- unistart
- Posts
- Employee-tailored credit cards, Social investing, and an AI data aggregator
Employee-tailored credit cards, Social investing, and an AI data aggregator
We launched at Babson!
Josh @ unistart
October 23, 2023
Happy Friday!
Welcome to the latest edition of unistart, where we feature the hottest early stage startups, job opportunities, and valuable resources, all in one newsletter.
We’re excited to announce that we just launched at Babson College! In honor of that, this week we’re featuring 3 popping startups from their school.
Now let’s dive straight into what’s on 🔥 this week.
Table of Contents
Startups of the Week - Babson Edition
New Entry Level Job Openings
Deal Preview of the Week
🤟 What Your Classmates Are Building
What? - A consumer credit card company powered by employers. The card’s features are tailored for company employees, such as housing perks and immediate reimbursements.
Why? - Hypercard aligns employer-employee incentives. The more perks and the happier employers are with them, the more retained they’ll be in the company. The card membership benefits also allow the company to save on costs. Using personal credit cards also keeps employees responsible and reduces corporate card misspending.
📍Industries: Delivery Service, Delivery, Food Delivery
🚀 Stage: Pre-seed
💵 Funding: $5 million in equity & $10 mil in debt
🛠 Founded: 2022
😎 Founders: Marc Baghadjian (Babson), Nikolas Ioannou (UWashington)
Bonus: Marc is a serial entrepreneur. Remember the super viral Tinder x Tiktok dating app Lolly? Yep, he founded that.
Hypercard is also proudly backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman 😳
They are looking for an operations intern. Reply to this email with your resume if you are interested.
What? - A social investing platform to trade over 5000 US stocks and ETFs commission-free.
Why? - Investors usually manage multiple apps and communities to gain investment insights. Investsky provides an all-in-one solution by providing market research tools, a community portal, and a commission-free way to buy stocks.
📍Industries: FinTech, Social Network, Stock Exchanges
🚀 Stage: Pre-seed
🛠 Founded: 2021
😎 Founders: Nitish Mittal, Turki Alshaikh (Babson)
What? - A universal retrieval engine for LLMs to access unstructured data from any source such as Discord channels and Microsoft Office files.
Why? - Incorporating AI can be intimidating for businesses. Carbon makes it easy because it can collect data from any source and convert it into AI-friendly plain text.
📍Industries: API, Developer APIs
🚀 Stage: Pre-seed
🛠 Founded: 2022
😎 Founders: Derek Tu (Babson)
Bonus: Carbon’s founder was employee #1 at Italic, which then went on to raise $50 million in Series B. Italic was founded by Jeremy Cai, who previously built Fountain, a hiring platform that’s now worth $1.5 billion. Jeremy Cai dropped out Babson for the Thiel Fellowship. Crazy story right?
This is why you should network with people in your school. (Hint: use unistart)
Know of a startup that we should feature in this newsletter? Send us a reply!
📃 New Job Openings
WAFL, an on-demand college laundry service, is looking for a USC brand ambassador
Stealth startup based in LA is hiring a SWE intern (paid)
Stealth startup is hiring a social media manager / content creator (paid)
Interested in any of these jobs? Send us a reply for more info.
None of these a fit? Check our job board for more.
We update our job board weekly with the best entry level jobs in startups & tech.
💰 Deal Preview for the Week
Each week, we’ll be giving everyone on our email list a preview of one of the startups in our curated deal flow list.
This week’s: A personal assistant for educators, this SaaS app went from 0 -> 52K ARR in 12 months, and has $1 mil+ in sales pipeline.
They are raising a conservative $1 mil pre-seed round.
Interested? Shoot us a reply and we will forward you the deck
📣 We want to hear from you!
If you are job hunting or hiring for roles in startups & VC, searching for deal flow, or just want to grow your college's startup ecosystem, we want to help.
Schedule a 30-min call with us so we can understand your needs.
🔗 Important Links
Founders 👨🔧: Fill out this quick 2-min form to be featured on unistart.io and the newsletter
Job seekers 👩🏼💻 - Sign-up for our alerts to be matched with tailored opportunities
Investors 🧙🏻♀️ - Join our private deal flow to see the hottest startups from top universities and their alumni base (this week features decks of Babson founders)