Wellfound has selected 10 top startups across 10 trending industries to showcase as we close out 2022. We selected these teams based on their potential to not only succeed, but to transform their respective industries.
To help us compile our list of winners, we consulted angel investors and industry experts to evaluate which startups have attracted the greatest investor buzz over the past year. We combined this insider knowledge with our own product data that gave us insight into what industries, products and missions our community is most excited about.
The final product is a list that blends expert insights with genuine community interest and excitement. We reached out to founders for an inside glimpse into what makes their team unique and how they credit their success. Choose your industry of interest below or keep scrolling to view the full list of winners.
Novo is keeping small business at their core.
"At Novo, we are truly reshaping the relationship between small business owners and their checking account.Today, the vast majority of small business owners see their checking account as a safe holding place for their money — one that often comes with clunky user interfaces and countless fees. Novo isn’t just focused on helping small businesses keep their money safe. We’re creating a customizable financial platform that puts the checking account at the center of small business owners’ financial universe, and allows them to customize this platform through our ecosystem of business apps.Since launching Novo in 2018, everything we’ve built has been focused on giving small business owners easier and faster ways to manage their finances. Novo has never strayed from this focus — and I think our “strategy” of working to exceed small business owners’ needs day-in and day-out is the biggest reason for our success.Novo has received a lot of recognition for its growth over the last year — from being named to the Forbes Fintech 50 to one of Business Insider’s Most Promising Fintech Startups. While our team is very appreciative of the external validation/recognition, what really drives us is what we hear from our customers.This year, Novo has made significant strides to unlock value for our customers, and I’ve been particularly proud of the foundation that we’ve built for future growth. From launching new products like Novo Boost, to introducing same-day ACH payments, reinforcing our infrastructure stack, and expanding our Ecosystem with hundreds of integrations (including new partnerships with companies like LegalZoom and Constant Contact), we are starting to carve out a category of our own.In 2023 and beyond, we're looking forward to welcoming millions more small businesses to Novo. I’m also very excited to share more news in early 2023 about how Novo is reimagining small business lending."
Method Financial is an embedded banking service that allows developers to easily pay any of their users' debts – including credit cards, student loans, car loans, and mortgages – all through a single API. Method manages the entire money movement process, keeping its customers out of the flow of funds, by handling compliance requirements, identity verification, and bank partnerships. The API provides access to 15,000+ lenders in the US, covering 95% of consumer debt.
Our mission is to improve the financial health of the user by making personal debt management self-driven and autonomous.“ Being a minority-owned business, we firmly believe that diversity drives innovation. We‘re passionate about building a workplace that represents a variety of backgrounds, skills, and perspectives, which will enable Method to succeed. We credit our success to being nimble, intently listening to our customers and building products with the financial health of the end user in mind.
Cushion was a trailblazer in the game of banishing banking fees. In fact, their team was the first ever company to automate negotiating and refunding bank fees. After successfully refunding $13+ Million to customers, they are putting an end to bank fees altogether by tackling the root cause: how people manage and pay their bills. The fact of the matter is: bill pay is broken. That is why 140 Million Americans struggle to pay their bills - while getting hit with fees and damaging their credit. With Cushion, you can connect your bank and credit cards and they will automatically track down and pay your bills for you, while protecting you from overdraft fees. It’s bill pay as it should be — simplistically systemized and automatic.
"Our success at Cushion stems from customer obsession and innovation. We're obsessed with improving the financial health of our customers — which we do by building innovative, often first-of-their-kind, products that they need and love.“
If Covid taught us one thing about the healthcare system, it’s that many medical facilities are not properly prepared to take on unexpected influxes of patient demand and maintain a standard of quality care. What we saw throughout the pandemic was a life-threatening crack in the system — when patient demand supersedes supply with little to no warning, operational chaos will ensue. Cue Qventus, a company with a mission to facilitate optimal medical operations through state-of-the-art AI technology. Qventus's algorithms analyze hospital data along important operational and clinical metrics, allowing hospital staff to both monitor operational performance and automatically diagnose operational issues in real time.
