Amar Patel

Amar oversees the finance and operations within Thousand. Amar has 15 years of experience in consumer products, supply chain operations, and scaling organizations. Prior to Thousand, Amar served as the Director of Strategic Sourcing and Giving operations at TOMS where he managed the sourcing of $100M+ of COGS across 1000+ styles, 26 factories, and seven countries. At his time at TOMS, he helped establish manufacturing relationships within India, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Haiti. Preceding TOMS, Amar established best in class supply chain operations and business case creation at Callaway Golf and Deloitte Consulting. Amar graduated with a finance degree from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Amar is the son of two Indian immigrant parents. Having inspiration from a father worked while going to engineering graduate school to save enough money to bring his wife to the United States, and who’s mother worked two jobs while supporting the family, a strong work ethic has been instilled into Amar at a young age.

Gloria Hwang

Gloria Hwang is the founder and CEO of Thousand. Prior to starting Thousand, she spent 6 years cutting her teeth at TOMS and Habitat for Humanity. During her career, she’s worked on everything from product development to analytics—all in the context of social impact. Gloria is a second generation Asian American passionate about the intersection of design and social good.

What inspired you to create this company?

Before starting Thousand, I never wore a helmet, even though I was a longtime cyclist. They were too bulky, too inconvenient, and too futuristic-looking. But when I lost a friend to a fatal bike accident, I knew I had to change. Wanting to help others change as well, I emptied my savings account, and got to work making helmets people actually want to wear.

We named our company “Thousand” as a promise – a commitment and a goal of helping to save 1000 lives. Our name serves as a daily reminder of why we do what we do.

What distinguishes your company and product in the market?
Thousand makes products that break the value/cost trade off by delivering high quality products that are:

Stylish
-Low profile + streamlined silhouettes
-High quality color, materials, and finishes
2. Safe
3. Convenient

In addition to our products, our demographics and distribution channels are highly differentiated from our legacy competitions.

Distribution
Thousand is 80% online, 20% brick +mortar, leaving us larger margins to market and build a strong brand around our products (Our competitors are 10% online , 90% brick + mortar).

Demographic
Thousand’s customers are highly diverse in race, gender, and age based on our inclusive marketing. (Traditionally, the cycling industry’s demo caucasian Males over the age of 35).

Jai handles all commercial operations of AshaPops. His past roles include corporate strategy and divestment of AIG’s aircraft leasing division, fundraising for select startups in the US & India, and launching a tech marketplace (HouseStay) which provides month-to-month corporate housing for traveling professionals. Jai graduated with honors from Northeastern University with a degree in Industrial Engineering. Outside his professional life, Jai is a private pilot with a passion for aviation, travel and languages.

What inspired your team to create this company?
AshaPops is founded by Mother & Son duo, Asha & Jai to bring Plant-Based Superfoods to the US that Asha grew up eating, starting with Popped Water Lily Seeds. Asha enjoyed snacking on these pearls of nature with their delicious crunch since she was a little girl. She started eating them again in the summer of 2017 because the Magnesium in AshaPops helped her relax and sleep better. When friends & family loved her AshaPops, they felt that she must bring it to others in the LA community and encouraged Asha & Jai to start in farmers’ markets. AshaPops are packed with Plant Protein, Antioxidants and B Vitamins. Asha & Jai feel blessed to share this guilt-free superfood snack with their AshaPops fam here in the US.

What distinguishes your company and product in the market?
Our AshaPops Popped Water Lily Seeds are a delicious better-for-you snacking alternative to snacks like Popcorn, Chips or Puffs. Given they are allergen-free (Corn-Free, Gluten-Free, Soy-Free, Dairy-Free), they’re safe for consumption for those with allergen sensitivities. At 100 calories per bag, they’re a Vegan & Paleo-friendly, low-calorie superfood and a good source of Magnesium, Antioxidants & B Vitamins. We handmake our AshaPops with love in small batches here in California and use Non-GMO Project Verified high quality ingredients only.

Celine Tien

Celine Tien is the founder and CEO of Flowly. Celine got her start in VR as the director and writer of Pippa’s Pan 盼, one of the world’s first immersive Virtual Reality hybrid live-action films. Pippa’s Pan 盼 was selected for the 2017 Festival de Cannes VR Library Showcase, making Celine the youngest director at Cannes with the youngest team. The VR film experience also won 3rd place at the 2017 AT&T VR/AR Challenge at the AT&T Developer’s Summit.

