The 2011 cohort of Techstars Seattle will be hard to beat. Three of the ten startups in the accelerator that year (Remitly, Outreach, Zipline) went on to become billion-dollar companies — a 30% unicorn rate.
But the 2024 group may have a chance.
“I’m confident that in the years to come, this cohort will compare very favorably,” said Bill Bryant, a longtime Seattle-area venture capitalist and Techstars Seattle mentor, speaking at Demo Day on Wednesday evening at the Museum of Pop Culture.
This year’s cohort, under the direction of managing director Marius Ciocirlan, doubled in size to 24 companies.
Startups spent the past three months honing their business models and go-to-market strategies, with the help of four new entrepreneurs-in-residence — Bryant, general partner at Threshold Ventures; OfferUp co-founder Arean Van Veelan; Shyft co-founder Chris Pitchford; and Loftium co-founder Yifan Zhang— along with more than 100 mentors.
Techstars played 2-minute video pitches for each company at Demo Day, then conducted a short Q&A with CEOs on stage.
I came away impressed with the quality of each company and founder, but these five stood out to me:
After engineering leadership stints with Amazon, Microsoft, Coupang, Zillow, Nordstrom, Level 3 Communications, Oracle, and StockX, Alan John is taking his startup leap with Discoverist, which aims to help online retailers with personalized product recommendations. It’s a hot area — Microsoft and Walmart just announced a partnership along these lines. Discoverist says it doesn’t need vast amounts of customer data, instead taking advantage of LLMs to train its models. It has three live customers and plans to launch a Shopify app.
AI has taken the world by storm, and customer service operations is a use case where the technology could have immediate impact. “Our AI agent is 10 times cheaper and can call thousands of customers in over 10 languages,” said CEO and co-founder Eunice Wong, who previously founded Milky Way AI, a Techstars and Y Combinator portfolio company. Less than a year old, TalkStack is already generating revenue from e-commerce, insurance, and staffing companies.
What if businesses could better predict the impact of weather and climate change? That’s the promise of Planette, which is developing AI-boosted forecasting technology using the predictability of the ocean. It is working with clients in energy, utility, government, and more. The company’s founders have some serious scientific chops: Dr. Hansi Singh is a professor of physical climate science and Dr. Kalai Ramea is an expert in geospatial analytics and remote sensing.
Joshua Penner, mayor of Orting, Wash., certainly has the most interesting day job out of the cohort — and one that is directly applicable to his startup idea. Inquisio wants to make it easier and faster for the public to access government data. It ultimately plans to launch a business-facing product. The company has inked four city pilot partnership agreements in the past three months.
Microsoft has made headlines for its “copilots,” or virtual AI assistants designed to improve productivity in various applications. But not every company has the engineering know-how and budgets to build copilots. Enter Tawkit. The company’s open source platform helps developers to build, maintain and deploy sophisticated AI copilots into apps with a few lines of code. It recently was trending on Hacker News, ProductHunt, and GitHub. Atai Barkai, CEO, previously worked at Meta and Doximity.
Read on to learn more about the other companies.
“We want to become your next generation, B2C digital advertising platform.” — AdsGency CEO Bolbi Liu
“The Shopify for in-game items.” — Astros CEO Zsika Phillip
“An anonymous social app where creators go to learn, earn, and grow together.” — Canopy CEO Ayomi Samaraweera
“We pair individuals who are taking care of aging loved ones with local human experts who make caregiving easy.” — CareCopilot CEO Alyse Dunn
“The fastest way engineers release tools from computer to robot, reliably.” — Chassi CEO Chuka Okoye (did not appear on stage)
“Supercharge your software testing.” — Chi CEO Arjun Menon
“We bring network security and identity security under the same dashboard.” — CloudFence CEO Mounira Remini
“Bringing a chef to your home to cook healthy, weekly meals is the new norm.” — Easy Platter CEO Mandhir Singh
“We want robots to help out in our homes, navigate dense crowds, avoid traffic accidents, scale up space operations — all of these applications require our technology.” — Et Cetera Robotics CEO Kendall Lowrey
“We’re helping eye doctors see more patients in less time.” — Moyae CEO Sami Mirimiri
“With our technology, a game designer can now give instructions directly to the characters themselves.” — Paralog CEO Elisabeth Gosselin
“We turn customer voice into strategy product decisions.” — Produx CEO Tony Tom
“Proprio makes accounting as simple and as easy as texting a friend.” — Proprio CEO Rodrigo Carriedo (did not appear on stage)
“We’re super excited to get started on this journey and help marketers become 10 times as effective by using Prospero to give them superpowers.” — Prospero CEO Rotimi Iziduh
“There are thousands of business tools on the market today, and companies rely on them to operate efficiently. However, managing those is a real challenge.” — Stackoon CEO Ole Shved (did not appear on stage)
“Trellis Health puts a decade of health history in your pocket.” — Trellis Health CEO Estelle Giraud
“Workplaces can be made safer — in fact, much safer with the help of computer vision.” — Visionify CEO Priyesh Sanghvi
“We help a technician troubleshoot a machine by simply explaining the problem in plain English.” — ZippiAi CEO Upinder Singh
