small air systems. They aimed at developing airplanes that had the ability to take off automatically, navigate and target independently, and be well-equipped to avoid obstacles easily. 

During the project, they learned that all existing small planes were too complicated to fly, so their new creation had to be effortless and modern. In addition, they believed that today’s generation couldn’t drive a 1960’s car, let alone fly an airplane. So, they needed to create something that would eliminate the requirements of training, extra cost, and time.

How it works: Airhart develops airplane systems that come with fire-by-wire functionalities. Pilots can fly these planes and direct them as they please. The control system is intuitive, helping detect and stop problems before they become accidents. 

What’s more, Airhart’s planes are convenient to operate. It is about choosing the desired speed and setting the power lever accordingly. Then, the pilot pushes the stick in their preferred direction, eliminating the need for rudder pedals or reverse controls. 

The flight systems in these planes have sensors, computers, and actuators that help handle the entire operation. The cockpit of the plan is designed as per the pilot’s needs. There are no unnecessary switches, buttons, and knobs to reduce the pilot's learning curve and create complications. This allows professionals and amateur pilots to fly effortlessly. 

Why it's interesting: Airhart’s advanced airplanes have the potential to help aspiring pilots get their Private Pilot License in a much easier way. They allow both new and experienced pilots to have complete control of their aircraft and prevent aviation accidents as much as possible. 

This company promises to produce simple-to-fly airplanes featuring modern technology and engineering techniques, so anyone can hop on them and fly. This is what Airhart considered as their growth strategy as well. The interesting thing about these airplanes is that they reduce time, costs, and training costs and allow various pilots to stop wasting their energies on planes that might be prone to accidents. 

This is precisely what people seem to seek these days: experiencing a complicated activity but with all the comforts. 

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What it does: Dime lets creators turn their content into unique digital collectibles that can be bought and traded. For example, Dime makes it easy to turn your Instagram feed into a complete NFT store. Fans can buy items from their favorite artists, trade them on the marketplace, and display their collections on the site. For creators it’s just like Patreon, except fans get to own a unique digital item in exchange for their support.

How it started: Aaron Barbieri-Aghib and Ben Share realized that for most creators the idea of creating a NFT is too intimidating: it’s often too complicated, too time-consuming and too expensive. Popular NFT marketplaces like OpenSea require you to create a crypto wallet, buy cryptocurrency, and a bunch of other stuff just to get started. Dime simplifies this by reducing the process to just

creating an account and they take care of the rest.

How it works: Creators sign up for an account at Dime, create their store and upload their content to be turned into NFTs. When the store is launched, their fans can buy the content and display it on their own profile. They can then also trade them on the marketplace.

Open Jobs:

• Software Engineer

• Web Design (UI/UX)

Why it’s interesting: The NFT market has blown up in recent years, and is more popular than ever. Popular NFT collections such as Bored Ape Yacht Club went for sale at $194 a piece and their current market price is at least $80,000 (see: Why Bored Ape Avatars Are Taking Over Twitter). Many of my artist friends are exploring how to get into NFTs and monetize their art (that they commonly post for free on Instagram) but it is often too cost-prohibitive (ETH gas prices range from $50-500) and complicated to set up. If Dime is able to provide a turnkey solution they will have millions of content creators lining up to get a piece of the NFT pie.

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What it does: Locale is a marketplace that aggregates high quality, local businesses together. Locale customers can order food from multiple businesses (some up to 200 miles away), pay in-store prices, and get it all delivered in one box with a $5 delivery fee.

How it started: Christopher Clark, Jonathan Friedland and Kaveh Nemati started Locale after realizing that even though food delivery is a really crowded space, small ticket items (< $10) don't fit the instantaneous delivery model as the majority of your bill will come from delivery fees. So they came up with a unique order-ahead business model that is able to expand the delivery radius of

businesses to reach new customers without any upfront costs or time commitments.

How it works: After placing your online order, Locale will pick up the order from the different vendors and delivers it once a week, on Saturday morning.

