Tagged: b2c
30 results
Captain.tv
Captain.tv (formerly Stream Captain) is a San Francisco game studio building a new category it calls streamer-led games - free-to-play titles designed for a live streamer to host and play alongside thousands of their viewers on Twitch and YouTube. Its flagship, Stream Raiders, lets a broadcaster act as captain while the audience drops units onto a shared battlefield. Viewers buy and gift cosmetic items, and a revenue-sharing model pays creators directly. Backed by a $10M Series A, Captain.tv grew to more than 25,000 streamers and over 1.5M viewers and has paid out more than $1M to streamer partners.
ELSA, Corp
ELSA (English Language Speech Assistant) is an AI-powered English pronunciation and speaking coach built on proprietary speech-recognition technology trained on non-native accents. Founded in 2015 by Vu Van and speech scientist Xavier Anguera, the app gives learners real-time, phoneme-level feedback on how they actually sound - not just what they type. It has grown to tens of millions of users across 100+ countries and expanded from a consumer app into ELSA Business, ELSA Schools, an API, and a generative-AI conversation tool called ELSA AI Tutor.
Honey Homes
Honey Homes is a membership service that gives busy homeowners one dedicated, fully-employed handyman to handle repairs, upkeep, and small projects, all coordinated through a mobile app. Founded in 2021 in the San Francisco Bay Area, the company pairs each member with a consistent, background-checked handyman for their neighborhood and manages proactive home maintenance, on-demand fixes, and trusted vendor referrals under a single subscription.
Hornet
Hornet is a queer social network and mobile app for gay, bi, trans, and queer men, built around community, content, and connection rather than pure hookups. Launched in 2011 and led by founder and CEO Christof Wittig, the company (operating as Hornet Networks / Queer Networks) has grown to more than 30 million members, positioning itself as one of the largest gay social platforms in the world and a frequently cited competitor to Grindr.
RUTI INC.
RUTI is a women's fashion label and boutique chain founded in 2009 by Israeli-American designer and former tech executive Ruti Zisser. Built on three rules - cool, flattering, and practical - the brand designs ready-to-wear clothing, shoes, bags and accessories aimed at women over 35, and pairs its slow-fashion boutiques with a homegrown AI platform (including opt-in facial recognition and a purpose-built retail CRM) that personalizes both in-store and online shopping. Headquartered in the Bay Area with stores across California, New York, Arizona and Dallas, RUTI raised a $6M Series A in 2019 led by Viola Ventures.
Sunnyside
Sunnyside is a San Francisco-based digital health company (formerly Cutback Coach) that helps people drink less without necessarily quitting. It pairs a habit-tracking app with SMS-based human coaching, a peer community, and - via Sunnyside Med - optional telehealth prescriptions of naltrexone. Members report cutting weekly alcohol consumption by roughly a third, and the company says it has helped 600,000+ people avoid more than 24 million drinks.
ZITADEL
ZITADEL is an open-source identity and access management platform that gives developers enterprise-grade authentication and authorization without vendor lock-in. Built in Go with an API-first design and native multi-tenancy, it supports OAuth2, OpenID Connect, SAML, SCIM, passkeys, MFA and self-service flows, and can run as a self-hosted deployment or as a managed cloud service. Founded in Switzerland in 2019 and now remote-first, ZITADEL aims to make identity a foundational piece of infrastructure - like a database or a web server - rather than a barrier to shipping software.
ActivityHero
ActivityHero is a Palo Alto-based online marketplace and software platform that helps parents find, compare, and book summer camps, after-school classes, and enrichment activities for their kids - in-person, online, or on-demand. Founded in 2012 by engineers-turned-mothers Peggy Chang and Shilpa Dalmia, it also provides registration, marketing, and management software to the camps, studios, and school districts that run those programs, connecting millions of families with tens of thousands of activity providers.
ACTIVZ
ACTIVZ is a West Jordan, Utah-based health and wellness company that bills itself as the first direct-selling brand built around epigenetics - the idea that lifestyle and nutrition can influence how genes express themselves. Founded in 2017 by David Brown and Ryan Thompson, the company sells supplements (LINQ, AIRO, Optimend) and an anti-aging skincare line through a distributor network paired with an omnichannel e-commerce model. It launched first in Spanish-speaking Mexico before expanding to the US, Peru, Japan and beyond.
ANJA
ANJA (ANJA Life LLC) is a minority-owned, state-licensed adult-use cannabis dispensary in Highland Park, New Jersey. Founded by a team of New York- and New Jersey-based entrepreneurs, it opened in January 2024 as the first recreational cannabis dispensary in Highland Park. ANJA pairs a curated retail and delivery experience with an education-first mission - normalizing cannabis through reliable information, community events like ANJA Fest, and partnerships with local New Jersey cultivators. The name is a play on the cannabis synonym 'ganja' and a Sanskrit term meaning 'to manifest.'
