Build Mode

Jenn Graham's startup Inclusivv looks very different from when it begins Civic Dinners in 2016. The idea back then was to take advantage of small group dynamics around in-person meetings — and dinners in particular — to foster important conversations around difficult topics, originally focusing on connecting government with the community. Inclusivv took that model, shifted it to digital in the wake of Covid, and expanded the mandate to help big brands and companies handle the topics their employees and users care most about, like sustainability, diversity and belonging.

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• Inclusivv

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Celine Halioua has spent much of her career focusing on life extension technology — but her own company started with a specific target of extending the lives of dogs, rather than humans. We hear from her why she wanted to start with canine companions, though her larger goals with her company Loyal include extending and improving our own lives, too.

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• Loyal

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Liya Shuster-Bier learned first-hand, twice over, that cancer care leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to everything beyond the basics, and it's incredibly hard to navigate not just for patients themselves, but also for their loved ones and care network. That inspired her creation of Alula, a platform designed to help consolidate the resources that cancer patients, survivors and their care networks need to face tough challenges together.

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Clarisse Beurrier went right from school to a lab-grown meat startup called Higher Steaks, and both her experience during her education and that first job in the field left her feeling like more needed to be done at a fundamental level, linking the work happening in research labs and universities to the commercial meat industry. That was the genesis for Animal Alternative Technologies, a company she co-founded with the mission of providing a scalable, end-to-end cultured meat production system for food sellers large and small alike.

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• Animal Alternative Technologies

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Amanda DoAmaral was an educator herself before she decided to found a tech company aimed at improving the education system. That's a surprisingly rare credential for a startup founder in this area to possess — despite the obvious benefits of real, first-hand experience. Her company, Fiveable, focuses on modernizing (including a remote-first approach) a key and often overlooked part of education for students: Building an active community of peers to share knowledge with. Hear how she took her dissatisfaction with an inadequate system and turned that into the motivation to build a venture-scale business outside of it.

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Oleg Stavitsky and his founding team at Endel are not your conventional startup founders: This artists' collective has been working together for years across multiple projects, and it just so happens that their latest collaboration ended up being a venture scale technology company. Endel is all about creating personalized soundscapes to trigger desired emotional and mental states, and the story of how it came to be is hardly your typical consumer app origin tale.

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Julie Bornstein has a storied career that includes spearheading the e-commerce transformations of some of the world's most popular and successful retail brands. She was also at Stitch Fix as COO during a pivotal time just ahead of the fashion startup's IPO, but her latest move was to become a founder and start her own company for the first time. The Yes is an e-commerce retail app that aims to please shoppers, providing a personalized digital store for every user that includes the best brands form all over the world. Hear how she wrangled luxe high fashion and everyday favorites into a single destination for all tastes.

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Aditi Shekar's childhood ambitions included literal world domination, but she ended up as an unstoppable entrepreneur instead. She's the co-founder and CEO of Zeta, a new kind of financial services company that's designed from the ground up for "multiplayer" banking — be it with a spouse, a trusted partner or anyone else. Aditi tells us all about how she's revolutionizing money management thanks to her drive and focus.

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Ashley Sumner's original concept for Quilt was all about meeting up in person — almost an Airbnb for conversations. But shortly after launch, the universe threw a wrench in the works, as a global pandemic shut down or severely limited in-person interaction almost everywhere, particularly among strangers connecting for the first time. Quilt made a pivot into the suddenly crowded social audio space, but Ashley explains how it kept its core focus and differentiation in the process.

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Rob Schutz didn't expect to be working on a startup addressing the need for reliable, direct-to-consumer erectile dysfunction therapeutics, but that's where he ended up at Roman. The company has since pivoted to become 'Ro,' with a focus on digital health and telemedicine more broadly, as well as pharmacy services, but we talk to Schutz about how he went from Bark Box to human health, and what the experience of building his startup alongside his two cofounders was like.

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Found posts every Tuesday. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts to be alerted when new episodes drop. Check out the other TechCrunch podcast: Equity . Subscribe to Found to hear more stories from founders each

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