From Stripe Atlas for government forms, to micro financing for projects, to better virtual workspaces – meet this month’s Pioneers.
Decimals - Andrios Robert
Accounting ledgers as a service
Decimals is an API to store balances and transactions. Who owes who money? How much? Do all of the numbers settle out properly at the end of each quarter? All marketplace businesses need a functional ledger: Uber for drivers, Airbnb for hosts, etc. This is often built in-house.
Decimals provides this as a service, shortening 5 months of development to just a few minutes, with added security, reliability and scale.
EasyGov - Sharon Lin, Max Land, Victor Hua, Son Do
Stripe Atlas for Government Forms
Filling out government forms is very intimidating, especially for non-English speakers. With EasyGov, you can fill out government forms online, with translations to multiple languages and without the intimidating legal jargon. They're focused on voting for now but plan to expand to all forms of paperwork minutiae in the future, turning bureaucratic PDFs into beautiful apps.
Motionbox - Michael Aubry
Figma meets Final Cut Pro
Software for video editing is stuck in the 20th century, with no modern web counterparts. Michael made Motionbox to make it easier to produce high-quality content with the power of cloud computing and collaboration features you can only implement within a browser. It allows you to edit videos to grow your social media brand completely online.
Motionbox also comes with several templates, one-click subtitles, a feature that converts audio to video, and thousands of stock videos and photos to choose from, making it much easier to produce professional-looking content.
Hackerstash - Chris Pattison, Lewis Monteith, Harry King
Micro financing for projects
Plenty of people are working on financing for companies. Financing for projects is a little more tricky. While Patreon and Kickstarter allow you to support projects, they’re for people who want to use the product itself, not for people who want to support products they won’t use but are interested in.
Hackerstash is a monthly tournament to micro finance projects run by entrepreneurs and hackers. You buy in at the beginning of each month with $12, and the prize pool grows with every new user. During the month, you vote on each other's projects, and the top 10% win cash prizes to fund their project.
Cadoo - Colm Hayden
Get paid to get in shape
Cadoo pays you to accomplish your goals, with a focus around fitness. It helps people crowdfund fitness goals, using money as a motivator to run that extra mile or cycle up an additional hill. Eventually, they plan on giving users discounts on products and services for earning money with Cadoo.
Rant - Ansh Chopra, Sam Mendel, Rishabh Minocha
Ephemeral voice messaging
While many think the next wave is video, we’re pretty excited about voice being the new platform, and Clubhouse has shown we’re not alone. Phone calls are great, but they’re synchronous. Interestingly, voice memos have taken off in every nation except America as the new way of calling. Rant is poised to bring that brilliance to the New World by making it ephemeral and frictionless, like Snapchat did to photos.
WFHLAND - Jonathan Bree
A virtual workspace for your team
Remote work isn’t easy. Especially with quarantine, we’re all looking for better ways to communicate and create the feeling of presence we miss from in person work.
WFHLAND is a new way to be together: a virtual space for your remote team, recreating the serendipity and natural conversation of a shared physical space. Feel more together with always-on proximity-based audio, one-click collaboration, and integrations with all your existing productivity tools.
Mon - Muhammad Harfoush
Financial Planning for Gen Z
Mon’s goal is to create a money management experience that doesn’t feel like tax filings and spreadsheets. It highlights recurring expenses, catalogs them for you, and rewards you when you stay on budget.
Accelerated - Moiz Ahmed, Thayallan Srinathan, Hussain Punjani
Heroku for GPUs
From machine learning experts to gamers, everyone is in dire need of GPU compute these days. Existing providers like AWS are expensive, and Accelerated is trying to provide similar performance at a fraction of the cost.
The GPU market is inefficient: ‘Server-grade’ products carry the same performance as consumer GPUs, but have significantly higher licensing fees from Nvidia. The team at Accelerated are arbitraging this dynamic by providing GPUs that function the same as your AWS instance, but at 50% the cost.
If these people and projects sound interesting to you, check out the full list: http://pioneer.app/winners. And if you’d like to earn your place on that list… just start playing: https://pioneer.app.