Techstars

Spacebackend (Techstars 2024), a Hispanic-Luxembourgish startup modernizing aerospace engineering, has closed a €1.8M pre-seed funding round. This brings the company’s total capital raised to over €2.2M. The primary bottleneck in modern satellite deployment is hardware integration, a process that remains largely manual, fragmented, and slow. Spacebackend’s AI-assisted platform addresses this by streamlining hardware and software integration, testing, and validation into a single environment. “Our ambition is to make Spacebackend a platform that enables the development of the next generation of aerospace systems. With the growing demand to launch more hardware and infrastructure into space, our mission is to reduce integration efforts from years to days. By enabling aerospace teams to streamline the entire hardware integration, testing and validation process into a single platform, we ensure faster integration timelines for all types of requirements." - Dmitry Goldenberg, founder and CEO Congratulations Dmitry, Yoav, and the entire Spacebackend team! https://lnkd.in/gDzsGAaj

The instinct to hire a salesperson is strong when you're ready to scale revenue. But for early-stage founders, that "Help Wanted" sign should stay down for a while longer. Your early customers are teachers, not just buyers. They provide insights that no product roadmap or strategy document can replicate. By delegating sales too soon, you lose the direct feedback loop that shapes your business. 🚀 Read more in the latest edition of the Techstars newsletter.

Meet the Techstars Tokyo Accelerator. 🇯🇵 Here, founders build at the intersection of global innovation and Japan’s leading corporations, unlocking opportunities across Asia and beyond. Applications are through May 6th. Start your next chapter in Tokyo. https://lnkd.in/gNaEUDdV Yuki Shirato | René Budeck | Rina Takikawa | Kanae Fujita | Tom Moss | Barry O'Neill | JETRO Startup | Cabinet Office, Government of Japan | Mitsui Fudosan | Tokyo Metropolitan Government

Winning the room takes more than a pitch deck. Gain the tools and insights necessary to navigate investor meetings with confidence during this exclusive 3-part Techstars Pitch Series. 📅 May 5, 12 & 19 💻 Virtual 🔗 https://lnkd.in/g7eg-vax Experts include 🎤 Keith Camhi, Techstars Healthcare Accelerator powered by Permanente Medicine Mid-Atlantic States Managing Director 🎤 Tim Grace, Techstars Columbus Managing Director 🎤 Kerty Levy, Techstars Anywhere Remote Accelerator Managing Director 🎤 Nick Culbertson, Techstars AI Health Baltimore Managing Director 🎤 Andrea Palten, Techstars VP of Marketing 🎤 Jessica Kaing, Techstars Marketing Manager See you there!

Joystik Life (Techstars 2024) is solving the stress epidemic in sport. Gen Z athletes are experiencing chronic daily stress at an alarming prevalence, fueling anxiety, depression, burnout, and injury. The tools that exist today simply haven't been built to meet that scale. Joystik is different. Built on autogenic training which evidence-based and made accessible, engaging, and scalable through a smartphone. No appointments. No barriers. Just a tool that works, anywhere, anytime. Founded by Christian Stoll and Sarah Pierce, Joystik just announced a partnership with Cleveland Clinic and Kent State University. Huge congratulations to the team on this milestone! https://lnkd.in/gpeXbwEY

