Startup Spotlight Founders
Meet the 12 Building Momentum Startup Spotlight founders and their teams, all creating solutions to complex problems across various industries.
Bumpa
The Bumpa cofounders met over a decade ago at Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) in Osun, Nigeria. Having both built popular software products on campus, they started working together and, in 2020, piloted Bumpa to help take African SMBs online amidst the global pandemic.
Bumpa officially launched in 2021, and powers digital commerce for millions of small businesses in Africa, where commerce is still heavily fragmented, and business owners are disenfranchised from digital and financial solutions. Bumpa gives African small business owners an easy way to sell online, manage their everyday operations, and engage their customers – all from their mobile phones.
Card.io
Amidst the pandemic, Card.io founder Destin Bell found a lack of fitness products that made solo, outdoor cardio activities fun. Passionate about creating something that fills the void, he moved to Austin, Texas, to work on Card.io. With his cofounder Max Miranda, Card.io is building for those who love cardio or want to love it by creating the most rewarding way to go outside.
Card.io is a gamified movement app turning outdoor cardio into a community-based game of team turf war. Card.io is now helping people in 50+ countries learn to love cardio.
CModel
As an executive with over two decades of experience with high-growth companies, Teasha Cable partnered with Jazmine Cable-Whitehurst to combine their expertise in business growth, analytics, and product development to change how businesses make decisions.
Across companies and industries, the team saw the same repeated trends: playmakers would lack the real-time information to evaluate growth, leaving them unable to make informed decisions on actions to take.
Consulting wasn’t scalable, so Teasha and Jazmine developed CModel, a comprehensive decision intelligence SaaS solution that enabled more leaders to obtain the insights they need to grow their businesses.
Fleri
The idea for Fleri, a global health marketplace for migrants seeking care for loved ones overseas, came from founder Sam Baddoo’s personal grief when he lost his grandmother who fell sick in Ghana.
Healthcare delivery in emerging markets is a complex issue, with challenges ranging from affordability to quality to access. With 1-in-9 people living in Low- or Middle-Income Countries depending on a relative abroad to support their basic needs, Fleri saw an opportunity to channel global remittances into direct healthcare access for those same dependents. This reduces the financial burden for immigrants supporting loved ones abroad by driving efficiency, transparency, and accountability for their hard-earned dollars.
Kadeya
Years ago, Manuela Zoninsein began wondering, “Why do we manufacture a new container every time someone consumes a beverage?” Kadeya aims to eliminate single-use beverage containers forever while ensuring the same quality, convenience, and superior cost compared to the status quo.
Kadeya is the world’s first closed-loop beverage vending system. Kadeya’s patent-pending kiosk washes, sanitizes, inspects, and refills bottles, combining a bottling plant with a dishwasher and a soda fountain in a unit the size of a vending machine.
Kadeya’s focus is providing hydration solutions for the industrial workforce, for whom hydration is critical to performance and safety, and for whom the costs of single-use beverages (financial, health, and environmental) disproportionately impact.
Matchplicity
Matchplicity co-founder Lauren Burke Silva spent a decade at a professional membership organization and experienced firsthand the struggle to generate non-dues revenue while managing lean teams and competing priorities. She also realized the unique access she had to a built-in community of niche (and often diverse) talent, and the relationships she had with major corporations who wanted to hire from my talent community.
Together with her husband Jovan Silva, Lauren built Matchplicity, which enables professional membership organizations to mobilize and monetize their communities of niche professional talent (with DEI in mind) and deliver them directly to hiring companies through their matchmaking platform.
Scripted
Spun out of a graduate school business competition, Scripted aims to solve the massive provider shortage that may cause a crisis in our healthcare system by 2034. Scripted is the first marketplace that connects patients needing same-day care for common conditions with local in-person pharmacy providers that can prescribe.
The Scripted platform enables the mobilization of pharmacists to provide direct patient care for better, faster, and cheaper access to healthcare for the 99%.
TeeRead
Teaching and learning English hasn’t changed since TeeRead founder Trini Bensusan Mille was a teacher in 2010. TeeRead is leveraging AI and speech recognition to disrupt this $56B market and help the 1.8B kids worldwide learn how to read and speak English.
For elementary schools and parents worldwide that don't have access to native English-speaking teachers, TeeRead provides an automated English reading and speaking coach that accelerates students' outcomes.
TeeRead also diagnoses a student's English reading and speaking abilities automatically in minutes, providing students with a personalized library of books at their specific reading level, and delivering coaching sessions with live feedback that help students continuously improve.
Trez
Trez CEO and Cofounder Arthur Garcia grew up in the family restaurant business, where he helped with the back office work of payroll and bookkeeping. Continuing on that journey, he spent 17 years working in the payroll and accounting technology industry, where he recognized a large underserved market – the US Latino market.
Trez cofounders Arthur Garcia and Gustavo Suarez first met in 2019 when they both participated in the Stanford SLEI-Ed Program and in 2022, leveraged their combined industry experience to launch Trez, an all-in-one solution to help businesses with payroll, taxes, and benefits.
WEST X EAST
WEST X EAST's mission is to elevate cultural expression. The core principle of the WEST X EAST business was founded on providing a service for third-culture kids like its cofounders Tania Kottoor and Liya Thachil, both products of two cultures. Tania and Liya strive to retain the traditions passed down to them by our immigrant parents, much of which lies within clothing.
WEST X EAST provides a seamless clothing design and purchasing experience that is transparent, reliable, and accessible. The modern yet cultural outfit(s) are then produced in a smart factory: zero waste, zero human error, zero inventory, and with as fast as 1 week turnaround time.
Wisy Platforms
The CPG industry loses $1T annually due to out-of-stocks because shelf-level data is inaccurate and store visits are labor intensive. Wisy's proprietary computer vision and predictive analytics platform enables field personnel to automate store audits and gain rich novel data at the shelf level.
Unlike other solutions that run in the cloud and are not operational in stores with poor connectivity, Wisy’s on-device AI allows users to process data without an internet connection. The app processes data and produces results in milliseconds without connecting to the internet. Users get in-flight analytics regardless of where they are in the store.
Wiz Kid Learning
Founder and CEO Kyla Bolden founded Wiz Kid Learning to equip children everywhere with the technical and future-focused skills they need to pursue their passions and succeed in the ever-evolving job market.
Wiz Kid Learning offers a B2B online educational platform and community that offers K-12 children immersive, social, and interest-based coding and technology courses. Wiz Kid Learning offers customized learning environments for its partners, including branding sign-up pages, course catalogs, student tracking tools, integrated videos, student accounts, and administrative accounts. Wiz Kid Learning’s courses are social and project-based, which makes them engaging and accessible for learners of a variety of learning styles.