Obvious World Positive Report 2024 by obviousvc

2024

Solving the Puzzle

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Solving the Puzzle We founded Obvious Ventures to invest in businesses solving complex problems like the climate crisis, chronic disease, and financial insecurity. Each of these challenges is like a vast, intricate jigsaw puzzle. Like solving a puzzle, our work at Obvious requires us to navigate the big picture while attentively analyzing the details. By decoding the minute connections among social, environmental, and economic factors, we can invest in the most scalable answers. Each puzzle piece represents a unique investment opportunity, and only when we place them thoughtfully together can we witness the complete picture of transformation. Purpose drives profit. In the right combination, they form a flywheel that delivers enormous financial returns while transforming the economy in a world positive way. Our investment strategy, with its purpose-driven focus on both financial returns and positive social and environmental outcomes, is key to unlocking human, financial, and planetary health. In this World Positive Report, you’ll discover how our portfolio companies are creating new solutions to humanity’s most significant challenges and building a better world around us, from accelerating the transition to electric vehicles to finding new ways to treat chronic allergies. We are humbled by their dedication, their progress, and their choices, and we’re excited to continue putting the pieces together with you. James Joaquin

Vishal Vasishth

Andrew Beebe

Co-founder & Managing Director

Managing Director

Contents

Obvious at a glance

01 Sustainable Systems Synop

Charging toward a more resilient grid

Diamond Foundry

Diamonds disrupted

Enervee

Energy-efficient appliances for all

Plant Prefab

From one to tons

Planet

Lightship

The future of carbon looks blue

RVs are going EV

Senken

A carbon marketplace that actually works 02

02 Healthy Living Positive Development

A positive approach to autism

Nectar Life Sciences

Nothing to sneeze at

Happiest Baby

SNOO gets OK from the FDA

Urban Remedy

Reimagining our relationship with food

Devoted Health

Openly 48

Healthcare that actually cares

LabGenius

52 54

Cal.com

Making the most of people’s time

Tandym

Helping small businesses inspire big loyalty

A pointed approach to new medicine

Beam

Corvus Insurance Less risky business

Thinking differently about learning differences

Gandeeva

Pro creativity

Discovering drugs faster

Parallel Learning

Engineers without borders

VSCO

Inspired, not wired

Recursion

A game of inches

Howdy

Using the genius of AI to fight cancer

Taika

03 People Power

Brightside

Lighting the way to financial stability

Rest assured

Puzzled? Certified B Corp

86 88

Obvious at a glance

Funds: OV I

2014

$123,456,789

OV II

2016

$191,919,191

OV III

2019

$271,828,182

OP I

2021

$71,111,111

OV IV

2022

$355,111,553

OP II

2022

$106,111,601

*OV I–IV are core early-stage venture funds.

**OP I–II are opportunity funds.

$1.1B

Total AUM

Typical investments per fund

109

Total investments to date

Mergers and acquisitions

Public offerings

Employees

Halloween costumes worn in the office 05

01 Sustainable Systems 06

These companies are focused on planetary health and are transforming the industrial systems of the global economy to make them safer, more efficient, and carbon-free. 07

Synop

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Charging toward a more resilient grid O

n a frigid evening in February 2023, after a cold snap hit Burlington, Vermont, and the temperature plummeted to 20 below zero, two bright yellow electric school buses parked at a school bus depot did something unusual. With the press of a button, they quietly began dispensing energy from their batteries back through their chargers to the electrical grid. For the next three nights, during peak usage time from 6 to 8 p.m., when heaters and everything else a household needs on a freezing evening began to strain the grid, the school buses supplied a total of two megawatt-hours of energy to Burlington. That’s enough to power a suburban block in winter conditions for two weeks. This energy transfer is called vehicle-to-grid charging (V2G). It was made possible by a collaboration between the local utility provider and Synop, an electrification startup that is helping accelerate the transition to commercial electric fleets by building software that connects vehicles, chargers, and the grid. Transforming the U.S. economy to run on clean electricity is a cornerstone of President Biden’s plan to slash emissions to zero by 2050. To get there, we need to “electrify everything,” which means replacing fossil fuels with wind, solar, and hydro energy and electric vehicles, heat pumps, and a robust electric grid that allows a two-way energy transfer, like with the Vermont school buses. “V2G is the future,” says Gagan Dhillon, Synop’s CEO and co-founder. “Very rarely do you have an opportunity to resupply such a strained national resource. To be able to impact how much capacity your local utility has based on a vehicle that you’re driving that is already offsetting carbon— we think this is the biggest opportunity out there.”

Move one vehicle at a time, forward or backward any distance, until the mint-colored truck drives out of the grid. (Hint: The shortest solution requires more than four moves.)

OPTIMIZE

EV performance

UNDERSTAND

EV efficiency

TRACK REAL-TIME

state of charge TRACK REAL-TIME

range remaining

Always tinkering The story of Synop began 18 years ago, when Dhillon met Andrew Blejde in an engineering class on their first day of high school in Brownsburg, Indiana. Blejde hailed from Australia, and Dhillon’s family was from India. The two outsiders became fast friends. “We were always tinkering and wanting to build stuff,” recalls Dhillon. “He’s like my brother.” The two friends built an iPhone app while still in high school. After college, where Dhillon majored in finance and Blejde in computer science, they founded their first startup to help students connect with volunteer opportunities. When they failed to make money, they spent a few years working corporate jobs and thinking of their next big idea. While Blejde was an in-house engineer at Amazon, Dhillon focused on vehicle telematic tools at Volvo. As they toyed with climate-related startup ideas, the theme of electrification echoed in Dhillon’s head. One day, as he was talking to someone from a major oil company about EV chargers, the idea for Synop hit him. No one was tracking EVs, he realized, and the way to track an EV requires a totally different dataset than a diesel vehicle.

“A commercial EV doesn’t have the luxury of pulling into a gas station for 10 minutes and filling up while the driver gets a snack,” Dhillon explains. “We didn’t think anyone was building to orchestrate all of that and connect chargers with vehicles and the grid. Then we realized that the bigger opportunity was charging and energy management.” Synop’s software enables their customers to optimize EV performance, understand EV efficiency, track real-time state of charge and range remaining, and use that data to inform their charging schedules and understand how much energy they draw from the grid to ensure they’re not exceeding site limits or overpaying for energy. It also enables fleets to send energy back to the grid. Dhillon and Blejde started the company in June of 2021. They closed their seed round, led by Obvious, 10 months later. Synop is now a team of 23, headquartered in New York City, with offices in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Oakland, California. They currently have 1,000 commercial EVs on the platform and manage 600 chargers across 14 states.

Battery packs on wheels A commercial electric truck or bus is essentially a battery pack on wheels, or a “mini power plant,” as Dhillon likes to call them. “They have massive 300-kilowatt-hour batteries in some cases,” he says. “They are storing all of this energy but not always using it.” Nearly 500,000 school buses in North America spend most of their time parked in lots. Internal combustion engines can’t do anything when they are idle. Electric buses, however, can serve as portable power plants. They can supply energy when a grid is stressed from energy demand due to a cold snap in Vermont or a summer heat wave. There is also the hope that public school districts will be able to make money from powering up the grid. Synop was involved in a pilot program over two summers in Beverly, Massachusetts, that showed that a single bus discharged 10.78 megawatt-hours to the Massachusetts grid over 158 hours across both summers, generating $23,500 in revenue for the school district. This summer, Synop plans to do V2G with electric school buses in six states—Colorado, Indiana, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Vermont, and Virginia.

