Brinc’s 14th demo day featured solutions from across foodtech, cleantech, medtech, logistics, hardware and IoT, with a mix of startups from Asia-Pacific, the U.S., Europe and the Middle East. This is the second time that Brinc is going fully online with its demo day.
On Thursday, venture capital and accelerator firm Brinc concluded its 14th virtual demo day for startups. The demo day featured startups from its Fall 2020 Greater Bay Area three-month online accelerator programs.
Brinc is a 2014-founded firm offering a range of accelerating programs across regions and industries. It conducted the demo day virtually, the second of Brinc’s demo days to go fully online. The first took place in August last year.
Like many virtual conferences, the demo day took place on virtual events platform Hopin. It featured a reception, live stage (where the pitches took place), networking and sessions spaces to facilitate interaction, and an expo area as well. The demo day featured over 390 attendees from across 30 countries, Brinc said.
Although funding asks ranged from $500,000 to $6 million, most startups asked for cheques of US$1-US$3 million.
Referring to the events of 2020, Founder and CEO of Brinc Manav Gupta said in his opening address, “We’ve all seen firsthand just how disparate the world is, with the challenges of one city, country or socio-economic group being very different from another, further emphasizing the importance of developing and more equitable, sustainable and scalable businesses.”
“The teams you’re about to see get on stage are helping solve urgent problems in a COVID world where it’s not about just recovery, but instead about our new normal,” Gupta further noted.
Thirteen of Brinc’s portfolio companies were building solutions for a post-pandemic world, he added, noting that one of Brinc’s portfolio companies had an exit with a “much larger player in Canada.” Further, Brinc also had a record-breaking year in 2020 in terms of number of investments and partnerships, Gupta said.
Diverse startups pitch at Brinc’s Demo Day
Sixteen pre-seed to Series A startups pitched on the demo day. While seven of these were from the Asia-Pacific region (China, Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia), the remaining were spread across the U.S., the U.K., Switzerland, Israel, Sweden and Canada.
The solutions of these portfolio startups also represented diverse industries. While several startups focused on the foodtech industry, cleantech, medtech, logistics, hardware and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies were also featured.
Startups pitching on the demo day included Nonnatech, an IoT data and analytics platform healthcare monitoring, recommerce platform Rebolet, soil intelligence platform Sensegrass, interoperable platform for supply chains Buytasker, supply chain AI platform Liberatrade, space tech company Space Industries, and Wildfire Energy, which is developing a waste-to-energy technology targeting landfills.
Portfolio startups from foodtech included a mix plant-based and cell-cultured alternative protein, baby formula, alternative dairy and precision nutrition companies. These are cellular agriculture startup CellX, plant-based food companies Haofood, KYF (Know Your Food), More Foods, New Singularity, and The Raging Pig Company, next-gen baby formula company Harmony, alternative dairy maker Rainfed Foods and precision nutrition platform Sova Health.
The event concluded with live Q&A sessions with Brinc and the portfolio startups.
Brinc’s accelerator programs were supported by 19 partners, including Artesian, Lever VC, The Good Food Institute, Lever Food, Cyberport, InvestHK and Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation.
“To the Brinc startups graduating from the recent programs, I wish you all the very best as you disrupt the comfortable and strive to make the world a better place. We at Artesian will be there with you along the journey,” Managing Partner at Artesian (Alternative Investments), Tim Heasley said during his address.
Header image courtesy of Brinc
