If there is one startup accelerator, the tech world keeps a watch on – it is Y Combinator! The accelerator has produced the likes of Reddit, Dropbox & Airbnb in their 10 years of existence. Here is what some of the best brains in the industry say about it:
“Several of our best investments have come from Y Combinator. Y Combinator is the best program for creating top-end entrepreneurs that has ever existed.” —Marc Andreessen, General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
On August 21, 2015 the twentieth batch of Y Combinator went through their demo day! Here is a brief introduction to some of the best big data & analytics based startups, which are in store.
Also read: “Big data/ Analytics startups of 2015 winter batch”
Analytics / Big Data startups in Y Combinator Summer 2015 batch:
SecondMeasure
Credit card companies can mine ton of information from transactions of its customers. Imagine what you can do by inspecting billions of credit card transactions? Second Measure delivers insightful and effective analysis by inspecting billions of credit card transactions and presenting detailed insights to investors and analysts through their products. Second Measure can deliver various insights like:
- Visibility into all private and public companies those sell directly to US consumers
- Benchmark the rank of companies against their competitors
- Provide insights on customer retention, engagement and life time value of customers of the company
Verge Genomics
Verge Genomics uses genomic data analysis to find better drugs for brain diseases. Cause of Neurological diseases are complex interactions between many genes. Most of the drugs fail because researchers target only one gene at a time but Verge Genomics discovered a way to map out the hundreds of genes that cause a disease, and then find drugs that target all the genes at once. Some of the benefits of this method are:
- Cures disease 1000X more cost effective and quicker compare to tradition way.
- More recovery of patients
Greenshoe
How do you provide credit in a market where credit history is not available? Greenshoe is solving this problem in Africa by using smartphone data. It is a lending platform for emerging market (starting in Africa) that helps people get approved for short-term loans based on their activity on their phones. To apply for a loan, you have to follow the following process:
- Sign-up with your phone number, name and identification number
- Share data of your smartphone like how often you recharge, what proportion of the plan is spent on data services, voice or text messaging” along with optionally answer a few questions
- They’ll analyse and tell you how much money you can request for along with the loan terms
- Send the money to your Mobile Wallet account in minutes
- Repay your Loan in installments or all at once before the due date. No penalties for earlier payment
Ixchel Scientific
Remember the joke “You can never find an average man?” Ixchel Scientific is applying this simple logic to make cancer treatment far more effective. It is a Biotech startup, which works on improving the success rates for trialed cancer drugs using an environment that better represents the human body. Currently 95% of cancer drugs fail human testing after investing billions of dollars and decades inventing in development. Ixchel Scientific provides organ specific platform that predicts how drug will behave in the human body. They offers various services like correlation analysis with clinical responses, Drug candidate screening, fully customizable, Rescue failed drug candidates and others.
SourceDNA
SourceDNA has built a stockpile of the most detailed data on how developers use tools, SDKs and plugins to create the top-ranked iOS and Android apps, paid and free, in 20 countries. Their customers harness the intelligence to spot new competitors and identify new developer trends that surprise their product and sales teams. They continuously update the data and keep it astonishingly deep, keeping their customers uncannily ahead of the mobile market.
GovPredict
GovPredict quantifies, tracks, and predicts legislative activity. With big data and powerful algorithms, they predict the likeliest cosponsors for legislation and convince them before competitors could reach out to them. Discover unlikely voting and cosponsorship alliances for specific kinds of bills, by keyword, originating committee, or sponsor party!
Convox
Launch a Private Cloud in Minutes and it come up with the simplicity of Heroku and the power of AWS. It uses ECS, ELB, Kinesis, and many other great AWS services under the hood but automates it all away to give you a deployment experience even easier than Heroku. It has various features like Instant Deployment, Standardize Development and it runs in your AWS account.
Vernox
Urban construction and development is fraught with uncertainties and one of the far off places for analytics. However, Vernox is applying artificial intelligence techniques to the pile of e-mails, Word documents and Excel files that are exchanged between contractors and designers. From that data, Vernox labs produces automated design reviews that project managers can run through with a new proposal. They are also creating a Google like search engine which can be used to query for specific materials or components.
ShapeScale
So, you have been working out for 3 months now but you are not seeing the effect you would have liked to? Shape scale not only monitors basic things like changes in weight but also changes at multiple body parts over time. Shoulder growth of 10% over a month, fat gain of 5%, belly diameter growth of 1% are some of the results delivered by ShapeScale. It is your own body monitor. Using predictive algorithms on previous work out data, shape scale helps you get the body of your dreams.