Traction: Since launching a year ago, Locale is available in the Bay Area and doing over $200K in monthly revenue and has delivered more than 15K orders. Consumers retain 70%+ month over month with more than $105 average order value. Locale is backed by YC, Tencent co-founder Jason Zeng’s Decent Capital, and more.

Why it’s interesting: By constraining their delivery window to once a week, Locale is able to bypass several factors that makes on-demand delivery typically expensive (up to 30% for delivery and 14% for pickup orders) or simply not reachable (on-demand delivery typically only delivers from vendors within a 2 mile radius). Of course what helps is that they’re not competing with the typical time-sensitive warm meals that constitutes the majority of food delivery orders. Overall, Locale has found a lucrative niche that has been previously underserved.

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What it does: Mello is a tool that checks in with your team weekly through your internal communications tool (Slack, MS Teams, Google Chat), asking scientifically backed questions (tested with over 10,000 respondents) to assess employee wellbeing in advance and prevent employees from burning out before it happens.

How it started: CG Chen (CEO), Geordie Graham (CPO), Derek Zhang (CFO) and Alex Zvaniga (CTO) were all working as co-founders on their previous startup Ample Labs and found themselves burning out when working on it. They looked for solutions but couldn’t find anything that was easy, integrated into their workflow and provided them with insights and action they could take.

They then found that their customers and partners were struggling with the same

thing. That led them to founding Mello and wanting to build a simple and seamless way for employees to know how burnt-out they are and take action immediately. They discovered that turnover is costing American companies nearly $11 billion per year and 50% of that is voluntary churn which can be attributed to employee burnout.

How it works: Mello sends a weekly survey with scientifically backed questions through an integration through your internal communications tool. At the end of the check-in each employee gets a burnout score, why they have that score and smart nudges on how to improve their wellbeing and workplace happiness. This is where companies can insert their health benefits into Mello as well. On the company side, HR, managers, and executives can track how employees are doing on an aggregate and individual level, so they can take data driven action to improve culture and retain employees. Unlike bi-annual surveys or pulse-surveys that lead to ad-hoc actions, Mello empowers employees with their own data, and incentivizes them with perks and benefits to keep them engaged, all the while keeping HR informed on team wellbeing.

Why it’s interesting: Burnout has always been a serious workplace problem that has not always been taken seriously. The pandemic has really highlighted mental health problems and I’m glad to see that there are startups like Mello tackling this problem but also quantifying how much it costs for the business (they have a handy calculator on their website that estimates how many employees will experience burnout and how much that will cost your business). As a business, offering mental health solutions is becoming a core benefit to keep your employees happy, engaged and satisfied and Mello is fitting that bill perfectly.

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What it does: Nash makes it easy for any business to offer same-day delivery to their clients. For example, a dry-cleaning business can offer pickup/delivery at a customer’s desired time, without hiring drivers. Nash connects you with multiple delivery providers (Doordash, Uber) nationwide, normalizes that communication, and allows you to track all your deliveries in one place.

How it started: Aziz Alghunaim and Mahmoud Ghulman have known each other for more than 12 years, have attended MIT together and are both second-time founders. With their background in logistics they realized that same-day delivery is growing at 43% annually across many business verticals (retail, pharmacies, groceries, auto parts, etc).

While businesses are trying to address this growing consumer need, launching

and managing a delivery operation remains challenging: marketplaces charge high commissions, internal drivers are expensive & many times inefficient/hard to maintain, and different businesses have different delivery workflows (pick-ups, scheduled deliveries, sign-on delivery, etc) - so there isn’t a one-size fits-all.

How it works: Nash allows businesses to offer same-day delivery (scheduled or within an hour), offer pickups at any given time (for example a dry-cleaning business picking up laundry from a customer’s house) or for B2B purposes, move time-sensitive inventory from one store/warehouse/office to another.

Traction: Nash is active in all 50 states and offers same-day delivery in more than 250 cities.

