Blackbook University

Blackbook addresses the institutional inequities in higher education and employment, especially for Black students. By creating a space for community, peer-to-peer connection, mentorship, and organization, Blackbook promotes an equitable and inclusive experience for Black students in their college journey. Blackbook is streamlining the career process for many Black students by catering to academic enrichment and professional development.

FireQuake

Climate change has heightened natural disaster occurrence and intensity, displacing communities and exposing millions to detrimental health effects. Currently, 45 US states are at high risk of earthquakes, which don’t allow for advance warnings. Additionally, 2.2 million American homes at extreme risk of wildfire are in California. FireQuake takes the most comprehensive approach by addressing each stage in the disaster life-cycle: mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. By addressing both mental and practical aspects of disaster preparedness, FireQuake gives students a comprehensive approach to disaster response.

Belonging: Protecting the Treasures and Dignity of the Homeless

Belonging Box is solving the problem of city-mandated sweeps negatively affecting unhoused people. They offer a solution that helps both the city and unhoused individuals by offering a space for both sleep and storage. By using a scanning system and app, the city, unhoused individuals, and Belonging has a flow of communication that protects belongings from being lost. Their goal to keep streets clean while protecting and helping unhoused individuals.

Send Help (Not The Police)

Data from Californian police departments reveal that up to 2 in 3 police dispatches stem from non-violent and non-criminal incidents. 9-1-1 calls for non-violent incidents in the U.S. have led to the brutal police killings of African Americans and at-risk citizens, most notably George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and Tanisha Anderson. Send Help’s mission is to make calling an alternative first responder as easy as calling 9-1-1. They have built an AI chatbot that connects residents to suitable non-police services for their non-emergency — all within three taps of a button. They aim to reduce exposure to police for at-risk individuals, which can decrease occurrences of police violence and save lives.

KovaDx

Sickle Cell Disease is said to affect 30 million people worldwide, including 100,000 people in the United States. For most of the world, it is too expensive to diagnose, leading to unnecessary childhood deaths. Even in high-income countries, SCD is hard to monitor and even harder to treat. KovaDx provides an AI-based diagnostic and monitoring device for sickle cell and other hemolytic anemias combining 3D phase imaging with deep learning. The point-of-care device can be influential in low-resource areas by affordable and quick tests. Monitoring also aids in the process of treating and minimizing health care costs.

Catena Biosciences

Catena has developed a novel platform to create cures for diseases previously thought incurable. Catena’s groundbreaking technology enables the attachment of proteins using only native amino acids, allowing for the rapid production of exciting new protein and cell-based therapies. We plan to utilize this technology to bring massive breakthroughs in autoimmune disorders, oncology, and vaccine development.

The Mobius Project

These days, tech companies constantly have to admit that they are not fully equipped to deal with all of the ways bad actors can use their platforms or technologies to cause harm – and the ways their product can disproportionately harm particular groups of people. The Mobius Project is a knowledge and research platform that provides practical ways to incorporate abusability testing into existing product life cycles and teams, drawing from existing expertise from privacy, security, scholars, and digital activists. This platform will gather a community of people interested in combating platform abuse, tools and frameworks that product teams can integrate into their software development project life cycle, and a searchable database of platform abuses to make it easier to identify product risks.

Sundial Foods, Inc.

Meat consumption in the United States has risen in recent years, and despite a variety of activism efforts, the trend shows little sign of slowing down. The alternative meats industry seeks to provide sustainable alternatives to meat in order to provide the experience of meat consumption without the environmental cost; however, current products are expensive, highly processed, and rarely healthy. Sundial Foods’ mission is to alleviate the global environmental and public health burden of concentrated animal agriculture. Sundial Foods is revolutionizing the alternative meat industry by developing a new method for the creation of these products that relies upon a biological approach to meat structure in order to inform the creation of a product that looks, cooks, and tastes like animal chicken. The processing method in development is significantly more efficient than the methods currently used in the alternative meat industry, and makes use of whole plant ingredients rather than micronutrient-depleted protein isolates. 

Signum

Unemployment and underemployment affect roughly 70% of all Americans in the deaf community. Signum is a video chat solution created to solve this problem. Designed as a workforce development tool, Signum utilizes a machine learning model to translate video of ASL gestures to text, easing communication for people with hearing and speech impairments who can only communicate in ASL. Although several other startups are currently developing similar technologies, Signum distinguishes a gap in the market due to its emphasis on providing an inexpensive and non-intrusive means of communication targeted towards removing barriers in the workplace. Signum’s current target market is “functionally deaf” ASL users in the workforce between 18 and 35-years old. Signum will be used in conjunction with popular workforce video chat platforms such as Zoom, Google Hangouts, and Cisco WebEx to expand to a broader audience and impact millions of lives.