Previously, Celine worked in feature development at Oriental DreamWorks in Shanghai and DreamWorks Animation in Los Angeles. She also founded a non-profit education-based organization: Zoom for Kids!

Before graduating from Yale University, Celine was an actor and model in Hollywood.

Narae Kim

Narae Kim is CCO of Flowly. Originally from Seoul, Korea, Narae is a visual designer and a media artist. Narae is an award-winning spatial designer and multimedia artist, specializing in projection mapping and digital drawing.

Her recent works include Tutelarius: 360 Full Dome multi media performance at Vortex Dome LA, Wanderer: an animation for projection mapping that was awarded 1st prize at LUMA Projection Arts Festivlal NY. As the Art Director of “Pippa’s Pan 盼,” she has been invited to speak and showcase at Cannes Festival, Busan International Festival, and the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show.

Narae holds a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, a BFA in Space Design, and a BA in Psychology from Ewha University, Seoul, Korea.

What inspired you/your team to create this company?
I grew up around pancreatic cancer patients, who experience extreme pain. Later, when I was developing animation and interactive content at DreamWorks, I realized there had been decades of research applying VR and biofeedback tech for pain management. Our whole team felt connected to this literal pain point and dove in.

What distinguishes your company and product in the market?
We’re helping you manage your physical and mental health through data. Our app teaches biofeedback for relaxation training, and allows you to actually track your progress through the various bio data points we collect from you and analyze for you. We’re also the only platform focused on addressing pain through a bio-psycho-social approach.

As thriving beauty enthusiasts, Cindy Wang and Maria Ho met in Los Angeles and founded Blackwood For Men. Having been a long-term member of the cosmetics industry, Cindy Wang brings her vision and talent in design and packaging, while Maria Ho, having traveled extensively, brings her breadth of research up-to-date with current beauty trends and skincare. Their passion for skin care meshed. Both fanatics of Japanese culture and skincare formulations, they wanted to create and share something special with the American market. They developed a line that would serve the modern man in America. Cindy is currently the head of Creative, Branding, and Product Development, and Maria Ho is the head of Business Development. Together with their dynamic and dedicated team, they have successfully made their vision into a reality. Blackwood For Men’s partners include Ulta Beauty, Target.com, Costco.com, JCPenney.com, Amazon, iHerb, others.

What inspired you/your team to create this company?
In 2014, we noticed two trends converging among young American men: a move towards more sophisticated grooming routines, and a growing focus on wellness and natural products. While these trends were about to redefine the American market, they had long ago existed in Asia, where many men had already embraced more specialized products and grooming routines. So, we partnered with one of the best skincare manufacturers in Japan to create a new line that would merge Japan’s high-quality formulas with American sensibilities to meet the rapidly refining needs of American men. Men in this emerging market still put a priority on value and convenience, and so, we set out to create multi-functional formulas with natural ingredients in a clean, modern package that would control costs without sacrificing quality. The end result is a unique line of Japanese-inspired premium men’s grooming products without the premium price, made for guys who appreciate simple luxuries and want to feel healthy and refreshed after a hard workout or a night out.

What distinguishes your company and product in the market?
Every Blackwood For Men product comes with its own Botanical Boost to not only cleanse, but to also restore and protect their skin and hair at the same time. The formulas help to reduce inflammation, aid healing and prevent damage. They are designed to help men do more with less — less time, less trouble and less cost than other premium products. We put an emphasis on Japanese botanical ingredients like Tsubaki Oil, Panax Ginseng, Swertia Japonica, and Tanakura Clay that are renowned overseas for their natural benefits, but are not found in current skincare market. Our products are cruelty-free, paraben-free, phthalate-free, and ocean-safe. They have received multiple awards: Beauty ID in 2017, Beauty Launchpad’s 2018 Readers’ Choice, and The Manual’s Best Shampoo of the Year in 2019. They have been touted by a rising number of elite athletes for their unique balance of power, precision, form and function. Our brand embraces sustainability, responsibility and giving back. Along with supporting veterans and front line healthcare workers, for every bottle of HydroBlast Moisturizing Shampoo purchased, we donate to The Maalgo Project providing clean water to the communities in Ghana, Africa.