Why it’s interesting: Especially during the pandemic, many local businesses have had to reinvent themselves to deliver their products to their customer’s door. Many restaurants have had to make this transition but also many other types of local businesses. Consumers have now had a taste of this and have increasingly come to expect this type of service. The most interesting thing about Nash is that it also allows for entirely new business models to flourish. For example, a service that delivers Craigslist items directly from sellers to buyers, would alleviate all the typical anxiety and stress of coming into other people’s homes and would make the entire process more streamlined.

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What it does: Reframe is an app for people that want to cut back on drinking - and possibly quit it altogether. It combines a behavior-modification program, community support, accountability tracking and personal coaches in one app.

How it started: Ziyi Gao and Vedant Pradeep started Reframe after previously working on a craving management app for recovery centers to help people prevent relapses. They noticed that the best recovery centers with the highest success rates almost always had three components working in tandem: an effective behavior change program, a supportive community, and access to recovery specialists on-demand.

The best recovery centers (which can cost up to tens of thousands of dollars per

month) are inaccessible however to the 50+ million Americans who have a drinking problem so Reframe was born to solve this problem.

How it works: Reframe consists of 3 elements, the behavior-modification program where users have to complete daily tasks (including questionnaires and journals), the ability to join their private anonymous community (which I guess resembles the AA meetings), and 1:1 access to coaches. Here’s a video of one of the founders:

Traction: Reframe has already helped over 5,000 people drink less. 74% of their users significantly cut back within 2 months and 49% quit entirely.

Pricing: Reframe offers monthly subscription plans up to $24.99 / mo - which is less than 5% of the cost of any equivalent program.

Why it’s interesting: Alcoholism has been rising over the last several years and has only accelerated during the pandemic - with some experts even speaking of an alcohol pandemic, so many people need all the help they can get but can’t actually afford it. The inability to get professional help has led to many ruined lives. Reframe is one of the few startups that can - if it actually lives up to its promise - actually effectuate positive change in the world by democratizing access to care that has previously only been accessible to the very rich.

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What it does: Maroo is a wedding fintech startup that helps couples to avoid high-interest credit cards and personal loans for their weddings. Couples can break their wedding expenses in up to 24 months with 0% APR and wedding professionals/vendors get paid within 1 business day.

How it started: Alexey Nikityuk (CEO), Andrei Riaskov (Head of Engineering) and Anja Winikka (CMO) built Maroo because they believe that there is a better way for couples to start their married life rather than going into a pile of credit debt. They realized that with 2.1m weddings in the US every year and an average all-in wedding cost of $40,000, 74% of couples go into debt in order to pay for their

wedding expenses.

And with an average APR of 15-35% for typical personal loan or corporate card rates they saw a big opportunity to offer easier payment solutions with lower rates.

Traction: Maroo has already helped a dozen couples to have the wedding they had in mind without overwhelming their bank accounts. They have raised $3.8M in their Pre-Seed & Seed round.

How it works: Maroo offers free 12 free coaching sessions with Certified Financial Planners to help couples helping them to start their married life on a right foot, understand various tax implications of being a new family, what joint accounts are and how to operate with them, how to buy houses. Once they establish their credit limit, couples can choose installment plans up to 24 months and pay it back over time with 0% APR. It also includes embedded event cancellation insurance in case of unfortunate cancellations.

Open jobs:

• Product Manager

• Product Designer

Why it’s interesting: The $95B US wedding market is a huge opportunity ripe for disruption. Any fintech solution that can make these enormous expenses easier to stomach (with a lower interest rate) is bound to capture the interest of many couples. What makes Maroo so interesting is that the transactions are huge, the benefits compared to comparable financial solutions are objectively superior, and there are millions of weddings each year (although the overall marriage rate is on the decline).

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What it does: Playhouse is a mobile app for browsing video listings of homes and neighborhoods. They combine property and neighborhood data with a highly engaging full-screen video feed to create the ultimate consumer experience for discovering real estate.

How it started: Alex Perelman (CEO) and Nathan Shinder (COO) both worked at Peerstreet, a technology platform that democratizes access to real estate debt investments. They realized that real estate is not just a transaction, it’s an entire culture (HGTV, a tv channel that covers home design, decorating and remodeling ideas is a top 5 cable network). Videos of real estate has billions of views across all social media platforms.

