The 4 month journey of the 18 startups of 500 Startups Batch 24 culminated on their Demo Day on February 28, 2019 at the Bestoke Co-Working Space in San Francisco. 500 Startups now boasts 10 Unicorns (companies that have a valuation greater than $1 B). In remains to be seen if any of the Batch 24 startups will make unicorn status, but for today, four have made my personal favorites. So in no particular order…

Sign Me Up!

Back Office is a SaaS accounting platform that uses human book keepers to manage the accounting for small businesses. Their secret sauce? The platform uses Artificial Intelligence and learns from the book keepers on how to categorize expenses. Best of all, their service starts at only $89 a month! As a business owner who hates accounting, sign me up!

Blockchain Made Easy

BlockVigil is a platform that helps developers create Blockchain applications. They describe themselves as the “Stripe” of Blockchain industries. What this means is that developers like myself can develop blockchain application by using their APIs instead of trying to recreate the wheel. Blockchain is pretty hot and I can see BlockVigil growing with a rise in demand for Blockchain applications.

Hmmm….What does Cash Intensive Business Mean?

Zeuss Technology describes themselves as a B2B payment solution for cash intensive businesses. “Cash Intensive Businesses” is code for the cannabis industry. Their solution gives cannabis companies the ability to do normal banking functions which is a serious challenge since cannabis is illegal under Federal Law. A company that can solve this problem will have cannabis customers beating down their door. It’s also interesting to note that John Chiang who was the former Treasury for California and who also ran for governor of California is on their board (see in the shameless selfie with myself above).

Wow, that’s a Novel Idea!

Crowdz has created a market place for companies that need to get cash for their invoices.  The invoices are valued by the credit rating of the company.  I think this concept only makes sense if you had a business and had to wait to get an invoice paid by your customer.  Instead of waiting, you can put it on Crowdz market place and an investor can buy your invoice at a lower amount.

Join 500 Startups

How well the Batch 24 companies do remains to be seen, but 500 Startups does have an excellent track record with 10 unicorns in their portfolio.

If you’re interested in joining 500 Startup, good candidates should have:

  • Balanced Team
  • Product Launched
  • Traction with Good Metrics

If your startup is interested in applying for a future batch, they are taking applications for Batch 25 here.