Just Products #5: Ventures that should be backed, highlighted.
Deisola, Corle, SAHA, Subsoccer, Untuvia, Hyperion Robotics, and Singa. Feat. Curious Talent, Reverlast and ReBL Eats
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It’s Slush week, so here’s a list of startups and, in the end, a take on why it doesn’t contain any AI-native solutions (yet).
Headlines in this post:
Ventures that should be backed.
Corle - “Oura for Clinical Sleep apnea diagnosis.”
Deisola - “Fiver / Upwork for DEI consulting”
SAHA - Making Competitive Sports Coaching Accessible.
Subsoccer - Making the Bench the Best Place in Sports.
Untuvia - Addressing the down-feather recycling issue.
Hyperion Robotics - “The Tesla of the construction industry”
Singa - “Spotify for Karaoke”
Talent to shape the future of the planet
The AI application-level solutions
Ventures That Should Be Backed
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The following list consists of people who founded companies I’ve spent some time getting to know or worked with while thinking the problem domain is essential to solve. They represent problems that can and should be solved, while any AI application to deal with the issue is secondary. Most are raising or in need of a spotlight at this point.
To elaborate on the list, I’m still placing AI application-level solutions in a separate box, as the space moves so fast, and I haven’t combed my intuition by studying enough to keep up with the pace. I work with intuition; I’m not listing the market sizes of these ideas, their revenue stage, or how long they’ve been at it; everyone has an angle, and the whole makes sense in my head. None of them will survive with the cash alone, but there is a clear path to success when you know what experience and network they lack.
Additionally, regarding the Finnish economy, I don’t think we currently need more “white-collar solutions.” We need companies building products that require expertise from across the board, from factory floors to domain experts, in addition to a whole new wave of AI knowledge experts, but the former needs to come before the latter.
Furthermore, I haven’t yet encountered many companies solving problems with AI that you couldn’t solve before. Still, I’m working with one in stealth who’s using AI to do things very differently than they’ve been done before, making the industry more inclusive by achieving more with less.
Corle
Corle is “Oura for clinical sleep apnea diagnosis”. Oura paved the way for wearables in health. In this growing market, and to Oura’s disadvantage, clinical sleep apnea diagnosis cannot be made without the position of the head, even if you have clinically acceptable data on blood oxygen saturation levels. It so happens that the best place to collect this data is from the ear, where you also get the position of the head.
Peik’s been at it for long enough and has finally been able to assemble a team and advisors to handle the challenges from inception to Go-to-market, with a clear path on how to get there—spending 5 months with him after we both left Smartly.io at the same time, you know the man has been born to operate in founder mode.
He pinged me the other week that he needed a high-grade pitch video for an accelerator program made in three days. I teamed him up with our friends at Sky Production, and we finished in one. Here’s the pitch.
Peik is seeking a seed to conduct clinical trials for the product. As those familiar with medical hardware know, you’ll need a few million to get started.
Deisola
A macro trend is that organizations increasingly rely on freelancers for knowledge work and embed it as part of their talent strategies; this is described well in the book Open Talent—Leveraging the Global Workforces to solve your biggest problems. The way to cater to this trend and win the space of freelancer platforms is to own niches. The DEI consulting space is a niche not yet catered to but is still in demand by both parties on either side of the market.
Deisola was founded by Chisom Udeze, whom we interviewed in Just Thoughts Podcast #7. It is her seventh venture. I spent some time with deidei last spring, aiming to understand the DEI space and its challenges while educating myself on topics of DEI, as explained in Just Thoughts #3- Through that work, I found that Chisom and the network, as well as the current trusting brand Diversify, has among practitioners in the field would have the best defensible mount in an otherwise easily replicable business model.
This is not your typical venture play, but it's a perfect opportunity for anyone specializing in the marketplace and angels wanting to support and learn more about the DEI space.
SAHA - Training
Featured in Just Thoughts #25, SAHA training captures an existing community of pro athletes and makes the experience of practicing with the best attainable by anyone. Not being a tech-native business, turning it into one is a struggle. Still, if Chisom can do six firms and a few different ones around the same community, there is no reason SAHA can’t do the same with a suitable kickstart to their tech journey.
They will keep at it until they get it right. No matter how long it takes.
Subsoccer
The third Just Thoughts interview featured Jarno Saarinen, the founder of Subsoccer. Few ideas are ubiquely pervasive in the face of time while being powerful because their time has arrived. Subsoccer makes for a game that grows the soccer industry, prolongs soccer players’ careers, is a healthy activity while being fun, and helps clubs engage fans meaningfully while providing partner visibility.
This is a novel idea that grows the industry without cannibalizing it. It’s so good that people can’t believe it’s true. It’s just one of those ideas where you wonder, why did someone in Finland develop this idea?
Untuvia
Teemu Shared his story as the first guest pen in Just Thoughts #34. When only 1% of any valuable material is recycled, there’s a 99% chance a business can be created out of it and 100% reason to try to solve this issue. Looking to raise a seed round to tackle the challenge of down-feather recycling, Teemu is looking for investors who believe in his mission at Slush.
