Best startups right now?

openstore seems pretty cool

If you’re in energy, there was a really cool startup I read about in MB earlier this week or last week. I think it’s called Form Energy (or something along those lines) and is working on making batteries for EVs with iron instead of lithium since it said iron has an unlimited supply whereas lithium doesn’t. 

A few (Early Stage) startups:

• Lolli https://www.lolli.com/ - Just closed a 10 MM round. A Bitcoin shopping rewards platform. Will be interesting to watch given the sheer amount of celebrities they packed into this small round (Ashton Kutcher, Serena Williams, Cody Ko all made direct investments).
• mem.ai mem.ai - Note taking app with some psycho mach learning algos cooked in. Raised 5.6 MM earlier this year, with round lead by A16Z. I've used it myself and quite like it, pretty different than other note taking apps (but maybe a bit over-engineered)
• Pangea.app https://pangea.app/ - Just closed a 2 MM round. Basically turning college kids into freelancers. Particularly interesting because they closed a 400k round in april, then a 2 MM round like a day ago. This company leans extremely heavy into the gig + remote economy.
• Cushion cushion.ai - This app will get in contact with banks and appeal banking fees automatically. Heard about it on a pod and had to dive deeper. Forget exactly what their return rate of fees back to customers is but it was substantial. Very interesting concept imo.

These are a few that have crossed my screen lately and I found interesting.

Databricks

E-Zinc, batteries that can hold energy for 10+ years without energy stored leakage/decay. Sadly, I already got the patent if you apes are trying to horde it before me. This technology I believe will be an end to energy wastage and peg the oil price steady.

Kind of mainstream now but Pipe is really cool. Basically let’s companies securitize their recurring revenues so that they can receive cash now

Planck within the insurtech market is brilliant. Their data scraping and analysis capabilities are wild. I've heard that supposedly one of the guys on their team was involved in the Stuxnet Worm.

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Sad thread to read here. Seems that nearly all "innovation" (and I use the term loosely) is in computer bits and financial services. Watch a movie from the late 1990s--things have hardly evolved at all. Real innovation has hardly touched society in any meaningful way. Everything is just a little bit better and a little bit cheaper, but the last products to meaningfully change society were the iPhone (2007) and Facebook (2004), and those have arguably been bad for society.   

Caveat is that there have been a ton of cool and interesting innovations but none of them seem to have meaningfully impacted the world. For example, lab grown meat, electric cars, autonomous vehicles, ocean cleaning vehicle. They just haven't really gained traction or really made much of a difference if they have gained traction.   

Deliverr is pretty cool. Just raised a $250MM series E. Enables merchants to offer free next day, 2 day, and 3 day delivery from their non-amazon (Walmart, Shopify, eBay) sales channels.