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Meet the Startups Joining the Long Beach Accelerator's New Cohort
Long Beach has a long history of innovation. It’s one of the densest aerospace hubs on the West Coast. There’s a vital port there, and the city is home to several tech industries—including health care, space tech and cybersecurity. That, along with its colleges and universities, have made Long Beach an enticing destination for entrepreneurs.
It’s within this environment that the Long Beach Accelerator sprouted in 2019 and has grown since. To date, the accelerator has cycled 20 companies through its four-month program, helping them raise a total of over $12 million.
On July 5, the program will welcome its fourth cohort of startups from around the world, participating in a hybrid combo of virtual and in-person sessions. Each cohort includes between five to 10 companies.
Long Beach, along with Cal State University, Long Beach’s Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and capital provider Sunstone Management, are all partners in this public-private model of startup investment. The accelerator itself operates as a nonprofit.
Long Beach Accelerator Managing Director Andrea White-Kjoss
The city provides help with some funding, covering the costs for some low- to moderate income Long Beach-based founders whose companies are accepted into the accelerator.
The organization's partnership with CSULB enables it to help founders move from idea stage to execution at the institute, and then advance to business growth via the accelerator.
Sunstone Management, a private capital management and investment firm, provides funding for the incoming cohorts. The firm's venture capital fund typically invests $100,000 in the startups as soon as they join the accelerator and takes a 6% equity stake in return.
Sunstone had also been providing some follow-on funding on a case-by-case basis. It upped the ante earlier this year by promising an additional $500,000 to current cohort and alumni.
“It's a model that brings enormous resources to the table for our portfolio companies, as well as for economic development, acting as a growth engine for the region,” managing director Andrea White-Kjoss told dot.LA.
A serial entrepreneur who has served as CFO at several companies, White-Kjoss came aboard as the founding managing director in July 2020. Before that, she co-founded seed-stage funding platform ExtraVallis, based in Rancho Santa Fe, and founded Mobis Transportation, which was the product of a public-private partnership with the city of Long Beach.
She also happens to be a 17-year resident of the city.
“So I know intimately how attractive this city is to tech entrepreneurs, from the high-tech industries, to the culture and lifestyle, to the world-class workforce and institutions,” she said. “When you bring all of that together...the opportunity to build a tech accelerator, and more than that really, a tech ecosystem here in Long Beach, was natural and irresistible.”
The accelerator was originally intended to be in-person, but quickly had to pivot to remote sessions during the pandemic. It remains virtual, for the most part, “which has turned out to be a huge source of strength,” White-Kjoss said.
That’s because the founders come from all over the world. There’s no geographic restrictions on who’s accepted and no need to burden founders with moving to Long Beach to participate.
White-Kjoss said the move has fostered diversity, and enabled the accelerator to draw on an international network of mentors, instructors, advisors and investors.
They—along with the accelerator’s staff of three facilitators — get to know the companies and their founders “deeply” and provide individualized assistance, including building strategic partnerships with potential customers and/or marketing partners.
There is still an in-person aspect to the accelerator. All cohort founders fly into Long Beach for about two weeks during the program. While there, they attend in-person workshops and networking events. They also participate in a Demo Day, with investors present. This helps the companies get additional seed funding for continued growth once they graduate.
So far, five graduating startups have received acquisition offers—but none have taken them.
White-Kjoss said that’s because those founders “felt they had much further to take their companies, at least in some degree, due to the empowerment of the tools, resources and networks provided by the accelerator.”
Bump's Success
One success is Los Angeles-based Bump. Since graduating from the Long Beach Accelerator, Bump has raised more than $5 million, co-founder and CEO James Jones told dot.LA.
It’s currently participating in another accelerator, Snap’s in-house Yellow Accelerator, which is now a co-lead investor in Bump, along with Sunstone.
The company is working on an AI-fueled fintech platform for the creator economy, which hasn’t yet launched. It would help creators track revenue from multiple sources, monitor expenses, access credit and manage their crypto and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
The company has started a waitlist, for access to its credit and financial management tools. Once the services are available users would pay about $400 per year.
The company also plans to integrate micro-advances into its platform, designed to enable creators to stay in full control of their finances and keep 100% of the rights to their work.
Jones said that participating in the Long Beach Accelerator’s very first cohort was a “great springboard” for the company.
Specifically, sessions on customer personas and discovering addressable markets, as well as mentor meetings were “invaluable,” he added.
Meet the Startups In the Long Beach Accelerator's Latest Cohort:
Apsy: Creating the first true fully AI platform to build affordable elegant custom apps.
Crumbraise, Inc.: Fundraising made easy for creators, clubs & causes.