The startup reached another impressive milestone recently: Their software helped a client log 500,000 miles of electric semitruck hauling from the Port of Long Beach to inland warehouses. The electric trucks saved the equivalent of 41,000 gallons of diesel from being burned and 294,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions from entering the atmosphere. It’s all part of Synop’s grand vision. “The ultimate goal is for us to be gatekeepers of any type of energy source that can create a more resilient grid, scale electrification, and lead to a cleaner, more decarbonized world,” says Dhillon.

500,000 school buses in North America spend most of their time parked in lots.

A single bus discharged 10.78 megawatt-hours to the Massachusetts grid over 158 hours across two summers,

generating $23,500 in revenue for the school district. 13

Diamond Foundry

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Diamonds disrupted

little over a decade ago, in a warehouse in South San Francisco, a small team of cutting-edge engineers led by the technologist and entrepreneur Martin Roscheisen began running tens of thousands of physics experiments. Their goal was to create plasma as hot as the surface of the sun and use it to turn greenhouse gas methane into sparkling diamonds. Fast-forward a few years: It worked. Diamond Foundry launched, and its diamonds began flying off the shelves and gracing the necks and wrists of celebrities like Taylor Swift and Jennifer Lopez.

From fine jewelry to semiconductors? It’s all part of the plan, says Roscheisen, Diamond Foundry’s co-founder and CEO. “Our master plan has always been to first introduce sustainable diamonds wherever mined diamonds have been able to go— mainly jewelry,” he explains in a soft German accent. “Step two was to introduce single-crystal diamond wafers to enable the most advanced technology. After that comes diamonds as a semiconductor with further massive benefits.” In the past year, Diamond Foundry has tripled its output to produce 5 million carats annually, including a 423-carat stone that was the largest human-made diamond ever, and from which a 4-inch single-crystal diamond wafer semiconductor was cut. Once its massive solar-powered factory in Trujillo, Spain, opens its doors in 2025, the company plans to produce 20 million carats per year. The global diamond jewelry market is $85 billion, and Roscheisen predicts it will soon be dominated with lab-grown stones, like the ones his company produces. “We plan to replace all diamond mining in five years,” he says.

In 2022, Diamond Foundry began producing single-crystal diamond wafers, semiconductors that could play a critical role in electric vehicles and quantum computing.

Hard carbon As we learned in science class long ago, diamonds are formed naturally deep within the earth’s mantle. At around 100 miles below the surface, temperatures are at least 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, and this heat and pressure can turn carbon into diamond crystals. These diamond crystals, the kind dug out of mines around the world, were brought to the earth’s surface by an ancient deep volcanic eruption. The world’s largest producer and distributor of diamonds, De Beers Group, mined 35 million carats of natural diamonds in 2022.

mid-aughts. A recent study by industry expert Martin Rapaport pointed out that diamond mining tends to occur in places with less oversight and that a mined diamond can change hands up to 15 times before it reaches a consumer, making its provenance difficult to ascertain.

So if we have all of these natural diamonds, why grow them in a lab?

“Everyone takes a cut with mined diamonds. Each time it changes hands, a diamond is marked up and the cost is transferred to the consumer,” explains Mona Akhavi, president of VRAI, Diamond Foundry’s direct-to-consumer jewelry brand.

One reason is sustainability. Mined diamonds have a carbon footprint of about 170 kilograms per carat, compared to 8 kg or less for lab-grown stones. Diamond Foundry is zero carbon. Today, the company powers its plasma reactors at its factory in Washington, with hydroelectricity from the Columbia River. The new $850 million plant in Spain will be powered by the sun. Diamond Foundry is the world’s largest buyer of pure methane, which it transforms into diamonds. “The whole cycle is as green as anything gets,” says Roscheisen. Another reason is ethics. The movie “Blood Diamond” brought the issue of conflict diamonds to the mainstream back in the

Then there’s a more common reason: price point. Lab-grown diamonds cost around 70% less than traditionally mined ones due to the elimination of all those intermediaries.

And consumers are paying attention. Lab-grown diamonds now account for 10% of the annual diamond jewelry trade, up from nothing a few years ago. Leading this trend are Millennials and Generation Z, the main purchasers of diamond engagement rings, who are moving away from conventional diamonds. Nearly 70% of Millennials say they would consider buying a lab-grown stone.

Why grow them in a lab?

Ethics

Diamond mining tends to occur in areas with little oversight, and mined diamonds can change hands up to 15 times before reaching consumers, making it difficult to track their provenance or origin.

Cost

Carbon

cost around 70% less

about 170 kilograms per carat.

Lab-grown diamonds

than traditionally mined ones due to the elimination of intermediaries.

The carbon footprint of mined diamonds is

The carbon footprint of lab-grown diamonds is

8 kg or less per carat.

How many triangles of any size can you find?

Diamond Foundry had a

151% growth rate in the last quarter of 2022.

A diamond is a diamond While traditional industry titans are not exactly welcoming of lab-grown diamonds, calling them “synthetic” and of lesser quality, the government disagrees. In 2018, the Federal Trade Commission declared that there is essentially no difference between natural and human-made: “A diamond is a mineral consisting essentially of pure carbon crystallized in the isometric system. Technological advances have made it possible to create diamonds in a laboratory. These stones have essentially the same optical, physical, and chemical properties as mined diamonds. Thus, they are diamonds.” In short, a diamond is a diamond, and the public has caught on. Previously, Akhavi spent a lot of time explaining to potential customers what a human-made diamond is and why it’s real. Those questions have melted away in the past five years. VRAI now has over a dozen storefronts across Spain, Britain, China, and the U.S., and it is opening four more in 2023.

In the last quarter of 2022, Diamond Foundry showed a 151% growth rate, and it doubled its revenue. The company’s founder is most excited about the realization of his long-range plan and the potential of diamonds as superpowerful semiconductors. Of his achievement of the world’s first single-crystal diamond wafer: “It’s the kind of advance that happens every couple of decades,” says Roscheisen. “The diamond wafer is a singular component that feeds innovation across industries. From making jewelry sustainable to fixing Moore’s law in AI and cloud computing.” From producing millions of carats of diamonds every year at mining scale to the potential of providing advanced chips for electric vehicles and quantum computing, the future looks sparkly indeed for Diamond Foundry.

Enervee

Energyefficient appliances for all

nervee works with utility companies to build consumer-facing, end-to-end marketplaces that offer information and incentives to help people choose more energy-efficient appliances. Large home appliances are responsible for about 75% of residential electricity consumption in California and about two-thirds of electricity consumption nationwide. Last summer, Enervee rolled out its Enervee/NY Marketplace. This online shopping platform allows New Yorkers to purchase clean and efficient appliances that reduce energy bills and cut greenhouse gas emissions. The company already offers a similar marketplace for California and has plans to expand nationwide.

To bring equity to home cooling, Enervee recently partnered with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to increase access to ACs for low-income Los Angeles residents. When temperatures spike, an air conditioner can not only make people more comfortable but can also save lives. Some 20% of LA households have no AC. Called Cool LA, the program offered instant rebates to LADWP customers with low incomes on discounted utility rates. During the four-month program, 2,272 energy-efficient ACs were sold, with a total of $627,833 of rebates deducted from the purchase price at the register or via gift card. One program participant who is disabled explained what a difference the program made for her: “I live in an apartment that’s on one power breaker, so the whole apartment loses power if we use an AC,” she said. “An energy-efficient AC was the only solution, and we could never afford one without help.”

2,272

energy-efficient ACs sold during the Cool LA program

of residential electricity in America is used by large home appliances.

Plant Prefab

From one to tons

lant Prefab was founded in 2016 to build high-quality, well-designed, sustainable housing using new off-site construction techniques that drastically increase efficiency. Since then, the company has redefined what prefab construction is capable of, winning awards in design and sustainability and proving there is a more efficient way to construct our homes.