David Lin

David Lin was born in NYC and grew up in Chinatown. As a first generation Asian American, he did not really have a mentor or guidance when it came to choosing my career path. He attended college at CUNY Baruch and chased the “American Dream” by graduating from a four year university and landing a job in corporate finance. It was not till one year into his job where he realized his true passion was to create something impactful, memorable, and meaningful. In 2015, he left his job to pursue entrepreneurship and started my first business with my co-founder Michael Tan. Together they opened shop in our community and created a product that pays homage to our Asian & American culture – Eggloo (Hong Kong Waffles & Ice cream).

Michael Tan

Michael Tan is a Co-Founder of Eggloo. Eggloo was founded with the goal of highlighting the Asian American experience through the use of nostalgic sweets and snacks. Growing up in New York City’s Chinatown, he is a supporter of small business development and reimagining how to keep the traditions of the community alive while also growing it with changing times.

What inspired your team to create this company?
The concept was based on my childhood growing up in Chinatown, and having this experience of eating egg waffles with my family. There was a very famous stand in the neighborhood, where the aunty would usually give free waffle bits to the local kids that visited. She always had lines that were down the block, but made time for the kids in the neighborhood. This story doesn’t come across as something so astonishing, but to many of us as Asian Americans it is an experience that is so relatable and tells the story of our upbringing. Asian foods and different flavors are unique to us and can tell a story that correlates with not just our cultural upbringing of being Asian, but being Asian American as well.

What distinguishes your company and product in the market?
Our company started as a novelty dessert shop serving Hong Kong egg waffles and ice cream. We had garnered a lot of attention in the past for not just our story and message, but also the uniqueness of our offerings. The flavors we have highlighted in the past include: Butterfly Pea, Lychee Rose, Horlick, etc.

We have since reflected on our mission, and have started producing CPG waffle and pancake mixes based on our store recipes in Asian inspired flavors. We believe there is a gap in the market for people who want to have flavors from their culture and childhood, as well as experiencing new flavors that are more common to other Asian cultures. In the future, we plan to expand to dry mixes for other baked goods in Asian flavors such as cakes, cookies, and brownies.

Derrick Dinglasan has over 20 years combined experience in E-commerce, mobile, and digital strategy for consumer products ranging from beauty, health & wellness, fashion, and electronics. He is Founder and Chief Product Officer of the venture-backed beauty technology brand, OPTE, the innovative, first-of-its-kind digital precision skincare system that promotes and reveals the natural beauty and radiance of one’s skin with its new disruptive solution to hyperpigmentation.

A native of Sacramento California, Derrick initially braved the cold Illinois weather to lead numerous consumer product launches for Motorola, before returning to the sunnyside at Qualcomm in Southern California. After joining lowermybills.com, Derrick found a passion for consumer experience and digital advertising, which has fueled the second half of his career. He was recruited to be an early member of the leadership team at The Honest Company, which became one of the most recognized digitally native disruptor brands in CPG during his tenure. He also spearheaded the online growth of startup brands like Five Four Club (men’s fashion), Jaanuu (fashionable medical scrubs) and most recently led the digital transformation at Manduka (20-year-old yoga mats, accessories and apparel) as its Global Head of Digital.

Derrick holds a Masters from Northwestern University and a BSE from the University of Pennsylvania.

What inspired you/your team to create this company?
Having perfect spotless skin has been the quest for centuries and yet outside of multi-performing foundation, innovation in addressing both the coverage and long-term improvement of hyperpigmentation have been few. On average, only 5% of facial skin needs to be corrected, yet most products on the market today exist in the form of creams that expect you to cover 100% of your skin, oftentimes exacerbating the spots you are trying to treat. OPTE was developed to provide precision skincare, to make only spots disappear, ultimately revealing the natural beauty of the skin. First incubated via a partnership between a Santa Monica venture firm and consumer products venture studio, and with years of product development, testing, and research conducted, we are excited to launch OPTE this summer as a direct-to-consumer brand.

What distinguishes your company and product in the market?
Nothing else exists in the market like OPTE. It’s not a laser, makeup, or skin lightening cream. It is a precision skincare system that leverages printing technology and digital optics through a built-in camera to scan the skin and pinpoint exactly where coverage is needed, delivering instant results for perfected skin. No cakey foundation. By treating and covering just the spots that need it and not the ones that don’t, the natural beauty of skin is revealed every day.

