

Get in the KNOW
on LA Startups & Tech
X
Image courtesy of Geekwire.com
LA Tech Week: 3 Student Projects Emerge from NASA’s Space Accelerator Program
Andria Moore
Andria is the Social and Engagement Editor for dot.LA. She previously covered internet trends and pop culture for BuzzFeed, and has written for Insider, The Washington Post and the Motion Picture Association. She obtained her bachelor's in journalism from Auburn University and an M.S. in digital audience strategy from Arizona State University. In her free time, Andria can be found roaming LA's incredible food scene or lounging at the beach.
Almost every company in existence today has some sort of diversity and inclusion initiative. NASA, however, took theirs one step further — providing $50,000 in funding to three underrepresented groups in academia.
NASA’s Minority Serving Institutions (MSI) partnered with Starburst Aerospace and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) to work with students as part of their beta space accelerator program. The course was designed to serve as a platform for innovators to build businesses to support technology and economic development.
In the program, students from the University of Massachusetts Boston, California State University and Fayetteville State University, along with faculty mentors, spent 10 weeks developing venture-backable businesses that have applications in multiple markets.
On Wednesday, the projects were presented as business proposals as part of L.A. Tech Week.
“L.A. has long been the aerospace capital of the world, and as we enter a new space economy, it continues to be, and we want to continue to build the industry here,” said Elizabeth Reynolds, managing director at Starburst Aerospace.
The first proposal, Mission Proteus, presented by Nhut Ho, a professor and director of NASA-Sponsored Autonomy Research Center for STEAHM (ARCS) at California State University, was designed to eliminate inefficiencies in existing autonomous software development methodology.
Photo by Andria Moore
Developers designing for autonomous software face many of the same obstacles as traditional developers, but they also face unique challenges. Proteus wants to provide a platform that unifies development tasks and workflows and allows for rapid testing. Building on NASA’s hard-won knowledge in autonomous development, the goal of Mission Proteus is to enable these systems to grow much more rapidly in other industries. Ho explained that his team wanted to eliminate the “pain” surrounding technical limitations of existing software.
The second proposal, ITX Drones, was presented by Thomas Materdey, senior lecturer of engineering in the College of Science and Mathematics at the University of Massachusetts Boston. The ITX team felt that, while revolutionary, drones today are missing a “real-life component.” The goal of ITX Drones was to create technology that would allow drones to more specifically respond to niche customer needs in ways that existing drones cannot—deliver medicines, provide surveillance or communicate with other drones. “Imagine being able to personally deliver a gift to your sister in Europe without having to wait a week,” Materdey said to the room of onlookers.
To make that a reality, their proposal aims to create drones that are capable of sending and receiving long-range data, have longer battery life and the ability to fly at any time of day. Their design incorporates fixed-wing rotors, precision landing capabilities, and lidar navigation, which would allow the drones to operate with extreme precision in novel environments.
SpireNeural, the final business proposal, would act as a software development company focused on enabling near-real-time data processing for autonomous systems with existing integrated devices. In other words, software that will speed up decision-making for our increasingly connected world.
Grace Vincent, an electrical and computer engineering Ph.D. candidate at North Carolina State University, explained that her team created SpireNueral in response to the California wildfires and the inefficiency of the tech used to detect them.
“How can we reduce overall response time?” she asked the room. “Edge computing.”
Edge computing is computational analyses that are done near the source of the data. SpireNeural was designed as an edge computing software solution that hopes to eliminate issues with wasteful computations, slow response times and power restrictions, instead making informed decisions at the edge.
For example, edge computing software could evaluate and make decisions about how to combat a forest fire at the site of the sensor rather than relaying that information to a central hub, waiting for it to be processed alongside other data and then relaying it to first responders.
The presentations were followed by a brief panel discussion on “Supporting Diversity in industry through investment,” where industry leaders from various venture capitalist firms discussed how the tech industry can work to be more inclusive.
Andria Moore
Andria is the Social and Engagement Editor for dot.LA. She previously covered internet trends and pop culture for BuzzFeed, and has written for Insider, The Washington Post and the Motion Picture Association. She obtained her bachelor's in journalism from Auburn University and an M.S. in digital audience strategy from Arizona State University. In her free time, Andria can be found roaming LA's incredible food scene or lounging at the beach.
Proptech Startup Snappt Raises $100 Million To Help Landlords Flag Fraudulent Rental Applications
05:00 AM | March 15, 2022
Photo by Isaac Quesada on Unsplash
Sign up for dot.LA’s daily newsletter for the latest news on Southern California’s tech, startup and venture capital scene.
Snappt, a West Hollywood-based proptech startup that helps landlords detect fraudulent rental application documents, has landed a $100 million Series A funding round led by venture capital giant Insight Partners, it announced Tuesday.
The startup is the part of an expanding real estate tech sector that raised a record $9.5 billion in funding last year to produce products ranging from retail analytics to energy efficiency technology to tenant management platforms.
Snappt, in particular, addresses the problem of financial document fraud by rental applicants, by providing landlords with a software platform that can detect when pay stubs and bank statements have been fraudulently altered. More than just a surface-level scan, the software analyzes the source code behind the documents to make sure it matches that of legitimate forms by banks and financial institutions. The startup claims its technology has a 99.8% accuracy rate, while roughly 12% of the forms it processes are flagged as fraudulent.
