techstars
(12)
Propio starts where the tax return ends
The Seattle startup puts tax forms at the heart of bookkeeping. Its bigger bet is that an accountant with better information can become a small business owner’s most useful adviser.
The Generator You Can Run in the Bedroom
A father-and-son engineering team wants to replace the gas generator with a box that makes hydrogen from powder and water - quiet enough to sit next to a CPAP machine.
The Startup That Turned 2,300 College Newspapers Into One Checkout
A former college newspaper editor got tired of cold-calling campuses one at a time. So he built the switchboard - and turned 2,300 student media outlets into a single ad buy for brands chasing 20 million students.
Techstars
Techstars is a global pre-seed investor and startup accelerator founded in Boulder, Colorado in 2006. It runs three-month, mentorship-driven accelerator programs that give early-stage founders capital, a dense mentor network, and lifelong connections in exchange for equity. Since its first class in 2007, Techstars has backed more than 10,000 founders across programs in dozens of cities and 150+ countries, producing companies such as SendGrid, DigitalOcean, ClassPass, PillPack and Remitly.
Joonko
Joonko was an Israeli-founded, AI-powered diversity recruiting platform that promised talent-acquisition teams automated access to pre-vetted candidates from underrepresented groups - women, people of color, and veterans. Founded in 2016 by Ilit Raz and named after Everest pioneer Junko Tabei, the company graduated from Techstars Atlanta and the Salesforce Incubator, and raised roughly $30 million from investors including Insight Partners, Target Global, Kapor Capital, and Vertex Ventures Israel. In 2023 the story collapsed: an investor confronted Raz over inconsistencies, she admitted to fabricating customer contracts, bank statements, revenue, and candidate counts, and she resigned. The SEC charged her in 2024 with a $21 million 'AI washing' securities fraud, and Joonko filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after shutting down and laying off all staff.
Bild
Bild is a San Francisco cloud PDM/PLM platform that moves hardware design collaboration off email, spreadsheets, and shared drives and into the browser. Founded in 2021 by ex-Apple engineering program manager Pradyut Paul, it gives mechanical and hardware teams version control, check-in/check-out, bill-of-materials, change orders, and secure supplier sharing across multiple CAD formats, plus an AI suite for diffing and searching designs.
Latent Knowledge
Latent Knowledge is a New York-based AI company building LitView, a semantic search and literature-visualization tool that helps R&D teams and academic researchers discover, cluster, and map scientific literature beyond simple keyword matching. Founded in 2019 by James Reilly, the company uses applied natural language processing to surface hidden links between technical articles and speed up the research process across public and private data sources.
ModernGuild
ModernGuild is a New York-based career mentoring and recruiting company that helps early-career and college students break into finance and consulting. Founded in 2011-2012 by Adrien Fraise, it pairs online career curriculum with live 1-on-1 coaching from in-field practitioners, and has evolved into a B2B marketplace using blinded candidate dashboards and matching algorithms to reduce bias in campus recruiting.
Reportwell
Reportwell is a Detroit-based, AI-powered compliance and reporting platform built for the K-12 education world - charter school authorizers, districts, agencies, and the schools they oversee. Founded in 2023 by a team of former education agency and school leaders, it scans for new laws, board decisions, and regulatory shifts, keeps policy documents current automatically, and answers plain-language legal questions through an AI chat. The goal is simple: turn the dreaded audit scramble into a routine, so educators can spend less time on paperwork and more time on students.
Rivet
Rivet is a Boston-based, AI-powered fan engagement platform that helps musicians, creators, labels and their teams turn attention into revenue. It stitches together scattered fan signals from social, commerce, ticketing, streaming and community channels into one owned view of every fan, then automates the outreach - email, SMS, DMs and ads - that converts casual listeners into repeat buyers. Born from a musician's frustration with tracking fans in spreadsheets, Rivet gives independent artists the kind of first-party data and CRM tooling once reserved for the industry's top 1 percent.
Tellescope
Tellescope is a HIPAA-compliant digital health platform that unifies patient communication, intake, scheduling, and workflow automation into a single, developer-friendly system. Built for digital health startups and modern clinics, it lets care teams reach patients across SMS, email, chat, and video, automate repetitive workflows without code, and plug into EHRs and clinical tools through an API-first architecture - so teams can launch faster and scale personalized care without stitching together generic sales software.
REEV
REEV is a medical robotics company building AI-powered wearable robotics to restore everyday mobility for people with neurological gait disorders after stroke, multiple sclerosis or paraplegia. Its flagship DREEVEN is a lightweight (about 3kg) motorized knee orthosis driven by electro-hydraulic actuation and real-time gait sensing, paired with REEV SENSE, an IMU wearable that turns a person's walking pattern into clinical-grade gait reports. Founded in 2021 and split between Boston and Toulouse, REEV raised $9.2M in February 2025 to finalize DREEVEN, run a clinical study at Boston University and prepare for FDA trials.