In addition, Qventus’s machine-learning based forecasting techniques enable hospitals to predict patient volumes and optimally allocate resources – such as staff, beds, and rooms – to meet this demand. Not only are they improving efficiency of operations, their AI technology is also helping ease the lives of overworked medical professionals, ensuring they are not overbooked or exhausting themselves over poor resourcing. Patients are also seeing the benefit: a spike in open surgery rooms as a result of AI-based scheduling. In many cases, getting an operation weeks or even days earlier could be life changing.
The team behind Qventus is impacting both sides of the medial equation, and making important strides towards a more effiecient and sustainable healthcare system.
At the intersection of mental health & AI lies the impressive team behind Kintsugi Health. At Kintsugi, they are developing novel voice biomarker software to detect signs of depression and anxiety from short clips of free form speech.
Awarded multiple distinctions for AI technology and recently named one of Forbes’ Top 50 AI companies to watch in 2022, Kintsugi helps to close mental health care gaps across risk-bearing health systems, ultimately saving time and lives. One of the amazing aspects of the product is that Kintsugi Voice does not rely on question and answer methods to assess a user’s mental health, nor is it based on natural language processing, because it analyzes how people speak, not the content of their speech. This expands the opportunity for this technology to operate in any country, in any language, and provide better mental health care to populations in every part of the world.
By reading between the lines, Kintsugi has proven they are taking innovative steps to detect the commonly overlooked signs of mental illnesses. We’re not the only ones taking notice of their impressive work — in September Kintsugi was named a 2022 Gartner Cool Vendor in AI Governance and Responsible AI – an annual award recognizing startups that are innovative, impactful, and intriguing.
"At Kintsugi, we are developing voice biomarker software to detect signs of depression and anxiety from free-form speech. Kintsugi, as an art form, is when broken pieces, most commonly ceramics, are rejoined with gold enameling. What was once broken becomes stronger and more beautiful. We apply this philosophy to behavioral healthcare with the ultimate mission of breaking down barriers to identifying mental health conditions and bringing the standards of mental health to parity with that of physical health.
As female-only founders, we secured $20M in Series A funding led by Insight Partners earlier this year. We're honored to have also received multiple accolades including Forbes AI 50, Gartner Cool Vendor in Responsible AI, and features in New York Times, Techcrunch, Axios, and more. I am amazed by the work of our team and am beyond proud of the lives we've been able to touch by streamlining access to care with AI-augmented practitioners."
You may have heard of the mental health service disrupting the way patients of all income levels can access therapy. But just how did they do it?
Headway built the first software-enabled network of therapists who accept health insurance, making it easy for therapists to grow their practices, and possible for patients to find quality care they can afford. Launched in April of 2019, they now facilitate 200,000+ appointments per month. They’re not the only ones betting on their vision — they’ve received funding from a16z, Thrive, Accel, and Google Ventures.
Statistics paint the picture: 70% of therapists do not accept insurance today because it’s too complicated for them to integrate, since about 85% of all therapists are solo practitioners. Headway had the idea to remove the friction, the hassle, and the complication of integrating insurance coverage for licensed therapists, while at the same time introducing them to a giant pool of patients through large insurers' like Aetna, Cigna, and United Healthcare. Therapists finally see a third-party provider as a win-win, and that's why the business model works for both sides. Given the timeliness of their launch admidst the pandemic, it's no wonder the team has seen such great success.
“One in four people in the United States has a treatable mental health condition, but most do not get the care they need. Headway’s mission is to build a new mental healthcare system that everyone can access. Our team's objectives are informed by this mission, which motivates us to do our best work every day."
Tax filing across a complex portfolio of assets can be a daunting and overwhelming task. Put crypto in the mix, and that process becomes an even greater feat.
Thousands of transactions without government guidance can scare a lot of crypto holders — thats where ZenLedger comes in. Their mission is to relieve the stress of filing your crypto assets. Think of them like TurboTax, but for Crypto. With ZenLedger, your instantly enabled to import cryptocurrency transactions, calculate gains and income, and auto-fill tax forms like 8949 & Schedule D, tax loss harvesting, and even receive a full audit report. Not to mention, their experts can easily calculate crypto taxes and provide insightful guidance every step of the way.
With over $25M in funding and $1B transactions processed, they have mastered the art of simplified and streamlined crypto tax filing, giving crypto holders one less thing to worry about this tax season.