3–5 million gross square feet of living space will be produced annually at Plant Prefab’s new Tejon Ranch factory

Until now, Plant Prefab has focused on bespoke single-family projects. Although this has allowed the company to prove its techniques, it hasn’t been able to advance its mission to drive the widespread adoption of prefab construction. Plant Prefab is now set to do just this. It is expanding into all segments of the housing market, with a focus on multifamily development. This shift to multiunit projects requires a lot more automation and capacity. In 2023, the company began commissioning its massive new factory in Tejon Ranch, just south of Bakersfield, California. The 270,000-square-foot solar-powered facility will use advanced

30–50

faster assembly of full structural building envelope using panelized components than on-site construction

digital modeling to drive automated equipment that will be able to produce 3 to 5 million gross square feet of living space annually— a 7500% increase from its original facility. Panelized components are constructed to the client’s specification and finish, providing a full structural building envelope 30% to 50% faster than on-site construction. Panels can be flat-packed and trucked to the job site or assembled into volumetric modules and fitted with finishes right in the factory. This infinitely flexible, hybrid approach allows Plant Prefab to factory manufacture almost any design with precision quality and industry-leading efficiency, avoiding local labor, weather, and supply chain constraints that plague site-based construction.

7500

increase in production from its original facility

Planet

The future of carbon looks blue

ake one look at the azure blue water of a seagrass bed or the fairy-tale root system of a coastal mangrove, and you’ll understand how important these ecosystems are. Known as the world’s “coastal blue carbon” stocks, marshes, mangroves, and seagrass beds can capture five times more carbon than upland forests. However, due to their inaccessible nature, it’s hard to tell precisely how much carbon these ecosystems store.

Enter Planet. Planet’s mission is to use space to help life on Earth. The company owns and operates the largest fleet of Earth observation satellites in history, with hundreds of satellites currently in orbit. Planet collects an image of every land-based location on Earth on a daily basis, generating an unprecedented dataset. They’ve partnered with the Nature Conservancy to use that data to map blue carbon habitats worldwide. Called the Blue Carbon Explorer, this tool is a Google Earth Engine that helps governments evaluate the health of these natural resources. Governments are then able to qualify their carbon credits, report their restoration progress, and financially support conservation efforts. “Planet offers us an unprecedented ability to look through a daily archive of imagery and select the very best scenes that are suited for looking underwater,” explained Dr. Steve Schill, lead scientist for the Caribbean at the Nature Conservancy. “This data permits us to visualize the dynamic nature of blue carbon habitats at a level of detail that previously has not been possible, and we can do this systematically across hundreds of islands and thousands of square kilometers of mangroves and seagrass beds.”

more carbon captured by coastal blue carbon stocks than upland forests

Lightship

RVs are going EV

t’s hard to head into the future when you’re towing a piece of the past. Traditional travel trailers are loud, clunky, and powered by fossil fuels. In 2023, Lightship released the world’s first all-electric towable travel trailer: the L1—a sleek, efficient alternative to outdated recreational vehicle designs that will make towing with an electric vehicle a reality. The L1 is supremely aerodynamic and all electric, with a solarpacked rooftop, a floor filled with batteries, and a drive motor to supplement towing range. Its streamlined aerodynamics mean there is almost no impact on your EV’s range. The company has opened reservations for the L1 on its website, and production begins at the end of 2024.

The need for an electric travel trailer is real. Between 2001 and 2021, RV ownership rose by more than 62%. With one in 10 households owning a recreational vehicle, North Americans emit 1.1 gigatons of carbon dioxide every year through travel. Lightship aims to accelerate the spread of electrification into the mainstream, bringing its benefits to the RV market. They also want to introduce new demographics to RVing while making the pastime more sustainable than ever. Before founding Lightship, Tesla alums Toby Kraus and Ben Parker took a road trip using a rented Tesla Model X and the most aerodynamic travel trailer they could get their hands on, towing it between California and Colorado. The trip did not go smoothly, as the two spent more time charging than driving and, at one point, were forced to abandon the trailer by the roadside just to make it to the next charging stop. The problem of towingrange loss was impossible for the pair to ignore. The Lightship L1 is a direct solution that will modernize and improve the RVing experience.

1.1

1 in 10

gigatons

North American households own a recreational vehicle.

carbon dioxide emitted every year through travel

increase in RV ownership between 2001 and 2021

Senken

A carbon marketplace that actually works

drian Wons was on a road trip through southern Africa when he realized the voluntary carbon market was not working. What had started as a pleasure trip quickly morphed into the inspiration for a new business.

150T

investment capital needed by 2050 to limit warming to reach net zero

Wons is no stranger to climate initiatives. With a background in wind energy, he founded a research institute for sustainable innovation for the University of Digital Science in Berlin. In Africa, as he spoke with project developers on his travels, he discovered that only a tiny fraction of the funds were reaching the few carbon projects that actually existed. In 2020, only 27% of carbon offset project revenue reached the project developer, while 73% went to intermediaries. Wons founded Senken in 2022 as a better way to buy and sell carbon credits. He envisioned a platform that connected service providers directly with buyers, where all transactions would occur on the blockchain, secure and visible to anyone. And it’s working. Senken has already listed 3% of the voluntary carbon market supply and is the world’s biggest voluntary carbon platform. An estimated $150 trillion in investment capital will be needed by 2050 to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels and reach net zero. Since carbon credits can be bought and sold on the secondary market, Senken appealed to private equity firms by making carbon credits tradable assets with potential significant returns. They also introduced projects that allow investors to invest in climate projects before they are developed at a discounted rate.

10B

expected increase in value of the $2 billion voluntary carbon market by 2030

By 2030, the value of the $2 billion voluntary carbon market is expected to increase to $10 billion. Senken aims to make it easy for investors and companies to support environmental initiatives and transition to a low-carbon economy by making the voluntary carbon market mean something through carbon credits that are accurately accounted for.

02 Healthy Living 30

In the following pages, discover portfolio companies finding ways to improve human health, from outcome-driven personalized care to new consumer wellness offerings. 31

Positive Development

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A positive approach to autism O

ne in 36 children in the United States are diagnosed with autism, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That means that every year, tens of thousands of parents begin a crash course in learning how their child’s brain works differently and what they can do to help their kid navigate the challenges of their diagnosis.

John Banta, the co-founder and chairman of Positive Development, can still recall with clarity his own son’s journey. The year was 1998. At the end of a routine checkup at 18 months, Banta and his wife shared some observations about their son’s development that seemed different from his twin sister. After a discussion, the pediatrician asked them to sit back down. Although their son was too young to be diagnosed at the time, his behavior was consistent with his ultimate diagnosis of developmental delay “not otherwise specified,” which was considered part of the autism spectrum. “We were stunned,” recalls Banta. “We knew nothing about autism.”

W WHITE BLACK

Many people with autism and other developmental differences experience sensory overload because they can’t separate incoming stimuli. To experience this sensation, try reading the overlapping words on this page. (Hint: The last design contains more than 12 letters.)

Banta and his wife began the process of learning all they could on the subject. Initially, it involved searching bookstores instead of the internet—and working with the best specialists they could find. Here’s what they learned: The most common form of therapy for children on the spectrum—then and now—is Applied Behavior Analysis. ABA is built around a consequences-and-rewards system (think gold stars as “treats” and withholding attention as “punishment”). Critics of ABA say the therapy ignores the inner worlds of children and is focused on training them to eliminate “problem” behaviors that make a child look autistic instead of figuring out why they’re exhibiting a particular behavior. ABA therapy can also take up to 40 hours a week. The Bantas quickly realized that ABA wasn’t for them or their son. “Separating our child from his parents for many hours a day. Rote repetition. It didn’t strike me as either constructive or getting at our son’s unique set of strengths and challenges,” recalls Banta.

