Hi Neo Family,
We’re responding to the market nosedive by doubling down on early-stage startups. We’ve picked 20 new companies to fund for Neo Accelerator 2022.
More than half the CEOs we chose are women or under-represented minorities. Our acceptance rate was 3.5% for new applications, with several spots earned by existing Neo Scholars. We feel privileged and grateful to select from an exceptional pool of hundreds of talented teams.
As part of our 5-month program, each startup will receive $625K of investment, 5 weeks of all-inclusive retreats with mentors, a share of each other’s companies, and more.
Making the Accelerator Relevant Again
Since 2005, Silicon Valley has been shaped and dominated by Y Combinator, a legendary firm that pioneered one of the most impactful ideas of the 21st century: the startup accelerator. YC spawned many of the biggest companies of the past decade and inspired many imitators.
The world is different in 2022. The strongest tech founders no longer care for today’s accelerators. They face new challenges and need new solutions.
We took on the task of making the accelerator relevant to them again. We redefined the essence of a startup accelerator with an in-person residential campus; a demo day focused on hiring; and a more generous funding structure than any other.
The resulting press coverage has already set the tone for a changing of the guard:
We’re proud to back a cohort of startups that either didn’t consider any other accelerators, or rejected them when accepted to Neo. Our work isn’t over, and we’ll keep iterating to ensure that Neo remains the top choice for technical founders.
Meet our Founders
Backstage, by Princeton grads Alberto Rigail, Aryaman Khandelwal & Jorge Zreik, is a digital music discovery platform where fans can invest in unsigned musicians.
Buskana, by ex-Google APM Abdel Mahmoud & second-time founder Zahid Mahmood, eliminates festival food lines with fast pre-ordering and more.
Chord, by Sidney Hough & Kevin Liu from Stanford, facilitates intentional, contextualized introductions through trusted mutuals.
Chestr, by Besart Copa & Isaac Fung from Georgetown & U. Michigan, is a social wishlist for all online stores.
Constellation, by Stanford engineers Matthew Katz & Parker Jou, helps blockchain developers build legendary games at scale and has also raised from Sequoia Capital.
Denali, by ex-Google APM Arjun Mishra & ML Engineer Kushagro Bhattacharjee, is using natural language to improve the productivity of financial operations work.
Kangaroo is bringing the OS experience to the cloud by reimagining how we use the browser.
Moment, by former Citadel quant traders Dylan Parker & Dean Hathout, provides instant liquidity to startup shareholders who want to sell their stock.
Momento, by brothers Daniel Salib from Tesla & David Salib from Lyft, makes listening to podcasts social, starting with making it easy to save and share any moment.
Protego, by Michael Dworsky, is a trust & safety tool. Michael previously spent 3 years at Meta on election integrity, COVID misinformation, and harassment.
Photizo, by Ebenezer Obiri, Philemon Armah & Dominic Asare Mensah, is a housing and real estate marketplace for Africa that has already leased or sold 500 homes in Ghana.
Plumlock, by project fiend Ryan Lee, former Bain consultant Max Kauderer & veteran startup engineer Russell Pekala, simplifies and demystifies medical debt by using data to make it more manageable.
Rootbeer Computer, by ex-Meta engineer Evan Mays, is an IDE for deep learning, ML, and data science to free AI scientists from software engineering.
Village, by Stanford & Yale engineers John Kim, Tae Hyoung Jo, Alexander Wang & Kevin Hu, is an infrastructure layer for developers to build real-time collaboration into any app.
Other founders include Ben Brooks, Calvin Giroud, Daniel Tian, Gerardo Ascencio, Jose Antonio Murillo, Santiago Buenahora and Shubhrakanti Ganguly. There are several more startups whose founders preferred not to be announced yet (including almost all the female-led teams, by coincidence), and we can’t wait to share them with you later.
Please join us in welcoming these 20 awesome startups into the Neo Community!
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