A month after TechCrunch watched, discussed and parsed the startups from Techstars’ April batch of virtual demo days, we’re back with the handy May edition.
Over the past few days, TechCrunch has been catching up by watching the shared video pitches from the five presenting demo classes, including the Lisbon demo day, its Seattle batch, the Los Angeles-based music-focused group, the Air Force-sponsored accelerator and the Cox Enterprises Social Impact Accelerator Powered by Techstars .
We’ve also included links to the pitch pages themselves, so you can take a peek and vet the new companies for yourself. The categories are:
- Social impact
- Lisbon
- Seattle
- Music
- Air Force
As before, we’re narrowing from a half dozen to around 10 companies in each group; what follows is our completely unscientific opinion.
“If you’re going to make a diverse world a better place, it starts with diverse innovators,” said Barry Givens, the managing director of the Cox Enterprises Social Impact Accelerator powered by Techstars, as he kicked off the new accelerator’s first demo day.
Launched in January 2020, the three-month-long program included a company creating supply chain management and distribution services for biomass-to-energy and waste-to-energy businesses; a company trying to create a better process for hiring diverse employees; and a virtual reality company giving kids access to exclusive content and tools to develop their own VR experiences. All of the companies had built interesting, early businesses, but our favorites were those providing college students with access and listings of available resources and a company that’s created an app for teaching math through music: