And The Presenters Are...
(Meet The 2019 Bay Area Impact Summit Demo Day Finalists!)
We are excited to announce the business that will be pitching to our audience and our esteemed panel of judges at the BAIS! These companies are actively scaling social impact in their communities and we are looking forward to showcasing these founders and their enterprises at the event. Thank you to all the entrepreneurs that applied! You can see the full list here.
Amped Innovation
Andi Kleissner is Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Amped, prior to Amped she worked at Bio-Rad Laboratories and Quantal Life. Amped is powering the next 1 billion energy users with clean, off-grid products that perform better than the grid. Energy access is not about energy, it is about what you are able to do with your power. And Amped is the brand of choice for customers in emerging markets who want to do more with their power: make ice, power a barber shop, preserve fish and produce, irrigate crops. They are the General Electric of off-grid appliances designing mobile-money enabled solar-powered appliances from the ground up for efficiency, performance, and affordability.
BioCellection
BioCellection is a social enterprise, developing advanced technologies to transform unrecyclable plastics into virgin-quality chemicals for sustainable supply chains. By focusing on the 91% of plastic waste too contaminated and difficult to recycle, BioCellection is unlocking a massive resource that leads to unprecedented opportunities. BioCellction is Co-Founded by CEO Miranda Wang, an entrepreneur, environmental advocate and inventor. She is a Forbes 30 Under 30, CNN “Tomorrow’s Hero,” one of New York Time’s 30 Visionaries with the Courage to Change the World, Echoing Green Climate Fellow, a United Nations Young Champion of the Earth, Pritzker Environmental "Genius" Prize Winner, and winner of the Wharton Business Plan Competition, the Westly Prize, and the CITEO Circular Challenge International grand prize (2018)
CircleOf
Mike Jordan is the CEO of CircleOf, Inc. based in San Francisco. CircleOf is a social caregiving platform that helps the 44 million family caregivers in the US organize and mobilize their family, friends and co-workers into on-demand care communities. With 1 in 6 working adults spending an average of 20+ hours per week caring for sick loved ones, CircleOf simplifies the logistics of caregiving by making it easy to privately share information, offer assistance, and volunteer knowledge and time. Prior to CircleOf, Mike was the Co-founder and CEO of ReviverAuto where he created Internet of Things (IOT) products for the automotive industry. Most recently he served as a distinguished entrepreneur for Cisco’s Hyper Innovation Living Lab which led to the creation of CircleOf.
CNote
Catherine Berman is CEO and Co-Founder of CNote. She is a 3X entrepreneur with experience building and scaling profitable businesses with transformative social impact. CNote is an alternative to traditional short-term investment options. With CNote you earn 2.75% and 100% of your dollars are used to fund loans to small businesses, to help build affordable housing and to bring sustainable economic growth to communities across America. CNote’s non-profit partners have been around for decades and have not lost a single investor dollar. Ever.
CollegeBacker
Jordan Lee is the founder and CEO of CollegeBacker, a fintech startup tackling the college affordability crisis. CollegeBacker has already helped American parents save more than $2M for college – and their kids avoid $6M in student loans – by making college savings social. In just a few minutes, a parent can start investing in a tax-free college fund and enlist a team of supporters to contribute at birthdays or other events, or on a monthly basis. Before CollegeBacker, Jordan founded a Y Combinator company, was a product leader at ClearSlide, and earned degrees from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.
Ecozoic Resources
Until now, there have only been 4 types of toilets: flushing, chemical, composting and pit latrines. Ecozoic Resources has developed the bio-filtration toilet: an ecological sanitation solution that solves many of the challenges in temporary and decentralized sanitation needs. Ecozoic’s water-less, high-capacity, regenerative toilet is low-cost, rapidly deployable and requires very little maintenance - making it the right choice for events, government, off-grid and many other needs. Matt Atwood is an entrepreneur and technologist with expertise in the WASH sector, he previously served as Founder & CEO of Algae Systems which developed the world’s first energy-positive wastewater treatment platform and is now focusing his efforts one toilet at a time.
Elemeno Health
Dr. Arup Roy-Burman is a former ICU Medical Director at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital San Francisco and now Co-Founder and CEO of Y Combinator-backed Elemeno Health. Elemeno is a mobile-friendly cloud solution that helps healthcare systems implement and spread organizational best practices through just-in-time training at the point of need. This improves frontline practice consistency, resulting in higher quality, increased safety, and better outcomes. Elemeno helps clients scale practices both within and across institutions, allowing the knowledge-rich to support the resource-poor, democratizing care for all patients.
Next Play
Charu Sharma is a 3rd time startup founder, has written 3 books, educated 1M women to start their businesses, won 5 national awards, was named a Power Woman alongside Oprah, stopped a train robbery in India when she was 9, and has been to all 7 continents. Currently, she is Founder and CEO of Next Play, an advanced AI app that facilitates internal mentorship matching for company employees at Lyft, Square, Gilead and Splunk to name a few. The App is a chatbot that personalizes employee career and leadership development with the goal of attracting, developing, and retaining more diverse talent. Next Play works with users to identify goals and preferences, match mentees and mentors at scale, and guide employees to achieve their goals. HR directors gain insight into employee engagement data with Next Play’s breakthrough AI Technology.
Penguin Smart
Dr. Amy Kwok is a Harvard and Peking University-trained doctor and public health practitioner who has launched HealthTech solutions in multiple countries. She is now CEO of Alchemist Accelerator-backed PenguinSmart, which enables intelligent, individualized rehab for all, starting with speech and language therapy (SLT) for children, which is needed by 1 in 7. PenguinSmart combines the latest data sciences with expert insights to empower parents to become a key part of the rehab journey, increasing the efficacy of therapy and expanding therapist reach by 8x. The company is first serving the $14B China SLT market impacting 26M families while developing global solutions.
The Town Kitchen
Eric Quick has over twenty years experience in operations management in the industries of foodservice, retail, e-commerce and food manufacturing and is now the CEO of The Town Kitchen. TTK is a mission-driven B2B food company that employs and empowers at-risk youth. TTK provides a turn-key solution to corporate catering needs, and made over $1.1M in 2018 revenue (up 82% y-o-y). Companies like Uber, Mosaic Solar, and Google have all enjoyed TTK’s culinary-inspired, "amenity in a box" offerings.
Wisdom Labs
Cory Smith is the CEO & Co-founder of Wisdom Labs. Wisdom Labs is committed to increasing the wellbeing of people, companies, and the planet via wiser workplaces. They provide evidence-based resilience, mindfulness, and emotional awareness SaaS software to help leading organizations drive higher performance, team productivity, and workplace thriving at scale.