London (October 18, 2023) – Village Capital, in partnership with IBM, announced that 45 startups have been selected for the fifth class of the IBM Hyper Protect Accelerator, an investment-readiness and technical mentorship program.
The startups will benefit from one year of technical mentorship from IBM, investment-readiness training from Village Capital with bespoke mentor and investor matching, and access to both IBM’s and Village Capital’s broader networks.
Out of the 45 finalists, 64% have at least one female executive in their C-Suite and 60% have at least one founder from the Black, Brown, or LatinX community. In terms of sector breakdown, Fintech startups comprise 24% of the cohort, with Digital Assets startups closely following at 22%. Additionally, it’s noteworthy that 33% of all startups are involved with Digital Assets, and 49% are engaged in AI, considering both their primary focus and related areas.
15 startups are joining IBM Hyper Protect Accelerator and will participate in Village Capital’s capacity-development workshops. The curriculum is focused on helping them develop the networks and tools they need to sustainably scale their impact and connect them with investors, mentors, and peers for one-on-one feedback and support. 30 startups are joining Friends of Hyper Protect III, where they will receive tailored business support from Village Capital with a focus on milestone planning and investor matchmaking.
Here are the 45 startups leveraging highly sensitive data to improve the quality and access to digital, financial, and healthcare services:
IBM Hyper Protect Accelerator:
- Avanzza (Guadalajara, Mexico) is a transportation management system with financial access for trucking companies.
- Axalio (Johannesburg, South Africa) provides a secure platform for tokenizing tangible assets, empowering financial inclusion, and driving a greener future.
- CartaMe (Minsk, Belarus) is a one-box mobile app solution that makes it possible to integrate users’ personal data into retail loyalty programs and bank cards at the same time.
- CheckUps (Nairobi, Kenya) offers urgent care and nurse dispatch services to uninsured informal sector workers and elderly persons. A hybrid fintech and healthtech solution that helps get medical cover for families with significant cost and time savings.
- Confection (California, United States) helps marketers take control of atomic-level digital marketing data and send independent session intelligence into CRMs, analytics tools, ad campaigns, and other critical endpoints.
- Eprezto (Panama City, Panama) is a vehicle insurance digital broker that uses automation and AI to simplify the purchasing process for the customer and increase the safety of the subscription process for the insurance company.
- F8th (Montreal, Canada) is a cybersecurity company that provides a revolutionary behavioral biometry-based continuous authentication solution for banks, governments, and corporations.
- Fairly AI (Kitchener, Canada) builds the compliance layer for AI to help compliance, risk, and audit manage the risks of the new wave of AI-enabled technology.
- Massdriver (Colorado, United States) enables engineers of all tenures to deploy cloud infrastructure quickly with compliance, security, monitoring, and infrastructure-as-code out-of-the-box, allowing organizations to spend more time building business value and less time fiddling with cloud infrastructure.
- One Creation Corporation (Boca Raton, United States) is the zero-party customer activation solution for creating transformative consumer engagement that builds digital trust at every point in your customer journey, regardless of your industry.
- Quanscient (Tampere, Finland) reinvents multiphysics simulations with their cloud and quantum-based technology to remove the bottlenecks in engineering.
- Sureti (Bogota, Colombia) offers turnkey 10-day secured loans.
- Telling.ai (Pittsburg, United States) modernizes respiratory care, the way in-home glucose monitoring transformed diabetes care 50 years ago by turning phones into powerful respiratory monitoring devices.
- Whyise (Amman, Jordan) is an impact management and analytics software solution that supports organizations in identifying the data they need to capture, aggregate, manage, and analyze as per their intended impact.
- Ziggma (Delaware, United States) empowers self-directed private investors to solve for return and impact through a broker-agnostic, innovative wealth management application.
Friends of Hyper Protect III:
- Auquan (London, UK) is instantly transforming noise into knowledge for financial services and instantly uncovering deep insights from the world’s unstructured data — with advanced AI.
- Awabah (Lagos, Nigeria) is a financial wellness platform for gig workers.
- Balance (Toronto, Canada) is Canada's largest digital asset custodian.
- Beyond You (Barcelona, Spain) analyzes gene expression from the blood transcriptome to detect and correct anomalies using Artificial Intelligence.
- Blockpliance (New York City, United States) gives people the power they need to fight against financial crime with digital assets.
- Cryptr (Lille, France) allows SaaS and Websites to manage and deploy all their authentication strategies with their plug-and-play and all-in-one authentication platform.
- Dexy (Miami, United States) provides worldwide bank accounts, cross-border transfers, payments, cards, and other digital money benefits for unbanked Latin Americans.
- Elemendar (London, UK) uses AI & ML to automate cyber threat intelligence for governments and enterprises to improve security with fewer resources and improve the lives of cyber defenders.
