Alchemist Accelerator announces new leadership alongside its latest class of companies • TechCrunch

Alchemist Accelerator, the enterprise-focused startup incubator, is hosting a demo day today for its 31st batch of companies. For many of these companies, it’s the first time they’ve shown their efforts to the world.

The accelerator itself, meanwhile, has some news: new leadership. Rachel Chalmers, formerly the head of AlchemistX (a division of Alchemist that helps governments and companies like Siemens and NEC build incubators of their own), will become the new president and managing director of the main Alchemist accelerator. Ian Bergman, previously global managing director for Microsoft’s “Microsoft for Startups” program before joining Alchemist in early 2021, will now head up AlchemistX. While former Alchemist managing director Ravi Belani says he’ll still be formally involved with Alchemist, he’ll be focusing on training founders, helping them fundraise, and “initiatives to deepen and broaden our platform.”

On the new role, Rachel Chalmers tells me “Ravi and I have worked together for years and have a strongly overlapping shared value set around the importance of connecting entrepreneurs with corporate domain experts to create innovation and opportunities. Alchemist is above all a network and a community, and I’m committed to serving that community.”

Alchemist will stream today’s demo day live on YouTube — you can find that right here beginning at 10:30 am pacific.

Meanwhile, here’s an alphabetical list of the new companies presenting today, each with a few words about what they’re doing as I understand it:

Advisar.AI: Builds models meant to help teams detect trends/patterns in their data with “self-supervised, predictive machine learning.”

agtools: A platform for “farmers, buyers, and everyone on the supply chain” to help better understand market behavior and make more money while minimizing waste.

AIsport: Tools for online/virtual sports coaches, with computer vision meant to help count reps and monitor form.

Flyhound: Builds tools to help rescue groups better utilize drones to find missing persons, respond to natural disasters, etc.

FreeFuse: Turns training videos into an interactive table-of-contents-style “tree”, allowing viewers to more easily find just the content they need/want.

Haze Automotive: More accessible carbon fiber for automobiles, it sounds like. Their landing page is pretty locked down, but the founder’s LinkedIn says they “are taking race-car technology [that] is normally exclusive to hyper-cars (due to the high price) and democratizing it to mass market vehicles.”

Insightarc: Automated insights to help you quickly figure out where/why you’re losing customers in the purchase flow.

Krinu: Connects chat platforms (like WhatsApp/Signal) into your company’s CRM (like Salesforce or HubSpot) to make customer chats easier to keep track of and follow up on.

Lendha: Banking tools and short-term loans for small businesses in emerging markets, beginning with Nigeria.

Loyee: Building a Slack bot that analyzes your company’s CRM data and messages when it spots unusual trends or insights.

Marvel Carbon: Carbon recapture. The company’s LinkedIn says it’s working to “capture and return CO₂ back underground”, while their website details using micro-algae to do the capturing.

PieData: Not much is available on this company, but they’re pitched as a “No-Code platform that helps you to find, launch & train ML models”.

Masthead Data: A no-code solution for monitoring your team’s Google BigQuery data, identifying anomalies and determining when/why things went off the rails.

mechlabs: A “fast-paced, hands-on crash course” that teaches students to build robots with laser cutters, PCB printers and more.

Peace of Mind: A “mental resilience” program meant to help employees identify and manage stress/emotional strain to reduce risk of burnout.

renovai: An “AI-based stylist” for e-commerce brands that can help identify, say, a table that might look good with that couch you’re buying and then place both in a mock-up image of a room.

Seccuri: A “smart matching” platform for helping companies expand their cybersecurity team.

Torus: Helps banks and payment providers better analyze and optimize the network fees they pay when a card is used.

Unibaio: Working on “nano-vehicles based on natural compounds” to reduce how much pesticide must be used to be effective.

weRice: An augmented-reality based tool that helps manufacturing/construction workers identify issues while automatically saving any learnings for the next person dealing with it.

The Demo Day will also include a handful of presentations from Alchemist alum companies now looking to raise a Series A, including Billo, MATERIALL, Mobiz, Outwork and Yieldigo.