Jaclyn Fu is the Co-founder & CEO of Pepper, an unapologetic bra brand for small-chested women. Pepper is solving the fit issues for a $5B underserved market in the U.S and is rallying women to embrace the ‘flat’ in flattering. Before Pepper, Jaclyn worked in San Francisco and New York City where she led product marketing at tech companies like Mozilla, Etsy and Conversocial. She is passionate about building community-focused products and leveraging social media and digital to change how brands interact with customers. Jaclyn is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, and is also a registered yoga instructor in Denver.

What inspired you to create this company?
Pepper was first inspired by my own personal experience of growing up during puberty and hearing ‘flat chested’ as an insult, and then as an adult the experience of going to Victoria’s Secret and being handed a push up bra to look 2 sizes bigger. Bras never seem to fit because I would get awkward cup gaps from not being able to fill it. I wanted to create a bra specially designed to fit and flatter this body type so that small-chested women wouldn’t feel less than or not enough.

What distinguishes your company and product in the market?
Unlike traditional bra companies in the market, Pepper specially designs to better fit AA, A, B cup sizes. Most bra companies will design for the industry standard (36C in America), and then scale that same design up or down, not taking into consideration the unique fit challenges of each size. More than just a bra company, Pepper’s mission is to create a movement to redefine society’s body standards so that being small chested is no longer a bad thing, but something that is celebrated like all body types.

James Li is the CEO of Mighty Health. Previously, he co-founded Encore Alert, a marketing intelligence platform that worked with brands like IDEO, Denver Broncos, and the American Cancer Society, which he led to an acquisition by Meltwater in 2016. In college, he wrote speeches for then-Vice President Joe Biden and was named Georgetown Entrepreneur of the Year.

Dr. Bernard Chang is the Chief Medical Officer of Mighty Health. As the Vice Chair of Research at Columbia University Medical Center, he is one of our nation’s top researchers on the intersection of cardiovascular disease and psychology, and was the youngest ever ED doctor to receive a top-tier NIH grant. He currently sits on the alumni board at Stanford School of Medicine (where he obtained his MD).

What inspired you/your team to create this company?
Growing up (especially in an Asian family), we can often think of our parents as invincible–they look after you and take care of you, and you usually don’t worry too much about them.

But a few years ago, my dad was suddenly rushed to the hospital for emergency open heart surgery. Though he luckily survived, it was quite the wakeup call—he had to change his lifestyle habits immediately, or else he’d have to deal with painful, worsening chronic issues for the rest of his life.

These changes—exercise, nutrition, sleep, and reducing stress—are hard as is, but even more so for folks over 50: most wellness apps are designed for motivated millennials, making them feel less relatable to older adults. They don’t take into account evolving health needs, joint issues, or technical limitations. And because the over 50 population is at higher risk of COVID complications, they’re mostly stuck at home and won’t be able to return to gyms for the foreseeable future.

We’re building Mighty Health to help this population, often overlooked in the tech world, live their best, healthiest lives.

What distinguishes your company and product in the market?
We’re the first digital wellness platform designed specifically for people over 50:

1) Coaching: Each member has a personal accountability coach keeping them motivated through SMS, providing a real human relationship.

2) Content: Workout videos that are easy on the joints, a personalized nutrition plan and grocery list designed by cardiologists, lessons written by physicians on how to improve chronic conditions

3) Celebrations: Family members can receive texts about each member’s achievements. Our app is simple to set up and use, accommodating large and high contrast text, large tap areas, and older devices.

James Oh found Avarelle Cosmetics, a company specializing in hydrocolloid acne patches in order to find an option for his wife who was battling acne. He yearned to create honest products using clean and safe ingredients, while making them affordable and accessible worldwide. Given his science background, James had learned how helpful hydrocolloid bandages were in treating open wounds. Using that insight, he had experimented with it by cutting small pieces and testing it on blemish areas. He saw that the medical-grade properties of hydrocolloid not only sped up the recovery process but also protected the pimple while it was healing. He thought, “why not take it a step further and add essential oils that have acne healing benefits to it?” and that’s how Avarelle was created. The rest is an ongoing story!

What inspired your team to create this company?
Many suffering from acne know that half the battle is the recovery time. We want to empower our community to find confidence beyond the coverage, while relying on our acne patches to get the job done. It protects & heals the blemish whether at home or on-the-go! We continue to deliver quality products at an affordable price to our customers, but more importantly, we care about the faces behind the purchases. We send our customers handwritten thank-you cards designed by artists with Autism through our LIFT Hire Program. The program was created to provide workplace equity and give an equal chance for those who are often overlooked in society. Now more than ever, during a global pandemic and racial reconciliation, we strive to not only be better but do better as a company.