Flirtey
Unmanned aerial vehicles are a reality nowadays and here comes in Flirtey with it’s delivery by drones system. You place an order and a drone drops it at your home. Scary? Well, it’s convenient, no delays due to traffic or any other human intervention. Flirtey has partnered with the University of Nevada to deliver on it’s promise and is currently operating in New Zealand. With time it is going be an industry and not a thing of the future anymore.
Ross Intelligence
Imagine having the law at your fingertips. Imagine having a Google like service where you can query: ”When can a debtor reject a collective bargaining agreement?” and pop comes some relevant links that give you the answers you were looking for. Built on top of IBM’s Watson, Ross sifts through all the law literature and returns only relevant data. It also monitors the law to inform you about relevant changes to the law which might affect your case. This is the perfect synthesis of law and technology for the greater good.
GrowSumo
With GrowSumo, a company can manage all it’s partners from a single page and add new partners, train them, reward them and also track their progress. Re-sellers can find products that they know make their clients happy. You can also work with companies your client already loves and discover new services from that which you think your client might like. The more recommendations you make the more money you can make. For example an educational institute listed on GrowSumo can be an attractive options to an online education provider for any particular course. They can apply to the educational institution and get trained. If it works out well each can recommend the other to businesses they know would benefit. This is thus an online community of companies.
Luna Sleep
A smart mattress cover that understands how you sleep and monitors your heart rate etc. while you are sleeping. Sleep is one of the most important functions that the body has to go through and we all know how groggy the next morning can be in absence of a good nights sleep. Just plug in Luna to a power source and let it handle this problem for you. It learns from your sleeping patterns and adjusts the bed temperature to your liking. It wakes you up in the moment of lightest sleep so that you feel refreshed when you wake up. Plug it in, connect to wi-fi and turn on the luna app. Sleep – Well.
TetraScience
It is a IoT venture from the Hravard Innovation Lab that creates products (software and hardware) which help engineers and scientists to monitor their machines, experiments on the cloud. An engineer can fit sensors to pressure gauges and monitor them on the cloud. A scientist can monitor his lab or experiments without being present there through a camera built by Tetra. So,buy a tetra science product, fit it to your existing machines and log into your tetra science account to monitor, manage and analyze data using your computer or cell phone, IoT is here.
Hickory
Hickory provides continuous learning through personalized learning material to increase employee knowledge and application. You learn and the Hickory algorithm adjusts the material based on your mastery over the subject. So learn a material, get a review done by Hickory and the next material is based on how much you have learned. A personalized teacher at your service.
PlateJoy
It creates your personalized Digital Pantry to keep track of ingredients in your kitchen, so you always receive just what you need by asking innovative Personalized Quiz to understand your preferences, time constraints, and goals. It uses Waste Reduction Algorithm to utilize ingredients across recipes to minimize food waste while optimizing for ingredient freshness and variety.
PickTrace
PickTrace is developed as a response to farm’s needs for a harvesting management. Today, it has grown into a suite of tools to perform entire operations like Real Time Analytics, Labor Management, Harvest Management and Legal Compilancce. It has a reliable, hassle-free solution, which helps farmers to improve productivity.
Paribus
It helps buyers to get money back when prices fall, missed better deal and missed a coupon. Paribus works quietly in the background to monitor for opportunities to get money back, you need to just connect your mailbox to let the Paribus Receipt Fetcher identify purchases. The Paribus team uses advance data structures, algorithms and data security to get your money back.
Leada
While Team Leada is not using machine learning or Big Data to solve a problem, they are teaching Big Data and Data Analysis in a unique blend of case studies, class room and support for coding. Professors can use them to supplement their lectures and Enterprises can use them to train the employees. While you visit their site, the team has also created four awesome books on data science after talking to thought leaders in the industry – you should check them out as well.
End Note:
So, there you see, Big Data and Data Science are touching every part of your life, be it learning, sleeping, harvesting to shopping! An exciting world and time to live in. All of these ideas and startups are exciting and on their track to change traditional industries fundamentally or create new ones – and all of this is based on analytics and big data!
What do you think about these startups? Do you feel as pumped up as I did when I read about them first? Do share your thoughts through comments below.
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Kunal is a post graduate from IIT Bombay in Aerospace Engineering. He has spent more than 10 years in field of Data Science. His work experience ranges from mature markets like UK to a developing market like India. During this period he has lead teams of various sizes and has worked on various tools like SAS, SPSS, Qlikview, R, Python and Matlab.