Another way The Bantas’ quest for care eventually led them to the office of Dr. Stanley Greenspan, a renowned autism specialist in Washington, D.C. Greenspan’s approach is based on developmental therapy and involves parents getting on the floor to relate and play with children at their level, building upon the child’s strengths and abilities through a warm relationship. “It was all very expensive and out of pocket,” Banta recalls. “But we immediately felt like we were making meaningful progress.” In fact, his son made so much developmental progress over time that by the end of fifth grade, there was no need for additional support at school, at home, or in a clinic. Now in his 20s, Banta’s son is leading a happy and full life— he graduated from college, is a data scientist and musician, and enjoys a wide circle of friends.

Professional development Banta never forgot how developmental therapy helped his son. Fast-forward a few decades, Banta went from working in investment banking, to entrepreneurship, and finally to running a venture capital fund, where he met Mike Suiters. The two discovered that they shared a passion for mental health. Suiters had seen firsthand the experiences of family members who had mental health issues and what it was like when the system didn’t serve them. As a venture capital investor, Suiters also looked at every behavioral health startup investment at his fund, and he realized that none of the autism therapy companies seeking investments prioritized the autistic person’s perspective or outcome. After Banta shared how powerful developmental therapy was for his family, he and Suiters began investigating how to make it accessible to more children. “Developmental therapy clicks with the way I think about people,” explains Suiters. “People don’t learn social connection through flash cards; they learn it on a playground or with their siblings. Your relationships are your vehicles for social learning.” Banta and Suiters co-founded Positive Development three years ago, and the company is now the largest provider of developmental therapy in the U.S. The company has many family stories similar to Banta’s across its senior ranks. Its chief operating officer, executive medical director, and many other senior clinical and administrative staff are parents of children who benefited from developmental therapy.

“It’s a testament to both the power of our mission and the commonness of the experience,” says Suiters, the company’s CEO. “We are able to recruit incredible team members who understand the impact of what we do firsthand.” Positive Development has quintupled over the past two years. It currently serves more than 760 families across six states. Most importantly, its model is now covered by insurers representing 60 million Americans. Over a third of its clients are covered by Medicaid or other safety net providers. Making its services affordable—especially to families with limited resources—is a huge part of its mission. Demand is high for Positive Development’s services, and the company plans to double in size in the coming year and expand to another three states. Banta once tallied up the amount he spent on developmental therapy for his son and family support at more than several hundred thousand dollars. “Now, if you’re covered by a health insurance company that has a relationship with Positive Development, your costs will be limited to the out-of-pocket expenses like co-pays that you are already familiar with. You’re literally talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars for each family. It’s an ‘everybody wins’ kind of thing,” he says.

Positive Development has grown

over the past two years. 36

Their model is now covered by insurers representing

60 million Americans.

Nectar Life Sciences

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Nothing to sneeze at N

ectar Life Sciences launched in fall 2022 with a clear and ambitious goal: to end allergies as we know them.

From environmental and food allergies to asthma and eczema, allergies are the leading chronic health issue in the U.S. Some 120 million Americans, or one in three, are impacted by allergies. And as the planet warms, allergy season is lengthening, meaning longer stretches of discomfort for those who struggle. To top it off, the country is currently experiencing an allergist shortage, with only around 3,400 full-time, board-certified allergists out of 700,000 practicing physicians.

1 in 3 Americans are impacted by allergies.

“The category is massive and underserved,” says Ken Chahine, the co-founder and CEO of Nectar. Until recently, if someone wanted long-term relief from their allergies in the U.S., the only available path of treatment was allergy shots. Allergy shots train the immune system to stop reacting to the allergen it perceives as a threat. And it turns out, you can achieve the same results at home by taking the same drop of medicine from allergy shots—but under your tongue every day, instead of via needle in your arm every week. Sublingual drops are easier to take, especially for kids. Their use is widespread in Europe, where more than 50% of allergy therapy is done in drops. Nectar was created to make this type of treatment widespread in the States.

“We want to become the world’s experts around immunotherapy and sublingual treatment,” says Chahine. The company released its first direct-to-consumer product for environmental allergies in June 2022. So far, the results have been incredible. More than 85% of people who used Nectar drops for their allergies in Q1 of this year reported seeing improvements. Compliance has also been strong, with 95% of participants continuing their treatment. Here’s how it works: You purchase an allergy test kit online after answering a series of medical intake questions. After your kit arrives in the mail, you prick your finger and send samples of your blood to a lab, where it is then analyzed, and a proprietary algorithm makes a recommended formulation just for you. Your drops are then blended at a compound pharmacy, packaged in dainty glass bottles, and shipped to your door. From there, you slip a couple of drops under your tongue every day.

If some of these steps sound a little familiar, they should. Chahine, formerly an executive vice president of Ancestry.com and general manager of AncestryDNA, is familiar with the process of developing medical kits at scale. His passion is winning over dubious customers and turning something new— in AncestryDNA’s case, testing kits involving little tubes of saliva—into something widely accepted. “The process is remarkably similar,” he says of Nectar. “The only thing that is different is that customers have to subscribe to the oral therapy with Nectar. It almost seems too easy—you just put two drops under your tongue, and it’s so much better than taking the shots.”

+85

of people who used Nectar drops for their allergies reported improvements.

Draw a path from the top arrow to the bottom arrow, moving one drop at a time left, right, up, or down. You must alternate between different-colored drops. The example path, for instance, makes four turns and ends at a dead end. (Hint: The shortest path makes fewer than 26 turns.)

Chahine is convinced that once Nectar’s treatment crosses a certain threshold, it will go viral. The company’s sales have been growing 50% month over month since January. Nectar’s next phase begins soon with the opening of its first comprehensive brick-and-mortar allergy center in Manhattan, where people will be able to go for an array of in-person allergy treatments. In a sleek and soothing environment, patients will be able to meet with allergists and receive treatments for a variety of allergy needs.

Nectar’s sales have grown

month over month in 2023.

“The experience will be a seamless merging of virtual care and clinic care,” says Chahine.

Happiest Baby

SNOO gets OK from the FDA W

ho hasn’t held a crying baby and wondered where the volume button was? Dr. Harvey Karp has built his career on helping people answer just that question. The renowned pediatrician who brought the world the bestselling book “The Happiest Baby on the Block,” Karp introduced new parents to the “Five S’s” to soothe babies—swaddle, shush, swing, suck, and side. The Five S’s inspired the SNOO Smart Sleeper Bassinet, the signature product of Happiest Baby. Since 2016, new parents have relied on the SNOO smart bassinet to calm their fussy babies with its gentle rocking motion and soothing white noise. But the SNOO does more than that. Thanks to its anchored swaddle, the bassinet

helps keep newborns positioned safely on their backs. The American Academy of Pediatrics strongly recommends placing babies on their backs to reduce sleep-related deaths, including sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). In March, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted De Novo approval to the SNOO for its ability to keep babies face up, making the SNOO the first and only product of its type to receive this approval. This new classification can help the SNOO be considered a necessary medical device, like a breast pump, opening the door for the bassinet to be potentially covered by insurance. Insurance coverage would increase access for sleep-deprived parents and potentially help prevent the deaths of the 3,400 babies who die from SIDS every year in the U.S.

the number of bassinets approved by the FDA for infant sleep safety

Urban Remedy

Reimagining our relationship with food

he journey to Urban Remedy was a winding one. One of the pivotal moments came when its founder, Neka Pasquale, was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome. Her doctors suggested medication to reduce the cysts. Instead, she drastically altered her diet to include juicing and low-glycemic raw foods. When she returned six months later for a checkup, the cysts were gone.

