Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #8

We started AlgoUniversity in our final year of college. Both Manas and I (Swapnil) were interested less in our academics and more in software engineering, products and things going around us. After securing internships/placements at Alphagrep and Apple respectively, we started working on side ideas/jobs. Manas taught a dozen students during college for interviews that helped them to land jobs, and realized that he could scale it. I had started working in an ed-tech startup where I was training students to get into Google through Google’s own program for these students called WTEF. After successfully placing 2 students at Google and helping the rest get offers from other tech companies like Microsoft, Gojek, Oracle etc., I realised that there was a gap between what edtech startups were doing and what could be achieved if proper focus were put on quality education, upskilling and first-principle problem solving. There is a better way to prepare for interviews and be a natural problem solver (and hence good at job) than mugging up GFG and Leetcode problems!

We went on to start AlgoUniversity, starting from one batch of 25 students last year from two tier II colleges in India, and achieved good placement results for our first batch: 100% placement, 21 LPA avg CTC (1.5x more than top universities in India), 3 people placed in Google, 3 getting Bytedance Intl offers. The international offers were big for us as students apart from tier 1 colleges in India don't have exposure to international jobs and their hiring process. We have now started to take in more students and multiple batches from this year onwards.

The thing that differentiates us from existing solutions in this space is our product-led approach: we have built a suite of microproducts that develop this problem solving attitude from scratch, simulate the actual interview experience and so on. We still have a lot to do in terms of scaling our teaching infrastructure to multiple batches, partnering with companies for hiring and hitting product-market fit. We have described some of our experiences here: https://www.algouniversity.com/blogdetail/, if anyone is interested.

Thanks for reading. We would love to hear your thoughts and experiences regarding the above, or finding jobs or interview prep or hiring candidates. We are also live on https://www.algouniversity.com. Please share your feedback with us!

Every year, 1.7 million Americans are evaluated for sepsis - and too many die while waiting days for the correct antibiotic. Imagine a one-day-old baby having to wait twice as long as they have been alive to receive accurate treatment. Or a cancer patient with bad immunity receiving 3 random antibiotics that might or might not work. This is a huge problem and I had an idea on how to fix it.

Every product in the market relies on identifying the bacteria to know what kills it. We thought, why care what the antibiotic is if you know what is killing it? We can do that by detecting the metabolic rate of the bacteria rather relying on phenotypic or genotypic methods--and, believe it or not, by mimicking the digestive system of mosquitoes.

I have a PhD in mechanical engineering with a focus on blood mechanics. Prior to my PhD I did customer discovery for 7 years. One day (my first day on a jet ski!) I got attacked by mosquitoes and had to rush home. The next day I went to the lab where I got bit by a mosquito again. I looked at the bite and noticed a sparkle on the bite spot. I looked it up and realized it was my blood plasma because mosquitoes urinate the plasma after digesting the red blood cells. This is exactly what I had been trying to do for years. I mimicked the digestive system of the mosquito and I got the missing piece of the product.

Astek’s first product will be the Eugris, a benchtop analyzer that can identify the presence of a bacterial infection in the blood and then perform antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST) of the bacterium in one hour. To accomplish this, a microfluidics device removes the blood cells from the plasma that would contain bacteria and adds resazurin, a fluorescence indicator. These steps take 25 minutes. In the presence of live bacteria, resazurin is reduced to resorufin, which is higher in fluorescence, by reacting with NADH, a ubiquitous intermediate in the metabolic process. The sample is monitored fluorometrically for 15 minutes, and metabolic activity is shown by an increase in fluorescence. The technique has been shown capable of detecting bacterial infection at a level of 10 CFU/mL (colony-forming-units). Antibiotic susceptibility can be assessed by incubating the plasma with antibiotics, where ineffective antibiotics fail to reduce metabolic activity while effective antibiotics diminish metabolic activity.

We have a prototype in testing in a clinical setting. Our initial target market will be clinical labs tasked with performing diagnostic tests for patients suspected of sepsis or septic shock. For these patients, rapid initiation of the correct antibiotic therapy is crucial: every hour of delay increases mortality by 7-8%. Currently, the gold standard for AST relies on blood culture, and takes 2-7 days to deliver results to the clinician. Most patients don't have that long.

Commercial EVs or electric rickshaws have 2 pain points. One high upfront cost of battery (can be up to 50% of the total cost of vehicle). Two, high charging downtime resulting in loss of revenue.

While working as an analyst covering renewable energy developments at Shell, I (Ravi) came to the conclusion that anything that makes energy storage more affordable will have the most impact in the next couple of decades. That simple thought is how the idea of Enerjazz was born. Pratik is an expert in lithium-ion batteries (PhD from German aerospace center). In 2017, we moved from Europe to India to work on developing a battery for storing solar energy.

One day, we were walking back to our office after having lunch at a restaurant. We saw an e-rickshaw get on a footpath and drive into a narrow lane. We followed the driver and found that there were more than 20 e-rickshaws charging there in an open area. All of those e-rickshaws had lead acid batteries. On talking to the drivers, we realized the pain they had was far greater than the pain of storing solar energy. We started talking to e-rickshaw drivers every day after lunch and decided to do something about it. We started with making affordable lithium-ion batteries for e-rickshaws. Since we joined YC in June, we have done more than 2,500 battery swaps.

