Kairos Society has announced this year’s Kairos 50, a collection of the 50 most innovative seed-stage companies in the world. The Kairos Society is dedicated to empowering young entrepreneurs to innovate in areas where others have remained unsuccessful and tackle global issues to make this a better world. In the past four years alone, the top 25 Kairos companies have raised a total of over $600 million in investment capital and are collectively valued at over $3 billion.
Kairos Society also announced its monetary prizes to three different companies, which were funded by Obvious Ventures, Tim Draper Associates and Tony Chen.
From a tech-driven baby food company to a 3D printing platform affordable enough to leave your wallet intact, the Kairos 50 represent a whole range of innovations in a ton of different fields. Check out the 50 companies changing the world and the innovations they are creating below:
CourseKey (San Diego, CA)
A leader in higher education technology
Easier access for students to ask questions in the classroom, form study groups, and navigate their way through the education system.
Founders: Luke Sophinos
SchoolHouse (Barcelona, Spain)
Exponential education
Zero cost, better learning outcomes. By giving birth to Exponential Education, SchoolHouse seeks to solve a historical problem: Scarcity in education.
Founders: Pol Ricart, Héctor Ramón Jiménez, Lorenzo Arribas
Knack (Tampa, FL)
Local Marketplace for Peer-to-peer College Tutoring
In today’s world, it is hard to find help in college courses. With Knack, a student can request help from a peer for any course without having to wait for a TA or emailing the professor.
Founders: Samyr Qureshi, David Stoker, Shawn Doyle, Dennis Hansen
Skriware (Warsaw, Poland)
Creating plug&play, affordable 3D creator & online education platform
3D printing is a rapidly growing market that many common people are curious about and would like to get their hands on. In order to make this technology available at every home, Skriware aims to solve three fundamental problems this industry is facing: accessibility, affordability and practicality.
Founders: Karol Górnowicz, Jakub Zaborowski, Damian Wierbilowicz, Stefan Stankiewicz
StockViews (London, OH)
A marketplace for asset managers and vetted, independent analysts
StockViews is building the infrastructure for asset management industry, in order to solve to bubbles, crashes and deliver long term outperformance.
Founder: Sandeep Bathina, Thomas Beevers
Benben GH (Accra, Ghana)
Benben is a Blockchain Powered Digital Land Transactions Platform
Benben GH seeks to solve long turnover times in delivering financial assistance and borrowers (property owners and business owners), who are left bearing the brunt of bottlenecks in the form of high-risk- high-interest loans and high-risk land transactions.
Founder: Emmanuel Noah
Wallarm (Menlo Park, CA)
Security for the modern web applications and API
Wallarm finds new ways to protect Internet-facing applications and APIs from new bulnerabilities, attacks, and critical flaws within the system.
Founders: Stepan Ilyn, Anastasia Novikova, Ivan Novikov
Toucan (Singapore, Singapore)
Toucan issues virtual credit card for the middle-class uncardables
Toucan provides the 200M rising middle-class that have no financial credit inclusion and face a huge hassle simply trying to leapfrog into the online era of commerce access to credit cards.
Founders: Elvin Zhang, Loh Zheng Rong, Xheng Rong, Beejay Urzo
Mati Inc (San Francisco, CA)
Identity platform: build trust online starting with bank-bank commerce Fraud
Identity has plenty of applications – payments, login, federal KYC, and anything that requires the proof that you are who you are.
Founder: Filip Victor
Wasteless (New York City, NY)
Re-capturing $1B of lost grocery revenues and optimizing grocery sales
Wasteless created an infrastructure to monitor lives inventory, which prevents grocers from creating waste, and out of stock and over stock products.
Founder: Ben Biron, Oded Omer
Brainbuild (Durham, NC)
Automated athlete health & nutrition scheduling via context-based A.I.
Brainbuild empowers all 460,000 NCAA athletes with the knowledge necessary to build healthy eating habits, and fundamentally change the way institutions take care of their athletes.