Pasquale realized that the foods we eat play a massive part in our health. “We’re in a culture of illness, and people feel disempowered because they don’t have the tools and the knowledge. Plants, fruits, and vegetables are good for us. You’ll never process food in a way that’s better than what nature has done forever,” she says.

Pasquale also recognized that it’s not just about diet. “Eating healthy is great, but if you have high stress levels and you’re not sleeping, it can only help so much. Do you love yourself? Are you in a loving community with healthy relationships and partnerships? All those pieces together can help deliver health,” she observes. Since Pasquale founded the organic food company Urban Remedy, her community has grown. Her meals and signature drinks now ship anywhere in the country overnight. She also has branded Urban Remedy kiosks in Whole Foods nationwide. Endorsed by Cindy Crawford and Kate Upton, her meals are completely organic and don’t contain preservatives, white sugar, seed oils, gluten, dairy, or iodized salt. Every recipe is based on the principles of traditional Chinese medicine and is designed to reduce inflammation while nurturing your body and mind.

Urban Remedy is a Certified B Corp,

with an impact score of 80. Not only is its food good for your health, but it’s also good for the planet.

Devoted Health

Healthcare that actually cares

evoted Health is a new healthcare company serving seniors that has a simple mission: provide the same kind of healthcare its employees would want for their own family members. The word is out. Devoted Health now serves more than 124,000 members who are seeing measurable health improvements because of the company’s programs. Devoted Health offers an all-in-one model of care that puts its members’ needs first. It delivers world-class customer service coupled with clinical staff available in person or online, ensuring every member gets the care they deserve. Devoted’s medical team collaborates with members’ primary care physicians to focus on each patient’s health priorities. The impact is substantial. At least 85% of members with diabetes have been able to control their blood sugar levels, achieving an average reduction in their HbA1c of 2.1 in only 93 days. And at least 77% of members with hypertension have gotten their blood pressure under control, reducing systolic blood pressure by an average of 15 mmHg in 40 days. In one case, a member suffered from untreated diabetes and chronic pain. She deeply wished to walk without pain and be more active with her family, but she could not get the back surgery she needed because of her high glucose levels. Offering tools like a continuous glucose monitor, nutrition and exercise education, medication modifications, and insomnia treatments, Devoted team members helped her turn her health around in just two months. Her impressive drop from 11% to 7.5% blood glucose levels made it possible for her to get the surgery she needed to improve her chronic pain.

77% of members with hypertension have gotten their blood pressure under control.

85% of members

with diabetes have been able to control their blood sugar levels.

LabGenius

Using the genius of AI to fight cancer O

ne in two people will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime. That’s half of us. Cancer is a leading cause of death worldwide and the second most common cause of death in the U.S. But as the saying goes, sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. Chemotherapy and radiation, the first-line treatments for cancer, take a nuclear approach, obliterating healthy cells along with cancerous ones. Even then, these treatments often don’t successfully kill all cancer cells, leading to resistance and relapse in patients.

So how do you develop new therapeutics that target cancer and leave healthy cells unharmed? This is what LabGenius is here to answer. Based in South East London, LabGenius is a team of drug hunters, robotic automation experts, data scientists, and software engineers focused on discovering new protein therapeutics using artificial intelligence. Protein therapeutics represent a massive category within the pharmaceutical industry. Seven of the top 10 best-selling drugs today are protein therapeutics. And around 25% of the $1.4 trillion in global pharmaceutical sales are biologics, which include protein therapy, gene therapy, and cell therapy. The team at LabGenius is focused on developing new antibodybased proteins to treat solid cancerous tumors—which account for 90% of all adult cancer cases. Discovering new antibodies is challenging because only a small number have the potential to make effective therapeutics.

of people will be diagnosed with cancer at some point

LabGenius stands out based on the sheer number of antibodies they can evaluate in a given time frame. Using a computational method called multi-objective Bayesian optimization, in just 12 weeks, they can accurately predict how more than 28,000 novel antibody designs will perform in disease-relevant functional cell-based assays. In a recent demonstration study, LabGenius’ machine learningdriven platform delivered multiple high-performing molecules designed to selectively target and kill tumor cells and leave healthy cells unharmed. Compared to the clinical benchmark, LabGenius’ molecules are 400 times more selective than Runimotamab, an antibody that also targets and kills healthy cells, leading to negative patient side effects. The team is now applying this technology to partnered programs and to generate their own pipeline of immunotherapeutics, paving the way for safer treatments for some of the most underserved cancer patients.

Taika

Inspired, not wired

here were three pivotal moments in the journey that led Michael Sharon to co-found Taika, the coffee and tea company.

The first took place years ago when Sharon decided to omit the sugar from his New York deli coffee one morning. He usually drank it sweet and milky, like the tea he grew up consuming in South Africa. But on this day, he tried it without sugar and discovered, much to his horror, that it tasted awful. This realization led him on an epicurean odyssey—one that took him from the bean water of his local deli to the front lines of third-wave coffee with its high-quality beans and single-serve pour-overs. The second moment occurred a few years later when Sharon was working at Facebook while it was still a startup. He was a product manager at the time, pulling long hours to rebuild the company’s iPhone app, and was looking for something to make his coffee even more powerful.

The moment where it all came together took place, fittingly, in a San Francisco coffee shop. Sharon was on sabbatical, figuring out what he wanted to do next, when he was introduced to a Finnish food scientist and master barista named Kal Freese. The two got to talking and realized that they shared a passion for coffee and “stealth health” and decided to go into business together. “We wanted to make something that tastes phenomenal and makes you feel great afterward,” said Sharon. And just like that, a company was born. They named it Taika, Finnish for “magic.” Taika coffees and teas are served in colorful cans and contain caffeine, of course, but about half the amount of a regular cup, along with ashwagandha for calm, lion’s mane for clarity, and theanine for focus. The number of stores selling Taika doubled in the first quarter of this year, as major national grocery stores including Sprouts and Raley’s began selling the drinks. Taika will be available at Whole Foods nationwide starting in December 2023, guaranteeing that soon even more people will be able to find a little magic in the drink section.

“I went on the internet and found these compounds—amino acids, adaptogens—I put together my own stack and went from seven coffees a day to one coffee a day and felt fantastic,” he recalls. “I had this balance and focus that I got from coffee that I hadn’t had before.”

The number of stores selling Taika doubled in the first quarter of 2023.

Recursion

Discovering drugs faster W

Recursion can advance a medicine into the early stages of drug discovery

faster than, and at half the cost of industry averages.

hat if there was a computer that could discover medicine?

This is what Recursion has set out to do. Recursion aims to radically improve the lives of patients and those who love them by using state-of-the-art lab automation and machine learning to make new drug discoveries. The biotech company runs one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world to surface biological insights while removing human biases. Its drug discovery engine, the Recursion OS platform, combines various technological advances such as lab robotics, computer vision, highly scaled CRISPR experimentation tools, cell culturing, and many other technologies to generate a unique, highly dimensional dataset. Recursion executes up to 2.2 million wet-lab experiments weekly and has amassed 23 petabytes of data with 3 trillion searchable relationships, which is one of the largest proprietary in-vitro biological and chemical datasets out there. In the past year, the company initiated five clinical trials to bring potential new medicines to patients, including three Phase 2 programs aimed at “underserved” diseases that have no current treatment options. They were a rare inherited cancer predisposition syndrome, a genetic disease that causes tumors in the nervous system, and a neurovascular disease that causes enlarged blood vessels in the spinal cord and brain. Additionally, Recursion has shown that they can save time and money in the incredibly time-intensive and costly drug-discovery process. Across all of Recursion’s programs, the company has demonstrated they can advance a medicine into the early stages of drug discovery and development about 80% faster than and at half the cost of industry averages.

