Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #8

There are 6 startups in this thread. The initial order is random:

AlgoUniversity (YC S21) - Job-driven virtual education hub for engineering students - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28233917

Enerjazz (YC S21) - Battery swapping stations for EVs and e-rickshaws - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28233919

Astek Diagnostics (YC S21) - Determine antibiotic treatment in one hour - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28233918

DigiBuild (YC S21) - Construction software powered by blockchain - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28233920

Karbon Card (YC S21) - Corporate credit cards for Indian Startups and SMBs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28233924

Sequin (YC S21) - Debit card that builds credit for women - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28233922

Every year, 1.7 million Americans are evaluated for sepsis - and too many die while waiting days for the correct antibiotic. Imagine a one-day-old baby having to wait twice as long as they have been alive to receive accurate treatment. Or a cancer patient with bad immunity receiving 3 random antibiotics that might or might not work. This is a huge problem and I had an idea on how to fix it.

Every product in the market relies on identifying the bacteria to know what kills it. We thought, why care what the antibiotic is if you know what is killing it? We can do that by detecting the metabolic rate of the bacteria rather relying on phenotypic or genotypic methods--and, believe it or not, by mimicking the digestive system of mosquitoes.

I have a PhD in mechanical engineering with a focus on blood mechanics. Prior to my PhD I did customer discovery for 7 years. One day (my first day on a jet ski!) I got attacked by mosquitoes and had to rush home. The next day I went to the lab where I got bit by a mosquito again. I looked at the bite and noticed a sparkle on the bite spot. I looked it up and realized it was my blood plasma because mosquitoes urinate the plasma after digesting the red blood cells. This is exactly what I had been trying to do for years. I mimicked the digestive system of the mosquito and I got the missing piece of the product.

Astek’s first product will be the Eugris, a benchtop analyzer that can identify the presence of a bacterial infection in the blood and then perform antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST) of the bacterium in one hour. To accomplish this, a microfluidics device removes the blood cells from the plasma that would contain bacteria and adds resazurin, a fluorescence indicator. These steps take 25 minutes. In the presence of live bacteria, resazurin is reduced to resorufin, which is higher in fluorescence, by reacting with NADH, a ubiquitous intermediate in the metabolic process. The sample is monitored fluorometrically for 15 minutes, and metabolic activity is shown by an increase in fluorescence. The technique has been shown capable of detecting bacterial infection at a level of 10 CFU/mL (colony-forming-units). Antibiotic susceptibility can be assessed by incubating the plasma with antibiotics, where ineffective antibiotics fail to reduce metabolic activity while effective antibiotics diminish metabolic activity.

We have a prototype in testing in a clinical setting. Our initial target market will be clinical labs tasked with performing diagnostic tests for patients suspected of sepsis or septic shock. For these patients, rapid initiation of the correct antibiotic therapy is crucial: every hour of delay increases mortality by 7-8%. Currently, the gold standard for AST relies on blood culture, and takes 2-7 days to deliver results to the clinician. Most patients don't have that long.

I grew up in construction with my dad and saw first hand the issues companies face everyday. The building process involves 50-100 stakeholders (ie. suppliers, contractors, architects) who suffer from low margins and work on projects that fail 70% of the time. Large builds create upwards of 750,000 documents. It is very complex and costly to manage them.

For every physical construction process that occurs, an “intangible asset” like a workflow or piece of data is created as well. Current software solutions offer some efficiency but fall short because they’re centralized databases or data silos with no transparency. From a risk management perspective, each construction stakeholder needs to review, verify, or otherwise build trust manually to make sure they’re protected (i.e. let me double check that document so I know you didn’t screw me over). The trust established with blockchain allows us to codify many of those processes and touch points, making them automated and giving more line of sight to construction teams. This is possible because unlike a centralized database, the blockchain is not owned/monopolized by any party and it is auditable so transactions can be verified by all the stakeholders. This meets their risk management requirements to do business.

We have multiple tools solving customer pain, including a construction management platform for managing any project workflow; a procurement product to find, order, and track building material; and a payment product to streamline the collection of payment documentation and disbursements. Without blockchain, these workflows involve suppliers, subcontractors, general contractors all sending contracts, invoices, and data sheets back and forth. This is manual trust-building which adds time, costs, and risk. Using smart contracts allows us to codify these processes, automating 90% of them for all of the parties and providing more transparency.

Our team has managed over $5B in construction projects. I’m also the former CEO of a nationwide construction company and our engineering team has worked on projects alongside Coinbase, IBM, Iota, and Linux.

We would love to hear from you and hear feedback. We’re especially excited to be challenged and to brainstorm around our use of blockchain in this market - we know HN has a wide spectrum of views on that, on both sides of the ledger!

We came across this problem separately while Amit was doing VC and Sunil was running his own fintech. We saw that a startup with $1M in the bank was facing mind-numbing issues in getting a card with a $5k limit. After speaking to finance managers in other companies of all ages and sizes, we realized the problem was massive. Seeing Brex at the same time growing so quickly gave us the kick to go out and figure out a way to solve this issue.

Before Karbon card, our customers were either using personal cards for company's card expenses or put a fixed deposit at a bank to get an equivalent credit limit on a card. Both options are painful in the long run: using personal cards leads to compliance issues, and putting a fixed deposit for a card locks your growth capital. Since we are a free product (we make money on interchange fees) and onboarding is simple, it is better to get a no-hassle corporate card from us.

Today we have a solution wherein a company completes a 10 minute application process and gets access to a virtual credit card right away. We are known across India’s startup community for quick card issuance (10 minutes vs 5 weeks), 10x higher credit limits compared to banks, and self-serve controls that help reign in unnecessary spending. We’ve also launched a vendor payment product that makes banking less cumbersome moving towards our longer term vision of becoming the only financial product a company would need to run it’s business aka India’s first corporate Neo bank.

Companies today use our product to run their marketing campaigns, infrastructure spends, pay SaaS vendors and take care of employee reimbursements. We work with clients who are as young as 2 weeks old to publicly listed companies in India. That alone shows the depth of the problem and the need for a company like us to help make corporate spending easier--it is the last thing a company should be blocked on.

Some of our customers are creatively using our card in ways that we have not even imagined. Our customer, Rajat, runs a marketing agency, and he issued himself 120 Karbon cards. He gave these cards to his clients and asked them to top up their cards to run Facebook ads. Another customer, Akshay, uses his card and payment product to process salaries and make vendor payments.

Please share your thoughts and questions and comments!

I could imagine that this is a problem that women may not realise until it's "too late" – when they get to opening that credit card or applying for a mortgage. While Sequin would help address that situation if used in advance, is there anything that can be done at the point that it's already too late?