ACT House’s Fifth Demo Day

In less than three years we’ve had five cohorts of founders go through the ACT House Accelerator. That’s 50 startups and as of Cohort 5, an investment of roughly $4.3M. Those companies have gone on to secure over $14M in follow-on capital and create over 100 jobs.

Today Cohort 5 will take the stage to share innovative ideas that have the power to shape the future of industries, including AI, digital health, fintech, edtech, and more. This day represents the culmination of countless hours of dedication and hard work to bring these founders’ ideas to life.

Before we wrapped the program, several founders had already reached new milestones — in fact three of the companies in this cohort raised funds, totaling more than $3M in pre-seed funding.

• Allspring, an AI learning platform, launched its beta on April 15 and secured funding from Antler, Microsoft, and Google for Startups.
• Between, a platform connecting nurse practitioners and patients, has had over 1K appointments booked on its platform and raised capital from Atento Capital and BFD Ventures.
• Kredit Academy, a financial literacy app for teens and first-time credit users, inked impactful deals with partners, including a sponsor bank in order to launch its first credit card and secured $1M in funding from 43North.
• Launch Ahead, an organization supporting the transition of youth out of foster care, made key hires including a CTO, Data Scientist, and UX/UI roles.
• Rejuvenation, a wellness-focused beverage company specializing in plant-based energy juices, secured a national distributor and is launching its product into 200 retailers this year.
• SkinCheck, a company using AI to detect early signs of skin cancer, were finalists in the SXSW pitch competition and reached new milestones with users, including over 100K downloads, 7K MAUs and over 1 million skin lesions scanned using its patent-pending SkinCheck technology.
• Swella, a beauty company leveraging technology to standardize and automate the braiding experience at braid bars, won first place at the Women’s History Month SVB X StartupOS pitch event and second place at the Harvard New Venture Competition. They also generated over $750K in revenue.
• Titan Intake, a company automating patient intakes with technology, closed its pre-seed round with investors including LookingGlass, Amplify.LA, SaaS VC and others, and increased its ARR by over 300%.

During the Accelerator program, founders took part in transformational sessions to uncover who they are as founders and who they are as humans. At the start of each program, founders take the ACT Assessment, a 15-minute evaluation that helps founders uncover their skills and talents, as well as their communication style and appetite for risk. The result is a common language to help founders understand their strengths and weaknesses in the workplace so they can match with other founders, optimize their teams and accelerate their business. Founders have also used these insights to refocus their product, change their strategy, or double down on their direction.

Much of the programming is focused on company-specific progress, but we always hold activities that involve the entire cohort to encourage peer learning which we’ve found to be incredibly impactful to founders. For Cohort 5, these activities included riding BMX bikes at the U.S. Olympics BMX course and hosting a basketball game with founders and VCs. This was a welcome change from the daily interactive workshops on topics like language market fit, operations, executive leadership, financial modeling and founder wellbeing.

Demo Day is about these founders, their journeys, and where they’re going to go from here. We can’t wait for them to share more with you.