A gift of perspective: Founders share their defining moments
Farris Pine
Bay Area Sales Lead, Startups
Jess Jinkins
Startup Center of Excellence
It's a diverse world full of diverse startups. Discover the stories and inspiration behind some of the most promising founders building on Google Cloud today.
“So what do you do for a living?” is a question that’s likely to come up this time of year as we socialize at holiday gatherings. While we are so quickly defined by what we do, we are very rarely asked why we do what we do and how we arrived where we are.
Yet this is core to the work of so many founders. Without a passion or a vision — without a defining moment — it can be hard to keep going or even to get started. To provide a little perspective, and perhaps something to talk about at your next family gathering or office party, we gathered nine startup leaders currently building on Google Cloud to understand their defining moments and origin stories.
Whether overcoming energy poverty and making electricity distribution more effective, classifying diseases more accurately for life-saving care, or providing every athlete with the insights of the pros, startups challenge the status quo in new and exciting ways.
These founders and their teams deserve the credit for these solutions. And yet hearing how many arrived at them, it’s clear just how much luck and inspiration it takes to match the drive and dedication that are the foundations of a successful startup. The ideas, you might say, are a gift, and it’s up to the startups to come up with the package we all can’t wait to unwrap and play with what’s inside.
COI Energy
Profound ideas and innovations are sometimes forged through the most challenging of times. Consider the experience of SaLisa Berrien, the founder and CEO of COI Energy, a provider of equitable green energy based in Brooklyn:
“Growing up in Bethlehem, PA, in a family of seven, my father worked in the blast furnace section of Bethlehem Steel and did not make enough to cover all of our bills, leading our family to live in the dark more frequently than I wish to acknowledge. This had an indelible impact on me as a child, and sparked an interest in working to improve energy efficiency and affordability in such a way that reduces the number of families living in energy poverty.”
Berrien’s COI Energy fulfills that objective by leveraging advanced AI technologies to identify underutilized energy capacity, what it calls “kW for Good,” which businesses can then provide to low-income households. This offers businesses tax deductions while creating a more climate-friendly economy for all.
Passage
Arriving in a new country as an international student can be dizzying — whether it’s language barriers and cultural adjustments or financial challenges and no network, the experience is fraught with hurdles. Martin Basiri, CEO of Passage, discovered these challenges firsthand through own experiences as an international student and sought to make things easier for those like him through his company that matches top international talent with labor shortages in Canada.
“Today, through Passage, I am working to remove financial and systemic barriers for international talent and empower them to contribute to Canada’s economy, assist in driving down labor shortages, and achieve their dreams,” Basiri said. “Funding a journey such as the one I was on and so many others find themselves in can be difficult, and Passage helps alleviate the stress while positively impacting Canadian employers.”
Ellevoy
“As a corporate software executive, I noticed a glaring lack of female and diverse leadership teams in both my customer base and the large software companies where I worked,” said Candice Edwards, CEO and co-founder of Ellevoy, an AI-powered intelligent matching platform for founders and funders. “At the same time, I saw that strategic investments in the startups ecosystem often overlooked underrepresented founders — not for a lack of innovative ideas, but because of systemic barriers standing in the way of accessing capital, resources, and networks. I wanted to change that storyline.”
Edwards went on to launch Ellevoy as an answer to the inequities that were stifling innovation. Ellevoy uses relational intelligence to level the playing field and empower founders from diverse backgrounds to thrive with more equitable access to capital, community, and talent.
“Ellevoy embodies my belief that by connecting the right people to the right opportunities, we can unlock a new wave of ideas, leadership, and growth in the future,” Edwards said.
Auransa
Viwat Visuthikraisee is the co-founder and COO of Auransa, an emerging clinical-stage biopharma company that’s created a proprietary AI platform to derive a differentiated pipeline of novel drugs. A defining — and life-saving — moment occurred when Auransa’s technology countered an initial diagnosis of a liver tumor as having come from a metastasized breast tumor with evidence that it was actually more likely from ovarian cancer.
