The COVID-19 epidemic has affected our world
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Last year was tough. The COVID-19 epidemic brought tremendous change to our world—with many of our lives turned the incorrect high. But even as there are hardships, we have seen a replacement pace of innovation emerge to satisfy today's realities and tomorrow's possibilities.
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Over the last year, we've been proud to support a broad array of startups driving this innovation. As voice interaction became more important for people around the world during the pandemic, the Amazon Alexa Fund focused on investing in startups that doubled down on areas ripe for voice, AI, and frontier tech innovation, like health and wellness, future home evolution, social audio, and AI and ML tools. These are emerging technologies that would shape our future.
This year, we made our 90th investment since launching the Alexa Fund in 2015, and that we unrolled new programs to support even more companies together with our Alexa Startups team. Our eight-week startup accelerator program, Alexa Next Stage, powered by Techstars, helped startup founders learn best practices, collaborate with mentors, and acquire access to funding and networking to fuel voice technology innovations. The seven participating startups were from five different countries and included innovators like Symbol, an organization that uses AI to form a replacement quite conversational voice tech infrastructure, and Blue Fever, creator of text and mobile apps that function as virtual "big sisters" to Gen-Z women. skrony33|world health solution
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To address challenges in diversity, equity, and inclusion in startups and risk capital, we launched programs to assist improve equity for underrepresented founders.
We partnered with All Raise, a nonprofit organization empowering women entrepreneurs and VC investors, to launch Women Founders Represent, a virtual pitch event offering venture capital investment, cash prizes, and AWS credits for women entrepreneurs. After pitching before a panel of prominent VC investors in November, startups Preemadonna, Aquagenuity, and Foodology were named winners.
We also collaborated with Blavity to support Black founders, co-hosting the Startup Showcase and three workshops at AfroTech World, a conference experience focused on building the Black tech community.
Our portfolio companies still think up new sorts of innovation that we never thought possible. It's been exciting to ascertain the variety of our Alexa Fund startups deliver on the promise of creative innovation that they have been working toward a previous couple of years. Here are a couple of the Alexa Fund startups that took off in 2020.
With health and wellness more important than ever, we've invested in companies using voice innovation to assist us a lookout of ourselves et al. . For example, Aiva's virtual health assistant was utilized in hospital patient rooms and senior living communities, offering new opportunities for COVID-safe care. Tonal and Zwift helped customers stay healthy with at-home connected fitness offerings. Molekule created an air purification device to assist keep homes clean and safe coronavirus epidemic.
Our homes also changed in 2020. No longer just an area where we eat, sleep, and spend time with family, the house became our college, workplace, gym, source of entertainment, then far more. We invested during a sort of startup using voice to reimagine what we will neutralize our homes. Amira Learning uses speech recognition and virtual assistants to assist young readers. And Rise Gardens makes connected indoor gardening systems.
We've also continued to explore new concepts in social audio. During this era of limited in-person interactions and social distancing, users increased their use of interactive audio as another mode for real-time human interaction. We invested in Betty Labs, creator of the room mobile app, an audio-based social network where sports fans can interact with a community of fellow fans, athletes, and sports pundits. Locker Room humanizes the digital social experience, engendering a way of real-time togetherness among fans and fostering spontaneity found in real-life interaction.
A woman crouches beside her Rise garden and tends to her plants.
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And while we're supporting startups that are rethinking the way to address today's challenges, we're also helping them use emerging technology and AI to reimagine how we'll interact with our world in the future. This year, Voiceitt, a pacesetter in commercial speech recognition for atypical speech, announced how it's helping people with speech disabilities be more independent with Alexa. Embodied launched Moxie, a robotic companion for teenagers that promotes social, emotional, and cognitive learning. Moxie was named one among Time magazine's 100 Best Innovations of 2020, alongside another one among our portfolio companies, Hatch, which creates products to assist everyone—from newborns to adults—sleep better. New portfolio company Fiddler builds software to form AI more explainable and help companies strive for AI model fairness, addressing the requirements of an increasingly AI-powered world. Alexa Startups collaborated with Alea Labs to support its Alexa Smart Energy skill launch during a new product category with Alea's smart air vents that conserve energy by providing room-level control over HVAC systems.
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Our Berlin-based portfolio company, Endel, won the 2020 Apple Watch App of the Year award by producing AI-powered personalized soundscapes to assist users in focus, relax, and sleep. In November 2020, the company released an update to its Alexa skill, introducing an AI Lullaby mode, a limited-edition sleep soundscape with original vocals and stems (groups of elements that structure the ultimate mix) created exclusively by artists Grimes.
In 2019, we announced the Voice Interoperability Initiative (VII)—a program to make sure voice-enabled products provide customers with the choice and adaptability to interact simultaneously with multiple agents on one device. In 2020, voice interaction was more important than ever, and saw three Alexa Fund portfolio companies (Aspinity, Syntiant, and Vesper) join VII. As we move forward in 2021, we'll still see the acceleration of voice technology's benefits in our daily lives. We're so pleased with the achievements of our portfolio companies over the last year, and that we stand able to help even more startups and founders imagine the art of the possible with Alexa.
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