Bookclubs
Bookclubs is a free web and mobile platform that helps book clubs organize themselves - scheduling meetings, tracking reading history, polling on the next book, sending messages, and discovering what to read next. Founded in 2015 out of one Philadelphia book club's messy email chain, it now serves hundreds of thousands of readers and monetizes through publisher and author partnerships rather than charging its members.
Butterball
Butterball is the largest producer of turkey products in the United States, selling more than 1 billion pounds of turkey a year from its headquarters in Garner, North Carolina. Jointly owned by Seaboard Corporation and Maxwell Farms, the company makes whole turkeys, turkey cuts, ground turkey, turkey bacon, sausage and deli meats for grocery, foodservice and export - and runs the Turkey Talk-Line, the Thanksgiving cooking hotline that has answered questions from anxious cooks every holiday season since 1981.
DIBS Beauty
DIBS Beauty - short for Desert Island Beauty Status - is a New York and Austin-based makeup brand built on a simple premise: fewer products, better results. Co-founded in 2021 by creator Courtney Shields and operator Jeff Lee alongside Tula Skincare's Ken Landis and Dan Reich, DIBS makes multi-use, vegan, cruelty-free essentials like its hero Desert Island Duo blush-and-bronzer stick. The brand grew primarily direct-to-consumer through Shields' social following, took growth capital from L Catterton in 2023, and expanded into Ulta Beauty in 2024. Its tagline: 'Do less. Look like you did the most.'
FavorDrop
FavorDrop is a Buffalo, New York software company that turns customer appreciation into a measurable marketing channel. Businesses send time-bound digital gifts - loaded onto a FavorDrop Discover Network prepaid card that works anywhere Discover is accepted - to customers by text or email, then track when each gift is opened and redeemed. Founded by father-and-son team Tim and Jack Sardinia in 2021, the platform started as a way to remotely buy a friend a drink and grew into a customer-engagement and rewards tool used by car dealerships, insurers, home-services firms, restaurants and staffing agencies. A patented 'bounce back' feature returns any unredeemed gift to the sender at expiration, so unclaimed budget is reused rather than lost.
FTN (For The Numbers)
FTN - short for For The Numbers - is a Las Vegas-based sports data and media company that turns advanced NFL, MLB and NBA numbers into fantasy and betting tools. Launched in 2020 (when the only live sport was Korean baseball), it now runs a network of subscription sites for season-long fantasy, daily fantasy, and sports betting, publishes articles, podcasts and livestreams, and is the new home of Aaron Schatz's DVOA metric after Football Outsiders closed. It serves both consumers who want an edge in their leagues and B2B clients who license its proprietary data.
FunCraft
FunCraft is a remote-first mobile game studio founded in 2019 by former Electronic Arts and Zynga veterans. It builds friendly word and puzzle games - led by flagship title Wordgrams and Word Yatzy - designed to become daily rituals players return to for years. The studio backs a philosophy it calls 'casual forever,' pairing rigorous live operations and ad-spend experimentation with a small, senior team. By its fifth year it had crossed 7 million installs and more than $15 million in revenue.
HerMoney
HerMoney is a digital media company founded in 2018 by longtime personal-finance journalist Jean Chatzky to give women judgment-free money guidance. It publishes the HerMoney podcast and newsletters, runs the FinanceFixx budgeting and InvestingFixx investing-club coaching programs, and partners with employers and financial institutions to close the gender wealth gap.
Indyx
Indyx is a San Francisco digital wardrobe app that lets people catalog everything they own, plan outfits, work with personal stylists, and eventually resell their clothes - all in one place. Founded by two former retail-industry insiders, it makes the opposite bet of most fashion businesses: instead of selling you the next thing, it helps you actually use what you already own. Users get a searchable digital closet with automatic background removal, cost-per-wear tracking, packing lists, and social sharing, framed around a simple idea - know what you own, love what you wear.
Ink'd Greetings
Ink'd Greetings is a Phoenix-based startup building self-service kiosks that let shoppers design, personalize and print a real greeting card - and optionally load a gift card onto it - in about 30 seconds for $2.99. Founded in 2023 by husband-and-wife team Andrew and Sammi Ekmark, the company is pitching a modern, on-demand alternative to the Hallmark-dominated card aisle, placing machines in malls, campus stores and retail partners. It has raised roughly $1M in seed funding (led by Hamid Shojaee of AZ Disruptors) and is expanding toward a nationwide footprint.
Jimmy Lion
Jimmy Lion is a New York-founded designer sock brand launched in 2014 by two Spanish MBA classmates, Felipe Cortina and Alvaro Gomis, who left banking to make original, premium-quality socks at accessible prices. Known for bold prints and licensed collaborations spanning artists and pop culture (Basquiat, Friends, Alfred Hitchcock, Jurassic World), the brand sells direct-to-consumer online and through roughly 400 multi-brand and department stores across 50+ countries, and has expanded beyond socks into tees, underwear, swimwear and slippers.