Hyperion Robotics
Tesla is likely a bad comparison as its IP is the shape, printing method, and blend of concrete, not the robot that does the printing. Nonetheless, they're trying to solve something in a space where our planet desperately needs revolutionization. It also bridges the gap between high-tech and the construction industry, the two pillars of economic growth.
Interviewing the CTO and Co-Founder Ashish Mohite in Just Thoughts podcast #6, you truly understand how hard it is to get ahead in the industry and how big of a cultural disposition they’ve had to operate from. The market and the problem are so big that they have the tenacity to deal with it. Getting a Series in Funding to match the funding they’ve gotten from public entities shouldn’t be an issue.
Singa
Singa “Spotify for Karaoke” is the backbone of the startup afterparties in Finland. There aren’t many industries you’re surprised that they haven’t been digitized. The karaoke industry is one. It’s also the only way the music industry will see growth in the traditional terms without trying to enter new markets like Africa.
There are quite a few technicalities to the industry that make it hard for others to enter the market, and Singa has a headstart unlike any you’ll be coming across anytime soon. The technicalities are that karaoke tracks are under different licenses than streamed tracks, and the UX design needs to be entirely different for simply listening to music or using something free like YouTube.
Spending 1,5 years with the company, it took a while to learn the nuts and bolts, but to me, it’s always been a simple factor of “when,” not “if” they’ll find the growth in traction. The trigger is likely the right geographical market, combined with unlimited content access, as the technology to create karaoke tracks on “auto-pilot” already exists, thanks to the rapid growth of AI capabilities.
Regardless of whether the entertainment business is of interest, the most epic parties will take place at Slush, wherever Singa is hosting them. Like in Apollo on the evening of Day 1.
Talent to shape the future of the planet
I have a personal connection to the companies listed above, and many more like them exist (companies I feel a personal connection with). However, I'd like to highlight a few more distant ones because I know AI will innovate and substitute my domain expertise quite effectively. Regardless of what I choose to do in the future, we all still need a planet to live on.
The work started by Curious Talent, Reverlast, and REBL Eats is worth highlighting for different reasons, including its connection to the spirit of sustainability and circular economy.
Curious Talent - Helping people transition to the sustainability space. In recruitment, you need to niche down, and as a playbook, start for something that is a consultancy business as first Curious Talent has used the modern playbook: start a media first and capture the audience's attention before building a tech solution.
They are looking for a seed round, and to scale their successful start, give them a look. Check them out if you want a more “impactful job.”
If you’re not looking to be employed, you can start your venture like the team at Reverlast, which aims to recycle windmills. Ever wonder what it takes to get rid of those sizeable rotating energy windmills we’re keen on building for sustainability? Reverlast has, and they plan to give them a new life as saunas or bridges.
Increasing the demand for products made from recycled waste decreases the demand for concrete. Solving climate crises is a wicked problem, so we need more wicked solutions like this.
Finally, nothing beats a good brand, and the serial founder, a dropout physicist, built REBL Eats. This is just a remarkable feat and something we need more of—more remarkable brands that give a bland product its uniqueness.
Now that you’ve considered all of these options. Let’s talk about AI.
The AI application-level solutions
Unless you’re Elon Musk, who’s gone late into the foundation-level development of AI and effectively appointed himself the Chief AI officer of the U.S.A. by first acquiring Twitter, then building the most potent center for training AI, and using his platform to endorse the next president fully, let’s say you’re late in the game.
Your only chance is to hop on to quantum computing or something that will put NVIDIA out of the chipmaking business by making them obsolete, like Vaire Computing, highlighted by
.However, you can capture value in the AI domain's application layer, and getting it done is not a magic trick. You need to be quick. The recipe for success is well-described by
here;The Startup Ministers also discuss “the big glaring white hole” where application layer solutions should be populated in their analysis of the “Startup Struggle” Survey made by Slush;
Software is eating software at speeds never seen before, making existing communities and established brands more attractive investment opportunities. For example, Deisola was built around Diversify and SAHA’s existing training community. AI is just a tool to quickly create an application-level solution around that brand with the right expertise and capital. Still, what sort of solutions make sense as a commercial category that would get obliterated with the next iteration of foundation model capabilities?
With AI hallucination being more accurate than human-level memory, getting expert advice “from someone” will likely hold value long enough for you to build a business around it, as you can build a moat around brands and knowledge. As a startup entrepreneur, you constantly seek wisdom from “the best” or “the expert”. In other jobs, you’re also looking to get sparring help from a peer, but they are unavailable, or you’re looking for feedback from a specific audience.
Hence, among the many application-level solutions working through a workflow with specific guidance provided by trained AI, with a certain quality to the data and feedback from a crowd on the output, will yield enough value to create a defensible moat if you get the UX & UI right.
The question is, will the most valuable application-level solutions be new businesses or extensions to the existing ones? We will have to dwell on this question in future editions of Just Products.
My problem with not being able to list AI startups is mainly that in my network, I only have a handful of people working in the space, so my mental model of who and what a great founder in this space looks like is a question mark. Since I know I’m only an amateur, using myself as the benchmark isn’t the way to go.
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