Founders: Joseph J. Lam, Brendan O’ Brien
Read our interview with Ankur Jain and Alex Fiance of Kairos Society on Moonshots for Social Good
Agrosmart (Campinas, Brasil)
We monitor crops to help farmers make better decisions
Agrosmart aides in the decision-making of irrigation since 70 percent of world’s fresh water is used in irrigation and about half of it is wasted because farmers don’t really know when to do it or how much water to use.
Founders: Mariana Vasconcelos, Raphael Garcez, Thales Nicoleti
Agrilyst (Brooklyn, NY)
Agrilyst is a platform that helps indoor farm operator use data to make more profitable production decisions. We track and analyze all farm data in one place, enabling growers to optimize plant performance and reduce operating expenses.
Founders: Allison Kopf, Jason Camp
Little Spoon (New York City, NY)
Fresh, organic and ready-to-eat baby food company, delivering straight to your door
Data-driven, tech-enabled, and delicious, Little Spoon combines nutrition with convenience to provide the best option for both baby and moms.
Founders: Lisa Barnett, Ben Lewis, Michelle Muller, Angela Vranich
BlackSMS (San Francisco, CA)
Privacy within a social network
The single platform for all private social networking BlackSMS addresses the fundamental need for intimacy and privacy.
Founder: Tyler Weitzman
VoiceOps (San Francisco, CA)
AI platform for analyzing enterprise voice conversations
Great Salespeople Are Made, Not Born. Using data from your sales team’s calls, Clover helps you implement highest ROI techniques throughout your sales force.
Founder: Daria Evdokimova
Diamond (San Francisco, CA)
Helps people achieve better work through personalized search technologies
Diamond is creating one personal interface to find all files across all platforms/devices – aiming to be the go-to portal between humans and machines
Founder: Leander Lee, Pierre Arys
Mya (USA)
Your team’s A.I. Recruiter
Mya is a staffing automation startup creating tools to help recruiters and hiring managers efficiently manage high volume recruitment campaigns. As a virtual recruiter it prescreens candidates, educates applicants, answers questions, determines eligibility and schedules onsite interviews.
Founder: Eyal Grayevsky, James Maddox
Squadrun Inc (San Francisco, CA)
Optimizing workflow for large businesses
SquadRun designs and runs customized workflows for large-scale business operations using a combination of machine learning and human intelligence to manage and optimize the end-to-end process flow to achieve speed, scale, accuracy and cost efficiency.
Founders: Ribabh Ladha, Kanika Jain, Apurv Agrawal, Vikas Gulati
Pavlov (San Francisco, CA)
Pavlov helps businesses automate their customer success process
Pavlov aggregates all the interactions a customer has with your business into one place and provides interfaces for customer success agents to consume that information.
Founder: Alexander Kern, Nikhil Srinivasan
GetLinks (Bangkok, Thailand)
A quality curated tech hiring marketplace in Asia
GetLinks bridges the biggest tech talents community in Asia with opportunities in Innovative companies building the future of work in Asia and beyond.
Founders: Pichaya Srifar, Polpat Songtamjitti, Djoann Fal, Keenan Kwok
Wiser (London, England)
Brand-led recruitment
Wiser is a service-led company that offers employer branding and graduate recruitment.
Founders: Ari Ratnakumar, Finian O’ Kane, Ben Buffone, Omar Habbal
Ranomics (Waterloo, Ontario)
Human genetics
Ranomics is improving the understanding of human genetics.
Founder: Cathy Tie
Ourotech (Waterloo, Ontario)
Cancer treatment methods
Ourotech removes the trial and error process of cancer treatment by testing which drugs work best on patient tumor samples outside of their body and giving them the right treatment the first time.
Founder: Duleeka Ranatunga, William Lin
Desktop Genetics (London, England)
Healthcare and cell therapy
Desktop Genetics is a bioinformatics company specializing in CRISPR sgRNA design for cell line engineering and cell therapy.
