AV and 14 AV Portfolio Companies Were Fast Company Award Winners
Alumni Ventures' portfolio companies appeared across a wide variety of categories in this year's list of Fast Company's World's Most Innovative Companies
Renowned business and technology magazine Fast Company has released its 2022 rankings for the World’s Most Innovative Companies and we are gratified to report that Alumni Ventures and several of our portfolio companies were included on the list. From cutting-edge manufacturing techniques to life-changing biotech solutions, these companies are developing important innovations with the possibility to reshape their respective industries. As for Alumni Ventures, we were listed as a winner in the Personal Finance category.
Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies Awards features 528 organizations in total whose efforts they find to be transforming businesses, industries, and culture at large. The magazine selected firms and companies making large impacts with their efforts across 52 categories, ranging from innovative in media, design, and consumer goods companies.
Here’s a list of 14 AV investments that Fast Company says are upending the status quo.
Category: Retail
Arrive Outdoors is an outdoor experience company that provides an easy alternative to buying and maintaining camping gear. Their website enables customers to plan outdoor adventures and rent premium gear that can be shipped anywhere in the U.S.
Participating Funds
Category: Most Innovative Companies in North America
Buzzer is a notification-driven mobile platform for the personalization and discovery of live sports. Their app aggregates and organizes live sports streams, allowing its users to set up customized alerts based on their preferences.
Participating Funds
Category: Biotech
Emulate creates living platforms that mimic the complexities of human biology to enable unprecedented insights into human biology and health. Their breakthrough organ-on-a-chip technology recreates the natural physiology and mechanical forces experienced within the human body in order to deliver clinically relevant, decision-worthy insights.
Participating Funds
Category: Food
FarmWise develops farming robots to facilitate autonomous cultivation and organic farming with the mission of building sustainable farming at scale. They capture and analyze crop data, take optimal crop-specific interventions, and help farmers produce.
Participating Funds
Category: Manufacturing
Guardhat develops smart hard hats with larger safety and industrial Internet of Things (IoT) applications, as well as a monitoring platform for IoT tools in industrial settings. Their IoT-enabled hats and the Guardhat monitoring platform increase onsite safety for industrial settings.
Participating Funds
Category: Transportation
HopSkipDrive is a web and mobile-based platform that offers alternative transportation for children and teens to assist with education. It develops safe, dependable transportation that schools and families can use to get kids where they need to go.
Participating Funds
Category: Transportation
FreeWire develops and manufactures mobile energy storage systems to transform electric vehicle energy delivery. Their products deliver clean and quick mobile power on-demand, charging electric vehicles without the added costs of construction or infrastructure upgrades.
Participating Funds
Category: Travel
Life House Hotels has developed a hotel software platform to manage its own properties and a white-label version for other hotel brands to increase their revenue and reduce operating costs. Their platform includes automated financial accounting and reporting tools, AI-driven pricing, and an employee-facing property management system. To date, Life House Hotels has opened four high-touch, locally rooted lifestyle boutique hotels designed to connect travelers with new places by celebrating neighborhood heritage.
Participating Funds
Category: Social Media
Lumanu streamlines payments and eases collaboration interactions to give creators more time to focus on building their brands and growing their businesses. Their media platform helps brands access first-party data and permissions from influencers, musicians, artists, streamers, and other creators. It simplifies and provides transparency to programmatic media buys directly through creator accounts.
Participating Funds
Category: Workplace
LYLA is a dedicated support system for employees designed to reduce stress in the workplace, benefit mental wellbeing, and increase overall retention. The LYLA app gives employees a resource that supports them in their day-to-day lives while increasing workplace productivity and reducing turnover.
Participating Funds
Category: Urban Dev
Mighty Buildings is a new, sustainable construction technology company. They are working on disrupting the construction industry with 3D printing tech, robotics, and composite materials.
Participating Funds
Category: Video
Slate is a content creation platform geared towards social media. Their solution allows companies to quickly overlay content with their own branded fonts, colors, filters, graphics, and animations from a custom mobile app and then post directly to social media platforms.
Participating Funds
Category: Consumer Goods
Spero Foods is an innovative, plant-based, dairy-alternative company specializing in creating tasty eggs and cheeses. They use sunflower seeds as their primary ingredient, which provides many advantages over nuts, including both cost savings and time to harvest.
Participating Funds
Category: Small & Mighty (1-100 Employees)
Twentyeight Health is a mission-driven women’s health organization with the goal of increasing access to reproductive and sexual healthcare. The company sells and delivers birth control pills, patches, rings, shots, and emergency contraception prescriptions at a low cost — or covered by insurance, including Medicaid.
Participating Funds
Alumni Ventures prides itself on offering its customers the ability to invest in innovative companies aiming to change the world through transformative business models, leading-edge technologies, and groundbreaking ideas. To learn more about adding venture to your investment portfolio, contact our team.
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