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When Belinda Mo shared with me the origin story of Viva Translate coming out of one of her Stanford classes as a real world challenge that faced legal organizations, I knew that this was a big opportunity. Most of us go through our daily lives in the U.S. not thinking twice about the support we are able to get as native English speakers. Meanwhile, a significant percentage of the American population does not speak English as their primary language. These people require the same services from customer support to medical advice to legal counsel that they cannot get if there is no translator available. The problem is that it is expensive and difficult to find real-time translators with on-demand availability. I knew first hand from my wife that there was an urgent need for translators at domestic violence hotlines. It is just as important today with the rise in Asian hate crimes which are notoriously underreported because of language barriers. We take for granted that every support service is designed for English speakers.

Belinda and Tony were able to make translations more conversational and natural so no one could tell if they were in a chat with a native English speaker. The integration allows support teams to seamlessly interact with a non-native speaker with instant translations. The most important factors for translation is accuracy and speed, which Viva Translate has in spades. The service was so valuable that they had two legal organizations paying them 6 figures for this software integration. Because translation is federally mandated for certain organizations, they chose Viva Translate because the cost savings of not using human translators was very significant.

I love their mission because they are serving the broader community of Americans that are often marginalized and forgotten. They are part of our communities and deserve the same access as the rest of us have. The sky is the limit for Viva Translate because customers in both the public and private sector will need translation and ignoring it will become a competitive disadvantage. I am proud and honored that Hyphen is an investor in Viva Translate.

I first heard about Offsyte when co-founder and CEO Emma Guo reached out to me cold off of LinkedIn after reading my post announcing Hyphen Capital (and thankfully we were reconnected by our one of our LPs and amazing founder and investor Holly Liu). I saw her impressive background from her masters at Carnegie Mellon to being a software engineer at Cisco working on WebEx to MuleSoft and then becoming a rising star at Lyft. I would later find out that she was named one of the top engineering managers in the company. One of the reasons she was so beloved by her teams was her commitment to her team members having a great experience both inside and outside of the office. That meant planning the best offsite experiences possible for them. As a busy engineering manager, you have enough on your plate as it is. The last thing you want to worry about is event planning. Unfortunately, events aren’t going to plan themselves. Until now, because Offsyte is the marketplace for discovering and booking high-quality team events.

I’m thrilled to announce that Hyphen Capital has made an investment in Runway. Runway helps teams and founders better understand the financial health of their business. It has been called the Figma for finance because it gives visibility into valuable business data and financial metrics to leaders across the entire team rather than being limited to just the finance team. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Elad Gil, Naval Ravikant, Dylan Field (co-founder of Figma), Henry Ward (co-founder of Carta) and many others, Runway is one of the most competitive early stage startups to invest in right now.
How did a small and relatively new syndicate manage to get allocation into one of the hottest startups around? Our network. Co-founder and CEO
Siqi Chen
has been an integral part of the Asian-American founder community in Silicon Valley for many years. As a dear friend of many LPs in the syndicate, it only made sense that he would want Hyphen to be involved. It was important to him to have the support of the Asian-American community represented on his cap table. More and more founders are realizing that they want more diversity among their investors. Hyphen has assembled some of the most successful business leaders and startup founders in the world who also happen to be Asian-American, to invest in the next generation of AAPI founders. We are proud to be supporting Siqi and his team in their mission to democratize financial data within startups.

No one loves their calendar. The amount of time and productivity lost on calendaring is real and costly. This cost is only compounded when working in teams. While there are 1.5 billion users on Google Calendar and Outlook, these products have barely evolved over the past decade, and John Li and Michael Zhao saw that as a huge opportunity. Vimcal includes everything a modern calendar should have: instant availability sharing, time zone conversions, hotkeys, and so much more. It is beautifully designed and intuitive, which saves the average user over an hour per week. Vimcal does for calendaring what Superhuman has done for e-mail.

Founder and CEO Yehong Zhu’s company Zette instantly resonated with me. I can’t count how many times I have hit a paywall on a news publication and abandoned it. The media monetization model is completely broken and millions of dollars are being left on the table every single day. Yehong is uniquely positioned to solve this problem as a journalist at Forbes and then a product manager at Twitter. By marrying her two experiences of traditional journalism and modern real-time news, she started Zette to solve this painful problem for both sides: consumers getting to read the content they want and publishers being able to monetize it properly. Zette allows readers to consume content a la carte from multiple publications versus being stuck at a buffet from one site, Zette will enable publishers to monetize all the abandoned visits. The publishing industry is in desperate need of revenue and the time has come for it to modernize from the record store to Spotify.

Pet parents all too often made the hard decision to skip necessary vet procedures and even routine visits. SnoutID is about to change all that by modernizing the check-in process at veterinary offices. CEO and co-founder Emily Dong is a second-time founder in the pet space having previously launched and sold her first company PawPrint. She is very familiar with the technology challenges that vet offices have in dealing with medical records and data. By enabling patients to have a better and more efficient experience, SnoutID not only frees up administrative time for the vets to see more patients, it also encourages pet owners to consider getting preventative care that they would otherwise choose not to receive by giving them insurance and financing options up front. SnoutID is helping keep pets healthier and patients happier, all while generating more revenue for veterinarians.

Fractional co-founder and CEO Stella Han was exposed to real estate investing and rental income properties from an early age through her own family’s investments. As a software engineer at Affirm, she and her co-founder Carlos Treviño were interested in buying rental properties for passive income. The process of finding, buying and managing income properties inspired them to do something about it. Fractional is a marketplace for fractional home ownership that generates rental income streams for investors that previously did not have access. Stella and Carlos are democratizing rental income property investing by allowing everyday people to join together to purchase a home and benefiting from the passive income that traditionally was only available to wealthy investors.

Charles Hua was a product manager for Amazon Alexa and has overcome his own personal challenges with communicating effectively. Effective communication is, quite possibly, one of the most important life skills. Mastering communication can be extremely impactful in advancing one’s professional career. Most people don’t have access to classes like Toastmasters or speech coaching. In a post-pandemic remote world, communication becomes even more challenging and difficult. The timing couldn’t be better for Poise, the Grammarly for speech. Charles and his co-founders Soumya Mohan (ex-product lead at Glassdoor, oPower, Microsoft) and Vicky Sehrawat (ASAPP) are seasoned builders of technology. Imagine getting live feedback while you are speaking on a Zoom call followed byanalytics and personalized coaching afterwards. That’s the magic of Poised.

Engineering and product teams have countless solutions to communicate changes, but operations and customer support teams still rely on emails and Slack. I experienced this problem first-hand as a founder running a highly intensive real-time operations startup. Our first investment is Relay, a SaaS platform focused on communications for operations and customer support teams. Relay is co-founded by Hetong Li and Jason Yun, two Asian-Americans who worked together at Instacart, where Hetong led growth engineering and Jason was working on customer success and operations. Hetong was previously at Amazon and Twitter while Jason was an early team member at Lyft, Instacart and Cruise Automation. Together they are integrating communications channels for teams into one single source of truth.