The Watercooler: Episode 24
We’ve come to the end of yet another week my dear readers, and that means it’s once again time to gather at The Watercooler.
Demo Day Champs: Tino & Rich
Prepare4VC recently held a Demo Day for its 2nd Cohort. Founders Tino Go and Richard Norris presented their startups and got some great feedback from judges Doug Zingale and Jadyn Bryden. Taken from personal experience, pitching (especially in front of a global audience, yay virtual) is never easy.
Tino and Rich did an awesome job and I can’t wait to see what the future has in store for these fearless founders.
Pandemic Response:
Our startup community continues to collaborate and provide support and solutions tackling COVID-19. There’s been lot of action lately — here are a couple cool examples:
Ryan Lambert from TowerHill Financial will be facilitating a presentation for the Prepare 4 VC community on the latest round of the Payment Protection Program on Monday January 25th starting at 2:00PM EST.
“Formed in 2014 through a merger between Connolly and iHealth Technologies, with offices in Waltham and Atlanta, Georgia, Cotiviti is behind a software tool that uses predictive analytics to map out the counties that are at highest risk for coronavirus outbreaks. The tool takes into account medical claims, laboratory data, demographic information, social determinants of health and more to make its predictions, which Cotiviti says are about 80 percent accurate.
Cotiviti began this work nearly a year ago, when the novel coronavirus was on the precipice of slamming the U.S. Watching as the disease took out swaths of Asia, then Europe, Cotiviti assembled a task force in January 2020 to begin building the tool.” — Rowan Walrath: A Waltham company is using AI to predict Covid-19 hotspots
“Hamilton Storage and Rhinostics, an early-stage Harvard University spin-out company, are pleased to announce the first step in a collaboration to improve decapping and accessioning of patient samples. These common bottlenecks occur during clinical sample processing of assays to detect antibodies and antigens in relation to the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, as well as many other pathogens. The agreement includes joining Hamilton Storage’s LabElite® DeCapper with the RHINOstic™ swab collection device for hands-free and high throughput sample processing.” — Rapid, Cost-Efficient Sample Processing in Workflows such as COVID-19 Testing Enabled through Hamilton Storage and Rhinostics Partnership
PathCheck Foundation has launched a real time dashboard to track vaccinations in the US and worldwide.
RateMyInvestor & Diversity VC Dig Into the 2nd Edition of Diversity In U.S Startups
RateMyInvestor and Diversity VC held an event Thursday, reviewing, reflecting and reporting on findings from the Diversity in US Startups Report.
The exhaustive and extensive intelligence contained in the report came from almost 10k founders and over 130 of the most active VC firms all across the United States.
Shila Nieves Burney from Zane Venture Fund, Sean Mendy from Concrete Rose Capital, and Cheryl Campos from Republic lent their insights to a panel discussion moderated by Arielle Pardes from WIRED.
Key takeaways abounded, with emphasis placed on being intentional, discovering entrepreneurs early in the process, being honest in evaluating data, correcting pipeline problems, and putting in the work for community building and dealflow.
Those curious in reading the report can do so by clicking here.
I’ll be publishing a separate event recap apart from this overview shortly.
Candelytics Hopes to Help The US Coast Always Prepared
“…With Candelytics, the U.S. Coast Guard would be able to reduce volumetrics time by up to 60% and potentially double the number of successful interdictions. Candelytics’ end-to-end solution accomplishes this by addressing three critical areas: 3D data collection, analytics, and knowledge management. First, by replacing manual measurements with cutting-edge mobile LIDAR scanning; second, by delivering faster insights via software-enabled differential analytics; and third, by optimizing interdiction operations across the fleet by sharing insights via a 3D data repository.” — The Buzz
MassVentures Continues Making Waves
“For a venture capital agency that’s been funding Massachusetts startups since 1978, pivoting is nothing new.
MassVentures, the state’s venture capital arm and the oldest quasi-public venture capital investor in the U.S., has followed emerging-technology trends for more than four decades. In the ’70s and ’80s, the agency invested in hardware. In the ’90s, telecom was the hot trend. In the 2000s, the team turned its attention to internet-enabled businesses, and then in the 2010s, to software-as-a-service (SaaS) startups.
Now, MassVentures is going all in on “deep tech.” — Rowan Walrath: At 43 years old, MassVentures sets its sights on seed-stage deep tech
The 2021 RFP for the SBIR Start Program will be released on February 1st! Find out more here: https://www.mass-ventures.com/start-program
The Remind & The Rewind:
The team over at Drag App is seeking passionate engineers to join their development team, with openings for:
👨💻 Full Stack Developer
🔍 QA Engineer
📱 Mobile Developer
Find out more here
Stephanie Roulic is on (another) amazing mission…this time she’s seeking speakers and event ideas for a series of Goldcast events. These events, geared towards both startup and enterprise companies will be themed around the following topics:
🔥#Marketing
🔥#Sales
🔥#RemoteTeamBuilding
If you or anyone you know is interested, click here to fill out the form.
If you missed out on “How Not To Be Kicked Out By Your Investor” featuring Victoria Yampolsky from The Startup Station and Startup Grind Boston, no worries! Click here to access the recording.
Now…
Enjoy the weekend, and keep shining diamonds.