What distinguishes your company and product in the market?
Using only clean & safe ingredients, our factory has a patent on their technology and built their machine from the ground up. This patented technology is only exclusive to Avarelle. Our ultra-thin acne patches have been approved by board-certified dermatologists and selected by top Allure Beauty Editors. We offer a variety of our acne patches at an affordable price while keeping our eye on sustainability.

Jesse Sum

Jesse Sum is the cofounder and CPO of LivMote by Soda Labs. He was formerly senior staff engineer at Lookout Android Security and lead Android engineer at Postmates. Jesse graduated from the University of Waterloo in Computer Science.

Andrew Jiang

Andrew Jiang is the cofounder and CEO of LivMote by Soda Labs. Serial entrepreneur and Y Combinator alumni. Founder of Bayes Impact, a Gates Foundation-backed nonprofit. Research featured in WSJ, Economist, The Atlantic, and Financial Times.

What inspired you to create this company?
We wanted to help businesses reopen without having to violate privacy or slow down. Our expertise is in hardware products, and this was our way of contributing.

What distinguishes your company and product in the market?
Our product is a fully touchless solution that automates checks for temperature, coverings, and screening questions — without giving up security or privacy. Designed in California, manufactured in Taiwan, and privacy-first. We brought together Foxconn (manufacturing JV), Microsoft, and Sharp North America to build the leading product of this category. And we’re delivering it in record time – 7 months between ideation to mass production. We’re on track to be in thousands of locations by the end of the year.

Jina Osumi is the CEO of Humphry Slocombe. She joined the company in 2015 after working in CPG for 10 years. She has had the opportunity to work on the power brands such as Del Monte, Man Dew, Pepsi, V8, and now Humphry Slocombe, her favorite brand thus far! She received her MBA from Stanford University and BA from Wellesley College.

What inspired you/your team to create this company?
Humphry Slocombe was founded in 2008 by Jake Godby (pastry chef) and Sean Vahey (F&B manager) with the desire to make ice cream for adults but still keep it playful. I consider them the pioneers of artisanal ice cream because they were the first in the industry to make boozy, savory and produce driven ice cream. Out of Jake’s creativity came Secret Breakfast (bourbon and cornflakes), Blue Bottle Vietnamese Coffee, and Elvis the Fat Year (roasted banana ice cream with bacon peanut brittle). I joined in 2015 to take the business to the next level (expand to more scoop shops, wholesale, ecommerce, etc.). I am fully aligned with the original vision and my job is to grow the brand to further that vision.

What distinguishes your company and product in the market?
We make adult, chef driven flavors. Our top flavors are Secret Breakfast (bourbon & cornflakes), Blue Bottle Vietnamese Coffee, Matchadoodle, and Salted Caramel Cocoa Nib. We make all of our inclusions in-house and continue to source as locally as we can. We also do a lot of collaborations with brands that we admire such as The Glenlivet, Cirque du Soleil, Domaine Carneros, and McEvoy Olive Oil.

Justin grew up in California and has always had an appreciation for the outdoors and formed a deep connection with nature at an early age. Prior to starting LARQ, Justin was the President of FOREO, an award-winning beauty technology company. In that position, he oversaw product marketing, strategy, product management, and sales and marketing. Justin helped to grow the brand to the leading beauty technology company in the world in just over 3 years. Prior to FOREO, Justin was an investor with L Capital (the investment arm of Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy), where he helped numerous entrepreneurs grow their consumer retail business through strategic investment and partnerships. Justin is originally from California and graduated from UC Berkeley.

What inspired you/your team to create this company?
We created LARQ to solve challenges we faced in our personal lives to eliminate single-use plastic water bottles. Reusable options on the market are great but they have 3 critical shortcomings – 1) they get stinky and dirty, 2) they are hard to clean (most are not dishwasher safe), and 3) probably most importantly – they don’t purify water on-the-go when we are most likely to reach for a disposable plastic option. We decided to hit these pain points on the head with the LARQ Bottle – the world’s first self cleaning water bottle that purifies water on-the-go.