We enable e-rickshaw drivers to increase their earnings by 80% because their downtime effectively becomes zero. We require just a 70 dollar refundable deposit (cheaper than lead acid battery) for e-rickshaw drivers. We also have a patent-pending technology that reduces the cost of lithium-ion batteries by 50%. The technology is already proven as Enerjazz batteries have completed 4M+ kilometers.

We look forward to your feedback!

I grew up in construction with my dad and saw first hand the issues companies face everyday. The building process involves 50-100 stakeholders (ie. suppliers, contractors, architects) who suffer from low margins and work on projects that fail 70% of the time. Large builds create upwards of 750,000 documents. It is very complex and costly to manage them.

For every physical construction process that occurs, an “intangible asset” like a workflow or piece of data is created as well. Current software solutions offer some efficiency but fall short because they’re centralized databases or data silos with no transparency. From a risk management perspective, each construction stakeholder needs to review, verify, or otherwise build trust manually to make sure they’re protected (i.e. let me double check that document so I know you didn’t screw me over). The trust established with blockchain allows us to codify many of those processes and touch points, making them automated and giving more line of sight to construction teams. This is possible because unlike a centralized database, the blockchain is not owned/monopolized by any party and it is auditable so transactions can be verified by all the stakeholders. This meets their risk management requirements to do business.

We have multiple tools solving customer pain, including a construction management platform for managing any project workflow; a procurement product to find, order, and track building material; and a payment product to streamline the collection of payment documentation and disbursements. Without blockchain, these workflows involve suppliers, subcontractors, general contractors all sending contracts, invoices, and data sheets back and forth. This is manual trust-building which adds time, costs, and risk. Using smart contracts allows us to codify these processes, automating 90% of them for all of the parties and providing more transparency.

Our team has managed over $5B in construction projects. I’m also the former CEO of a nationwide construction company and our engineering team has worked on projects alongside Coinbase, IBM, Iota, and Linux.

We would love to hear from you and hear feedback. We’re especially excited to be challenged and to brainstorm around our use of blockchain in this market - we know HN has a wide spectrum of views on that, on both sides of the ledger!

I was rejected from the credit card I helped launch because, despite having a high income, I lacked credit history. I had been using my debit card and was an authorized user on my dad's card - neither of which was building my personal credit history.

I saw in Visa data that 70% of women's spend (concentrated around young women), was similarly on debit or cards in other people's names. As a result, women were disproportionately being rejected by credit cards or getting lower limits and higher interested rates - even though we are shown to be better to lend to. Young women have the largest spending power of any demographic in history, yet there is a clear gender gap in financial services. We're leveling the playing field.

Our first product, the Sequin Card is the first debit card that builds credit for women. Unlike traditional debit cards (which do not build credit), Sequin fronts the money for purchases in the background and repays ourselves automatically from a linked bank account daily. We then report repayment history to credit bureaus - and voila, you're building credit.

Sequin users are primarily young women who are new to the workforce, and are looking to establish or build credit more effectively (towards a higher value credit card). Soon, we'll launch our own suite of credit cards geared towards women with smarter underwriting, targeted rewards, and safer repayment options.

Anyone can apply for Sequin - we designed the product to center women's financial needs (for the first time in history - women could be denied a credit card without a male co-signer until 1974)!

Looking forward to your comments!

We came across this problem separately while Amit was doing VC and Sunil was running his own fintech. We saw that a startup with $1M in the bank was facing mind-numbing issues in getting a card with a $5k limit. After speaking to finance managers in other companies of all ages and sizes, we realized the problem was massive. Seeing Brex at the same time growing so quickly gave us the kick to go out and figure out a way to solve this issue.

Before Karbon card, our customers were either using personal cards for company's card expenses or put a fixed deposit at a bank to get an equivalent credit limit on a card. Both options are painful in the long run: using personal cards leads to compliance issues, and putting a fixed deposit for a card locks your growth capital. Since we are a free product (we make money on interchange fees) and onboarding is simple, it is better to get a no-hassle corporate card from us.

Today we have a solution wherein a company completes a 10 minute application process and gets access to a virtual credit card right away. We are known across India’s startup community for quick card issuance (10 minutes vs 5 weeks), 10x higher credit limits compared to banks, and self-serve controls that help reign in unnecessary spending. We’ve also launched a vendor payment product that makes banking less cumbersome moving towards our longer term vision of becoming the only financial product a company would need to run it’s business aka India’s first corporate Neo bank.

Companies today use our product to run their marketing campaigns, infrastructure spends, pay SaaS vendors and take care of employee reimbursements. We work with clients who are as young as 2 weeks old to publicly listed companies in India. That alone shows the depth of the problem and the need for a company like us to help make corporate spending easier--it is the last thing a company should be blocked on.

Some of our customers are creatively using our card in ways that we have not even imagined. Our customer, Rajat, runs a marketing agency, and he issued himself 120 Karbon cards. He gave these cards to his clients and asked them to top up their cards to run Facebook ads. Another customer, Akshay, uses his card and payment product to process salaries and make vendor payments.

Please share your thoughts and questions and comments!