Warbler Labs is taking the exclusivity out of crypto by loaning to real businesses in the real world. By building decentralized lending protocols that allow loaners from diverse backgrounds to acquire crypto, they are expanding accessibility by looking beyond the big players and putting focus on developing countries located in LatAm, Asia and East Africa.
Take Tugende, one of their financing fin-tech lenders located in East Africa. Tugende is tackling the credit gap for small businesses in Africa by enabling informal entrepreneurs via ownership and credit. Warbler Labs has allowed their fintech to employ over 750 full-time staff in Kenya and Uganda, raising a $5M borrower pool to fund the growth of their Kenyan operations. Work like this in incredibly impactful and uplifting to developing communities, and we can't wait to see how this trend progresses withhelp from teams like Warbler.
"In the world of crypto, where many projects sadly focus on playing money games, Warbler Labs (supporting Goldfinch) is unique in it's commitment from the beginning of creating value for real companies in the real world. Our mission is to connect the world's capital with the world's growth, and we're already well on our way, with over $100M in loans outstanding to borrowers in over 20 countries."
Coined as the “personal Fort Knox of Crypto”, Cypherock is giving peace of mind to crypto holders everywhere. More than $4 Billion worth of digital assets have been lost or stolen in 2019 alone.
Cypherock is building a vertically integrated solution to Hodl, transact, backup, exchange and inherit without the risk of loss an theft of crypto.
How do they do it? Decentralized, seedless hardware wallets that spread your keys across 5 separate shards, making them 10x more resilient to theft or tampering attempts. With the ever-increasing complexity of the crypto market as we head into 2023, Cypherock is taking an ambitious stride at solving one of the most critical problems in the blockchain ecosystem.
"We believe the idea of a decentralized bank built on Cryptography, Crypto & Tamper-proof hardware is so ambitious that it really resonates with a lot of talented people which makes it a worthwhile mission to pursue it."
Polycam is bringing 3D capture and creation to the masses. This AI-powered technology enables anyone to capture and share their world in 3D.
Sounds complex, but their innovative technology has made it as easy as taking your standard photo or video. Using the LiDAR video and motion data available on smartphones, combined with cutting-edge computer vision and AI, the Polycam app is bringing an entirely new form of reality capture to the general population.
The use cases are endless, but think architecture, interior design, fashion, film and video game creation. On the other hand, there's many people out there just using Polycam for fun — with photo mode, you can transform average, every-day pictures into hyper-detailed, lifelike creations.
Polycam believes that by democratizing 3D capture and creation, the building of our growing metaverse is more open, creative, and participatory than ever.
They’re not the only ones excited about the technology — Polycam is backed by some impressive names in VC like Sequoia Capital, Chad Hurley, and more.
Photon Commerce enables fintech and e-commerce leaders to standardize all of their customer, invoice, and payments data from any origin.
Photon accelerates customer acquisition and B2B spend for Brex and 120 other fintech and eCommerce companies. To date, Photon Commerce has utilized its automated AI processing to review $11B in data from invoices, receipts, and B2B payments.
Payment companies finally get insightful visibility into customer's product purchases, which, with the help of their technology, allow companies to predict what SKUs customers will buy next.
Photon's AI technology is a game-changer for the e-commerce industry — enabling companies to capture, configure and utilize complex data to understand their customers on a deeper level than ever before.
CloudAEye has created sophisticated AI-based technology that allows end-to-end visibility into your serverless applications.
The San Francisco based team saw the importance of time to market and service reliability in today’s remote world, especially given the stats: IDC reported that 29.3% of enterprises experience a downtime costing over $25K per hour. C
Their technology is wired with AI-powered models that will use intelligent monitoring to ingest and analyze applications data, identify anomalies, and deliver detailed root-cause analysis of each and every incident. This allows customers to stop digging for the issues and instead be met with context and causality for each and every data outlier.
The pre-seed startup has raised $500K over their first seed round and continues to grow in headcount as they move into 2023.
“We have a learning-oriented culture. We focus on solving critical business problems for our customers. We internally organize book clubs, tech-talks to promote an environment for learning. We don't behave as if we 'know-it-all'. We seek team members with moral courage and instincts to lead. We encourage all members to take ownership over decisions, be bold, focus on impact and contribute to a thoughtful, dynamic team culture where respectful interactions are a norm.”