What distinguishes your company and product in the market?
We use a patented PureVis technology to purify water and help to keep your water bottle clean.

Vanessa Pham
Vanessa is a co-founder of Omsom, the daughter of Vietnamese refugees, and a Bain & Company and Harvard alum. She advised Fortune 500 CPGs on their growth and retail strategy as a management consultant at Bain. Prior to that, she managed a $3M e-commerce business while studying Sociology and Economics at Harvard. She loves thinking about the cultivation of vulnerable and wholehearted work culture, painting watercolors, and cooking all things fermented, caramelized and braised. She was recently named one of the Top 100 Home Cooks by Airbnb.

Kim Pham
Kim is a longtime human-in-technology, having worked in early-stage startups and venture capital since she was 16. She graduated from New York University, where she was the first female president of Tech@NYU, NYC’s largest developer and designer organization, and founding partner of Dorm Room Fund NYC, First Round Capital’s student-run venture arm. Prior to co-founding Omsom, Kim was most recently Head of Platform at Frontline Ventures in London, where she was named one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in 2017. When she’s not over-using garlic in recipes or biking around Brooklyn, you can find Kim thinking about the decolonisation of POC cuisines, sex positivity in modern society, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

What inspired you/your team to create this company?
Omsom was founded on a mission to reimagine the outdated “ethnic” aisle and to honor, reclaim, and celebrate the multitudes that exist in Asian cuisines and communities. Our name, rooted in the Vietnamese word for rowdy, is a reflection of that – no more diluted dishes, no more cultural compromise.

We partner with iconic chefs to craft our starters who, like us, have connections to these flavors that run deep. And because we firmly believe that rising tides raise all boats, our Tastemaker chef partners receive a royalty fee in exchange for their hard work, creativity, and expertise.

We’re here to bring proud, loud Asian flavors to home kitchens any day of the week, sitting right between the tomato sauce and olive oil.

What distinguishes your company and product in the market?
Our Omsom starters are truly a product form all their own. Unlike other sauces, seasonings, spices or condiments that are combined or added at the end of firing up a dish, our starters have all the foundational flavor components needed to cook a specific Asian dish. We often source from 15+ suppliers for a single ingredient to ensure the best quality, flavor, and integrity, and this includes importing ingredients from Asia that aren’t currently being brought in by other food brands. Our deep partnership with our Tastemaker chefs in our R&D and formulation process also help us to deliver the “closest” to homemade flavor.

Rosa is a food fanatic, always searching for the yummiest flavors. She’s a believer in “food as medicine” but doesn’t think you need to give up taste for health. Inspired by the herbal tonics her grandma brewed for her while growing up, she’s on a mission to make Asian inspired herbal remedies that are naturally healing accessible to the masses by combining ancient herbal wisdom with modern taste. Her sparkling wellness drinks quickly became the functional beverage of Silicon Valley, stocked at 300+ companies such as Google, Facebook, and Uber. Before Wildwonder, Rosa had founded a loose leaf tea business and traveled around Asia to source the best teas and herbs. Prior to embarking on her entrepreneurial journey, Rosa was a private equity and venture investor at Warburg Pincus. Rosa holds a MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business. She is also a Fulbright Scholar and published author.

What inspired you to create this company?
Growing up in China, my grandmother brewed tonics with a symphony of wild herbs. Health-wise, they worked wonders, from boosting my immunity to calming my stress. But taste-wise, they were hard to swallow. As an adult, my love for food deepened and I gained a greater appreciation for the wild plants, medicinal herbs and rare spices of my childhood. I’m a huge foodie and I don’t believe we need to give up taste for health. I started to look for ways to give eastern herbal tonics a modern twist. And so wildwonder was born – a bubbly, delicious, and nourishing beverage! Every drink lifts you so you can create everyday wonders. 5% of profits from each bottle goes towards causes that empower women and marginalized communities.

What distinguishes your company and product in the market?
The beverage aisles of grocery stores are packed with sugary sodas and beverages with fillers that do not do our bodies any good. Functional ingredients that offer health benefits such as herbs and probiotics are mostly in pill forms – they can be intimidating and definitely aren’t fun to consume. Wildwonder delivers gut and immune health in a new and delicious way: our drinks are crafted with real ingredients derived from plants: superherbs, plant fiber, and live probiotics, balanced and naturally sweetened by fruit. Our differentiated branding brings whimsy and approachability to a serious functional category. We also strive to bottle the cleanest organic and vegan ingredients with no refined sugar, no filler, no coloring, and no artificial ingredients.

