Our favorite startups from YC’s Winter 2022 Demo Day, part 1

Day one of Y Combinator’s Demo Day confab for the Winter 2022 batch is over.

We shook up our coverage this year, divvying things up by sector and geography. Our goal was to avoid a huge list, the sort that we compiled in years past. TechCrunch has notes on the ever-growing contingent of companies from Africa, Indian startups, international fintech and even a discussion on intra-startup competition at the accelerator.

But one thing we’re not changing with our Y Combinator coverage is collecting favorites.

Naturally, this is just our opinion. Our staff spends lots of time diving into the technologies that startups are building, the sectors they are focused on and the parts of the world they hope to serve. As a result, each of us has a distinct perspective. So, our favorites often stem from areas we know best and what we are currently fascinated by.

Out of the hundreds of companies we saw today, which stood out the most to TechCrunch staffers? Read on!

Our favorite startups from YC Winter 2022, day one

The following list is in no particular order. Companies’ websites and authors’ Twitter profiles are linked.

Alex Wilhelm: Discz Music

• Details: A mobile application aimed at the youth market that combines music with social features. The company reports that its application has reached the top 10 slots in the App Store’s music category. That translates to 15,000 daily active users (DAUs), a tidy figure likely large enough for the startup to really learn from its early audience.
• Why it’s a fave: If Discz can keep its DAUs growing, it’s acquisition bait. Every major social service — and the small ones, too — is in awe of TikTok’s ability to influence culture by shaping what people listen to. Social platforms need a music strategy. Why not buy what Discz is building and has found some early user traction with? In reverse, Spotify is great at providing music to folks, but rather distant in cultural terms. It could use a social strategy, yeah? Guess who I have in mind?

Christine Hall: LunaJoy

• Details: The Atlanta-based company provides precision mental health care for women, saying that it offers services including targeted psychotherapy, medication management, genetic testing, coaching and holistic wellness. Since launching in 2021, LunaJoy’s revenue has grown 30% month over month.
• Why it’s a fave: Not only is it focused on women, which is a demographic that continues to be underrepresented in healthcare, but the company has had some amazing traction since being founded last year. This includes obtaining national insurance contracts in five months — a process the co-founder said can take up to two years.

Natasha Mascarenhas: Kaagaz

• Details: Founded in 2019, Kaagaz is a New Delhi-based startup that wants to make it easier to run businesses from your phone. Co-founders Tamanjit Bindra and Snehanshu Gandhi are building a suite of services for businesses to manage documents via smartphones. The company says it has 3 million monthly active users over the last 18 months and grows that number 10% per month. It has 2,000 paying customers to date.
• Why it’s a fave: While I initially thought it was too niche, Kaagaz is the maturation of the old trend of building businesses in India using WhatsApp. The social messaging app has been a growth hack for indie businesses to get reach in both sales and marketing, and even launched a companion app so companies can create profiles and messaging tools. Kaagaz feels like the back-end answer to the habit that WhatsApp created, and that’s a safe yet smart place to disrupt.

Devin Coldewey: Starling

• Details: The in-toilet spectrometer you never knew you needed. The device analyzes urine using spectroscopy, watching for indicators of things like UTIs, vitamin deficiencies and so on. This would replace urinalysis done at hospitals via in-person samples.
• Why it’s a fave: Toilet tech may not be highly marketable, but urine testing is an extremely common way to test for tons of medical problems, and who wants to go to the hospital or mail a package full of pee? This is a high-tech solution using custom hardware that could make an inconvenient process way, way easier for millions.

Alex Wilhelm:  Peakflo

• Details: Calling itself Bill.com for Southeast Asia, Peakflo is money-moving technology for corporate customers. In more practical terms, it helps companies collect and send money, targeting SMBs more than larger customers.
• Why it’s a fave: If there’s one thing the race between Brex and Airbase and Ramp and Bill.com and Divvy has taught us in the last year, it’s that there are huge revenues to be found in helping companies spend and receive money. Another startup lesson from the last few years is that models that work in one geography usually work in other geographies. So what Peakflo has is a proven market posture and a pretty good shot at a market. The company recently crossed the six-figure ARR mark — evinced by its self-reported $13,000 MRR — which means it’s ready to raise. One to watch.