At the intersection of Climate Change and Space you'll find the passionate team behind Spire. The uniqueness of Spire is found in how one companies products can assist in so many different purposes, passions, and people, all for the greater good.
The team credits their success to market Leadership and Tailwind from massive, global, secular trendsSpire, which has grown from 1m of recurring revenue to 100m in 5 years. So far, fewer than 5 other companies have been able to ever achieve that.
Spire is not just the market leader in the products they serve, but the need for these products is fueled by massive global trends, like Supply Chain, Climate Change, and Global Security. Spire has the right strategy: find the critical trends at the forefront of conversation, then create products to solve real issues the consumer cares about. This is how they ensure they stay relevant in these same conversations, and more importantly, successful in their attempts to aid humanity as we mitigate rapidly changing environments. It’s a foolproof strategy, seeing since going public they’ve continued to grow at 100% YoY.
“Three words: Space, Data, Climate Change. Spire collects data in space from a vast satellite constellation that we have built and operate ourselves. We then perform large amounts of analysis on that data, including AI/ML to create products for our customers. A key mission for us is to help humanity adapt to Climate Change through more predictable weather solutions. If you are a farmer figuring out how to protect your crop, an off-shore wind farm planning your energy production, or a Formula One race car driver looking for that extra edge, you are a customer of Spire”
Planet is taking to space to create a better life on earth. Through their mind-blowing constellation of earth-imaging satellites, they’re aiming to capture the entire planet at an unprecedented rate.
Planet's individual “Doves” make up their flock of 200 satellites that are currently floating in space, capturing high-res geo-spatial data of every single speck of our Earth.
Why? Their team believes we can't solve what we can't see, so they're getting a better (and much more rare) view of the world we inhabit. With this vantage point, their imaging is able to unearth trends and discover insights that will help us solve our greatest problems and in some cases help better our lives for generations to come.
From hurricanes to heat waves, to the war coverage in Ukraine, their technology is allowing researchers, scientists, governments, journalists and more to have an unparalleled look at earths happenings and take necessary action in real-time.
Want an inside look at what this amazing team is doing? Checkout the fascinating imagery here.
Orb is redefining the way we look at aviation, starting with how we lessen our footprint and create accessible aviation for the entire population.
An Orb is an electric aircraft that can be anywhere in the world within 24 hours — wild right? That's because Orbs are unlike anything we've seen in aviation; innovating the way we move through air through mixed propulsion and a unique design that resembles something like a starfighter.
Combine first-of-it's-kind design with disruptive chemistry, you get the Orb: an innovative combination of helicopter and airplane.
The best part of this team is the mission behind the genius: to bring healthcare to underdeveloped areas and fight human suffering at a largely impactful scale. Orb Aerospace has heart and passion behind their work. Check out their impressive (and quite moving) mission
'We are a company on mission, which is to decentralize aviation in the best interest of those who will perish without it. We are building Orbs for the purpose of creating the largest humanitarian Air Force in the world. Accessible aviation for all mankind."
The Oren mission is here to keep us all in check. Their team does the digging to ensure all those “sustainable” businesses we see are in practice, actually sustainable or moving towards a more sustainable future.
Basically, their team does the important job of keeping companies accountable by real-time analyzation of data. At the core of it, they help businesses reach their goals and stay literate on their data as it relates to sustainable efforts.
The Oren team swoops in to automatically collect, analyze, and report on ESG (Environment. Social, and Governance) data in real-time — a task that, if done manually, would be incredibly daunting and meticulous. To give you an idea, there are about 500 to 1000 different data points to consider, all of which live across the company's departments like HR, sales, procurement, operations, finance etc. These data points can take up to 10 months to sift through and make sense of without the help if automation.
The bottom line, Oren is paving the way for accountable sustainability in modern day business.
“We're proud (and blessed) that we've convinced a team that is extremely smart and passionate about sustainability to join our mission. Our customers choose us as their trusted partners to manage their ESG data, create value from it and meet their sustainability goals. We wouldn't be able to do any of this without our team of rockstars. And a big Thank you to Wellfound for connecting us with these rockstars.”
Joro is helping people live lighter, one purchase at a time.
The Joro team knows just how scary climate change is, and they’re here to remind you of that each and every time you hit the checkout. With their app, you can track, reduce, and offset the omissions of every item you purchase.
