Two weeks ago, the latest incarnation of the 500 Startups Seed Program, Batch 22 (B22), kicked off in sunny San Francisco.  The new cohort consists of 36 innovative startups from 14 countries.  42% of the companies are based outside of the United States, with founders representing Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, Nigeria, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom.

B22 includes a focus on FinTech (9 companies), Data (7 companies), and Digital Health (4 companies), with other startups ranging from facial recognition to supply chain management to the largest global community of motorcycle riders.  14% of companies have a female founder.  31% of founders are Asian, 11% Middle Eastern, 10% LatinX and 8% Black.

As is tradition, B22 kicked off with the notorious Sales and Marketing Hell Week, as founders dove head-first into the world’s most rigorous growth accelerator program.

Here’s a full list of B22 companies:

Agentbong — A home care marketplace in Asia that helps families hire qualified and trustworthy caregivers.

Botsociety — A design tool for previewing, prototyping and testing conversational interfaces

COR — Project management software for helping professional services firms increase profitability by intelligently optimizing project costs and cash flows.

Core Labs — Helps knowledge workers early in their career access mentorship, build a reputation, and unlock the value of their professional connections with goal-oriented “micro-networks.”

Cryptomover — Developing index funds to allow investors diversify their crypto portfolios with minimal time and effort.

curio.io — Listen to curated, professionally narrated articles from premium publications like The Financial Times, The Guardian, and Aeon at home or on the go.

Cushion — Trains bots to fight banks fees on customers’ behalves.

Elyse28 — An online subscription service that helps women live free of chronic illness by offering personalized health coaching.

FalaFreud — An online subscription service that helps Brazilians get therapy from certified therapists over audio, text, and video on their mobile device.

FreightRoll — Makes shipping predictable through an open marketplace of connected shippers and truckers.

Fyodor Biotechnologies — Developing a non-invasive technology that helps people with a fever diagnose malaria in 25 minutes using a few drops of urine instead of blood.

Jones — Automated insurance compliance that helps enterprises kill the headache of hiring independent contractors.

Judolaunch — A tool that helps small e-commerce brands expand internationally by engaging a global community of online consumers.

LaborVoices — LaborVoices protects apparel brands through intel on factory conditions sourced directly from workers.

MailHaven — An electronic mailbox that helps suburban homeowners secure and monitor their deliveries without the need for wired power or home WiFi.

Mediation Online — A web service that helps Brazilian corporations and consumers resolve legal disputes quickly and inexpensively with an automated, binding mediation process.

Mira — Streamlines the life insurance experience for the higher risk population using technology and machine learning.

Mobile Forms — A platform for local and international businesses to crowdsource reliable market data in Africa.

Myndlift — Offers a therapist-guided solution to help people improve their attention ability using “brain wave” training.

Next Play — Powers personalized employee mentorship at scale.

Ohalo — Blockchain-based data management solution to help financial institutions prove data provenance and compliance.

OpenUp — Measures the impact on purchase behavior across online and offline ads.

Payment24 — A fuel payment and fleet management system that integrates into gas stations and vehicles to reduce fraud and increase efficiencies.

Plum — A chatbot that automates your money so you can effortlessly save, invest and avoid rip-off bills.

Prodsmart — Provides a tracking system to help factories eliminate paperwork and collect real time data by using smartphones on the shop floor.

Public Goods — Health-focused consumer-packaged goods.

Rapa — Alternative mortgage lender for US customers to buy homes abroad

reDock — A proposal automation solution that mines and tailors corporate information on-demand to help professional services companies win complex RFPs

Rever — A mobile application that helps a global community of motorcycle riders discover, track and share their riding experiences together.

Sendoso — Helps B2B companies grab the attention of prospects and customers with an all-in-one platform for sending things like direct mail, handwritten notes, and custom gifts.

ShortPoint — A subscription software that helps department managers build gorgeous intranets with no coding from their existing content systems, such as Office 365, SharePoint, and SAP Cloud Portal.

Sofy.ai — Intelligent, trainable bots for software developers to end daily repetitive tasks like testing, deploying and monitoring and live support.

Texel — Enables efficient streaming of VR and AR content over existing networks by using viewing data and behavioral analytics to reduce the bandwidth by more than 50%.

TrueFace.Ai — A turnkey facial recognition solution for privacy conscious enterprises

VCV — AI-powered recruiting bot that helps enterprises hire smarter and faster by autonomously searching resumes, conducting automated phone screens with voice recognition and recording video interviews.

WayPay — Streamlines the accounts payable process for SME’s by connecting to any AP system and automatically reconciling payments sent to local or international suppliers from any combination of bank and credit card accounts.

Welcome to the #500Strong family Batch 22!