It’s Demo Day time! Today marks the 30th Demo Day for Alchemist, the enterprise-focused accelerator that helped grow companies like LaunchDarkly, Rigetti Computing, and Privacera early on.
As an enterprise accelerator, the companies Alchemist backs generally focus on selling things to other companies as opposed to selling straight to consumers. Some of the companies might have a consumer angle to them as well — but their primary market will generally be other businesses.
In a conversation ahead of Demo Day, Alchemist Accelerator director Ravi Belani told me that Alchemist companies have collectively raised over $2.2 billion in capital. Alchemist has also continued to grow AlchemistX, a program in which Alchemist helps companies like LG, Siemens, and NEC build accelerators of their own; today it announced ten companies selected into a space-focused accelerator built in partnership with Amazon’s AWS.
As with Alchemist’s last few Demo Days, today’s presentations will be entirely virtual and streamed on YouTube. Pitches are scheduled to start at 10:30 am pacific, with nineteen companies presenting in all. A list of the companies presenting today follows below, plus a bit about what each is doing as I understand it.
The companies presenting today:
FaradaIC Sensors: Making mini gas sensors, allowing companies to add things like oxygen sensors to “any IOT device”
Rocketbrew: A competitive analytics dashboard for e-commerce brands, giving you an easy view of “how competitors price, launch new products and manage their product portfolio”
OneCommons: Building a low-code platform to allow anyone to quickly deploy open source apps to cloud providers like AWS or Google Cloud
Firecell: Helps enterprises build private 4G/5G networks
RED Atlas: A platform for real estate insights and analytics, focusing first on Puerto Rico.
SmartAn: A financial analytics platforms (to aggregate things like financial statements and risk assessments) — used, for example, when one company is deciding if it’ll work with another.
Liqui: A marketplace, focusing first on Latin America, meant to help gig workers find jobs and establish employment history.
Recoshelf: A computer-vision tool that lets retail employees use cameras to more quickly audit shelves, checking for things that are out of stock, in the wrong place, or priced incorrectly.
GiveShop: A matchmaking platform to connect companies that want to give with social impact projects that need money.
Ntapi: An edtech platform for Africa, built to feel more like a social network than a traditional upskilling platform.
Budee Solutions: An “all-in-one digital safety platform” for industrial workers (construction, mining, transportation, etc.) to help them keep track of safety checklists, record certifications, receive safety/weather alerts, etc.
Var.energy: Developing proprietary hardware for solar power generation facilities to improve compatibility with the existing power grid
Lynxai: An analytics platform meant to help companies make decisions about their ESG (Environmental/Social/Corporate governance) investments, with things like social network sentiment analysis and tools to help you stay on top of new regulations.
Joinedapp: E-commerce tools for selling on apps like Instagram/Facebook/Whatsapp with support for cryptocurrencies
engageLively: A drag-and-drop interface meant to help data scientists build interactive dashboards quickly, beginning with data from the open-source data science app Jupyter.
MotionRay: Redundant internet service to help ensure that your critical hardware (like your retail POS) stays connected through any outage.
NavigateIO: a “self-contained” service for precisely locating individuals — think first responders or warehouse/industrial workers — when GPS is insufficient.
xLight: Working on what Ravi Belani calls “the next generation of semi-conductor fabs” to help build the chips of the future. Co-founder Will Schumaker says this is a commercialization of a FEL (Free Electron Laser) project he worked on at Stanford’s SLAC National Accelerator Lab.
Codelock: Pitched as “software security at the code level”, Codelock helps companies monitor for unauthorized changes to their codebase and identify where they came from.