Day: April 30, 2023

TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 takes place on September 19–21 in San Francisco and — if you don’t already know — it’s the startup world’s big tent. It draws founders, investors, CEOs, tech professionals, scientists, policy makers, researchers and entrepreneurs. It’s where you’ll find inspiration, gain knowledge, forge new relationships and discover tools to help you build your business.

Shameless, but helpful, plug: Buy your pass now for significant savings. Prices increase on May 12 at 11:59 p.m. PDT. Who doesn’t like to save money?

Pivotal partners at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023

We’re fortunate to partner with some of the startup world’s leading companies to help make magic at Disrupt. We say fortunate because they’re passionate, thoroughly engaged and hands-on. They consistently deliver highly relevant content, educational expertise, resources and connection to the event. Their participation elevates, engages and supports early-stage founders.

Our partners also come to Disrupt to connect and explore opportunities with other companies within the startup ecosystem. They form alliances, forge partnerships, and look for potential investments, and sometimes they become a startup’s new client. Be sure to make time to meet, greet and network with our partners.

Here’s an early look at just some of our partners who will be on hand to help you move your early-stage startup to the next level. We’ll announce many more in the coming weeks.

Don’t miss out on the invaluable startup insights that Dealmaker, Helm.ai, Mayfield and Visa will bring to the stage during breakout sessions. Connect with other attendees in small group roundtable sessions with LatinX Startup Alliance, Mayfield and Otter.ai.

You’ll find plenty to discover on the exhibition floor, too, with Builder.ai, DuploCloud, Hedera, InvestHK, Platform.sh, Remote Technology Services, Yatta and others showing off their latest technologies, discussing how you can engage more with their companies and offering everyone’s favorite: swag! Plus, for the second year running, JetBlue Technology Ventures will be front and center connecting with female founders at the Women of Tech(Crunch) reception.

Oh, and if that bounty isn’t enough to whet your startup appetite, check this out. Visa will hold the finals of the Visa Everywhere Initiative 2023 global competition at TechCrunch Disrupt. Stop by to meet and greet the finalists at the TechCrunch Disrupt Pavillion on the exhibition floor.

And finally, you won’t have to worry about dead device batteries while you’re at Disrupt — just plug into one of the charging stations courtesy of Brex, and you’ll be good to go.

TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 takes place on September 19–21 in San Francisco, and our partners will help make it the best one yet. Don’t forget, prices go up on May 12 at 11:59 p.m. PDT. Buy your pass now and save.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

The Wall Street Journal went under the hood of the lab-grown meat industry, also known as cultivated or cell-cultured meat, and the struggles within.

The Journal particularly homed in on what’s going on at UPSIDE Foods, which received a blessing from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration related to its process for making cultivated chicken, essentially saying it was safe to eat and making it the first company to receive this approval. Eat Just, which has been selling its product in Singapore, the first nation to approve the sale of cultivated meat, followed, getting its “thumbs-up” from the FDA in March.

WSJ’s story pays particular attention to UPSIDE Foods’ success at making small batches of its chicken product, as well as its lack of being able to produce large amounts of product at a low cost, or at even price parity with traditional meat — and to be fair, most cultivated meat companies struggle with this too.

“Initially our chicken will be sold at a price premium,” UPSIDE founder and CEO Uma Valeti told TechCrunch in November. “As we scale, we expect to eventually reach price parity with conventionally produced meat. Our goal is to ultimately be more affordable than conventionally produced meat.”

Companies in this sector make meat from animal cells that are fed growth factors. The production and pricing challenges presented in the WSJ story, however, are not new. “Is cell-culture meat ready for prime time?” wasn’t just a clever TechCrunch+ headline, but a legitimate question posed in early 2022 that still really hasn’t been answered.

Most cultivated meat stories in our archives include at least a sentence about how hard it is for companies to produce mass quantities and to create foods by this method so that the finished product is under $10 a pound.

Houston, TX, March 31, 2023 –(PR.com)– A new mom works diligently to pump, freeze, and store breast milk for her baby in order to build a supply for when she heads back to work. After three months of pumping, she finally thaws the milk and gives the first bottle, but her child spits it out and refuses to drink it. Due to high lipase or other factors affecting its taste while stored in the freezer, her milk has become essentially unusable. Months of work gone to waste, mom and baby are both in tears.

This frustrating scenario is one of many that happens over and over for new moms. Houston company Milkify, the first breast milk freeze-drying service available direct to consumers, solves that problem and many others. Milkify’s solution is so groundbreaking that it’s being featured on ABC’s hit show, “Shark Tank,” on April 7.

Berkley Luck, Ph.D., molecular biologist, new mom and founder of Milkify, says the most rewarding part of her work is to hear stories like this – and then hear from that same mom that her baby happily gulped down six ounces of freeze-dried breast milk. The same milk that baby had previously refused, now has new life thanks to Milkify’s patent-pending process. This is an actual story from one of their first clients here in Houston.

