In our October digest we’ve collected a list of startups that are bringing disruptive innovations in terms of technologies and industries. Jua, Cityswift, Sensat, Factorial, Bumpa, Ludenso, IriusRisk, and Minerva Lithium empower B2B markets, offering new processes, technical solutions and sustainable services. The list includes great newbies in the stage of Pre-seed, Seed, and A funding that are already showing incredible results, as well as established players that have changed the rules.
TechCrunch Disrupt 2022 winner
Minerva Lithium
TechCrunch Disrupt is an annual startup competition. Over two days, startups make their pitches to the judges’ panel for a chance to win a money prize and a cup. This year’s winner is Minerva Lithium, which has produced the Nano Mosaic membrane filter system that allows for critical materials extraction from non-traditional water resources.
Extracting lithium is time-consuming, expensive and damaging to the environment. This element is the crucial ingredient in lithium-ion batteries, the kind used in Teslas and iPhones. Minerva Lithium invented a clean technology to extract it more efficiently. Scientists say they can extract one metric ton of lithium from 30,000 gallons of water in three days. The startup is aiming its pitch to battery manufacturers, lithium manufacturers and chemical companies.
Artificial Intelligence, weather and climate
Jua
Country: Switzerland
Founding date: 2022
Jua provides an AI-powered platform to better predict and understand weather patterns. The weather prediction model has a coverage of 1 square kilometer every 5 minutes and can predict more than 15 parameters, including precipitation, air pressure, wind speed and wind direction. Some regions have resolution up to 250 square meters, while the model is updated every 15 minutes. This makes it possible to forecast extreme events more precisely.
Global weather patterns are becoming more and more unpredictable due to climate change. Weather-based events such as floods, periods of drought, winter storms or extreme heat have a huge impact on society and businesses. Jua’s data-driven platform offers accuracy far beyond the existing tools, meaning higher spatial resolution and higher temporal resolution through millions of sensors.
The platform contains a large set of weather and geospatial data and allows for building customized weather models. Jua has hubs in Zurich, Berlin and Cape Town. Jua has raised $2.5 million in a Pre-Seed funding round to expand its business reach and open access to a wider audience.
Artificial Intelligence, transportation
Cityswift
CitySwift offers a Mobility Intelligence as a Service platform for the public transport industry. The platform, based on data and AI, analyzes factors such as traffic, routes, passenger numbers and other external factors, and improves decision-making. Through a number of dashboards, users can investigate all the critical points, follow driver performance, and forecast demand.
CitySwift aims to bring sustainability to public transportation and improve resilience against the effects of fuel hikes, driver shortages and Covid-19 consequences. The company already operates in the UK, Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. It has raised €5 million in a series A funding round for new product development, for example the Evolve module for scenario planning of AI bus timetabling and movement pattern simulation.
This year CitySwift partnered with New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority for a one-year pilot program. The project aims to improve the passenger experience and reduce carbon emissions by optimizing the public transport network and passenger capacity predictions.
Artificial Intelligence, software
Sensat
Country: UK
Founding date: 2015
Sensat is a digital twin technology company that offers Infrastructure as a Service to the construction, mining, energy, and similar industries. The company’s software assists in planning and managing infrastructure projects, assessing risk, predicting outcomes and optimizing efficiency on all stages of the project, starting before construction even begins. The core idea is to help companies to deliver projects on time and within budget and to make the whole process sustainable.
Companies can map and visualize all the data gathered from sensors attached to assets, wearables, satellites, lidar and drones, and use publicly available datasets such as traffic. The software can parse real-time insights into what is happening on the ground.
Recently, the Sensat M25 project won high marks in the National Highways Industry Awards for workforce health and safety. M25 is a collaborative project with Connect Plus and Osborne Infrastructure to digitally map the road network.
Sensat has closed a $20.5 million Series B round of funding. Using financing, the company plans to cover infrastructure projects spanning the energy, telecommunications, and rail sectors and extend into new markets such as the US.