The only problem is that the content is scattered and not really browsable by your

area (the entertainment is not resulting in transactions as a result). Alex and Nathan are hoping to close this gap by connecting millions of entrepreneurs and small businesses with potential customers in the real world.

How it works: Playhouse works pretty much as described - just like TikTok. When you open the app you can browse real estate videos by swiping up and down and you have the ability to share and learn more about the houses. There’s a demo video here:

Traction: Playhouse is currently live in the Bay Area (Palo Alto & San Francisco).

Why it’s interesting: TikTok is the most interesting of all big social networks because it’s the only one where the interest graph does not depend on your social graph. I therefore believe that we will see many other verticals who will copy the TikTok model and Playhouse is a very interesting take on this. I initially thought the high production value was going to pose a supply-side problem (can they create enough interesting looking videos to keep users engaged?) but real estate agents are incentivized to maximize their exposure so they shouldn’t have a problem convincing them to join the platform and supply those videos. And there clearly is high demand from buyers who endlessly scroll through thousands of boring zillow listings and watch hours of HGTV (why not make it more fun for them at the same time?), so I think that Playhouse has everything it takes to become successful in this space.

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What it does: Talentdrop is an open talent marketplace where anyone can refer someone else to a posted job role and earn up to $25,000 in bounty rewards. Generous recruiting bounties have always existed in tech but were typically only accessible to a select number of recruiters or internal employees. Talentdrop has opened up this private incentive structure to everyone and created a smart marketplace around it.

How it started: Maddy Nguyen (CEO) and Janelle Tiulentino (CTO) met at Snapchat where they both were early employees. Janelle built the early versions of the app and Maddy led all kinds of recruiting efforts and teams from pre to post IPO. After working many years in recruiting Maddy became frustrated with the lack of innovation in recruiting while at the same time observing that there’s incredible value in the network that everyone has which companies are willing to pay a lot of money for.

In addition to that, they also recognized there’s a lot of friction and frustration for

all parties in recruiting: companies hate paying $50-100k for someone to spam candidates for them on LinkedIn, recruiters hate being spammers and candidates hate being spammed. They quickly realized a marketplace was the right solution to unlock the enormous potential and solve these problems to create a win-win-win situation.

How it works: Companies post a bounty on Talentdrop for any role they want to hire for. Bounty hunters are anyone inspired to refer someone from their network - for example a friend, a former colleague, or what recruiters call a "near miss candidate," which is someone they met during the recruiting process in their normal workflow who was great and available but just not quite a fit for their open role (recruiters and hiring managers experience this a lot). Candidates can also refer themselves, in which case the bounty works more like a sign-on bonus. When a successful referral happens, Talentdrop collects the bounty and holds it for 90 days (to avoid attempts at gaming the system) and on day 91 pays the full bounty amount to the bounty hunter.

Traction: Within 4 months from inception, Talentdrop went from 0 to 50 customers, 100 job postings, 100 bounty hunters, $1.3M in bounties up for grabs, and 6 placements. Its growth has been about 90% organic.

Why it’s different: Usually talent marketplaces end up becoming a glorified firm and have trouble scaling beyond a certain point, because everyone ends up getting their next job outside of that platform and it becomes too spammy and expensive. External referral programs have typically treated this too much like simply an external referral program and not a marketplace. Oftentimes recruiting “innovation" around the top of funnel problem is solved by building a scraper, having offshore people qualify profiles for you, and calling it AI. Talentdrop is building something that's sort of a hybrid of a decentralized firm + marketplace + basic ML recommendations (not to turn recruiting into robo-sourcing, but to make matches humans might have missed).

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What it does: BoldVoice is a speech and accent coaching app that helps non-native English speakers speak more clearly and confidently. It combines personalized, bite-sized video lessons from Hollywood accent coaches with real-time pronunciation feedback via speech AI to create an effective and engaging learning experience.