“This crucial insight prompted further investigation from oncologists and led to a surgery to remove the patient’s ovaries and the surrounding tumors, changing her path of treatment,” Visuthikraisee said. “This experience underscored a realization for us: drug development is a long journey, and not the only way to make an impact. We can save lives today with our technology through diagnostics.”
Who says only professional athletes deserve access to the best coaching strategies? Not Rocky Collis, co-founder and CEO of Mustard. Collis had the opportunity to closely observe coaching styles and tactics from two legendary coaches, and knew that modern AI, computer vision, and other technologies could democratize these personalized lessons for the rest of us.
“Mustard uses proprietary computer vision and AI technology to unlock exceptional, personalized coaching experiences for every golfer and baseball pitcher who wants to level up,” Collis said. “We are helping athletes improve their skills dramatically, and we believe Mustard will help many users achieve new heights through best-in-class coaching that would have otherwise been inaccessible.”
Eka Solutions
The transportation and logistics market is highly fragmented, manual, and undigitized, with an estimated half of all logistics customers using spreadsheets to track their orders, shipments, and other key information. When J.J. Singh saw this and realized how big of a barrier it is for small and medium-sized businesses, he thought he had a solution. Specifically Eka Solutions.
Eka Solutions is a cloud-based transportation management platform that delivers high customer productivity, performance, and security to small-to-medium businesses (SMBs), freight brokers, shippers, and trucking companies.
“SMBs are the great American engine of entrepreneurial business growth in the transportation and logistics sector, and I wanted to help build a sustainable platform to help fuel growth therein,” Singh said. “Everyone in the industry knows that if the wheels are not turning, you are not earning. Eka Solutions is helping improve driver safety, SMB performance, and so much more through affordable digital tools.”
WriterDuet
As a lifelong lover of movies and television shows and obsessively logical software developer, Guy Goldstein, the CEO of WriterDuet, would grow frustrated when characters or stories would be plagued by internal inconsistencies, arbitrary motivations, and plot holes. Goldstein also recognized that fixing these problems once filming has commenced would be extremely difficult, expensive, and maybe even impossible.
That’s why he launched WriterDuet, a real-time collaborative screenwriting software that includes AI-powered tools to summarize, analyze, and visualize screenplays.
“WriterDuet helps writers tell their stories in a more seamless and collaborative manner, and our new tool ScreenplayIQ is built to assist them in improving their stories and bring them to life in production,” Goldstein explains. “This can prevent a lot of challenges for writers, and ultimately benefits myself and other lovers of films and television shows with higher quality productions.”
CLIKA
What happens when a long-time programmer with firsthand experience in the challenges of deploying AI models meets a public affairs professional with experience in navigating new markets? The answer is CLIKA, an MLOps solution provider that achieves up to 87% AI model compression and 12X faster speed without compromising performance.
Nayul Kim, co-founder and CEO, and Ben Asaf, co-founder and CTO, bonded over the realization that AI deployment was not just a technical challenge, but rather a bottleneck standing in the way of innovation, as engineers were spending up to a year to deploy a single AI model for specific hardware. CLIKA’s automated, unified SDK helps bridge the gap between any AI software and many types of hardware and allows companies to deploy models seamlessly — even in air-gapped environments — through a single line of code.
“CLIKA represents more than a tool — it’s a mission to unlock AI’s full potential by breaking down the barriers of AI deployment on devices and helping organizations move faster,” Kim and Asaf wrote in a message.
Bytebrew
When Kian Hozouri looked out over the gaming industry, he saw a highly segmented and siloed tooling ecosystem that ultimately penalized developers for growth. The fragmented games landscape dictated that developers use a series of high-priced platforms to locate optimization opportunities and take action to boost in-game performance that only became more expensive as a given project became more successful.
Hozouri co-founded ByteBrew and now acts as COO of the company that provides an all-in-one product analytics platform through a unified suite of tools that identifies revenue-driving opportunities and empowers developers to take actions that improve experiences.
“ByteBrew is now trusted by more than 10,000 studios and developers because it provides a free platform that democratizes a product arsenal that breaks down previously walled gardens that used to prevent a diverse gaming ecosystem from flourishing,” Hozouri said.
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