By linking your credit and debit cards, Joro gives users an exact breakdown of carbon emissions in relation to consumer purchases. Not only do they break it down for you, but they also do the research to find more sustainable providers for your goods, along with personalized tips and recommendations on how to shift your spending to become more eco-friendly.
Joro is tackling the ever-present hum of thoughtless consumerism, and their team is hoping that with one purchase at a time, together, we can make small but accumulating actions to reduce negative climatic impact.
Check out the Joro TED talk to learn more about their mission.
“More people than ever before want to live sustainably. With our app, turn every purchase into an opportunity for climate influence. Identify which actions actually make a difference and leverage your purchases to build a better world.”
At the intersection of creativity and climate change is the small but agile CO2ign team.
Founded just two years ago, the team has been a driving force in a rather untapped industry — digital art that funds unique carbon-reduction projects. It's an environmentally-friendly alternative to NFTs for artists who don't need the immutable ledger guarantees of blockchain.
CO2ign Art avoids the materials and shipping cost of print sales and the energy cost of NFT sales. In addition, 50% of the list price of CO2ign Art goes to voluntary carbon credits from projects certified by leading environmental standards organizations. By combining some of the world’s best digital artists with critical climate control efforts, they’ve created one crucial, yet tasteful mission.
“Our company is very new, but we now have eight very talented people working together to bring CO2ign Art into being. I credit our success growing the team to our goals and our culture. People want to work on something they feel is valuable and meaningful, and we aim to do good across the board: giving people new ways to enjoy art, helping artists make a living, funding carbon-reduction projects, and of course, building a successful company. We also believe that the success of a company comes from its people, and maintain an open, supportive and collaborative atmosphere where everyone’s ideas can work together to drive us forward.”
Guild is proving education shouldn’t have to stop after graduation.
Guild is a career opportunity and education platform, empowering employers to invest in the education and professional growth of their employees. Employers who use Guild for their workforce can connect employees to a betted marketplace of certificate and degree programs, specifically designed for frontline workers of all backgrounds. The programs are strategically built to align with the most in-demand skills of the moment, and those forecasted with up-and-coming technological advancement.
Guild is redefining higher education for the 31+ million frontline workers and entry-level managers who have yet to graduate college or earn a meaningful credential in America by bridging the gap between education and employment. And let’ s not forget to mention, Guild is a female founded, venture funded, and mission led certified B-corp.
Stellic saw a problem in college advising: the so called "advising" process was often unmotivating and confusing for students to follow.
At an overwhelming time in these young adult’s lives, standared advising was only adding complication to the already confusing system that is higher education. This is how Stellic was born: an educational platform for students, designed by students and administrators. This integrated, digital platform is focused on the planning and advising for students to create an organized pathway to college that allows for real-time visualization for both parties, along with course opening updates and other resources that will allow advisors to effectively guide their students to graduation. The platform also includes requirement updates, activities, internships and alerts for students at risk.
The platform services both the student and advisors who will be auditing and guiding students through the requirements for college. With Stellic, colleges have seen an 8x engagement rate within the first year, meaning more retention, better course placement, better advising and more guided, successful graduates.
Stellic isn’t just making sure college students graduate, they’re making sure they graduate doing what they’re truly passionate about as a result of effective, engaged, and personalized advising.
Education tech is on the rise as educators and families try to adapt to a generation of children raised online. The ed-tech industry is projected to grow to $100B by 2025.
At the forefront of this movement is the team behind CareerNinja, who is building the world’s largest personalized digital university. The use of AI curates the best content from around the internet, seamlessly structures it into bite-sized courses, and formulates content in easy-to-learn manners via WhatsApp, YouTube plugin & various apps.
Their popularity is growing — CareerNinja currently has 350,000+ learners across 200+ courses, with an average rating of 4.8/5 from users worldwide. The platform focuses on helping learners acquire in-demand skills and land jobs with their hiring partner companies such as Google, Amazon, Apple and more.
What's more, Career Ninja has tailored the product to the younger generation by gamifiying the experience through token rewards. The more courses students complete, the more tokens they can instantly redeem for prizes — digital incentive at its finest.
