Welcome to the PAX Spring-21 Cohort!
After a successful inaugural Fall session, Pax Momentum is delighted to announce our Spring-21 cohort! Through a rigorous selection process, we’ve curated a group of diverse companies that we’re excited to help grow. Pax focuses on a unique niche of growing companies that are ready to build out their go-to-market strategy. With that vision, we’ve selected a group of companies from diverse industries, united by their readiness to harness their market potential and boost their growth.
Each session, Pax looks far and wide for promising start-ups. We have companies from the east coast in Pittsburgh, Bethesda, New York, and Philadelphia; from the Midwest in Chicago and Ann Arbor; and from the south in Atlanta. We even reached outside the country and found amazing startups in Santiago, Chile and Toronto, Canada! Our companies also come from a variety of verticals; this group includes climatetech, healthtech, eCommerce, fintech, and HR startups.
The Spring 2021 Cohort’s start-ups are led by a diverse group of founders who are passionate, driven, and committed to their work. 55% of our companies are led by underrepresented founders, including 44% female-founded companies. The cohort is also 20% international.
The Pax Momentum Accelerator exists to help these companies scale and reach new heights. Over the next two months, these founders will hone the skills necessary to build repeatable, scalable sales processes. From high-level strategic decisions about product positioning and the customer journey, to the nitty gritty of digital funnels and sales meetings, we’ll teach them how to take their operations to the next level.
Each company in the cohort is breaking new ground in their industry. Our climatetech companies each have innovations that will help make our planet more green — two of them literally! Bloomfield Robotics is at the frontier of the precision farming movement, using AI to improve farming efficiency, while Just Vertical lets you grow your own produce in their vertical hydroponic gardens. Sesame Solar is expanding the usability of solar power in remote areas with their modular solar units that can be sent anywhere in the world.
We’ve selected two eCommerce companies that are helping retailers streamline the online shopping experience from start to finish, and back again with returns. Sweft allows stores to streamline launching their products online, while Lillii’s Freeing Returns ameliorates the inefficiencies of the returns process.
Our HR tech companies help companies strengthen teams and improve employee engagement and sense of belonging. Rallybright’s performance management platform helps teams to identify improvement areas, and Storybolt helps companies overcome biases and improve engagement with award winning documentaries.
In fintech, Protosure’s no-code insurance platform allows insurers of all sizes the capability to build, iterate, and distribute new products on the cloud. Meanwhile, in healthtech, Pegasi is making a big impact in healthcare outcomes by empowering doctors and researchers across Latin America to organize and access data on and offline.
We are proud to introduce you to our Spring-21 cohort!
ClimateTech
Bloomfield Robotics (Pittsburgh, PA) assesses the health and performance of crops using specialized cameras and AI, and provides recommendations to optimize plant health and yield, making farming more precise and efficient.
Sesame Solar (Ann Arbor, MI) creates modular solar nanogrid solutions that can provide instant mobile power for a wide range of applications, including communications, medical care, refrigeration, disaster response, and more.
Just Vertical (Toronto, Canada) is an indoor vertical hydroponic company that creates “furniture that feeds you” — easy-to-use vertical gardens made for homes, businesses, and schools. In addition to their beautifully designed indoor gardens, they offer over 200 varieties of seed pods and custom-blended nutrient kits.
eCommerce
Freeing Returns (Atlanta, GA) by Lillii RNB is a B2B marketplace for store returns. They are the ‘middleware’ that connects point-of-sale systems to return management applications, allowing retailers to reduce the frequency of return fraud, as well as increase brand loyalty with facilitated interactions.
Sweft (Philadelphia, PA) provides a platform that helps large e-commerce retailers profitably scale by automating the process of launching products online. They are an end-to-end solution that streamlines the product workflow across teams, from selection to launch.
HR Tech
Rallybright (Bethesda, MD) provides a behavioral science-based performance assessment and management platform, designed to improve team performance by enabling team leaders to pinpoint the areas where they can make high-impact improvements.
Storybolt (Chicago, IL) is a platform for promoting employee engagement and sense of belonging. The company aims to inspire organizational change by helping their clients unpack difficult topics like implicit bias, gender equity, mental health, and more through curated selections from their collection of award-winning documentaries.
FinTech
Protosure (New York, NY) offers a no-code insurance product development and distribution platform that allows users to rapidly develop, distribute, and embed complex insurance products on the cloud. Their low-barrier platform allows users to prototype and launch insurance products in a matter of days.
HealthTech
Pegasi (Santiago, Chile) makes healthcare information accessible, clear, and secure for the developing world, facilitating information management, televisits, and more. They also aggregate non-sensitive Big Data into Healthcare Business Intelligence (BI) as a tool for accelerating regional development.