Parallel Learning

Thinking differently about learning differences

iana Heldfond, the founder and CEO of Parallel Learning, was diagnosed with dyslexia when she was 7 years old. She remembers struggling with even the most straightforward books while her peers soared ahead. She remembers the loneliness and frustration she felt.

Fortunately, Heldfond had an incredible support network to help her overcome her learning differences. She was one of the lucky ones. In the U.S., one in every five students faces similar challenges with learning or thinking differences. Yet the support available today is confusing, expensive, fragmented, and, in many cases, inefficient. Students with learning differences are twice as likely to be suspended and three times as likely to drop out.

That’s where Parallel comes in. The company’s mission is to support all learning styles so that every student can access the resources they need to reach their full potential. Parallel combines human expertise with technology to create a comprehensive learning experience. Their expert team, which includes industry-leading provider education programs, ensures that every student is matched with the best provider to meet their unique needs. Whether that is a psychologist, speech-language pathologist, or special ed teacher, Parallel will find the combination of support each student needs for their success. The company’s proprietary, technology-driven platform informs student progress and helps them improve. As of today, Parallel is in 80-plus school districts and has paired 2,800 students with 150-plus providers, giving them the comprehensive support to transform their futures.

Gandeeva

A pointed approach to new medicine

It takes

3,000 to 6,000 compounds to go from the discovery stage to clinical trials. Gandeeva can do the same thing by

testing 200.

onventional drug development takes a scattershot approach. You uncover something going wrong with a particular gene and then create a compound to knock out that corresponding protein, regardless of its greater function within the cell. This approach is a bit like trying to understand a car by studying the steering wheel— without a complete picture of what’s happening between proteins, a drug can be less effective and come with unintended side effects. Gandeeva Therapeutics uses a different method. They are trying to directly influence specific disease-driving protein interactions without affecting the rest of the protein functions. It’s the difference between using a floodlight and a laser pointer.

Gandeeva starts with a rigorous identification of the optimal protein-protein complexes and surfaces to target. Then, by imaging these target interfaces at atomic resolution, they can make better decisions and, ultimately, better therapeutics. It can take years and 3,000 to 6,000 compounds to go from the discovery stage to identifying a drug candidate for clinical trials. Through its highly collaborative and iterative weekly design cycle, Gandeeva can reduce this process to less than a year and by testing just a couple of hundred compounds. How can they achieve this level of precision? Through cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM). Cryo-EM is a technique used in structural biology to study the 3D structures of macromolecules such as proteins. A protein is frozen in a thin layer of ice and placed into an electron microscope. Scientists take millions of images to generate a 3D model of the protein. With these detailed models, scientists can better understand the structure, movement, and function of specific proteins, including the interfaces at which proteins can bind together. By deploying cryo-EM at every stage of the drug discovery process, Gandeeva can develop high-resolution models that allow them to identify promising molecules and to intelligently guide next steps. With the world’s most advanced imaging technology, Gandeeva is transforming lives with the next generation of medicine.

For decades, scientists have known that understanding the language by which proteins communicate is fundamental. Alterations in cellular protein structures and their interactions are implicated in nearly every disease.

Beam

Rest assured

ince its founding, Beam has been helping people get a better night’s sleep. Seventy percent of adults in America have trouble getting enough rest. The benefits of a full night of sleep are undisputed: Adults who sleep less than eight hours report higher stress levels than those who sleep eight hours or more.

Many factors interfere with a good night’s sleep, but too much screen time and caffeine are the big ones. The average American spends over seven hours a day looking at a screen, absorbing harmful blue light that can suppress natural melatonin secretion. Caffeine consumed too late in the day can also reduce the deep sleep we need for restoration. Beam’s Dream product is scientifically formulated to reduce these effects. It contains 3 milligrams of melatonin, plus reishi and L-theanine to aid deep sleep. Dream also has nano hemp and magnesium, which support the body’s response to stress. Many supplement brands use lower-quality ingredients in minuscule amounts just to be able to name-drop them. Beam sources only top-quality ingredients and uses amounts that make a difference. In a recent double-blind clinical trial, 93% of participants reported that Dream helped them get a more restful night’s sleep and wake up feeling more refreshed. Continuing its commitment to sustainability, Beam has redesigned all the packaging for its products. It’s reduced package sizing and removed paper inserts. These streamlined packages are easier to ship and will prevent 18,000 kilograms of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere. With its ever-expanding range of products and sustainable ethos, Beam aims to be good for people and the planet.

93%

of participants reported that Dream helped them get a more restful night’s sleep.

03 People Power 62

These companies are reshaping financial services, insurance offerings, and work-productivity systems to give individuals and small businesses the tools for financial health and success. 63

Openly

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A game of inches

ong before Openly began selling home insurance, co-founders Ty Harris and Matt Wielbut kept getting the same feedback from potential investors: “Can you distill your idea to one succinct, sexy thing?”

They couldn’t. In the fintech space, insurance is as old as the Babylonians. “We hadn’t invented anything completely new,” recalls Harris. “We hadn’t patented some massive piece of technology.” What they had, and what admittedly took time to explain, was a plan to make home insurance better “in a thousand incremental ways”—and then to keep making it better. “That was our one tool against the incumbents: the ability to constantly improve,” Harris says. “And we knew that if we kept improving, we’d win.” Six years later, Openly sells insurance in 21 states. Its product is built on two core tenets: Customers want better coverage with less fine print, and independent insurance agents are an underappreciated channel to reach those customers. While most of the industry has shifted to directto-consumer, burning millions on advertising, Harris and Wielbut have taken the contrarian view that knowledgeable agents are still the best way to sell a complicated product— if they have radically improved tools.

U.S. states covered

Room for refinement Given regulatory constraints and the financial demands of underwriting, they knew it would be a long path to actually selling insurance. But that freed them to start with a blank sheet and design both customer-facing and back-end systems for continual innovation. Each with a decade of industry experience—Harris in the upper ranks of insurance behemoth Liberty Mutual, and Wielbut at financial giant Goldman Sachs— they knew how slow those large players could be to change. Harris and Wielbut took that as their tactical challenge. Home insurance had boundless room for refinement—and that work would never be truly finished. “I fell in love with the greenfield-ness of it,” recalls Wielbut. He had worked as a programmer at Goldman, where in-house tech was a powerful advantage. He then founded a small insurance agency with Yana Harris, an MIT grad and actuary who is also married to his Openly co-founder. They saw firsthand how effective agents were at educating their customers and how little the old guard had done to make their lives easier. Underwriting a new policy requires answering hundreds of

of insurance revenue goes to administrative expenses rather than claims or profit.

questions—from the roof material to the type of wiring in the walls. With 10 agents coding new policies every day, Wielbut and Yana Harris had a front-row seat to their frustrations. “I could just stand next to them and see a hundred clicks—the same clicks every time,” says Wielbut. “And we’re like, Why is this happening? We can automate all this!” Harris, for his part, knew that no one else in the industry was tackling this kind of holistic innovation. In his prior role at the large insurer that employed about 50,000 people globally, Harris oversaw a team of 800 people that was responsible for pricing and underwriting 10 million customers and $20 billion in premiums. Across the insurance industry, almost 40% of revenue goes to administrative expenses rather than claims or profit. Often lacking cohesive technology, the insurance giants mainly depend on a slew of vendors and face perennial tangles as they bolt their tools and platforms together. For Openly, making a better UX for agents was part of the challenge—but so was reimagining the underwriting models that properly price every policy.

