Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #7

As immigrants to the US, we’ve personally experienced that having a foreign accent can affect your confidence and job opportunities (by as much as 20%, according to studies). So we built this app to help non-native English speakers like us.

Users start by watching 3-5 minute video lessons to learn new concepts from Hollywood speech coaches, like Ron Carlos, such as how to pronounce tricky sounds, or how to properly use intonation. They then spend around 10 minutes a day improving their accent skills by going through words, sentences, and conversations, with real-time feedback on their accent from the pronunciation assessment AI model.

The user tells us what their native language is during onboarding, and we serve them content on the typical accent and speech challenges that a person from that linguistic background faces in English. Regarding the feedback part, the user speaks certain words and sentences into the app, we record it, we compare each sound to the "correct" sound according to our library, and we spit out a score and a recommendation for what they should change.

The vast majority of language learning apps focus on grammar and vocabulary, not on speaking. Even when they do speaking, they score it broadly as "right" or "wrong" with no feedback on how you can improve. Learning an accent is all about muscle memory formed in the mouth/lips/teeth, not memorization in the brain—this is what most language learning apps get wrong.

Practicing the physical skills required to acquire an accent is a lot like working out, and with consistent work come results -- usually you can start seeing a difference within 2 weeks. Since launching 8 weeks ago, we’ve had startup founders, globally distributed teams, BPO firms and even middle school Spanish teachers pick up BoldVoice to start working on their accents and feel more confident in English.

We'd love to hear your experiences with accents and your comments about BoldVoice!

As opposed to most famous no-code tools, we don't do any nested-based editing (e.g. tree structure like Webflow - which is an amazing tool, but is basically a visual HTML editor requiring almost the same skills). Instead, we have free canvas-based editing, so we let designers freely iterate as they do with prototyping tools like Figma/AdobeXD/Sketch/etc.

Our visual interface builder lets you add controls using "springs". This is a kind of constraint layout (like XCode/Android studio does) without Cassowary solver (which means more tolerance to inconsistencies). This idea actually came from a master thesis project with my girlfriend where we created methods to simulate elastic material deformations. Then I realized that those abstractions (elastic springs) are easier to understand than the flexbox/grid/box model for UI layout.

Abstra is great for companies that want to make MVPs in production, learn with real data and move faster. We already have a few companies using Abstra. One of them is Stone (Nasdaq: STNE), which uses us to build internal tools faster than coding by hand. Examples of what people have built so far include a customer support portal, a field sales collaborative notes app, financial controls, timesheets, an employee evaluation tool, and a student enrollment control.

Plug is an API to manage multiple payments providers. Through a single integration, businesses can connect to multiple providers and route transactions between them.

It’s hard to know who the right payments provider for your business is. In the early stage you may care most about a fast integration, later you're looking for lower fees and more payment methods, and finally for better acceptance rates and fail-over options. We built Plug so companies could focus on their core business. With our multiple connections, provider-agnostic vault, and routing engine, our users always work with the best provider, on a transaction-by-transaction basis. Working with multiple providers means you can optimize costs and acceptance rates through routing and retries, and that you will be able to avoid lock-ins.

Brazilian merchants in particular change their payment provider frequently. They do this to support multiple local payment methods, to try and improve the worst acceptance rate in Latin America (77% according to Visa), and to reduce their costs, which in some cases can be 10% or more of the transaction.

Alex was at Braintree, Marcel was at Gympass, and Thiago was at Medicinae. We got the idea from seeing our best clients, companies like Uber, AirBnb, and iFood, build their own payment abstraction layers to work with different providers. We've built software that allows any business to do the same: one integration for multiple connections, and the ability to always transact with the best provider without having to write extra code.

Rei do Pitaco has been using Plug to reduce their costs and support multiple payment methods through different providers. CartX has been using Plug to offer multiple providers to their client base without having to integrate each provider. Simplix uses our product to optimize costs by routing to the least expensive provider for each transaction. We're looking forward to hearing your comments!

With Monto users can pay for basic services (like water, electricity) on time, avoiding penalties. They can stop paying overdraft fees and avoid having to resort to abusive credit alternatives like shark loans, employer loans, payday loans, credit cards, bank loans, department store credit cards, pawn shops. The conditions on these options are abusive and prohibitively expensive for low-income workers and have resulted in serious financial stress for millions of people.

Andres was working in investment banking in New York, but ended up back in Mexico for a while working on the family business and advising some friends with their business. Through these experience he was shocked to find out: 1) The level of indebtedness that low-income workers had in Mexico. 2) Companies were not offering benefits that promoted financial wellness in most cases they were offering problems that exacerbated the problem. 3) The lack of transparent, low cost, easy-to-use financial products in the market. He decided to move back to Mexico after living abroad for 12 years, and start a company that would fix this for people.

Users have immediate access to their earned money with Monto - we deposit the money in 2 minutes into any bank account. Withdrawals are secure and confidential. Users don't need to fill out an application, provide documentation or fulfill a long list of requirements – any employee of our affiliated companies can use it. Users pay a small fixed charge per withdrawal, regardless of the amount. There are no interest payments or hidden fees. In contrast to other alternatives, we don't perform credit checks and usage of Monto cannot affect our users in any way (e.g. credit score).

Really disappointed to read this. Wages are so low that working people can't pay their bills, so your solution is to lower their wages even more? There was another YC company like this but they were charging the company, not the employees. You may not be a loan shark, but you are enabling the company to pay low wages and offloading the cost of mitigating the problem to the already-exploited. This is ethically dubious, at best

65% of Mexican savers keep their savings in their checking or savings accounts, yet 97% of all bank accounts are non-interest bearing. This is partly due to a highly concentrated banking market, where 7 banks hold 80% of the market.

I (Salvador) walked past the CD-Pricing Desk at Mexico’s biggest bank every morning for 5 years. In 2017 Mexico finished the year with the highest inflation rate in two decades and the Central Bank’s overnight rate was 8.25%. But Mexico’s biggest bank offered clients rates below 3.5%. This is when I realized how broken the system was and set myself to find a solution to this.

Levo is a certificate of deposit marketplace. People who save money in their checking or savings account, can access CDs from multiple banks through our app and get up to 300% better rates. For example, our client Gustavo recently got a 50,000 USD inheritance; his bank offered him 4.5% p.a. for his savings, with Levo he got 6.5% p.a. with one of Levo's banking partners.

We are currently running a private beta, if you are a Mexican resident please reach out to be part of our special group! If anyone has questions or comments we'd love to hear them!