- eTEU (London, UK) digitizes the process of exchanging rights of ownership documents in the maritime industry with the help of blockchain technology.
- FractalUp (Lima, Peru) is an all-in-one super-app that optimizes engagement and productivity across industries in order to foster loyalty through active online communities.
- Frontnow (Berlin, Germany) uses AI to boost customer engagement, drive unparalleled growth, and catapult businesses to the forefront of digital innovation.
- Garantir (California, United States) supports enterprise customers to secure their infrastructure from supply chain attacks with cybersecurity tools.
- Innovare (Chicago, United States) empowers education leaders to make data-driven decisions that positively impact students and communities.
- IQPay (Johannesburg, South Africa) is an innovative biometric authentication solution revolutionizing how consumers pay. With IQPay, individuals can effortlessly shop without needing physical devices or wallets, all while ensuring top-notch security.
- Kryp.tools (Florida, USA) solves the complexity of managing investment portfolios exposed to digital assets with their AI-driven platform.
- Lifelight (Southampton, UK) delivers the most innovative signal processing and AI techniques to turn every smartphone into a clinical-grade vital signs monitor.
- MedMatch (Florida, United States) is an AI-powered digital health marketplace facilitating patient engagement and care coordination.
- MedTrack (Accra, Ghana) is a secure Health Information Management System (HIMS) linking patient data to national biometric identification for universal access to health records.
- Moabi (Valbonne, France) offers a solution capable of carrying out automated and secure audits of your software without holding the source code to identify vulnerabilities according to several metrics and to secure the supply chain.
- NeuralMed (São Paulo, Brazil) develops AI-based solutions to improve decision-making processes in healthcare by analyzing unstructured data (images and texts).
- One37 (Toronto, Canada) is an AI-powered digital-identity platform for user authentication and secure data exchange.
- PolymerHQ (New York, United States) stops sensitive data leaking from enterprises using SaaS & GenAI tools.
- Schwarzthal (London, UK) aims to revolutionize how compliance works in the financial sector by shifting from traditional KYC to a new concept: Know Your Network.
- Spiking (Singapore, Singapore) is revolutionizing the stock market by democratizing access to financial data and insights through real-time data and AI-driven predictions, notably employing Generative AI to develop a domain-specific model that benefits both retail and institutional investors by reducing information asymmetry and enabling them to follow expert trading activities.
- TapestryX (Connecticut, USA) is a new, innovative, optimal approach for distributed data that allows distributed ledgers to self-synchronize.
- THE Hub Dao (Amsterdam, Netherlands) provides users with the picks and shovels for a seamless metaverse experience.
- VeriTX (Buffalo, USA) provides data assurance at the asset level for digital assets in manufacturing, AI, ML, and decision-level analytics in the aerospace, defense, legal, and high-value asset verticals.
- ViAct (Hong Kong, China) is a scenario based AI powered monitoring platform for improving safety of accident prone critical workplaces via vision intelligence.
- XPay (Cairo, Egypt) is a neobank for youth and families in Egypt.
- Zenrise (Cordoba, Argentina) allows SME's to plug and play all the means of payment and the right technology to pull it off.
This virtual accelerator will take place between September and December 2023 and provide continued support into 2024.
Datatech's rapid growth is changing how we access essential services like healthcare, banking, and education. Still, the rising concerns over data security, as seen in recent incidents like election misinformation and consumer data breaches, highlight the global consequences of mishandling data. Many datatech startups struggle with limited resources and expertise to ensure robust security and navigate complex data privacy rules. The IBM Hyper Protect Accelerator empowers startups to build scalable and sustainable solutions that meet people's needs while guaranteeing compliance with the highly secure cloud, Hyper Protect.
This cohort will receive support from IBM's top-notch security services and expertise from Village Capital's extensive network of peers and investors.
For media inquiries, reach out to Eva Waweru at Village Capital (eva.waweru@vilcap.com), and for more information about the program, reach out to Lucia Prinz (lucia.prinz@vilcap.com).
About Village Capital
Village Capital is reinventing the system to back the entrepreneurs of the future. Known for its groundbreaking approaches to supporting founders who are building solutions to emergent social, economic, and environmental challenges, VilCap unlocks critical social and financial capital for early-stage companies to maximize business and impact growth.
Since 2009, Village Capital has supported over 1,400 startups that have raised over $5 billion in investment capital. It has made more than 150 investments through its various affiliated funds, including Vilcap Investments, which has invested in 110 peer-selected companies. Over 20,000 entrepreneurs have improved their investment readiness through its network of entrepreneur support organizations and its platform, Abaca. Learn more at www.vilcap.com and follow @villagecapital.
