This week, I will focus on the recent 🏆Y combinator cohort and pick out the startups that support learning, teaching and research. If you want to check out all the startups from the August demo days go to TechCrunch; or for an overview of SaaS, retail, and fintech trends, I recommend Alexandre’s newsletter - Overlooked.
Rethinking networking and engagement
In the middle of lockdowns last year, the world was obsessed with increasing engagement while doing stuff remotely with others 👩👩👧👧. Zuddl (YC 2020) and hopin dealt with running better converences online. Sidekick (YC 2020), Mesh (YC 2020), Rally (YC 2020) and Gather were the zoom alternatives for socialising and connecting with friends, colleagues or peers. For better online class experiences you had platforms like Engageli and Together Video Chat (YC 2020).
This year’s Y Combinator startups that focus on networking and engagement are using audio and video to build on the expert-to-consumer relationship, aka remote ways to monetize knowledge 🧐. Quest, for example, is scaling up business advice. It’s trying to reduce the amount of time the hero of today’s superproducts has to answer questions about how they build their startup or wrote a business book. I can see this working really well for students trying to figure out what major to pick or what course would be useful. Similar to Quest is Mentorcam; this startup wants to connect people with their business idols. A bit like Cameo or the numerous apps where popstars monetize their time.
Less impressive imho is FirstIgnite 🤷🏻♀️, not because they aren’t doing something remarkable, but because I’ve already seen so many of these platforms trying to match academic researchers and experts with industry, that this isn’t as exciting anymore. I wrote about a few of these in 2019. Just last month, another platform where scientists talk to the public or industry and policy-makers was launched, called Science Says.
Productivity tools
📜The note-taking space has been pretty active with visual apps like Nototo (YC 2020), Roam, RemNote, Obsidian and hypernotes and moving towards better use of your note-taking activity for learning and building your knowledge graph. It’s no surprise that a startup in the YC 2021 batch is taking this one step further. Genei auto-summarizes your background readings, the goal is to help you add these to your essay or blog. Sounds like a mashup of scholarcy and Mindstone.
Three startups in the YC 2021 batch are solving the too-many-meetings problem 🤯. Hera is building an alternative calendar app 📆 that starts with the meeting rather than the date and follows that through to your own or team’s objectives. I am hooked, definitely want to try it!
Sounds like hypercontext literally adds context to the meeting, which is generally not a big challenge if you’re a student, although it might help to get some auto-alerts for homework and credits related to a particular lecture you are about to attend.
🎧 Synth lets you search and find stuff across all your audio and video materials. This would have been pretty handy when I was in uni.
Schooling and technology for learning
Courses, microcredentials and certificates for continuous learning is still going strong in 2021 (see the call for the new wikipedia entry to align all definitions), and even stronger is the offer outside of US and Europe. Kurios and Lernit both target professionals in Latin America. Algo University trains university students in India to become software engineers. Careerist (in a similar vertical with Lambda and Strive School) provides tutors and other types of trainings to equip students for their next job, that they also help land. Still in this tutoring category, Filadd (LatAm) helps those that are about to finish highschool pass university entrance exams and then continue tutoring them throughout until they graduate.
I loved the idea of KaiPod Learning; the company offers shared spaces similar to WeWork where learners (mostly kids) and their families can come and jump into curriculum-related activities or just socialise. I’ve heard this idea from a variety of thought leaders in the CourseTech community before, and awesome to see it’s finally happening 🎉.
While edtechs offering extracurriculars in universities were common even before the pandemic, Spark Studio is doing that for younger kids (as a result of all the online learning that happened in 2020), offering arts and music remotely. Litnerd is applying this type of creativity to the curriculum, getting professional actors to reenact scenes from books live in the classroom.
See you next week!