Founders: Edward Perello, Victor Dillard, Riley Doyle
Eligo Bioscience (Paris, France)
A new approach to antibiotic resistance
Eligo, an MIT-Rockefeller spinoff, has created the next-generation of programmable CRISPR bio therapeutics to selectively eradicate antibiotic resistant bacteria and engineer the microbiome.
Founder: Dr. David Bikard, Dr. Xavier Duportet, Prof. Luciano Marraffini, Prof Timothy Lu
Stasis Labs (Los Angeles, CA)
Monitor patient’s vitals remotely
Stasis rescues the 11 million under-monitored patients around the world with their cloud-connected vitals monitoring system.
Founders: Dinesh Seemakurty, Michael Maylahn
NeoLight (Phoenix, AZ)
Empathy-driven & best-in-class tech for treating conditions in newborns
Neolight developed Skylife, an at-home neonatal phototherapy treatment that will provide the safest and most efficient treatment of infant jaundice. The company is developing a hypothermia treatment device to help at-risk infants with low birth weight.
Founders: Sivakumar Palaniswany, Vivek Kopparthi, Chase Garrett
Read more about startups heating up in Phoenix
Sibly (San Francisco, CA)
On-demand medical device
The most effective and responsive mental health professional in your pocket, 24/7 On-Demand mental health help. With Sibly, it reduces the cost for help and gives you someone to speak to about what is going on in your life at a very low cost.
Founders: Mohammad Al Qadi, Omar Aleisa, Paula Wilbourne
Genetesis (Cincinnati, OH)
Medical device company building novel cardiac imaging tools
Founders: Peeyush Shrivastava, Vineet Erasaia, Emmanuel Setegn, Chandan Srivastava
Neurescue (Copenhagen, Denmark)
Greatly improved treatment of the no.1 killer, cardiac arrest, & bleedings
Neurescue™ seeks to help save people with cardiac arrest and hemorrhage.
Founders: Habib Frost
Quio (Berkeley, CA)
Smart injection devices and connected software for injectable therapies.
It is estimated that only 50-60 percent of patients take injectavle therapies properly. Quio is designed to be taken long-term and control chronic disease for years.
Founders: Alexander Dahmani, Jared Schwartzentruber
Unite Genomics (Berkeley, CA)
Big data and medical trials
Massively scalable genetic data analysis for Pharma and Biotech companies.
Founders: Taner Dagdelen, John Dagdelen
Dyndrite (Berkeley, CA)
Building advanced manufacturing software (stealth mode)
Dyndrite allows people to draw things that were previously impossible.
Founder: Harshil Goel, Plus 4 Co-Founders
Synapse Technology (Boston, MA)
Improving travel security
Synapse Technology automates the detection of dangerous and illegal objects passing through x-ray checkpoints, applicable to government TSA and commercial security installations.
Founders: Bruno Faviero, Simanta Gautam, Ian Cinnamon
Apis Cor (Moscow, Russia)
3D printing and construction
Apis Cor provides a kind mobile construction 3D printing technology, which allows mass use of additive technologies directly on construction sites and can compete with traditional methods of construction. The printer prints a whole building directly on site by printing walls and partitions.
Founders: Boris Bliznioukov, Nikita Cheniuntai, Konstantin Nefedez
Maidbot (Austin, Texas)
A robotics company on a mission to bring Rosie the Robot to reality
By using Maidbot’s systems, hotel operators will see an increase in profitability, healthier and happier staff and higher guest satisfaction.
Founder: Micah Green
The Engineering Company (London, England)
The Engineering Company makes small rockets for small satellites
The Engineering Company’s next generation engineering technology, built from the ground up at Imperial College, automates the design development work bringing a step change in the cost of development.
Founders: Parikshat Singh, Patrick Moniz
Nelumbo (San Francisco, CA)
Advanced manufacturing company focused on enabling higher performance, lower cost cooling systems
Nelumbo was formed to solve this problem at the root cause. The founders invented and developed the world’s first Droplet Ejection coatings, or materials capable of making water droplets jump off a surface while still microscopic. This is the final frontier of water repellency, and Nelumbo is using it to enable a double-digit performance and cost advantage in a market desperate for differentiation.
