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Image credits: Redistri

ASIF Venture, an Amsterdam-based venture capital fund run by students, made three new pre-seed investments in student- and recent graduate-founded startups in Amsterdam – Hello Mentor, Elementa Labs and Redistri. 

Hello Mentor

Based out of Amsterdam, Hello Mentor is a recruitment platform that connects tech students with mentors from tech companies such as Adyen, ING, ASML, and PwC. 

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The company has raised €25k pre-seed funding from ASIF Venture. The funding will enable Hello Mentor to accelerate product development.

The company was born out of co-founder Quincy Dalh’s desire to bridge the gap in students’ transition from study to work. 

Founded by Quincy Dalh and Eline Stapel in 2018, Hello Mentor helps companies and universities manage their institutions and invite employees or students to the platform. 

Once onboarded, Hello Mentor leverages its matchmaking capabilities to match mentors to mentees based on interests, skills and learning goals.

The Dutch startup charges a subscription fee to companies in exchange for access to the platform, social media, and tailored events to widen companies’ employer branding and awareness.

Elementa Labs

Elementa Labs, a deep-tech startup that provides voice assistants for biomedical lab workers, has secured €25k in pre-seed funding from ASIF Ventures. The funding will enable the company to build out an algorithm and train their assistant. 

Biomedical lab workers are prevented from using computer keyboards in most sterile environments. In this case, researchers are forced to either use pen and paper or digitise notes later. 

As a result, researchers’ workflow is often interrupted, and the documentation is therefore imprecise, incomplete, un-digitised, and irreplicable.

Amsterdam-based Elementa has developed a Jarvis-like voice assistant using state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing and Understanding (NLP and NLU). With this voice assistant, researchers can simply dictate their actions, observations and inferences to the smartphone app, which then formats the information straight into an electronic lab notebook or other word processors. 

The algorithm learns from each researchers’ workflow, identifies repeated mistakes, and assists in these areas to maximise productivity and accuracy.

Ahmed Khalil, co-founder and CEO of Elementa, says, “Most of the biomedical research field is late to taking advantage of essential opportunities within technology. With our product, we’re helping break away from hundred-year-old practices and bring this field into the digitisation era.”

“The team at Elementa is tackling a crucial problem in today’s world. It’s fascinating to imagine what the health crisis would have looked like if research had progressed at the speed Elementa enables”, says Victor Bey-Smith, director at ASIF Ventures. “Plus, the pharmaceutical industry is just the tip of the iceberg concerning Elementa’s utility”.

Redistri

Redistri is a platform that connects shippers with carriers and combines less than truckloads to increase carrier revenue/decrease shipping costs. The company’s founders Jelle and Abhilash call this a carpooling for truck shipments. The Amsterdam company has raised €25k in pre-seed funding from ASIF Ventures. 

Their clients’ vast truckload networks are managed by Redistri’s in-house developed RoadOS, an AI-driven system that matches shippers with carriers and then maps out optimal routes for combining different truckloads.

The company’s platform helps carriers to deliver more goods and generate more revenue, while shippers make use of fewer trucks and save costs.

Hidde from ASIF Ventures is impressed with the startup’s mission. “We believe Redistri is solving real issues and is working hard to revolutionise the trucking industry, and the founding team is extremely solid and complimentary. Therefore, it was a no-brainer for ASIF to invest in this hard-working and dedicated team, to become part of their exciting journey,” Hidde says.