Natasha Mascarenhas: RTHM

• Details: A telehealth and at-home diagnostic company for long COVID. Consumers are able to connect with a care team that specializes in complex post-COVID illnesses and access fitting therapies. It is seeing patients in California, Oregon and Washington in the U.S.
• Why it’s a fave: Amid the proliferation of digital health point solutions, a gap continues to exist around elusive conditions such as PCOS and long COVID. Despite the complexities of long COVID — both in research, diagnosis and solutions — I respect the company’s focus on the condition, which it estimates impacts 100 million people worldwide. There are lots of ways that RTHM may be challenged, but that makes it all the more interesting to track going forward.

Alex Wilhelm: Azuki

• Details: Azuki is a comic subscription business aimed at consumers of Japanese comics, better known as manga. The company is somewhat comparable to Crunchyroll, which sells streaming services to watch Asian cartoons in other markets. Which makes sense, as it shares the same founding team.
• Why it’s a fave: Crunchyroll is a big deal now. Why wouldn’t the same model work with static art, which also has a proven fanbase around the world? Even more, the company talked about turning current content pirates into paying customers. You know when that worked before? Music and movies. Once the tech worked to stream music and rent films, piracy collapsed. Sure, we all miss the good days of BitTorrent, but subscription services are so damned easy that consumers are willing to pay to get what they previously had to try to get for free.

Devin Coldewey: Mintlify

• Details: An automatic code documentation engine that reads your code and safely inserts comments that put it in context. Coders don’t always have time to do that, and it makes code auditing and reuse difficult — so having a tool that does it for them (at least to a basic degree) could save time and effort.
• Why it’s a fave: It seems obvious in retrospect, operates simply and (looks like) effectively. It appears to use some really interesting NLP in the back end as well. Plus, I bet a lot of companies would want this even if it’s only kind of effective. But really, it’s easier to tweak a comment that’s 90% there than write one from scratch.

Alex Wilhelm: Supersheets

• Details: A software service that allows non-developers to build tools atop their existing databases. It has a focus on finance and ops denizens, with features like the ability to sync data with Google Sheets.
• Why it’s a fave: This company is a confluence of trends that are all hot. No-code software? Hot. Tooling for finance and ops teams? Hot. Selling the ability for teams that traditionally don’t have in-group developers to build their own magic? Hot. Automating rote work? Hot. The company’s in-market performance is nascent today, with just a few pilots at work. But if it can land even a handful of customers, it should be able to raise more than enough money to hone its product.

Devin Coldewey: Rosebud Biosciences

• Details: The company makes micro organs like a heart on a chip — but it does so with the patient’s own DNA, so (theoretically) the way the cells react should be much closer to how the person’s own body will react.
• Why it’s a fave: While this definitely has some squicky sci-fi biopunk vibes, it’s potentially a very important step in the world of personalized medicine.

Alex Wilhelm: Lenco

• Details: A digital bank — neobank, challenger bank, pick your term — targeting Africa’s business market. The company targets generating revenues worth 3% of its assets under management (AUM) and some interest incomes from lent funds in the form of working capital.
• Why it’s a fave: Fintech in developing economies is a well-known mega-opportunity for startups. That makes the space that Lenco is working in pretty darn crowded. But the startup stands out for its rapid growth, with Lenco reporting that it reached $73,000 MRR ($876,000 ARR) in six months. That’s off the back of what the company calls 25% monthly revenue growth. Traction, y’all, is not just for tractor pulls.

And to close us out, Mary Ann Azevedo cited Digiventures — an Argentinian fintech startup that presented today — as her highlight. Why? Like with Lenco, early traction caught her eye.