Healthcare recruiting is broken - and a Techstars company just raised $14M to fix it permanently. 🏥 One in three new U.S. jobs is in healthcare, yet turnover at most health systems exceeds 50% and vacancy costs rank among the highest of any industry. The hiring process that's supposed to solve this still runs on manual workflows built for a different era - until now. Take2 AI has built autonomous AI agents that conduct phone interviews around the clock, evaluate candidates, record calls, and sync results directly into applicant tracking systems with no human in the loop. 🤖 Trained on healthcare-specific hiring data and already deployed across some of the largest health systems in the country; the platform doesn't assist recruiters - it replaces the workflow entirely. Legacy staffing firms have built their business models on a percentage of salary for work that is now fully automatable. That equation doesn't survive what Take2 is building. The CHRO of Mercy Health put it plainly: faster hiring, better economics, a better candidate experience. 📉 When outcomes improve and costs collapse simultaneously, the incumbent model is irrelevant. This is what AI-driven transformation actually looks like at the operational level. Not streamlining a process. Eliminating it. ⚡ At Techstars, we back founders building exactly at this inflection point - companies that render legacy workflows economically untenable. 🚀 Take2 is one example inside a much larger Techstars portfolio of founders doing the same thing across industries. If you're a CEO or COO at a health system, a large enterprise, or a company exposed to the economics of legacy recruiting - the shift in your cost structure is already underway, whether you've mapped it or not. ⚠️ Drop a comment or DM me directly - I speak with executives navigating this every week, and if you want to understand what's moving through the Techstars portfolio before it lands in your sector, I'd welcome the conversation. 👇 Techstars Take2 AI Yaniv Shimoni Kaushik Narasimhan Keith Camhi Pia Desai Samvid Ventures Gemma Lenowitz Picot David Cohen Andrew Cleland Sabrina Kelly Ryan Spillane Angie Grimm Matt Turnbull #AIAgents #HealthcareInnovation #FutureOfWork #Techstars #OperationalExcellence #AITransformation #HealthTech #EnterpriseAI #COO #Leadership

Thinking about your next step? Check out open roles across the Techstars network. 🔹 AI Operations Engineer, Cube (New York, NY) - https://lnkd.in/eGNnTayi 🔹 Strategic Partner Manager, Artera (Santa Barbara, CA) - https://lnkd.in/e8JU4bqB 🔹 Senior Director, Software Engineering, Bevi (Boston, MA) - https://lnkd.in/eWm4jRcH 🔹 Sales Development Representative, LogicGate (Chicago, IL) - https://lnkd.in/empGdqBy 🔹 Director, Product Engineer - AI Tooling & Builder Experience, Veho (New York, NY) - https://lnkd.in/erW4RQqv Find more jobs at http://tsta.rs/nOWU50YeB9L

Navigating the world of venture debt can feel like a balancing act between fueling growth and protecting your equity. This is your chance to get practical advice directly from the experts. Join us for a conversation with Marshall Hawks, author of Venture Debt Deals, and Brad Feld, partner at Foundry, co-founder of Techstars, and author of Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City. 📆 April 29th at 4pm ET 🔗 https://luma.com/a2rd961a We’ll dive straight into a fireside chat followed by a Q&A session where you can ask your specific questions about debt structures, timing, and strategy.

Kepler Communications Inc. (Techstars 2016) has officially launched the largest operational computing cluster in orbit. The system includes about 40 Nvidia Orin edge processors across 10 satellites, linked by laser communications to function as a distributed compute network in space. It already supports 18 customers, marking one of the first real commercial uses of orbital compute infrastructure. Rather than sending all data back to Earth, Kepler processes some of it directly in orbit, helping speed up time sensitive workloads like Earth imaging and satellite sensing. Founder and CEO Mina Mitry does not see themselves as a space data center company, but as infrastructure for applications in space. The goal is to become a network and compute layer for satellites, and eventually for drones and aircraft below. Congratulations to Mina and the Kepler team! https://lnkd.in/eGP7mbbF

Graduates can’t get hired. Startups can’t find talent. Something has to change. Drafted (Techstars 2026) is addressing this. Founded by Andrew Kozlovski and Rodrigo Pecchio, the company started as a way to match candidates with companies using referrals, data, and video resumes to streamline hiring. But soon, Andrew saw a new path: microjobs. Unlike traditional internships, microjobs are short, paid, project-based roles where students and early-career talent complete specific work over days or weeks, not months. “There’s four million students finishing university every year. That means there’s sixteen million college educated or in process students that can contribute to this effort.” - Andrew Kozlovski, CEO and Co-Founder The first line on a resume may no longer be a company name. It might be a set of contributions to systems most people never see, but rely on every day. https://lnkd.in/gKDEhREz Gabriel Schlumberger | USC and Techstars Program