How it started: Anada Lakra (CEO) and Ilya Usorov (CTO) built BoldVoice to solve a pain they had themselves as non-native English speakers. When Anada first moved to the US, she was often asked to repeat herself, which took a hit on her confidence. Ilya also saw his Russian-born parents struggle to be recognized and promoted at work due to their accents.

How it works: BoldVoice brings Hollywood accent coaches to your phone via

high-quality video lessons tailored to your native language. You can also speak into the app and get detailed feedback from its AI so you can keep improving your pronunciation. Here’s a demo of its functionality:

Pricing: Boldvoice costs $15 per month or $89.99 per year. Which is a fraction of what traditional 1:1 accent coach sessions usually cost in the range of $200 / hour.

Why it’s interesting: With English being the number one business language of the world, it pays off not only to learn the language, but also be able to speak it clearly. As a non-native English speaker myself, I often struggle with pronouncing some basic words on a daily basis, even though I have been working, living and breathing English for the past 11 years. This oftentimes causes embarrassing moments and annoying distractions during important meetings I have with my team. It wasn’t until I took a public speaking class by Jill Slye and was told by her to “embrace my accent” that I learned to speak more clearly and confidently, even if it is with an accent. I believe Boldvoice solves an important problem for millions of non-native English speakers to be as clear and confident in English as they can be in their native language and the $15 / month will probably be the best return on personal investment they’ll ever make. As for myself, I got a 84% score on the BoldVoice assessment, so I have some work to do…

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What it does: Mindmesh is a knowledge base search engine that allows your team to search for information across a wide range of commonly used SaaS products such as Slack, Confluence, Drive, Notion, Intercom, Zendesk and Jira. This allows you to keep your knowledge base in one central place and have it automatically scale with your team and across different SaaS products.

How it started: Rafaella Colella (CEO) and Ulysse Mizrahi (CTO) started Mindmesh after Rafaella’s experience as a product manager at Google helped him realize the impact on team productivity a good information management system can have. Knowledge bases are often outdated or not maintained at all, causing up to 20% of time being spent on searching for information and leading to all kinds of costly miscommunication issues and delays.

How it works: Mindmesh integrates with a lot of popular SaaS products to create

a single centralized search engine that can search for information across all of the products that your team uses. Here’s a demo of the interface:

Why it’s interesting: One of the most common interactions I have on Slack is either asking someone else for a link to certain information or someone else is asking me for a link to certain information. As a small team we’re having lots of product discussions and we do diligently record all our notes across Google Docs, Notion, Slack and Figma but even for a very small team as ours it quickly becomes hard to navigate and access all that information across all of those different products. Having tried knowledge bases in the past such as Confluence the information does indeed get outdated very fast or not complete, causing no-one to treat Confluence as the single source of truth. Other products we’ve tried were StackOverflow for Teams where we incentivized the team to answer questions that other team members might have. All of those attempts failed so I definitely see a bright future for Mindmesh if they can deliver on their promise.

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What it does: Careerist is a learning platform that trains job seekers for their first job in tech. By partnering with small bootcamps and high-profile individuals they provide live, job-specific classes for software testing, engineering, DevOps, cybersecurity, support or tech sales roles. They also have a handy tool that helps job seekers automate their job applications to apply to lots of jobs at once (most job seekers typically need to submit over 100 applications to get a single job offer).

How it started: Max Glubochansky came up with the idea for Careerist (formerly known as JobEasy) when he started his career in tech after attending a boot camp. He started helping friends and family do the same and more and more people kept reaching out to him to ask for help to get a tech job. Soon he realized he had a business idea and started Careerist together with his co-founders Ivan Tsybaev (CEO) and Max Gusakov.

Business model: Their programs range from $2,499 to $5,999 upfront fee with no

income share agreement. Their standalone job application automation software (JAS) is $599 / month.

How it works: After acceptance, there are about 6 weeks of intensive training including live sessions with mentors. After that there’s 2-4 weeks of internship and after graduation they’ll help you for about 6 weeks with applying for jobs. It is expected to get your first job 3-5 months after graduation.