"We are a hybrid workplace, with a distributed team working from all corners of India, right from farms in Tamil Nadu & Maharashtra to the remote north-east and our office right in the heart of Mumbai. Our diversity brings unique perspectives from interns to top management and merit is the only judge of them. We don't look at degrees, colleges & to an extent even resumes. All we care about is the ability, drive & mindset of our people.
Our agility is what brings us where we are today. We reinvent ourselves every quarter asking just one key question: What does our learner need from us? We cater to more than 350,000 learners today and 56% of them say they would be highly disappointed if we didn't exist. These learners deserve better & we want to help unlock the best opportunities for them by helping them up-skill. This makes us bring our A-Game to work everyday."
The team behind Playground Labs is focused on keeping all of their products true to the original ethos of web3 & crypto: trustless execution, self-sovereign asset ownership, and transparency.
Specifically, their web3 game sectors are encouraging creators to take ownership of their digital assets and enable them with successful monetization strategies. This means compensation for both developers and players through fair and equitable token distribution, as well as ownership rights.
The mission at Playground Labs is to help users across the metaverse economy access more equitable compensation and unique asset opportunities. Led by founder Sam Peurifoy, the team is developing community-driven engineering infrastructure and play-to-earn DAOs within the blockchain gaming space.
“We've seen a ton of success with being remote-first and relentlessly MVP-focused. We build in lockstep with our communities, which means that every feature is QA'd in real-time by dozens of passionate members. It's allowed us to massively accelerate the feedback cycle and iterate towards industry-dominating products substantially faster than the competition.”
Medal.tv is one of the fastest-growing consumer applications in gaming — but here’s the catch: it’s not a game. Medal allows users to share IRL gaming moments to friends, families, or even the world. The process is simple: Medal automatically detects and records your in-game moments. All you have to do is press a button, get a clip, and access the clip anywhere from the cloud.
Medal’s high-tech editing software allows players to capture all the ICYMI moments, as well as add music, transitions, and unique features to enhance engagement on their gaming clips. The app also allows users to sync their game recordings right to their phone, so clips can be transferred and shared across social apps and text with minimal friction.
As you can imagine, Medal took off during COVID lockdown — allowing gamers to interact, connect and engage with each other from physical distance, redefining the ecosystem of gaming & gamers across the world.
“Human behavior tends to trend towards the lowest barrier entry form of doing something — and the lowest barrier form of having fun with friends is jumping on your gaming device and having fun in virtual worlds with no limitations. Medal helps friends capture and share the memories they create while physically apart — which will increasingly become a bigger part of our social lives, and lead to more meaningful IRL friendships also.”
Have you ever wanted to own your own soccer team? Might seem far-fetched, but Footium is making that dream a reality.
Footium, a web3 football management game, is allowing players to own their own NFT football club. Located in London, the startup is been backed by investors in the crypto and gaming space like Stride VC, football fans, and angel investors including UK football player, Chris Smalling.
In Footium, players are able to own and manage their very own virtual football club. The details are entirely realistic, given that owners can mint and transfer players, receive tokens for moving up the football pyramid, and bask in glory over a cup championship.
Just this year, the small but impressive team behind Footium raised $3.5 million in funding, launched 2D and 3D simulations to the game, expanded their championship cup and developed a DOA for the community.
And they’re not stopping there, the team continues to expand on their mission to bring new life into the gaming community by allowing players to realize true ownership and experience economic benefits from their in-game achievements.
“We are extremely proud of building a team of 16 amazing people across 3 continents and 10 countries in 2022, all of whom are super passionate about building the world's best football management game.”
In a market historically known for its volatility, stress, competition and uncertainty, Ribbon Home’s mission is to put the security back in homeownership — empowering sellers, buyers, agents, and loan officers.
Ribbon saw a broken buying and selling system, one that’s been invaded by wealthy investors scooping up investment properties, only to leave them empty and lifeless. They saw how defeated the agents and homebuyers felt when trying to compete for a house to call their home, and they knew they needed to create a better experience for everyone involved.
Ribbon Home is evening the playing field; allowing homeowners to finally find their dream home, hard-working agents to up-level their careers, and most importantly, enabling stronger communities consisting of homes, not houses.
Reggora thinks clunky mortgage processes are a thing of the past.
