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A Dallas-based founder looks to tackle the student loan crisis with his startup, College Cash

Demetrius Curry has spent the last couple years chasing a dream.

His startup, College Cash, allows brands to petition users to create photo and video marketing content highlighting their product or service, with the wrinkle being that content creators are paid by the brands in the form of credits that go directly toward paying down their student loan debt. This model awards the brands involved a level of social good will and tax benefits.

The Dallas-area founder was inspired to tackle the student loan debt crisis after talking with his daughter about the prospect of eventually paying down her own loan debt. Curry has spent the past two years building out the nascent platform, tracking down brand partners, navigating accelerator programs, enticing users and pounding the pavement to find investors willing to bet on his vision.

College Cash has raised $105,000 to date, and is hoping to eventually wrap the funding into a $1 million seed round.

Filling out the round has been its own challenge for Curry, who has struggled at times to find opportunity, even among historic levels of capital flowing into the startup ecosystem, a distinction that has been less noticeable for black founders that still make up just a small percentage of VC allocation. In the aftermath of last summer’s protests against police brutality, a number of venture capital firms issued statements decrying institutional racism and pledging to back more underserved founders, spinning up new programs for diverse founders.

Demetrius Curry, CEO of College Cash

While Curry says he appreciates the scope of the problem and the good intentions of those making the statements, he believes that venture capital networks still have a lot to learn about what being an “underserved” founder means, and that plenty of the existing efforts feel like “lip service.” He says that even as Silicon Valley continues to idolize dropouts from prestigious universities, stakeholders have less interest in recognizing the accomplishments of founders who fought their way through poverty or found opportunity in geographies where opportunities are harder to come by.

“You can’t look for something different if you’re looking in the same places,” Curry tells TechCrunch. “When you look at the topic of ‘underserved founders,’ it’s not only a skin color thing, it’s also about where they came from and what they’ve been through.”

Curry says that it can be frustrating to compete for early-stage opportunities when investors aren’t willing to meaningfully adjust their parameters. Of particular frustration to Curry has been navigating the world of “warm introductions” to even get a foot in the door for programs meant for diverse founders, or applying for early-stage programs geared toward the “underserved” only to be told that they weren’t far enough along to qualify.

“Think about how much we had to go through to even get in the room with you,” Curry says. “I’ve sold plasma to pay a web hosting fee, nothing is going to stop me.”

College Cash’s mission of expanding opportunities for people struggling to manage their student loan debt is personal to Curry, who saw his life turn around after going back to school.

Decades ago, fresh out of the military, Curry said he had a random conversation with a stranger while eating at a Hardee’s — the discussion about what more he wanted from life ended up pushing him to to go back and get his GED and later a business degree. What followed was a career in finance that eventually led toward his recent entrepreneurial pursuits with College Cash.

The platform is firmly an early-stage venture at the moment, but Curry has big ambitions he’s building toward. His next effort is building out a College Cash tipping integration with gig economy platforms, with the aim that users of those platforms could ultimately opt to tip a worker and route that money directly toward paying down that person’s student loan debt.

Curry says the team at College Cash has been working with a “national gig economy platform” to run a pilot of the integration and has run focus groups showing that users are more likely to tip when they know that money goes toward erasing loan debt.

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Lang.ai snags $2M to remove technical burden of implementing AI for businesses

Lang.ai, which has developed a no-code platform for businesses, closed on a $2 million seed funding round.

The company’s SaaS platform aims to allow business users to structure any free-text data with custom categories built through a drag & drop interface, based on AI-extracted concepts.

Village Global led the financing, which included participation from new and existing backers including Acceleprise, Oceans Ventures, Alumni Ventures Group, 2.12 Angels, GTMFund, and Lorimer Ventures.

Spain-born Jorge Penalva founded Lang.ai in 2018 with the goal of giving any business user the ability “to build enterprise-ready natural language processing models in just minutes.” It was built to give non-engineers a way to automate repetitive tasks in use cases such as customer service and claims processing.

“It can be installed in our cloud or theirs,” Penalva said. 

Lang.ai saw its revenue double from the last quarter of 2020 to the first quarter of 2021 and the seed funding was motivated mainly to continue that momentum.

“We’re getting demand in the form of projects with our larger customers, so we needed the funding to be able to support that demand,” Penalva told TechCrunch.

In his previous role of CEO of Séntisis, Penalva realized that processes driven by free-text data remained a blind spot for many companies. 

“Today, millions of dollars and hours are invested by companies to manually read and process textual information captured from disparate areas of their business,” he said.

His mission with Lang.ai is to “empower businesses to put AI to work for them, without the technical complexities of building and training custom algorithms.” 