Drive from the left arrow to the right arrow without ever making a right turn or a U-turn. (Hint: The answer has more than 10 turns.)

A goal of flexibility “We didn’t go into this thinking we were going to have to build it all, at least in the beginning,” says Wielbut. “We had that MVP mentality. But the deeper we got, we realized that there was nothing off the shelf that we could really use.” Having seen their old employers bogged down under the weight of their aging systems, Harris and Wielbut adopted a goal of flexibility for Openly. Without the archive of data the legacy companies use to price risk, they had to define a general language that would allow their new models to be rapidly tweaked over time. “Above the waterline, it’s a beautiful, simple, fast experience for the agent and customers,” Harris says. “Below the waterline, it’s seven or eight big models making decisions really quickly, in an interactive way, that humans often make at other companies.”

Jason Bucholz, Openly’s vice president of insurance product management, can see the difference. Without the constraints of old corporate structures, Openly built constant innovation into its organizational design. Insurance product managers— the people with a deep knowledge of this highly regulated product—sit with the data scientists, who seek out new information sources, and the engineers who will actually be programming the models and their interconnections. The size of a property, for example, might be inherently linked to the potential for wind damage. But the more finely grained that relationship can be understood, the more accurately it can be reflected not only in the underwriting, but also in the rating— offering the appropriate price to the appropriate risk.

In a traditional organization, each new variable would be incorporated into the model incrementally like a waterfall— moving in one direction from pricing to product to engineering. “At Openly, it all happens simultaneously,” says Bucholz. “We get everyone together, and we say, ‘Hey, these are the variables, the characteristics that we’re going to look at’—and everyone’s together having that discussion.”

Fast iterations Openly proactively makes continuous small updates to its programs and underlying models and targets a major upgrade every six months, dependent on state requirements and within regulatory frameworks. This is 10 times the pace of the existing giants, which might typically upgrade their major models every five to seven years. The online portals used by both agents and customers get a similar treatment. Danielle Wyman, vice president of product and strategy, works alongside UX designers and researchers to refine each step of the workflow. “Our value proposition is ‘It’s easy for the agents,’” Wyman says. “They can get a

quote in 15 seconds. So they are not spending time reentering data—they’re spending time talking with their customers and understanding their needs.” To make sure that’s being done right, they interview agents about how they work, track their cursor movements, and organize broader “agency councils” for discussion. The tweaking never ends. By Harris and Wielbut’s founding logic, there’s no limit to improvements. The core product—not just the insurance, but the tools used to sell it—will never be done. Along with typical performance indicators, Openly’s teams are organized around actions rather than functions—like “make life easy for agents,” “lower expenses,” and “match risk to rate.” “We decided early on that our pillars should be things we can change,” says Wielbut. As old as insurance is, Openly’s attitude is that there’s room for refinement—of every piece of the business. And then, every quarter, it reevaluates those pillars, changing the axis of change itself.

Openly targets a major program upgrade every

6 mos.

10x

the pace of existing insurance giants

Howdy

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Engineers without borders F

our years ago, Praveen Kalamegham met his friend Frank Licea for dinner at a trendy Japanese restaurant in downtown Austin. Over sushi, the conversation turned to work. Kalamegham, a CTO, was struggling to hire engineers even though his startup, Workrise, had just secured $300 million in funding.

“Unless you were a FAANG company, you couldn’t even get into conversations with experienced software engineers,” Kalamegham recalls of the intense competition for engineering talent at the time. Licea had just co-founded a company to solve this very problem. Howdy is a workplace hiring startup based in Austin that connects developers in Latin America with jobs at companies in North America. Licea explained to Kalamegham that Howdy would take on all the complexity of hiring someone abroad and supply Workrise with dedicated engineers. Kalamegham decided to give Howdy a try. Within weeks, six Howdy engineers had joined his team. By fall 2020, the number was up to 20.

Draw a path that connects company budget at the top to development at the bottom, passing through letters to spell a word, without going through the purple walls. For instance, you could spell HOWDY or HOLA or SCANNER. You may pass through a letter more than once, but you may not pass through the same instance of the letter twice in a row. What is the longest English word you can spell? (Hint: It has more than 10 letters, and its meaning is relevant.)

“They are active participants in our meetings. They are integrated. They are our engineers,” he says proudly.

“Desperate for a chance” Engineering shortages have long plagued the U.S. tech sector. Big tech companies point to immigration restrictions that hamper their efforts to find employees. The idea to co-found a company to help solve this tech shortage problem came to Licea’s co-founder, Jacqueline Samira, in 2018. At the time, she had been running sales teams for startups and had a front-row seat to the shortage. “There was such intense competition for engineers,” recalls Samira. “It felt like an imbalance.” Raised by a mother who was an immigrant and an engineer, Samira knew firsthand what amazing talent can come from other countries. She also knew what it felt like to be desperate to be given a chance—she began her career during the downturn of 2008 when jobs were hard to come by. Surely there were engineers somewhere who were desperate for a chance too, she thought.

Samira turned to Latin America—a region encompassing Central and South America and the Caribbean that shares time zones with the U.S. and where salaries for senior engineering talent are 20% to 30% lower. Samira hired her first engineer in Montevideo, Uruguay, in December 2018. In 2020, as remote work became normalized during the pandemic, Howdy hired another two dozen engineers and has been building ever since. In winter 2021, Samira and Licea, who was born in Mexico and raised in El Paso, Texas, were accepted into Y Combinator. They raised Howdy’s Series Seed after the accelerator’s famed Demo Day.

Howdy has contracts with 47 companies and employs more than 172 developers across Latin America.

Where developers come first Since the beginning, one of Howdy’s mantras has been “Where the developers come first.” Samira and Licea are building Howdy around their employees. “Our top KPIs are developer retention and developer happiness,” says Samira. Javier Bayona noticed this right away. A developer based in Cúcuta, Colombia, Bayona had worked for a series of startups before connecting with Howdy in 2020. “I was already working remotely, and the pay at Howdy was a bit better,” says Bayona. “But how they treat me is different. They are focused on the human component, and I feel appreciated.”

Howdy offers its developers perks that rival many big tech companies including healthcare, a gym membership, and weekly free lunches, but what Howdy’s employees say they value most is that “human component.” There is paid sick leave and ongoing career development with engineering managers, and when a company occasionally ends a contract with Howdy, the startup continues paying the employee’s salary until a new role is secured. Howdy also requires that its partners treat its developers well. “One of our core requirements for companies we work with is that they have to treat our engineers as full-time team members,” explains Samira. “They need to be in the all-hands and the internal meetings.”

A good fit Qingqing Ouyang, CTO at the real estate tech startup Ojo, learned about Howdy two years ago. At the time, engineering salaries were skyrocketing, and she was spending a huge amount of her day vetting potential candidates. She knew she had to look elsewhere, but there were huge concerns on her engineering team about what external engineers might be like. “It was really important to my team that they were treated well,” she says. “There was also the concern that if we hire someone ‘wrong,’ it can cost you more in the long run.” So when a friend who shares Ouyang’s same high bar for talent told her he knew of five Howdy engineers who needed new jobs, she snapped them up. They’ve been with her ever since.

Both Kalamegham and Ouyang attribute much of their successful partnerships with Howdy to how the startup continues to work with their companies and support the engineers after they are hired. “It’s like a mom and dad relationship with someone on each side looking out for them,” explains Kalamegham. “Howdy really stands out in the way they treat their people. In that kind of environment, you end up with more productive people,” Ouyang says. “When we hire again, I would like Howdy to be a bigger presence on our team.”

“The hit rate was 100 percent,” she says. “They work seamlessly with the team and have earned their respect. Some of them have even become tech leads.”

