From beaming actors into the class room to plucking things out of space, the second day of Y Combinator’s S21 Demo Day was a fresh snapshot of what nearly 200 startup teams believe is the future of innovation.
Yesterday, the TechCrunch team covered the first half of this batch, as well as the startups with one-minute pitches that stood out to us. We even podcasted about it! Today, we’re doing it all over again. Here’s our full list of all startups that presented on the record today, and below, you’ll find our votes for the best Y Combinator pitches of Day Two. The ones that, as people who sift through a few hundred pitches a day, made us go “oh wait, what’s this?”
Spark Studio
My experience with Indian culture is that it has a long history of valuing math and science over any other subject, which is why Spark Studio’s twist on online enrichment was refreshing. The YC company offers live, extracurricular learning classes for kids in Indian households — with a twist: The classes are about music, art and communication. As seen by the success of Outschool, small-group classes for school-going children can be a scalable way to supplement traditional education. Spark Studio is selling to kids between the ages of 5 to 15, which are highly impressionable, exploratory years.
Growing up, I was the only kid in my predominantly Indian family friend group who didn’t gravitate toward STEM. There were no services, other than the local library, to quench my interest in writing and reading. A service like Spark, if it gains the trust of parents, has the potential to make currently unconventional interests more conventional. And with over 400 students, and less than 2% churn, Spark Studio has early inklings it may be onto something. — Natasha
Litnerd
The best books don’t feel like homework, they feel like trips into another universe and hangouts with characters that could be friends. Litnerd is trying to scale the feeling of immersive, engaging text to millions of students, while also encouraging better literacy and habit-forming skills. The startup has works read and enacted by actors, making classroom reading into a more entertaining experience for school-age children.
Missionwise, Litnerd feels like a step away from the era of Shmoops and SparkNotes, two companies which (perhaps unintentionally) led to a love of skimming instead of reading. It’s used by 14,000 students and is contracted with New York City’s Department of Education.
Right now, Litnerd could be a Bookclub for younger students — but in order to be truly inventive for literacy like it says it wants to be, the startup will need to find district-friendly ways to bring student attention from the stage, back to the page. — Natasha
Litnerd streams live actors into the classroom to help kids better connect with reading
Startups in space
Hey friends. Instead of picking a startup or two, I’d like to highlight an entire cohort of companies, namely those focused on space.
First up, HEO Robotics wants to employ unused satellite time to help find stuff in orbit around the Earth. The “HEO” in its name stands for high-Earth orbit. What HEO is up to reminded me of what Turion Space said it is working on during the first day of presentations. Both want to make space around our home rock safer by either finding stuff that you might not know is there, or clearing the debris of the birth of our species’ extraplanetary efforts.
I was enamored by TransAstra Corporation today, a startup that is building space tugs. Like the working boats, but in orbit. The startup says that it wants to improve space logistics, which is rad. Even better, the company riffed about solar thermal rocket engines? I don’t know what those are, but as the name of the tech could find home in any of the science fiction novels I’ve read this year, I have to rate it a Very Cool out of 10.
One more for flavor: Inversion Space. As I noted in our main roundup, most space tech companies that we cover are working on sending things up into space. Inversion is flipping that around — you could even say inverting the concept — by making it easier to bring things back from space. Which is pretty important as we put more and more gear up into orbit. The startup wants to be able to land its cargo pod anywhere on the planet in under an hour. Hell yeah, bring on the future of space-made goods landing in my home state.
Space is not a new theme at Y Combinator. From the Winter 2021 cohort, Albedo Space has been busy, closing a $10 million round for its orbital imaging tech. If past is prelude, we’ll see more rounds for some of the space companies in this batch. Bring on the future. — Alex
Therify
Okay, the name sounds like “terrify,” which isn’t great, but Therify is one of several companies taking a hard look at mental health services offered by companies and finding that they come up short. Founder James Murray noted that he, as a Black man, found a distinct lack of professionals with shared experiences that would make good matches for therapy — and it’s a problem shared by many other demographics or people with specific needs or wants. Therify aims to focus on inclusion and diversity and push to have mental health needs met as a standard part of company health plans, and I think that’s a really laudable goal. — Devin
Catena Biosciences
Autoimmune diseases are scary and very common, yet extremely difficult to treat. Catena‘s approach uses customized protein chains to latch onto red blood cells and train the immune system that the structures it is mistakenly attacking aren’t harmful after all. If this works as claimed, it could be an enormous breakthrough for dozens of autoimmune diseases, from Graves’ to MS. This kind of deeply engineered protein treatment wasn’t possible a few years ago and it’s awesome to see such a potentially major technique appear through a government-and-university-backed startup rather than a multibillion-dollar pharma concern. — Devin
Parallel Bio
Similar to Catena, Parallel concerns itself with the immune system. But the latter has created an “immune system in a dish.” This kind of self-contained testing method is used in lots of disciplines and if Parallel’s works as advertised it’s going to be everywhere. Plus it’ll probably save about a million mouse lives. — Devin
Mindstate Design Labs
We don’t generally put too many medtech startups among our favorites because the timelines are long, the stakes are awfully high and we don’t have too much time to dig into the specifics of what every startup is working on when we’re getting a crash course on hundreds of new startups. All that said I’m personally very excited to see more startups grappling with the therapeutic potential of psychedelics. Mindstate Design Labs is looking to build a “safer MDMA” that minimizes negative side effects and they’re building out a platform to build out a greater understanding of the psychoactive compounds out there. I’ll be intrigued to see where this one goes. — Lucas
Dots
Community is the buzzword du jour and few startups actually seem to have a clear idea of what managing a community looks like. Dots is building a platform to help companies manage their communities bubbling up on Discord and Slack and make sure that new users feel seen and users with issues feel heard. This is one of those features that Discord should probably be building themselves given the wide applicability of more exacting moderation tools, but it definitely seems like a smart space for a startup to be experimenting. — Lucas
The Breakaway
I’m a big proponent of communities based around accountability and self-betterment. Fitness is obviously a great place to build a business here. The Breakaway‘s plan is to help people make the most of the exercise bike they have sitting gathering dust in their apartment with a very specific app designed around getting people cycling more, it’s uber-specific and I love the focus. — Lucas
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