Snappt co-founder and CEO Daniel Berlind
Courtesy of Snappt
“Financial institutions’ documents come in incredibly consistently,” Snappt co-founder and CEO Daniel Berlind told dot.LA. “A Bank of America statement will always come in with the exact same properties. And if you're going to move these properties around, there’s obvious evidence of that.”
Berlind and fellow Snappt co-founder Noah Goldman experienced such issues firsthand; their families both run property management businesses based in Los Angeles, and the pair would often consult with one another on problems they were having with tenants. In 2017, they noticed a surge of fraudulent bank statements and pay stubs; the numbers wouldn’t add up, or the format of various forms submitted from the same bank were inconsistent.
The pair founded Snappt that year and quickly gained traction with the platform, which is used at over 1,000 multifamily properties across the U.S. While real estate is still their target audience for the software, Berlind said other potential use cases could include mortgages, auto loans, utility bills and health care documents (such as forged COVID-19 vaccine cards).
“At the core of what we've built is a fraud detection engine,” Berlind said. “It’s more about how we tune it and the information that we have available.”
In a statement, Insight Partners managing director Thomas Krane said Snappt “is revolutionizing the rental screening process” by addressing “the biggest challenge for today’s property manager—lowering eviction rates and thus reducing bad debt.” Snappt claims its platform helped customers avoid more than $105 million in bad debt last year.
The startup’s previous investors include New York-based early-stage venture firm Inertia Ventures, which provided it with $1.5 million in seed funding, according to Snappt. The company did not provide its current valuation.
From Your Site Articles
- dot LA's Salon Looks at the Future of Proptech - dot.LA ›
- Proptech Startups Will Face a Shakeout in 2023 - dot.LA ›
Related Articles Around the Web
Read moreShow less
Keerthi Vedantam
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
https://twitter.com/KeerthiVedantam
keerthi@dot.la
LA Fintech Dave Goes Public on the Nasdaq After Sealing SPAC Deal
12:21 PM | January 06, 2022
Neo-bank Dave makes it debut on the Nasdaq with a billboard.
West Hollywood-based banking app Dave made its much-hyped debut as a publicly traded company on the Nasdaq stock exchange on Thursday.
Shares in Dave (ticker: DAVE) opened trading at $8.27, giving the company a market capitalization of roughly $3 billion. After swooning close to $7 per share, Dave’s stock rebounded above the $9 mark before closing the day at $8.53.
The fintech startup, which is notably backed by famed billionaire investor Mark Cuban, wrapped up its merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) sponsored by Chicago-based investment firm Victory Park Capital on Wednesday. The company is expected to raise up to $465 million in capital as a result of the merger, and is looking to use the proceeds to further grow its business—including a potential foray into crypto.
Dave founder and CEO Jason Wilk told dot.LA that part of the reason the company decided to go public was because he had personally grown weary of “the distraction of having to raise private capital.”
“We had a lot of interest in the private market, but we really thought to go public—and give the everyday retail investor the chance to invest in the company and grow with us—was a really good opportunity,” he said. “It makes it easier for us to raise more capital as a public company. Of course, there are some headaches of being a public business, but access to capital is far easier.”
Dave is among a wave of fintech startups aiming to disrupt the retail banking sector with low-fee, digitally-enabled banking services. The firm launched in 2017 as a financial planning app to help customers avoid the billions of dollars in overdraft fees charged annually by traditional banks.
It has since grown its offerings to include a checking account, and now has 11 million customers who use its services for banking, overdraft protection, building credit and finding side-gigs. Dave estimates that it has helped customers avoid nearly $1 billion in overdraft fees to date through its flagship feature, ExtraCash, and earn over $200 million in income through its gig-economy job board, Side Hustle.
As part of the IPO, Wilk and several other Dave executives rang the Nasdaq’s opening bell on Thursday—though the ceremony actually took place in L.A. several days ago, and not in New York City on the day of the company’s market debut.
Because of COVID-19 protocols and social distancing restrictions, the stock exchange shipped a duplicate podium to Dave’s old offices in the Mid-Wilshire district. The podium arrived from San Francisco, where it is occasionally used for bell-ringing ceremonies involving Silicon Valley tech firms.
Though Dave moved its headquarters in October to the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, Wilk and the other executives pre-recorded the opening bell ceremony in their old digs on Tuesday. “It was really cool to ring the bell in the place where we used to pump out code with just a few of us sitting around a desk or a coffee table,” Wilk said.
Dave is not the only L.A.-based neo-bank that has looked to go public via a SPAC merger. Marina del Rey-based Aspiration, which offers banking services with an environmentally-conscious angle, is pursuing a similar route and aims to make its market debut by the end of March.
From Your Site Articles
- As Its SPAC Listing Nears, Neo-Bank Dave Has Its Sights Set on ... ›
- Dave's SPAC Deal Is Close, and Its Crypto Play Gets Clearer - dot.LA ›
- Dave Banking Startup to Go Public via SPAC at $4B Valuation - dot.LA ›
- Neo-Bank Dave Lands FTX Investment To Grow Crypto Presence - dot.LA ›
Related Articles Around the Web
Read moreShow less
Pat Maio
Pat Maio has held various reporting and editorial management positions over the past 25 years, having specialized in business and government reporting. He has held reporting jobs with the San Diego Union-Tribune, Orange County Register, Dow Jones News and other newspapers in Ohio, West Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C.
RELATEDTRENDING
LA TECH JOBS