Educational Vision Technologies, Inc.: Automated video editing and content curation using A.I. to make online learning accessible, efficient and engaging.
Gift Pass App Inc.: Streamlining experiences around digital gifting & payments.
The Girls Co LLC: We are a women's health company that is currently focused on a solution to alleviate period cramp pain.
Intellitech Spa Inc.: Intellitech is a realtime telematics, predictive maintenance and driver behavior monitoring platform.
Kwema: Kwema provides an easy to scale Smart Badge Reel Duress Service that reduces incident response time without escalating the situation.
Pathloom, Inc.: Outdoor trip planning made easy!
Rotender: The world's fastest and most reliable bar.
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In a conversation with dot.LA, Ross, who has worked for the city since 2004 and was appointed to CIO by Mayor Eric Garcetti in 2015, spoke about the challenges of getting city bureaucrats to embrace remote work. He found it is much more cultural than technological.
We also discussed L.A.'s collaboration with USC's Viterbi School of Engineering that uses machine learning to spot and clean up graffiti, a program that will be expanded as the city rolls out next generation 5G technology.
Here's our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Los Angeles Chief Information Officer Ted RossHow much of the workforce do you think will stay remote?
Right now the city of Los Angeles is examining its teleworking policies. It's not a technology issue. We've been doing it for the last year. So it becomes more of a policy issue. Looking at my department, I expect that 60 to 70% of my workforce can be a hybrid workforce, which means we expect them to come into the office a day or maybe two days a week. And you can say part of it is quality of life, but there's a lot of other aspects that are just good business. So, for example, we want to be a resilient government, which means if there's a flood or if there's a fire or if there's an earthquake, we're able to restore government services as quickly as possible. Teleworking is a big component of that. If there's an issue that affects the civic center we've got to be able to still run government operations from people's homes or alternate locations.
Do we have floods in Los Angeles?
Well we have mudslides. But when I say flood, I mean something more localized, like a pipe burst in a data center.
Before the pandemic did city employees have to be at their desks 40 hours a week?
Before the pandemic, we had 35 teleworkers at the city of Los Angeles and they were all at the 311 call center. I had to spend two years negotiating policies and terms and working with unions and city management to bring that about. So you can imagine going from 35 teleworkers to 18,173. But it really wasn't about the technology as much as about understanding the culture. Some of the questions that I received are insightful. I remember a senior manager at another city department saying, "If they don't have a desk phone that I can call, how will I know that they're there?" I remember being in debates with a high-level person in an elected office where that person said it's always better to run into people in the hallway and have hallway conversations to get work done. And I looked at him and I said I don't agree. I said a hallway conversation informed you and me. But what about those six other members of the team who weren't in the hallway? One could argue that telework actually allows better coordination among team members because the communications are digital, they're easy to share and people can step in and step out depending on the nature of the conversation. But it's different for people who are used to getting work done in a hallway conversation.
It was your job to digitize City Council meetings. What was it like doing that?
There's a very elaborate network of physical interactions that used to make up a City Council meeting. And so what we had to do is quickly come up with a digital version of that and also to make it secure. If you remember early on in COVID, everyone was talking about Zoom bombing and we couldn't allow somebody to jump on and take over a City Council meeting. I think honestly the toughest was the council members themselves who are conducting city business from their own homes. Some are super sophisticated, some it's a bit of a learning curve.
I'm also interested in this other thing you've been working on – which is using machine learning on street cleaning trucks to catch graffiti and other things. Can you talk about that?
City services are an extremely important part of what a city does and traditionally the method of receiving services requires a citizen to notify the city of something. But there's some challenges with that. What if in some communities they just tend to not notify? And what if in some other communities they notify a lot? We don't want to provide city services inequitably simply because some people are better at notifying us. So we're looking at proactive ways without having to hire hundreds of people to drive the streets every day.
The idea came to us that a sanitation truck drives the street every week once a week. And if we can put a camera on that truck that is able to use machine learning we can identify an abandoned couch on a curb or graffiti on a wall and automatically create a service request. Now, I must mention, privacy is an extremely important aspect to us. So what we do is we do not track and record and do facial recognition or any other kinds of things. The purpose is simple. We want to identify graffiti, geolocate it and be able to assign a crew to get rid of the graffiti. We already have a couple dozen sanitation trucks that have these cameras and we've been working on refining the algorithm and the software to be able to make this work. We're also excited that this is really even just an initial conversation that we can iterate on as we start to deploy 5G connectivity across the city. We'll get better at geolocation and we can leverage ultra high speed wireless networks to feed this data to a cloud hosted virtual machine that can then run its algorithm near real time.
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