Happy Monday!

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 hope you all have been enjoying a restful, productive summer so far, and we can’t wait to share what’s on 🔥 this week.

Table of Contents

1. Startups of the Week

2. NEW job openings

3. Try out the unistart investor outreach tool

4. Content Recap - Styl (Tinder for Clothes)

🤟 What Your Classmates Are Building

SMACKIN’ Sunflower Seeds

What? - Healthy sunflower seeds packed with bold flavors that’ll knock your socks off.

Why? - Sunflower seeds have been a baseball staple for over 70 years, keeping players entertained, fulfilled, and focused throughout their games. However, the industry today features dull, uninventive flavors with excess sodium. Smackin’ Sunflower takes this traditional snack to the next level with high-quality jumbo seeds and unique flavors that taste better and last longer.

Bonus - Founders Brian and Cole were college roommates who took more than 2 years to develop the perfect snack. They’ve now amassed close to 1M followers across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube with their simple snack-sampling videos with major and little league players. Now they fulfill over 5000 orders a day through their own factory 🤯

• 📍Industries: Food & Beverage, Snack Food

• 🚀 Stage: Seed

• 😎 Founders: Brian Waddick (University of Minnesota), Cole Shaefer (University of Minnesota)

StrokeDx

What? - A rapid, portable, and low-cost stroke diagnosis device.

Why? - Stroke care is prohibitively expensive and inaccessible even today. StrokeDx could revolutionize 21st-century stroke diagnosis, drastically reducing the time to treatment in stroke patients, improving prognoses, and reducing medical costs.

Bonus - They just raised an oversubscribed $5M in seed funding led by healthcare VCs like DigiTx Partners and Freeflow Ventures.

• 📍Industries: BioTech, Health, Healthcare, Neurotech

• 🚀 Stage: Seed

• 😎 Founders: Shane Shahrestani (California Institute of Technology), Alexander Ballatori (University of Southern California)

Parea

What? - Parea’s platform helps businesses debug, test, evaluate, and monitor LLM applications.

Why? - AI engineers often must work across multiple platforms to test, monitor, and improve their LLM-powered applications. Parea is an easily integrable one-stop shop for engineers at every stage of their application lifecycle.

• 📍Industries: Developer Tools, Generative AI, SaaS

• 🚀 Stage: Seed (YC S23)

• 😎 Founders: Joel Alexander (Columbia University), Joschka Braun (New York University)

Interested in connecting with these startups or know of one that we should feature in this newsletter? Send us a reply!

 📃 New Job Openings

Engineering

• Community investing startup Hedge is hiring a Full-Stack Engineer (Remote)

• Unibui, an AI-powered student talent management startup, is looking for an iOS Developer Intern (Remote)

• Computer vision startup Matroid is searching for an Infrastructure Software Engineer (In-person, Palo Alto, CA)

• Squint, a Sequoia Capital and Menlo Ventures-backed AR platform, is hiring a Backend Software Engineer (Remote)

• Healthcare operations AI startup Phrase Health is looking for a Full-Stack Software Engineer (Remote)

Non-Engineering

• Freelancing platform startup Solo is looking for a Growth Associate (In-person, Seattle, WA)

• Orum, an AI-powered live conversation platform, is hiring an Account Executive (Remote)

• Startup-investment platform Wefunder (YC W13) is hiring a Business Development Intern (In-person, Nashville, TN)

• Spotify for restaurants startup Foncii is looking for a Content Creator (Remote)

• Pepper, a food supply chain operating system startup, is hiring a Marketing Manager (Remote)

🚨 Check out: unistart Blast Your Deck

Search through thousands of VC firms with easy-to-use filters.

Get their email contacts directly on the page.

Try it out for free here: https://unistart.io/investorsCheck 

Please let us know how we can best serve you as a student founder or investor at [email protected] Thanks so much

📸 Content Recap: Styl (Tinder for Clothes)

What? - This week on unistart, we featured Styl, a Tinder-like app made by Duke students that helps women find clothes that match their vibe.

Why? - Social media marketing is notoriously difficult to master from strategy to execution, but these student founders managed to leverage a viral trend that EXPLODED 🔥 

Find out how Styl’s posts got 2M+ likes and CRAZY celebrity attention HERE ⬅️