“My goal in starting Milkify was to allow moms to preserve the nutritional value of their breast milk long term,” Luck says. “It was only after starting Milkify that I realized the many other life-changing benefits of our freeze-drying process, including salvaging high-lipase breast milk. Our one-of-a-kind facility and strict quality controls allow this to happen in a safe environment that is up to the highest standards. We allow no corners to be cut and no compromises to be made when it comes to the safety and quality of our freeze-drying process for breast milk.”

Milkify gives mothers an easy and safe option to freeze-dry their breast milk, extending the life of this precious source of nutrition for up to three years. Freeze-dried breast milk powder is easy to use when parents are on the go, requires no refrigeration, and prevents nutrient degradation caused by long-time freezer storage. Since its founding in 2019, the company has saved over 500,000 ounces of breast milk from the freezer. They make it a simple process for parents with their easy-to-use shipping kits and local drop-off options, handling all aspects of breast milk logistics for their clients – a first-of-its-kind “breast milk concierge.”

After over $1M of investment and months of development, Milkify inaugurated its new flagship location in Houston in October 2022. This is the only GMP-certified processing facility in the U.S. built exclusively for the freeze-drying of human milk. Milkify is the only company with a completely contact-free process (the breast milk never contacts their equipment or utensils). Milkify’s proprietary SafeDry freeze-drying pouches allow water vapor to escape while protecting the breast milk from contamination during processing.

After freeze-drying, each bag of breast milk powder is packaged individually in order to avoid the use of packaging equipment. Trained technicians perform this transfer using sterile techniques in ISO5 cleanroom workstations. This is important because recent FDA inspections of infant formula facilities identified the presence of Cronobacter sakazakii (the same bacteria responsible for several infant formula recalls in 2022) in powder-packaging equipment. Milkify’s process allows the packaging of breast milk powder without the use of this type of equipment.

Not all freeze-drying services are the same. Given the immense effort a mother puts into saving her milk (and the consequences of improper handling), Milkify recommends they look into a service ahead of time and ask thorough questions in order to keep their baby and their breast milk safe. Services operating out of their homes – or outsourcing the freeze-drying to a processing center that also packages other types of foods (including raw meat, dairy, nuts, poultry or pet food) cannot maintain the kind of environment needed to ensure the sterile handling of breast milk. As the only company to have a completely contact-free process from start to finish, Milkify’s safety protocols are sterile, consistent and absolutely safe.

“We started Milkify to give parents a better way to store, use, and transport their breast milk,” said Pedro Silva, the co-founder and CEO of Milkify. “And while we welcome new entrants into this space, it is disappointing that not all breast milk freeze-drying services share Milkify’s commitment to safety and quality. As the string of recent formula recalls has shown us, when it comes to feeding infants – the stakes are high. That is why we urge all parents to thoroughly vet a freeze-drying service and its facilities in order to protect the integrity of their breast milk and the health of their babies.”

If you would like to set up a tour of the one-of-a-kind facility, interview co-founders Berkley Luck and Pedro Silva, or receive video of client stories/be connected to Milkify clients, please contact Jenna Jackson at P+R Creative Group at Jenna@PRCreativeGroup.com or 917 922 8146. Learn much more about Milkify at www.milkify.me.

There are oodles of advantages to having a diverse workforce, but, as inBeta founder James Nash points out, you can’t simply take your homogenous workforce, add diversity, stir and hope for the best.

Often, something subtle gets in the way of diversity at startups: Companies depend on employee referrals in the beginning, but if a startup’s makeup is already not diverse, referrals aren’t going to change that.

That’s for startups. In the world of venture capital, things are more pronounced: A warm introduction is the only way to get in front of investors at many VC funds. That’s great for people who are already hooked into the startup ecosystem, but you don’t have to look for very long to realize that this is not a very diverse group of people.

For many companies, employee referrals are one of the main ways to attract new talent. That’s all good until you stop to think who your newest hire is likely to know best. It doesn’t take many rounds through that particular mill until you end up with a relatively homogenous group of people with similar education, socioeconomic backgrounds and values.

If that’s what you’re optimizing for, great! Well done. If it isn’t, perhaps it’s time to stop being lazy and question why warm intros are still common practice.

My question has long been: What are you optimizing for by relying on referrals? If you spend some time thinking about that, I bet you’d unearth some uncomfortable unintended consequences.

Let’s talk about what we can do about it.

The situation in VC

If you read any guides about startups or raising money (including my own, although I also try to cover cold emails and cold intros), you’ll find that you need a “warm introduction” to land a meeting with a VC. Given the above parallel with hiring, that’s a problem.