Sara Du

Sara Du is the CEO and Co-Founder of Alloy Automation (YC W20). Prior to Alloy, Sara was an engineer at Snap and DoNotPay. She completed 25% of her undergrad at Harvard, during which she was involved with Dorm Room Fund, before leaving to start her company.

Gregg Mojica

Gregg Mojica is the CTO and Co-Founder of Alloy Automation (YC W20). Previously, he served as Application Architect at Fiserv in Mountain View, CA where he worked to modernize the company’s legacy infrastructure and helped co-create the First Data Developer Portal.

What inspired your team to create this company?
My cofounder Gregg and I have been working together for 5 years now. We met through the open source developers community, and started working together on side projects.

Before we started Alloy though, we were living pretty different lives. I’d left high school early to move to SF and work at a startup called DoNotPay, after which I decided to give school another shot and do my undergrad at Harvard. I left Harvard because I didn’t feel like I was learning the way I liked, and ended up at Snap as an engineer. Meanwhile, Gregg was working on an agency full time after leaving college as well.

We started Alloy as just a side project. We got the idea from the work we were doing for friends – a lot of them had become influencers in the past 2 years and we often helped them write custom code to do things like automatically upload IG pictures to their Shopify stores. We realized we should just build a platform to make it easier for any nontechnical store owner to automate store operations, and so we began building Alloy, just the 2 of us, almost exactly a year ago.

What distinguishes your company and product in the market?

We’re making workflow automation more accessible to an extremely nontechnical, ecommerce audience by making it easy to connect various apps and APIs using a drag and drop interface. We’re also building up a marketplace of workflow templates that users can use immediately to implement business strategies like SMS for abandoned cart recovery (similar to how Airtable has the template marketplace that targets various types of users).

By focusing on the e-commerce vertical, we’re able to provide functionality that isn’t supported in other general automation platforms like Zapier. For example, we provide users the ability to loop through and perform actions on all of the line items within an order, or access other deeply nested data like tax codes to export to other apps.

Jiake Liu

Jiake Liu is the Co-Founder and CEO of Outer, a forward-thinking, community-driven brand redefining outdoor furniture through comfortable, durable, innovative and eco-friendly products.

Along with his co-founder, Jiake launched Outer in 2019 as a way to redefine the approach to outdoor furniture – both the shopping experience and product offering itself through eco-friendly practices and materials paired with the ability to make both beautiful and durable furniture. Jiake’s vision for Outer is for each customer to live more of life outside and make the experience of being outdoors effortless and more enjoyable. Coming from a tech and software background, Jiake admires the magic of the design industry, specifically the ways in which creating a beautiful piece of furniture can make everyday life more comfortable and pleasant.

Prior to launching Outer, Jiake co-founded ProspectWise, a venture backed startup company with the mission of helping main street small businesses adopt modern software solutions. At ProspectWise, Jiake and his team mobilized thousands of local consultants across the country to physically step foot into neighborhood businesses to help them understand, select and integrate solutions with genuine human touch. Jiake’s experience across the software and tech industries lead him to realize the importance of human touch and the need for various skill sets and backgrounds in a team, which is how he imagined Neighborhood Showrooms, a new type of retail experience that brings the showroom home; Neighborhood Showroom allows potential consumers to experience the Outer Sofa in-person at a real customer’s backyard prior to purchasing.

Jiake holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Alabama in Huntsville and currently lives in Santa Monica, California.

What inspired you/your team to create this company?
I am a second time startup founder with a family in outdoor furniture manufacturing. My cofounder was the Head of Furniture Design at Pottery Barn. We shared the vision of reimaging outdoor furniture through the lens of material and design innovation to support the fast rising trend of outdoor living that’s catalyzed by the pandemic, all while rethinking the shopping experience for home goods with our crowdsourced Neighborhood Showroom platform that turns our customers’ backyards into Airbnb-esque showrooms.

What distinguishes your company and product in the market?
We have the world’s first outdoor sofa that’s as comfortable as a bed, as durable as camping gear, and uses proprietary weather/life proof materials that are 100% recyclable. Our patent-pending OuterShell solves the “wet bottom syndrome” that plagues any outdoor furniture that requires bulky rain covers when not in use.