VSCO

Pro creativity VSCO was founded on the belief that you can do anything with the right creative tools, inspiring resources, and a supportive community. This ethos is the throughline in everything it does, and its new product, VSCO Pro, is no exception. When speaking with the community, VSCO kept hearing that more and more of its users wanted to make a living from their creativity. Creators wanted more tooling and better ways to be discovered by clients. VSCO Pro delivers just that. All new pro-tuned presets, fine-tuning sliders, and early access to VSCO for Desktop offer unprecedented control over the creative process. Coupled with the new tools is access to a supportive community of other Pro members and prospective clients. This community is meant to be a safe space to give and receive feedback on each other’s work. VSCO Pro member Jordé shares how the VSCO community inspired his own journey: “The community has provided me with breathtaking inspiration way before I ever thought of being a photographer. And experimenting with almost every preset has helped me understand color theory and find my style and artistic identity,” he said. Pro members also have access to premium support with live chat and priority access if they have questions. The new Pro tier has been well received, with most new signups opting for Pro after their trial period ends. Pro member Hans Isaacson explains why he switched: “I use VSCO to edit both mobile photos and photos made on my digital and film cameras. Upgrading to VSCO Pro made sense for me because of access to the desktop editor, as well as quicker support and access to the Pro presets.”

Corvus Insurance

Less risky business Corvus Insurance is no stranger to risk. That’s why it’s devoted to protecting people from it. It’s right in its mission statement: to make the world a safer place. Its team of underwriters, data scientists, and engineers predict and prevent cyber incidents and supply the coverage that helps organizations withstand risky events when they do happen. Corvus’ latest product, Corvus Signal, takes a three-pronged approach to mitigate risk. Always-on threat intelligence is the first line of defense. Companies receive alerts that are delivered the same day a new threat is discovered. Organizations that use Corvus typically patch their systems three times faster than others and receive an average of two weeks advance notice before alerted threats are exploited in the wild. Corvus Signal members also experience nearly 20% fewer cyber breaches.

Corvus also will conduct a personalized threat assessment of a company’s vulnerability when it signs up. This personalized security advice from Corvus experts helps organizations to focus their efforts and investment on relevant security priorities. Lastly, companies can use Corvus’ proprietary platform that offers 24/7 monitoring of new threat alerts and allows companies to conduct additional self-guided security assessments. This platform can also connect clients to Corvus-vetted security and incident response vendors. New cyberthreats emerge by the hour, and it can be impossible to keep up. With Corvus Signal, companies can rest assured that their systems are protected and always up to date.

Corvus Signal members experience

20% fewer cyber breaches.

Cal.com

Making the most of people’s time C

al.com was created like so many other businesses before it—from a completely unrelated company.

In 2020 Peer Richelsen was out of a job. Instead of looking for a new one, Richelsen built a marketplace to help founders find jobs. This marketplace, called Lean Hire, quickly expanded to be a place for anyone to find a job. As the business grew, Richelsen found himself building a lot of calendars and other scheduling-related software. “I didn’t really feel like I should be working on that,” Richelsen recalled. He looked for an open-source, off-the-shelf solution but couldn’t find a single result. Instead, he found a lot of people like himself asking for the same thing. This was the seed that became Cal.com. Richelsen knew the product had to be open source to integrate into Lean Hire. But he had barely put up a waitlist and started building the prototype.

100,000+ people have scheduled meetings with Cal.com.

People kept signing up for Cal.com until, eventually, Richelsen decided to walk away from a generous acquisition package to work on Cal.com full-time with his co-founder, Bailey Pumfleet. From day one, Cal.com was built on a culture of openness. The code base is open source, and the company posts all its salaries, metrics, and values. Richelsen likes to call it the “most public private company.” When you’re dealing with sensitive information like calendars, trust is vital. The community must trust your product, expertise, and roadmap. Cal.com has been building that trust since its inception. And it’s paying off. More than 100,000 people have scheduled meetings with Cal.com, and over 200 companies have integrated its apps. The company just launched version 3.0, which makes the booking flow four times faster than 2.0, adds more branding options, and turns any email into a bookable link.

Tandym

Helping small businesses inspire big loyalty

veryone’s had this conversation. You’re out to dinner with friends, and someone offers to put it on their card so they can get the points. “Oh, you should get this card,” they gush. “I get so much money back.” Who’s funding those rewards? Small businesses are. Payment processing costs, credit card fees, and customer rewards are disproportionately borne by small and midsize companies. If you buy something on your card, that gives you 3% back; that 3% is being paid by the merchant. Nearly all large retailers have a private label credit card and loyalty program. Historically, these cards were available only to businesses with a billion-plus dollars in revenue. That’s because the cost to set up one of these programs is gargantuan. Six issuing banks in the U.S. issue private label cards, all of which have been around since before the internet existed. Getting a program through one of these banks involves

a process lasting nine to 12 months with large amounts of manual coding in software languages as obsolete as the hardware they’re running on. Tandym has a better way. They issue private label cards directly to businesses, with a setup time of about 30 minutes. They charge them half a percent to process the payment. The merchant uses the rest to fund their rewards program. It’s a redistribution of wealth back to the merchant and their customers, and they can reward their customers for shopping with them, just like Amazon or Target. U.S. merchants spend around $100 billion annually to process customer payments. Half of that funding goes to funding the rewards programs of big banks. Merchants on Tandym’s payment network see an 80% reduction in payment processing fees, which they can use to fund their own rewards programs instead.

Tandym’s customers see an

80% reduction in processing fees.

Brightside

Lighting the way to financial stability

iving paycheck to paycheck means that you could be one car breakdown or hospital trip away from financial ruin. It means that you might never be able to retire. This is the reality for 61% of Americans who scrape by. Many bridge the gap with credit cards. Americans now owe $986 billion on their charge cards. We pay $120 billion in credit card interest and fees every year—that’s around $1,000 for every U.S. household. These financial struggles affect employers too. Financially stressed employees miss 16 more days of work per year, on average. They are two times more likely to look for a new job, and their healthcare costs are 30% higher. That equates to $4,200 lost per employee per year for employers. All of these reasons prompted Tom Spann to co-found Brightside in 2017, after a long career in healthcare. Spann realized how much a person’s financial health affects every aspect of their lives.

“We call ourselves financial care,” says Spann. “We’re not only financial wellness—we’re urgent care and primary care for financially sick people.” Brightside was created to make it easier for people to become more financially stable, he explains. Among other things, this means helping employees start savings accounts and figure out which bills to pay off first. Brightside users pay off debts in collections on average five times faster than people who don’t use the service, and they save an average of $1,200 per household per year. Jessica, an employee at a large distribution center in rural Illinois, was in need of serious financial help when her work connected her with Brightside as part of her benefits. She owed $20,000 on her credit cards—some with interest rates of nearly 30%—and $25,000 in student loans. After Jessica shared her bills and credit report with her Brightside financial assistant, the company made an action plan for her that included consolidating her credit card debt into a single loan at a lower interest rate and refinancing her car. In total, Brightside helped Jessica save more than $15,000 in future interest payments.

Brightside users pay off debts in collections on average

5x faster.

$1,200

is the average amount saved per year by Brightside users.

Puzzled? If you made it this far, you may have discovered there are several layers of puzzles hidden in this report. Think you’ve solved them all? Email us your solutions at puzzles@obvious.com. Stuck going in circles and need a hint? Drop us a line at hints@obvious.com.

In 2017, Obvious became one of the first venture capital firms in the world to become a Certified B Corporation. B Corps are businesses that meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose. We perform biannual audits to ensure we’re putting our values into practice with our employees, our corporate governance, our partners, our communities, and our environment. In 2023, after a two-year recertification process, our impact score increased from 83 to 108.