Founders: Liam Berryman, Lance Brockway, David Walther
Speechify Inc. (Providence, RI)
AI-based text-to-speech
Speechify is deep learning powered text-to-speech education software. It aims to aid people with learning differences in reading, and to provide a faster way for every person to be more productive by creating instantaneous audiobooks of any text.
Founder: Cliff Weitzman
Wildfire Technologies (Berkeley, CA)
Crowdsourced safety alerts paired with local news
Wildfire sends you real-time safety alerts – like Waze for safety.
Founders: Vinay Ramesh, Hriday Kemburu, Jay Patel
Hype Labs (Porto, Portugal)
An SDK that connects everything, even without internet
Hype Labs seeks to achieve a vision where we can interact with the world around us and vice versa despite various technologies. It provides new types of connectivity to help offload current networks and bring new user experiences that were impossible before.
Founder: Carlos Lei Santos, Andre Francisco
Memgraph (London, England)
Memgraph is the world’s first scalable real-time graph database
A graph database is an optimized database technology to store, manage, and access interconnected data to answer complex questions. MemGraph is bridging this gap by bringing the performance of graph databases built by tech giants to every enterprise.
Founder: Dominik Tomicevic, Marko Budiselic
Fluid AI (Mumbia, India)
Artificial Intelligence solutions that interact with you in the real world
Fluid AI is solving the problem of humanizing digital interaction in the real world. Using Fluid AI’s artificial intelligence technology offers customers a much more engaging and effective experience whether they be in a store, bank or in a hotel lobby.
Founder: Raghav Aggarwal, Abhinav Aggarwal
Mira Labs (Los Angeles, CA)
Affordable and accessible augmented reality platform
Augmented reality is going to fundamentally change how we interact with technology. The problem today is that there is no accessible platform for developers and innovators to start actually exploring how AR will fit into our everyday lives. Mira Labs is working to lower all the significant barriers to entry for AR.
Founders: Joseph May, Ben Taft, Matt Stern, Montana Reed
Shipsy Shipsy (Gurgaon, India)
Proactive approach to supply chain operations
Shipsy Shipsy provides real-time alerts to help operations teams move from a reactive to pro-active approach. The system tells them what is going wrong, based on the KPIs they have set, and they act on the most important matters in a prioritized manner. The solution makes lives of operations teams easier, and improves service levels without impacting costs.
Founders: Soham Choksi, Dhruv Agrawal, Himanshu Gupta, Sahil Arora
Talkin’ Things (Warsaw, Poland)
Smart packaging system for customers’ safety
Talkin’ Things’ technology is a unique solution for protecting customers against refilling. Many industries face a problem of counterfeiters who refill genuine packaging with unauthorized products. Losses are forecast to be $2.3 trillion by 2018.
Founders: Dariusz Konik, Marcin Pilarz
Sokowatch (Nairobi, Kenya)
Amazon Prime for African Retail Shops
Millions of small shop keepers across the developing world are currently forced to source their own products independent of any distributor or manufacturer. This leads to increased costs and limited availability of products for billions of emerging consumers.
Founders: Daniel Yu, Josh Middleman
Starsky Robotics (San Francisco, CA)
Truck driving robots
Starsky Robotics are robots that drive trucks. The founders figured out a clever way to make it possible with existing technology, have already moved freight for money and are hoping to take over the American trucking industry.
Founders: Kartik Tiwari, Stefan Seltz-Axmacher
STORD (Atlanta, Georgia)
Asset-Light 3rd Party Warehousing
STORD is positioning ourselves as a tech-driven warehousing company that is not bound by geographical reach. Utilizing partner facilities, STORD is able to add bottom-line revenue to small businesses across the country by giving them access to new customers and large, national contracts.
Founders: Sean Henry, Jacob Boudreau
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