#12 - Social Impact Startups
A bi-weekly newsletter containing curated entrepreneurial focused content for students, founders and friends.
The Recap
Often social impact is associated with organizations and charities trying to assist individuals and communities. Though charity based social impact is important, it is also critical to acknowledge companies designing platforms and technology to solve social issues. This article highlights a wide variety of startups and organizations in the social impact space looking to make an impact and develop technical solutions to support social causes. Make sure to subscribe below and read to the end for job and internship opportunities at many of the featured social impact startups!
Featured Social Impact Startups
Founders: Athena Kan, Shiroy Aspandiar and Brandon Kent Wang
Dreambound is a startup designed to assist senior citizens affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Dreambound has designed a platform that eases the path to becoming a certified nursing assistant (CNA) by helping pay for, and finish the process of, becoming a CNA. Dreambound also assists employers to hire directly and avoid dealing with staffing and recruiting agencies. Through providing additional free services for individuals and businesses in America, Dreambound also helps CNAs navigate through unemployment benefits, paid leave, housing assistance, and more.
Founder: Maya Burhanpurkar
Adventus Robotics develops multi-purpose self-driving software and hardware for wheelchairs, cleaning technologies, and agricultural applications. Adventus helps empower individuals with disabilities by implementing self-driving artificial intelligence-based software in wheelchairs. Adventus’s self-driving software and corresponding retrofit kit are mountable on any third party manually-operated powered-wheelchair and allows customers to achieve a great sense of freedom through the chair’s ability to safely navigate a wide range of environments. With their technology, Adventus is revolutionizing the automated wheelchair space and is easing the lives of countless individuals. This is particularly useful in airports, where people with restricted mobility can wait hours for human porters who could spread pathogens, and in hospitals, where wheelchair porters are mandatory for inpatient appointments. In light of the pandemic, Adventus has pivoted to also begin developing self-driving cleaning and tug technologies for hospitals and greenhouses.
Seed Stage Ventures
Juno runs a bidding process between banks, credit unions, and other lenders. The banks, unions, and other lenders compete for people’s collective business by offering exclusive discounts. Customers are then able to decide whether they want to use the deal negotiated by Juno.
Almond Finance brings economic opportunities to consumers, merchants, and financial institutions in developing regions. They are currently working on a global financial solutions platform to act as a digital wallet enabling individuals to send and receive money along with getting a loan through your phone.
Surge Employment Solutions provides pathways to employment for reentering citizens and financial stability to their families. Formerly incarcerated people are unemployed at a rate of over 27% and they seek to help solve this issue.
CaribEd is a team of university-level students from US and Guyana that aims to restore hope to students facing academic disadvantages and shift local educational norms by providing a variety of engaging supplementary educational resources, with a focus on supporting low-income students outside of the urban core.
ArtLifting is a social enterprise that connects corporate customers with artists who are either homeless or have disabilities. ArtLifting artists are located across the U.S. and their customers are worldwide. Clients of AirLifting include Google, Starbucks, CBRE, FedEx, and LinkedIn.
Pre-Seed Ventures
Teach To Learn is a Boston-based nonprofit that uses music as the educational, creative, and therapeutic foundation for building personal relationships and an online community. Their platform connects musicians, teachers, and classrooms across the world through online cultural exchange programs and education services.
Insightiv aims to help solve the issue surrounding the lack of radiologists in developing countries through their Intelligent and Distributed Diagnostics Platform. Their platform leverages connectivity and Artificial Intelligence to optimize the workflow for doctors, allowing them to effectively serve more patients from across the country in a shorter period of time.
Green Source seeks to help smallholders in West and Central Africa attain economic sustainability through providing local and affordable processing machinery, sustainable certified oil, and through connecting these smallholders to environmentally and socially-minded buyers.
Shelly Xu Design (SXD) aims to maximize beauty using a minimalistic approach. SXD creates artful, versatile, and functional apparel that produces no waste and reduces waste left by using deadstock or remnant fabric which would otherwise go to landfills.
Coding it Forward (CIF) is a nonprofit for individuals creating new opportunities and pathways into social impact and civic technology. CIF organizes fellowships, programs and has a fund designed to support early stage founders solving technical challenges.
Viinko is making time management and organization education accessible for all students. Viinko’s platform integrates into a school’s curriculum making the essential time management and organization a part of every student’s education.
Opportunities
Internships
Dreambound - Software Engineering Intern (Summer 2021)
Full-time Positions
Dreambound - Business Development Representative
Dreambound - Software Engineer, Back-end
Dreambound - Software Engineer, Full-Stack
Dreambound - Software Engineer, Front-end
Dreambound - Operations Lead
Dreambound - Chief of Staff
CaribEd - Content Producer
Juno- Customer Success Associate
Juno - Product Manager
Juno - Senior Back-end Developer
Juno - Head of Performance Marketing
About the Author
Alex Marley is a junior majoring in electrical engineering and economics at Northeastern University. Currently he is the Vice President for the Huntington Angels Network, External Relations Lead for Generate, researching neural interfacing devices at Northeastern, an electrical engineer for Paradigm Hyperloop and the founder of the StartOP newsletter. Alex is also working part time as an electrical engineer at Notch Technologies and was a venture analyst for Wiase Capital.