Their new reality? High quality appraisals that take days, not weeks to complete. As it stands now, the residential appraisal process is inefficient, slow-moving, and overall cumbersome. Reggora saw the opportunity to create a streamlined system, one that simplified and shortened the entire mortgage workflow. Through their modern automation technology, they’re stripping away the unneeded complications and facilitating efficient, quality orders through mortgage lenders and appraisers.
Fast forward to today, the company has completed countless orders through mortgage lenders and appraisal vendors across the US, helping them save $258 on cost per loan by shortening cycle times and removing expensive revenue leakage from appraisal fees.
Learn more about how they see the future of the appraisal process as we move into 2023.
Culdesac is reimagining cities — ones built for people, not cars.
Their mission is to take back the roads and allow more green space, more bikes, more long mid-day strolls, and a whole lot less traffic. If you’re thinking of all the ways you couldn’t live without a car, they’ve thought of that too. Culdesac is bringing together services like ridesharing, bikes, scooters, and same-day grocery delivery, so zero private cars means zero hassle. Sounds like your favorite European cities, right? The good news is you don't have to hop the pond because they’re building right here in the US, starting with Tempe, Arizona.
Culdesac communities are built to be a “pedestrians paradise”, but they also account for longer travel, partnering with the world’s best mobility companies to allow efficient and low-cost ways to get around. All residents receive 15% off Lyfts, free rides on the metro, and easy access to Bird scooters at nearly every corner. Plus, all the saved space from parking allows for more greenery and common spaces (think dog parks, barbecue areas, expansive pools).
If you’ve already started packing, you’re not alone. The demand for their first community has skyrocketed, which makes one think this is the beginning of a larger shift towards more connected, walkable, car-free living in the United States and beyond.
Content Creation / Social Community
Teachable wants everyone to share what they know.
The small but thriving team has built a teacher-student ecosystem, allowing anyone to sell courses on their passions, skills, and knowledge. With instructor-focused online courses, their platform is empowering course creators from all backgrounds to sell their expertise. Think watercolor artists, cake decorators, skateboarders and shoemakers — whatever your thing is, teachable is there to help transform your skills into a thriving business.
And creators are loving it: Teachable has seen rapid growth, with triple-digit year-over-year growth .Instructors using Teachable collectively have earned more than $555 million to date while the company has raised more than $12.5 million from top venture investors.
Teachable is now a part of the Hotmart group after acquisition in March 2020, an international startup, based in Brazil, with over 800 employees worldwide.
Over the past decade the idea of making a living off of content creation has gone from a novel idea to reality for a growing number of people. Yet, one of the more daunting aspects of hiring creators is managing all the payments, dealing with tax filings, invoice delays, and scaling issues.
Enter Lumanu: a platform that is paving the way to power business transactions between creatives and marketers worldwide.
Their platform offers automated payments for both creators and freelances, as well as a seamless integration with CRMs, accounting services, international payments, and more. They handle all the compliance details, and make sure your system is set up to scale when that time comes. Bottom line, Lumanu is there to remove hassle, minimize friction, and ensure you maintain great relationships with the creatives that bring life to your brand.
The Lumanu team has taken off in 2022 — last year, they were named one of the top New York creator economy startups. Not to mention, they’ve acquired hundreds of leading brands and thousands of impressive creators (cough cough, Kate Hudson), all of which are using Lumanu to thrive in the rapidly growing creator economy.
The Sacramento, CA based company called Grin is leading the way to to becoming the #1 influencer marketing software solution in the world.
It’s no secret that with the rise of new social media platforms like TikTok, the the influencer marketing industry is expected to continue growing in the coming years. More brands and companies are realizing the value of creator content and turning to micro and macro influencers for authentic marketing strategies.
Grin is there to meet that demand with an end-to-end, all-encompassing creator management platform primarily for direct-to-consumer brands. Their platform enables brands to easily find, recruit, and nurture the relationship between each and every creator partnership, all within one easy-to-use platform.
Not only do they connect brands with their partners, but they handle all the logistics of shipping products and reporting on metrics, making it simple and seamless for small businesses to get up and running with their influencer strategies.
Grin is solving every pain-point of the influencer lifecycle, and the success is showing: their team recently closed a $110 million series B funding round in early 2022. Given the new ecosystem of DTC marketing, thier upwards trajection sees no signs of stopping as we move into the new year.