main-street
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Hello Alice: A good business should not need the right friends
A Houston founder could not move across the country for an accelerator. Hello Alice grew from that inconvenience into a platform for finding capital, getting advice and making fewer expensive guesses.
Baton
Baton is a New York-based online marketplace that helps owners sell their small businesses and helps buyers acquire them. It replaces the slow, opaque world of traditional business brokers with fast data-driven valuations, confidential listings, digital data rooms, and guided M&A support - achieving a roughly 70% close rate at about half the cost of conventional brokers.
Harper Insurance
Harper (YC W25) is an AI-native commercial insurance brokerage that turns the $100B+ industry of email and spreadsheets into a fully autonomous engine for Main Street America. Co-founded by Dakotah Rice and Tushar Nair — two Goldman Sachs alumni who swore they'd never work in insurance — Harper uses its internal AI platform, Harper Hub, to automate form completion, carrier matching across 160+ carriers, underwriter follow-ups, and client communications. The result: 1–2 day quotes instead of 5–7, 85% success rate on traditionally 'uninsurable' cases, 5,000+ businesses covered across 35 states, and 1,000+ customers handled per month versus 20–30 for a typical human brokerage. Backed by $54M in total funding led by Emergence Capital, Peak XV, and Y Combinator. Named after Dakotah's mother's maiden name.