This morning is Alchemist’s Accelerator demo day, and there are 22 companies making their debut across a wide range of industries. Whether you’re building a construction business, cleaning solar panels, or exploring quantum computing, there’s something here for you.
Alchemist also announced a partnership with Microsoft under which the latter will provide startups with $350,000 in Azure credits, presumably a “free for first” approach to get them hooked on the services. Especially generative ai stuff, which Microsoft is clearly pushing to be the default provider.
You can see all the companies in class 34 present here or at the bottom of this post as of 10:30am Pacific Time, but I’ve selected five to highlight ahead of time below.
critical loop: “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a van full of magnetic tape hurtling down the road,” someone once said, and the same can be said for a truck full of electric vehicle batteries, or at least that’s what they say. create Critical Loop. The “mobile energy asset management network” will act as a grid balancing agent that can physically add capacity where existing infrastructure struggles to keep up. Of course, it involves a lot of network analysis and logistics, but they seem confident that “Sneakernet for power” will have a place in the increasingly decentralized energy economy.
tech/”>Kara Technologies: Many new technologies are powerful enablers in the accessibility space, but there is also the pernicious preconception that a transcription is sufficient for a deaf person to experience an auditory presentation. ASL interpreters provide an important service with rich, live translation, but they are not always available or convenient to use. Kara has developed 3D sign language avatars that can provide this crucial modality in those situations, not replacing interpreters, but rather offering an on-demand alternative when it makes sense, for example, in emergencies or other developing live situations.
Image credits: Live diagrams
SunnyApp Robotics: If we are to continue adding solar capacity at the current rate, we will end up with millions of football fields (an industry standard measure) of panels that are not inspected or cleaned frequently enough. That can seriously affect efficiency, but cleaning them is labor-intensive and uses a lot of water. SunnyApp Robotics (a sub-brand of the installer) makes a cleaning robot that can do the job automatically and using less water, with humans there to supervise it and move it from panel to panel. (By the way, there is also a wind turbine monitoring company, Werover, also on the lot.)
beam: Every increasingly smart robot, autonomous vehicle, and home needs sophisticated sensors, but existing solutions don’t always meet the requirements. Beamlet has built a new super small photonic sensor that (as far as I can tell) measures the Doppler shift in the returning light to infer velocity (as well as other physical metrics) more accurately than other methods. It won’t replace your phone’s FaceID, but it could be small and effective enough to be a new benchmark sensor in robotics and autonomy.
Image credits: SunnyApp
Live diagrams: The idea of a “Google Maps for cloud infrastructure” probably seems strange until you look at what network engineers currently use to navigate the web of services and connections that businesses rely on. Presenting this information in a visually understandable way, automatically and with live updates, makes this information more accessible and is likely to improve the mental health of the system administrator.
Alchemist is also taking a victory lap with some accelerator alumni who have raised money at various stages. The company says its applications are up 70% from last year, so if you’re thinking about applying, keep in mind there’s a lot of competition.
