Electives provides live virtual learning experiences for employees delivered by unique and interesting experts.
The Problem
If you’ve ever had training at work, where you watched hours of videos and took a quiz every 30 minutes, you know they are not very engaging. When companies look for external teachers to facilitate live, interactive classes, it’s also challenging to find quality instructors in a highly fragmented market.
What The Company Does
Each month, Electives matches your company with unique experts such as FBI agents, pro athletes, Hamilton performers, and professors to teach classes to employees about learning and development and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Electives tracks employee interest data, company objectives, and teacher review data to provide data driven recommendations…
Platform that identifies and accelerates development of multiple novel drugs addressing high value clinical needs
The problem
Drug discovery is highly inefficient and current drugs only address roughly 1% to 2% of the human genome. In addition, finding new, successful drugs has become so much harder. The average cost of bringing one to market is $2.6B, a number that has nearly doubled between 2003 and 2013. There is an urgent need to rapidly discover and develop drugs for new disease targets, whether it’s to address the current COVID-19 pandemic, or for the large number of diseases that still lack effective treatments today.
What The Company Does
Kumuda effectively leverages the wealth of large-scale orthogonal and multi-faceted data sets available to generate…
The student venture investment fund at the University of New Hampshire.
Mission Of The Organization
The purpose of the Rines Angel Fund is to fuel undergraduate students’ direct involvement in private equity markets and entrepreneurial finance. A student-driven, multi-disciplinary team, with the supervision of the director of the Center for Venture Research, manages the Rines Angel Fund program.
History Of Organization
In 1978, William Wetzel, then a professor at the University of New Hampshire and founder of its Center for Venture Research, coined the term “angel investor.” The fund was made possible by the generous donation of S. Melvin Rines, UNH class of ’47, with the support of Dr. Jeffrey Sohl, director of the Center for Venture Research…
An intuitive app to manage high-cost auto loans and expensive car ownership, truly saving time and money.
The Problem
America’s auto debt problem is massive, today holding a record $1.36 trillion in loan balances. These vehicle loans make up 9% of all household debt and have staggering average interest rates over 7% even in this low-rate environment. People are increasingly saddled with inappropriately expensive auto loans. Because of this, drivers will continue to lose money during ownership. The industry is designed to lock in drivers to a litany of ongoing expenses including insurance, servicing, repairs, parts, add-ons, media and communication services.
What The Company Does
PayDownHero is a fintech platform that rounds up your normal daily transactions and puts the money toward paying…
An app enabling people with traumatic brain injuries to track their symptoms and prepare for clinical trials.
The Problem
Football players are at an increased risk of developing traumatic brain injuries (TBI), and they are just the tip of the iceberg. Falls are the leading cause of TBI and the age groups most affected are those zero to four years old and then older than 60. The number of cases are increasing. There are 1.5 million new cases every year and 5.6 million people living with this invisible, chronic health condition. And these numbers are underreported by as much as 57%.
What The Company Does
Power of Patients is a digital health app that lets people with brain injuries track their symptoms and…
Bringing one of the first room temperature, easily accessible, and regenerative therapies to veterinary medicine
The Problem
Veterinarians have many solutions to treat the symptoms of inflammation in the body. Those solutions, while effective, have long recovery times, inconsistent dosing, and lower efficacy rates. Despite current therapies, over $1B is lost each year in the equine industry due to injury or disease. Revenue is not as important for our dogs, but the quality of life and cost of care is. Of the 90M dogs in the U.S., 20M will have an injury each year that requires expensive treatment.
What The Company Does
Hilltop Bio’s revolutionary treatment allows veterinarians to have an off-the-shelf, effective product, that does not require a large capital…
Eliminates the uncomfortable experience of using a dull razor and the cost associated with constantly replacing blades.
The Problem
In the U.S. alone, millions of men shave regularly and replace their blade cartridges after just a few uses, making shaving expensive and wasteful. According to Men’s Health, “modern razors are designed to last between 5–10 shaves,” and the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 2 billion disposable razors and blade cartridges are thrown out in the U.S. each year. On top of these stats, in bathrooms around the world, men simply don’t have a dry, sanitary home for their razors, leaving them on a wet sink, in the shower, or in a medicine cabinet filled with other products. …
Bringing the community together through social, virtual, and hybrid events.
The Problem
Organizations are constantly trying to build and maintain a diverse and inclusive community given the evolving landscape of remote and hybrid world. A recent report from the tech website Built In found that companies are more likely to have a CEO named “John” or “David” than to have a woman CEO. The report also found that racially and ethnically diverse companies are 35% more likely to perform better, while inclusive companies are 1.7 times more innovative.
What The Company Does
Host initially launched as a platform to connect bartenders with corporate events. But the coronavirus pandemic put a dent in that plan, forcing the…
Automating the process of labeling data, allowing data science teams to quickly build fully-trained models.
The Problem
Artificial intelligence is currently powered by armies of humans. Machines cannot ‘read’ natural language like humans do and require labeled data to ‘learn’ (adjust neural network weights). Massive efforts are underway to manually label data; typically hundreds of thousands of examples are needed to train machine learning models, and even more for deep learning. Human-powered approaches are extremely slow and can take months, be expensive, wildly inconsistent, biased, and error-prone (often three+ humans are put on the same labeling task to increase accuracy).
What The Company Does
Data is fed into Jaxon through an elaborate assembly line that dissects, analyzes, and then refines itself…
A group of students at the University of Connecticut has organized and is investing in student startups.
History of Organization
Recently, a group of students at the University of Connecticut under the mentorship of Professor David Noble, the director of the Peter J. Werth Institute for Entrepreneurship & Innovation Management, teamed up to found the school’s first student-run venture fund. The idea started as an independent study with a couple of students trying to raise capital, while also navigating the intricacies of a venture fund. Now, the fund consists of a full class of 17 students analyzing companies, ready to invest in the next great generation of entrepreneurs.
The Mission
Hillside Ventures was founded to address a gap in the training for…
Bram Berkowitz
Writing about banks, stocks, and startups. Frequently published in The Motley Fool and Rhode Island Inno. Co-founder of The Buzz.