Identity management used to mean making sure you had your driver’s license when you left the house, but these days it’s not so easy: Identity fundamentally underpins how we engage with the digital world, and identity services can take on many forms (and, unfortunately, abuses). I’m excited to host a TechCrunch Live event with Persona co-founder and CEO Rick Song, one of the early movers in the space, about how his company identified ID management as an opportunity.

This TechCrunch Live event takes place on Wednesday, May 10, 2023, at 12:00 p.m. PDT. Register here for Hopin access, where viewers can ask questions and network with other attendees.

Along with Rick, Index Venture’s Mark Goldberg is speaking at the event, too. Mark made a prescient move to spot and back Persona during its Series B fundraise and backed the company again for its $50 million Series C.

Rick Song co-founded Persona with Charles Yeh in 2015, and according to PitchBook, the company’s valuation is $1.5 billion as of Persona’s Series C in 2021. Since its founding, the company’s goal has remained the same: provide users with a verification system to protect and secure identity from theft and fraud. The company raised a Series B in 2021 after seeing revenues jump 10x while users increased 5x. In late 2022, Persona introduced new services, expanding beyond identify verification with the launch of à la carte tools, including a risk assessment engine, an identity workflow tool, a graph database aimed at link analysis and fraud detection, and a marketplace for external developers to help connect their business tools to Persona’s identity tools.

I hope you can join this TechCrunch Live event. Rick and Mark are set to provide actionable insights on how companies can better protect users, and how founders, building such services, can stand out among their competitors.

REGISTER HERE FOR FREE

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Generative AI isn’t just about creative endeavors and parlor tricks. Investors and Big Tech alike are betting that it will also affect enterprise infrastructure and cybersecurity, and they are putting money where their mouth is. — Anna

Dev tools plus generative AI

Y Combinator Demo Days are a strong indicator of the trends investors might be interested in — and that’s one of the main reasons why TechCrunch always watches them pretty closely. In its Winter 2023 batch, three areas stood out, the accelerator said: “open source, dev tools and AI.”

Dev tools startups in that batch drew particularly strong interest among investors, with four of them raising additional funding just weeks after Demo Day, Insider reported. AI-related startups, on the other hand, were very popular with founders, representing 34% of the winter cohort.

While these areas can be looked at separately, I’m more interested in how they might overlap, so I called up Israeli VC Rona Segev to see what she had to say — not only because Israel has positioned itself as a hotspot for dev tools, but also because almost half of her portfolio involves AI in some form.

Segev, the co-founder and managing partner of VC firm TLV Partners, thinks that generative AI could lead to innovative ways for companies to explore and manage their infrastructure.

Atlantic City, NJ, April 04, 2023 –(PR.com)– The New Jersey Heroes, the newest professional sports team in Major League Cornhole, are excited to announce their upcoming tryouts for the 2023 season. The “combine” will be held at the Showboat Resort in Atlantic City, NJ on April 22 and 23. The tryouts are open to anyone who wants to showcase their skills and earn a spot on the team.

“We can’t wait to host the tryouts for our team and have the opportunity to see the amazing talent of cornhole players in the area,” said Ralph D’Alessandro, one of the team owners. “We look forward to building a strong team that will bring the championship title home to New Jersey.”

Co-owner Rich Lauletta also expressed excitement about the upcoming tryouts, saying, “We’re excited to see what players will bring to the table. This is an opportunity for players to show their skills and become a part of something that’s going to be big!”

While the tryouts will be held for two days, attendees only need to attend one day to try out. The typical tryout should last an hour, but players are welcome to stick around and enjoy the festivities. The combine promises to be a fun and exciting event, featuring food and drinks, a beer garden, vendors, merchandise, games, and more.

“We want the combine to be an experience that everyone can enjoy, whether they’re trying out for the team or just supporting their friends and family,” said Lauletta. “We’re excited to bring together the cornhole community in New Jersey and celebrate this amazing sport.”

The combine will take place at the Showboat Resort, which has been transformed into a state-of-the-art cornhole arena for the Heroes’ home games. The venue offers a unique and exciting atmosphere for fans and players alike, with plenty of seating, food and drink concessions, and a lively energy that is sure to enhance the tryout experience.

“We’re thrilled to partner with the New Jersey Heroes and host the combine at the Showboat Resort,” said Showboat Resort VP of Marketing, Josh Allison. “Our commitment to providing unforgettable entertainment options to our guests and visitors is only strengthened by this exciting new addition.”

Don’t miss your chance to showcase your cornhole skills and earn a spot on the New Jersey Heroes team. Register now for the combine and join in on the fun and excitement.

You can get your tickets to the tryouts here: https://njheroes.ticketleap.com/combine/

For media inquiries, please contact:
Support@njheroescornhole.com
www.NJheroescornhole.com