LinguaTrip
LinguaTrip is a Silicon Valley-based edtech company that helps people around the world learn English and study abroad. What began in 2015 as a marketplace for booking language-immersion trips grew into an online platform for English courses, TOEFL and IELTS exam prep, university enrollment help, and visa support. Co-founded by YouTube creator Marina Mogilko - whose linguamarina channel has millions of subscribers - LinguaTrip pairs its courses with a massive free content engine, and says it has served 160,000+ students across 25+ countries.
Marriage Pact
Marriage Pact is a research-driven matchmaking company, born as a 2017 Stanford economics class project, that runs an annual values-based questionnaire on college campuses. Instead of judging looks or swiping, students answer roughly 70 questions about their deepest values, and a stable-matching algorithm pairs each person with their single most compatible 'backup plan' on campus. Founded by Liam McGregor and Sophia Sterling-Angus, it has expanded from one campus to more than 100 schools and over 600,000 participants, and raised a $5M seed round in 2022 to keep building relationship technology.
Mustard
Mustard is a Los Angeles-area sports-tech company that puts elite athletic coaching in an app. Using AI and computer vision, it analyzes ordinary smartphone video of a pitcher's throwing motion or a golfer's swing, compares it against a decades-deep biomechanics database, and returns a report card plus a personalized drill plan. Co-founded by legendary throwing coach Dr. Tom House, the company aims to make world-class, data-driven coaching accessible to any athlete, starting with baseball and golf and expanding toward other sports.
Offcall
Offcall is a San Francisco financial and career platform built by and for physicians. Founded by Jake Horowitz and emergency physician Dr. Graham Walker (creator of MDCalc), it gives doctors free access to a verified database of compensation, call schedules, benefits and workplace culture data, plus financial resources and a peer community. The goal is to combat physician burnout by giving doctors the 'financial vital signs' they need to navigate their careers. It launched in December 2024 with $2 million in seed funding.
P00LS
P00LS is a community-first Web3 protocol that lets creators and brands launch their own cryptocurrency token, distribute it to fans, and reward on-chain engagement across platforms. Founded in 2021 by Hugo Renaudin, the company turns audiences into token-holding communities, giving creators data and tools to map, reward, and grow their most active supporters. Backers include Acrew Capital, Maveron, and Kima Ventures, and early adopters range from footballer Ronaldinho to TIME and Ed Banger Records.
PalmDrive, Inc.
PalmDrive (棕榈大道) is an education-technology company that connects students - mostly Chinese students aiming for top overseas universities - with a network of thousands of mentors who have themselves attended those schools. Founded by Stanford, Berkeley, and Harvard alumni in 2013, PalmDrive pairs one-on-one mentorship in admissions, cultural integration, and career planning with an online platform that has drawn a community of more than a million students. The company operates across China and Silicon Valley and has raised over US$10 million in venture funding.
Pogo
Pogo is a New York-based consumer data platform that pays Americans for the data they already generate. Through its free mobile app, more than 3 million opted-in users share transactions, receipts, app usage, and location visits, then choose exactly how it gets used - anonymous market research or personalized offers from trusted brands - and collect real cash 'Data Dividends' in return. In 2026 Pogo leaned into that first-party purchase data to launch what it calls the world's first AI research platform, connecting brands with purchase-verified buyers through AI-moderated interviews and surveys.
Polygence
Polygence is an online research mentorship platform that pairs ambitious high school students one-on-one with PhD-level mentors from institutions like Stanford, MIT, Harvard and Oxford to design and complete an independent research project over roughly 10 sessions. Founded in 2019 by two Stanford PhDs, Janos Perczel and Jin Chow, it turns curiosity into tangible outcomes - published papers, apps, novels, podcasts - and gives students a distinctive credential for college applications. The company now spans a network of 2,000+ mentors across 40+ fields and runs a biannual Symposium of Rising Scholars where students present their work to a global audience.
Popcorn
Popcorn is an AI-native, software-first telco that sells a single global phone plan - unlimited talk, text and data across 180+ countries with no roaming fees, delivered over eSIM for about $69 a month. Beyond connectivity, Popcorn layers AI on the line itself: screening calls, taking notes, and defending against deepfakes and SIM-swap fraud, while offering developer SDKs and APIs to add voice, messaging and phone numbers in a few lines of code. Founded in 2023 and based in New York, it argues telecom has barely changed in 25 years and rebuilds it as cloud software.
Poplin
Poplin is a nationwide app-based laundry marketplace that connects households with vetted, background-checked local 'Laundry Pros' who pick up, wash, dry, fold, and return laundry - typically within 24 hours - for about $1 per pound with free pickup and delivery. Founded in 2018 as SudShare by father-and-son duo Mort and Nachshon Fertel, the company rebranded to Poplin in 2023 and now spans 500+ cities and 8,000+ zip codes, powered by a network of over 100,000 independent Laundry Pros who work from home using their own washers and dryers.