Specifically, Penalva said that Lang.ai’s product analyzes a customer’s historical data “in minutes” and suggests AI-extracted concepts to build custom categories through a drag & drop interface. The custom categories are applied in real-time to automate “tedious” tasks such as the manual tagging and routing of support tickets, the processing of insurance claims and the dispatching of field engineers to incoming work order requests.

Put simply, Lang.ai’s goal is to remove the technical burden of implementing AI for a business.

Lang.ai’s community of users (called “Citizen NLP Builders”) consists of mostly non-technical business roles, ranging from customer service operations to marketers, business analysts and UX designers.

Customers include Freshly, Userzoom, Playvox, Spain’s CaixaBank, Yalo Chat and Bancolombia, among others. 

Ben Segal, director of infrastructural efficiency at Freshly, described the platform as “so nimble.”

“Out of the box, it took us two days to make automated tagging 15% more reliable than a previous platform that we had had in production for 2 years, with the added benefit that now all of our teams can tap into and exploit our support data,” Segal said. “The marketing team has built workflows to understand key customer moments. Our data and analytics team is super excited about having all these new tags in Snowflake, and it’s crazy how easy it is to use.”

Penalva is proud of the fact that Lang.ai’s engineering team is primarily based in Spain and that he has been able to grow the 10-person company outside of his native country.

“With very few resources, it took us a little over two years to build an enterprise-grade product and find the right set of early customers and investors who are aligned with our vision,” he said. “I moved to the US from Spain to build a global company and this is just the beginning…Lang has always been powered by immigrant hustle, and it has been core to our values since day 1.”

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Zero, a plastic-free grocery-delivery startup, to launch in LA

Plastic-free grocery-delivery startup Zero is gearing up to launch in Los Angeles on February 10, after solely operating in the San Francisco Bay Area. Zero works directly with suppliers to sell food and other household items in jars, boxes and other types of sustainable packaging, and offers next-day delivery.

Zero works with both big-name brands like Sightglass Coffee, Annie’s and Newman’s Own, as well as emerging vendors that are focused on sustainability, like Planet FWD, founded by Zume co-founder Julia Collins.

Zero members pay $25 per month to access discounted prices on food along with free deliveries. Zero is also available without a subscription, but prices on individual items cost a bit more, and delivery costs $7.99.

I’ve used Zero a couple of times and overall had a pleasant experience. The selection of food is pretty good, but I wasn’t able to find certain types of items like tortilla chips and mandarin oranges. On the plus side, Zero sells my favorite candy of all-time, Tony’s Chocolonely.

In total, Zero founder and CEO Zuleyka Strasner says there are just over 1,100 different items available in the store.

That’s partly because of the leg work that’s required to ensure the food manufactures are meeting Zero’s internal standards for packaging. In the case of chicken, Zero has worked directly with butchers to ensure they package it in compostable paper, which then goes into a compostable resealable bag, Strasner said. That took a lot of time, effort, energy and technology, she said.

Zero does allow plastic at some point in the supply chain process but ensures that plastic is not passed on to consumers. Using chicken as an example again, the chicken starts at the farm and then must travel to one of Zero’s butcher networks and then to a facility to get packaged and processed.

“So those farms and those parts of that transportation process do oftentimes involve plastic in there,” Strasner said. “And as the company grows, we get involved more and more and more into changing more and more of the processes and removing more and more of the plastic for each of our new manufacturing suppliers. So it’s always a journey for each farm, to start with that product going out to the customer plastic-free and then working backwards backwards backwards to removing more and more and more plastics.”

While it would be ideal for all of Zero’s partners to operate fully plastic-free, Strasner said it was important to make it as easy as possible for farms, suppliers and other stakeholders to get on board, “rather than setting up a set of rules and regulations that say either you’re plastic-free from the minute the chicken gets slaughtered all the way to getting it to the customer,” she said.

“That would not create the shift in the industry that we’re looking to create.”

The idea for Zero started to come into fruition for Strasner during her honeymoon in the Corn Islands in Nicaragua. During her trip, she was shocked at how much single-use plastic washed up on the shore, she told TechCrunch. Meanwhile, she had seen the zero-waste, anti-plastic movement growing and began to wonder what would happen if she went plastic-free. Going plastic-free made her think more about the supply chain and how foods are packed in the country, she said.

Given her background in technology, she began to think about how technology could be applied to the problem of plastic waste, “which must be solved within the next seven to 10 years,” she said. “Time is truly finite here and that’s the mission I decided to undertake.”

Zero began testing in 2018 and officially launched in November 2019. The majority of Zero’s customers are members and, overall, the company has “many, many thousands of customers,” Strasner said.

To date, Zero has raised $4.7 million in funding from investors like Precursor Ventures, Backstage Capital, 1984 and others.

“We aim to be and we will be the largest sustainability platform in this country,” Strasner said. “So whatever you need and desire — food, homewares or otherwise, certainly plastic-free but also just sustainable in general — you would come to us. Zero really is a movement beyond just food.”