The Envision Accelerator Cohort 5: Underrepresented Founders, Game-changing Companies
As Envision Accelerator approaches its 2 year anniversary, we’re taking some time to celebrate our founders’ recent accomplishments as we wrap up our fifth cohort.
Envision was started with the sole mission of inspiring, supporting, and equipping young, diverse founders building the future. Through our accelerator program — an equity-free, community-driven approach to venture support — we’ve accelerated 58 companies to date that have gone on to raise $25mm+ from world-class angels/VCs like Alexis Ohanian, Greylock Partners, the CEOs of Doordash and Product Hunt. More importantly, we’ve supported over a hundred founders on their company-building journeys with mentorship, a built-in support system and network, and a lifelong community.
In our most recent cohort, we accelerated 11 companies in industries spanning fintech, consumer, healthcare, and more over the course of ten weeks. Envision family, please join us in welcoming the founders of EC5.
AlphaRora
AlphaRora allows financial institutions and professionals to integrate data science and intelligence tools into private market operations and processes.
Adoba is a co-founder at AlphaRora where he works on operations and technical development. He has a degree in computer science from Austin College, he previously had a role in Rift where he led their payment integrations with other financial institutions. Adoba is also a member of OnDeck as well as Launch House.
Michal is a co-founder at AlphaRora where he primarily works on product and design. He has a background in finance and economics and was part of the team which managed the college endowment fund. Michal also owns a pub / restaurant, currently lives in Poland Warsaw and attended Austin College alongside Adoba.
Cashex
CashEx helps African migrants send money with zero fees.
Kingsley Ezeani, the CEO, is a serial entrepreneur from Nigeria, where he built an online portal with over 5 million users. When he moved to the UK a few years ago, he witnessed how expensive it was to send money to his family in Nigeria. Kingsley has completed an MPA at Harvard and an MBA at Oxford. Scott Morgan, the CTO is an MBA student at MIT. Scott had spent his career as a software engineer at a hedge fund building software for algorithmic currency trading. Scott saw the level of sophistication at large financial institutions and wanted to bring that same sophistication to people who the financial system has left behind.
Clear
Clear helps you buy, track and share your skincare
Ahana is the Founder at CEO of Clear. She’s 22 years old and was raised between the UK, New Delhi, and Singapore. She started building Clear full-time in January 2021, and was accepted to Y Combinator’s W21 batch. After launching in June 2021, she grew the company to 6,000+ users, raised her seed round, and built out her team to 5 members from around the world. Clear is the integrated social commerce app for skincare — they help our users track and share their skincare routines. Having suffered a lot with her own skin growing up, Ahana wanted to build a tool to help people track their own skin progress, build more transparency in the process of learning which products to use, and drive cosmetic formulators to create more innovative products and make data-driven decisions.
Clocr
Clocr is an all-in-one digital legacy and emergency planning platform that helps you pass on your legacy.
Apoorva is an Austin-native and studies Management Information Systems and Economics at the University of Texas at Austin. She co-founded Clocr after a personal experience led her to realize the difficulty of dealing with the aftermath of a death of a loved one. She also spent her summers interning at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in the Research and Statistics division.
Okel
Okel connects the world over more meaningful meals at local restaurants by facilitating the curation, scheduling, reservations, and payments.
After moving from Syria for asylum 8 years ago, sharing meals was Farah’s ultimate recipe for cultivating community, so she went to college and studied the history, psychology, and anthropology of sharing meals, founded a service organization to help refugee women monetize sharing their recipes, started a media platform that celebrates the stories of immigrant restauranteurs, then went on to co-produce a docu-series that united disparate strangers over sharing meals hosted by immigrant chefs. But upon her return from my graduate studies abroad, she was lonelier than ever, knowing what she was missing and that she wasn’t the only one missing it. Farah left her first job after 8 months to start Okel and help more people share more meals more often.
Pareto
Pareto makes getting dressed the easiest part of your day through quality wardrobe essentials + life-simplifying technology.
Jessica and Olivia met as undergrads at WashU over 9 years ago and bonded over their love for retail. They are total retail nerds — they’ve worked as sales associates, in-house for retail brands such as Band of Outsiders, J.Crew, and Target, and then spent a combined 7 years as retail consultants with McKinsey. Now, they’re taking all of this experience, passion, and frustration to build the next legacy retail brand!
Peko Produce
Peko Produce delivers “imperfect” or surplus fruits and vegetables to consumers at up to 40% off grocery prices. We’re on a mission to fight food waste and promote access to affordable, healthy food.
With Sang’s background as an operator in food tech and Arielle’s background in venture capital for the consumer goods industry, they teamed up to go through multiple iterations of potential solutions to reduce food waste. After many trials and errors, Peko Produce came along in May 2021 — a “peculiar” produce delivery service, on a mission to reduce food waste and empower access to affordable, healthy food.
Sencha
Sencha is building embedded crypto infrastructure for legacy banks.
Based in Boston, Christopher Lamarre (CEO) and his brother Kristian Lamarre (COO) are from Haiti, and in the US they have also experienced the limitations and differential opportunities that the financial system offers to consumers using local banks and credit unions vs. the big banks. Rishi Nair leads product & technology, having worked on eBay’s NFT team. Together, the team is bridging the gap between legacy banking and the crypto space.
SHE
SHE is reinventing access to mental and sexual health services for female identifying GenZ.
A NYU grad, Rina is the Founder and CEO of SHE. She previously founded and scaled a health and education youth non-profit in India and has worked with thousands of youth across 100 communities globally. SHE is supported by a team of seasoned medical professionals and has partnership with Girl Scout Nationals.
Sotira
Sotira is an integrated SaaS platform that enables income stream management, financial tracking, expense tracking, sales logging, profit optimization and profit forecasting for ecommerce sellers and resellers on platforms like Etsy, Poshmark, Depop, Shopify, StockX and GOAT.
Amrita is the co-founder and CEO of Sotira and is currently a student at UC Berkeley. She is from Menlo Park, California. Amrita’s co-founder and CTO, Gary, is a UC Berkeley graduate. He is from San Francisco, California. Sotira has raised from Soma Capital and is a part of their Spring 2022 fellowship program.
Agora Labs
Agora Labs is building infrastructure for the tokenized economies.
Matt and Charles are high school best friends that have built other ventures together, and Jerry and Freeman were brought on the team for their knowledge in building and scaling web3 products. They started Agora in summer 2021, and then launched to the public on Oct. 22. 4 weeks later they received a $50K non-dilutive investment (grant) from the DeSo Octane Fund (fund by a16z, Sequoia Capital, and Coinbase). Their core team consists of ex-Facebook/Meta, ex-employees of YC-Backed Companies, and very deep expertise on the Web 3.0 x Creator Economy space. Their own token on the DESO Blockchain reached over $500K+ market cap on initial launch!
If or anyone you know is interested in getting in touch with the founders above, please reach out to us at eteam@envisionaccelerator.com, and we’ll happily put you in touch!
At Envision, we’re building the best community, accelerator program, and built-in support system for young diverse founders. Subscribe to our newsletter, apply for our upcoming cohort, and follow us on Twitter.
Envision is a community-driven accelerator for young, underrepresented founders. We believe that high-potential founders should have nothing standing in their way to building great companies. Envision’s approach combines a non-dilutive grant, tailored workshops, 1:1 mentorship, and a community for life.