Why it’s interesting: I would describe Careerist as a vertically-integrated boot camp that helps you go from nothing all the way to a decent entry job in tech. Whereas most boot camps are primarily focused on training you for software engineering jobs (typically within 9-12 weeks), it is interesting that Careerist chose to focus on different jobs in tech that may be more accessible to the general public. Software engineering itself is definitely not accessible for everyone, as I have personally warned many friends and family members not to take it lightly. Many of my friends have attempted to become a software engineer and have failed to see it through. Even the ones that have succeeded by completing a bootcamp still had an uphill battle to fight against the boot camp stigma and gaining actual useful work experience was a multi-year effort. In contrast, Careerist focuses on lower hanging fruit tech jobs that can actually get you a foot in the door at a tech company in a relatively short time.

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What it does: Cloudthread is an analytics platform that helps engineering teams reduce their spend on cloud hosting resources. It provides deep level unit cost analytics (cost per query, cost per request) to unlock cost efficiency without development disruption.

How it started: Daniele Packard (CEO), Ilia Semenov (CPO) and Thomas Yopes (CTO) were building cloud cost management systems at big companies like EA and Lyft and now want to use that deep expertise to bring those tools to every engineering team. They realized that many companies still do not have cloud cost management practices in place (causing extra spend), and those that do mostly take advantage of discounting mechanisms that cloud providers have (no optimal savings), while only few invest heavily in optimization building sophisticated cost management systems (optimal savings, but costly and time-intensive to set up).

How it works: Cloudthread integrates with your APM platforms (such as New

Relic & AppDynamics) and sends alerts to your Slack channels to make cloud cost analytics easily accessible to the engineering team. This allows engineering leaders to figure out their spend on a unit economic level to figure out costs per query or per request and keep an eye on spiking or extraordinary events.

Why it’s interesting: Keeping track of cloud spend is extraordinarily difficult for engineering teams because it is almost like a full-time job to figure out how all the cloud components are priced based on usage and where to find additional savings. In previous teams I have had to hire expensive consultants to figure it out and those were usually one-time fixes and cost savings, meaning as we kept building we eventually ended up in the same opaque situation. On smaller teams, engineering teams oftentimes misconfigure things and not knowing about them without any alerts, which ultimately results in unexpected expensive bills that can burn a small startup’s budget very fast.

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What it does: Dots lets a marketplace pay their gig workers in the ways they want to be paid (including Venmo, Paypal, CashApp, ACH and Zelle) with a single API. While most 1099 workers prefer to get paid with the payment apps they already use, most marketplaces either do not allow their 1099 workers to get paid through anything other than ACH (typically set up with Stripe Connect) or have to keep reinventing the wheel to integrate all the different payment platforms.

How it started: Sahil Hasan and Kartikye Mittal started creating internal APIs to deal with payouts to all these different platforms while they were working on their own digital wallet and realized that integrating all these platforms was a lot of effort and that most marketplaces simply ignore this and pay out through ACH instead, even though there is tremendous demand for flexible payout options. So they decided to launch their internal APIs to the public.

How it works: While Dots doesn’t offer mobile SDKs yet, they do have Python

and Node SDKs available, which allows marketplaces to create a payout experience on the web. Here’s a demo of a seller trying to withdraw their balance:

Why it’s interesting: As we’re building out a new SaaS-enabled marketplace for dog walkers at Paway, we are interviewing a lot of walkers and the overwhelming demand of these walkers is to be paid out in apps like CashApp, Zelle and Venmo (it is by far our most popular feature request). As a small startup it seemed like a daunting tasks to support all these apps from day one but Dots seems to make this easy. Now, the big question is: why do all these gig workers want to get paid out in these apps and not through ACH? Because of strict KYC laws it’s a hassle to set up ACH payouts: they have to share privacy sensitive information, share their bank account information and even tax information just to be paid. ACH payments also often take multiple days to process. So being able to offer payouts to all the favorite payment apps that people are already using, seems like a huge competitive advantage for any supply-constrained marketplace.