Human Resources
Factorial
Country: Spain
Founding date: 2016
Factorial offers an HR management platform for small and medium businesses. The platform automates recruiting, onboarding, absence management, payroll, and time tracking, and makes it possible to reduce time spent on repetitive administrative tasks. Small companies can use insights and metrics to foster a people-first approach and make more effective decisions.
Factorial has closed a $120 million Series C funding round. Its value has been raised to $1 billion, making the company a European unicorn. The company is planning to work on product depth, add new features, and scale operations in the markets of the UK, Spain, the US, Germany, Italy, Portugal, France, Mexico, and Brazil.
Together with a group of 9 startups in Spain, it has founded EsTech, a platform facilitating technology development and digital transformation in the country and aiming to contribute to the economy, environment, and labor market.
Business management, e-commerce
Bumpa
Country: Nigeria
Founding date: 2021
Small and medium businesses in Africa still employ many manual processes that hinder their growth and scale. Bumpa offers the solution—a social commerce and retail automation platform. The idea behind Bumpa was to create a connecting platform that would unite social media, payments, invoicing, logistics and marketplace apps in the African market, offering small business owners a one-click solution to manage processes, handle daily operations and facilitate efficient transfer of information.
Bumpa allows users to create a business website, issue invoices, accept payments, manage inventory, record sales, receive financial reports and manage all business operations and engage customers. The app has integration with Meta, connecting the company’s Instagram and Facebook accounts to Bumpa and enabling it to receive messages from customers and respond via the app. Thanks to this integration, the seller can sell products, share receipts, record sales, request payments and store clients’ information in the app, all without requiring the buyer to leave Instagram or Facebook. The next integrations planned will include WhatsApp, Messenger and Google My Business.
Bumpa has raised $4 million as a Seed funding round. The team is planning to expand its product offerings across the African market and embed digital commerce solutions for small and medium businesses.
Education, Augmented Reality
Ludenso
Country: Norway
Founding date: 2018
Ludenso offers an AR solution for the educational industry. Publishers can add AR elements to their textbooks using an intuitive drag-and-drop interface and a huge library of existing 3D models. Students can get access to interactive elements via the Ludenso Explore app, just by holding a phone under the book.
The company partners with various educational Scandinavian institutions, including the University of Oslo, and a number of academic publishers such as Aschehoug, SAGE and PG Online. The platform aims to enhance the learning process and increase student engagement while reading traditional materials. AR elements, embedded videos, links, and audio enable users to learn about things that are hard to visualize, for example how the heart pumps and how earth’s geomagnetic fields work.
Ludenso has raised $1 million as a Seed funding round. It is planning to scale throughout Europe, reach more students, and partner with more academic publishers. The team aims to transform educational content, enabling publishers and teachers without technical knowledge to create and deploy AR-powered material.
Cybersecurity
IriusRisk
Country: Spain
Founding date: 2015
IriusRisk offers a platform for automated threat modeling for secure product design and development. The company is a technical member of the ISA Security Compliance Institute, which means it has access to the library of Threats, Weaknesses and Countermeasures for companies to achieve certification.
Threat modeling can help identify all types of threats that may harm software. Using an automation engine and security standards libraries, the platform generates a full list of flaws and suggests measures to fix them. It makes it possible to avoid delays to deployment and speed up time-to-production, as well as saving costs. The platform also allows for importing code from AWS CloudFormation, HashiCorp Terraform and Microsoft Visio, and automatically generates a diagram and threat model for this code. For the moment, IriusRisk clients are financial services companies, FinTech, HealthTech and B2B software builders.
IriusRisk has raised $29 million in Series B funding to expand its engineering and customer support teams in Spain, the UK and the US, and also to explore the Asia-Pacific region. The company sees Web3 and blockchain-based technologies as some potential areas for threat modelling.
