Reddit has reminded us that some games never stop, including that of company foundation and innovation. Pioneer is somewhat a proof of this; we now measure 215 founders from 50 countries who started out as players in our Tournament.
We're proud to announce the latest cohort, working on everything from a new Okta, to haptic hardware, to an enterprise variant of the very popular Lunchclub. Here they are:
Potlatch - Taiga Kobayashi, Michitomo Nakahara
Lunchclub for the Enterprise
There are now tens of thousands of Slack communities. Potlatch is software that integrates with Slack to help streamline the process of networking upon arrival.
Gone are the days of unanswered DMs. Create a profile that includes background, goals and interests. Through AI-curated matches, Potlatch scouts the most relevant people in your vicinity, automatically finds a good time to meet and initiates a 1:1 video call.
Afriktrip - Ibukunoluwa Salau, Angela Kagabo
Travelocity for Africa
The African touring industry is still largely transacted offline. Afriktrip is a marketplace solution that aggregates local tourist trips throughout the continent.
With Afriktrip, guides in any city can market their business, find potential customers and process bookings all in one place. Likewise, tourists can discover safaris, city tours and more. They currently offer over 1000 trips in 28 countries.
Onboard - Dante Lex
Okta 2.0
As a company grows, so too does the complexity and expense of managing employee access to team tools. Onboard is software that lets you quickly manage employee access to your team’s apps in under 90 seconds, all in one place. Baking these processes into software also eliminates the risk of inadvertent or malicious disruptions during contractor and employee offboarding.
Field of Vision - David Deneher, Tim Farrelly, Omar Salem
Haptic Hardware for the Blind
Over 160 million blind and visually impaired people around the world are limited in their ability to enjoy sporting events. Field of Vision is building a handheld tablet that enables them to experience games through haptic feedback and touch.
Using computer vision, they track the exact location of the ball on the pitch and mirror its position on a tablet via dynamic finger piece. This same technology is extensible to other sports and beyond.
Proficient - Anar Kafkas
Job Application Assistant (GPT-3)
It’s difficult to stand out in a stack of resumes. Proficient is software built on GPT-3 to help prepare and polish a unique job application. In addition to auto-generating improvements to your responses and filling out repetitive information, Proficient provides a dashboard to track and manage the status of your submissions.
Warp - Andres Leon, Alexis Leon
Digital Banking for Latin America
Small businesses in Latin America can't afford expensive payment methods like cards. Warp intends to become the platform for day-to-day payments, allowing modern methods like QR codes, Bluetooth payments and even digital menus for contactless ordering in restaurants.
With Warp, you get access to a bank account, a mobile app and card. If you're a business, you can open your account on Warp, start accepting payments instantly and forego painful paperwork, bank branches, and inefficient call centres.
If finding the next 2,000 companies sounds interesting to you, shoot us a note this week. We're actively looking for an engineer and designer: team@pioneer.app.