Morgan Stanley-Backed Startups Pitch at Showcase & Demo Day

Morgan Stanley’s Inclusive Ventures Group hosted “Demo Day,” the culmination of a five-month in-house accelerator that provides each portfolio company with $250,000 or £250,000 in addition to access to investor networks, mentoring, and a tailored curriculum in exchange for a 5% equity stake.

At Demo Day, hosted in New York and London, founders pitched their companies in person to hundreds of investors and also had the opportunity to connect with attendees one-on-one. The Morgan Stanley Inclusive Ventures Lab’s 2024 cohort includes startups within the Seed to Series A funding rounds from the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. The 25 companies are in sectors as varied as enterprise software, financial technology, healthcare, retail and travel.

During the event, we also announced the creation of Morgan Stanley Inclusive & Sustainable Ventures (MSISV), which provides early-stage innovators in both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors with access to capital and resources to help them develop and scale.

Morgan Stanley Inclusive & Sustainable Ventures builds on the success of the Inclusive Ventures Lab and the Sustainable Solutions Collaborative, which together have distributed more than $30 million in capital to more than 100 startups and organizations in the last eight years. It leverages Morgan Stanley’s integrated firm approach and deep expertise to better serve the needs of early-stage founders, startups and organizations.

Accelerators Open for Applications

Morgan Stanley Inclusive & Sustainable Ventures offers two complementary in-house accelerator programs—a Lab designed for commercial startup founders and a Collaborative to support emerging nonprofits. Applications for the 2025 cohort of both programs are open from February 5 to March 14, 2025.

Morgan Stanley will provide participating Lab companies with an equity investment, a five-month curated program, mentorship, networking, office space for the duration of the program and access to certain external advisors. The equity investment is $250,000 for each company participating in our New York-based program and £250,000 for each company participating in our London-based program.

Similarly, each participating Collaborative nonprofit will receive a $250,000 grant if based in the Americas, £250,000 for all other regions and access to the same program content as the Lab.

2024 Cohort Demo Day Recap

Global Co-Heads of Inclusive Ventures Group LaToya Wilson and Sanghamitra Karra spoke about the companies presenting at Demo Day in New York and London, respectively. “Our largest cohort yet of groundbreaking startups is scaling innovations and work in sectors that range from the circular economy to clinical trials, among many others,” Wilson said. Karra added: “Our mission is to foster a more equitable and sustainable investment landscape. I’m incredibly grateful to all the Morgan Stanley employees and our partners who helped select these companies, mentor them, advise them and set up this showcase.”

Jessica Alsford, Chief Sustainability Officer at Morgan Stanley, spoke from London about the Lab’s history and wide geographic reach: “Morgan Stanley started the Inclusive Ventures Lab back in 2017, with the aim of promoting financial inclusion and providing access to capital for early-stage companies. Since then, the Lab has supported almost 120 portfolio companies, which is an incredible achievement—17 different countries to date. Just in this latest cohort, we’ve got founders from Ghana, Jamaica, Chile, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Germany, UAE, Uruguay, Canada, U.S. and the UK.”

Meet the global companies and founders who presented at Demo Day that are disrupting the environmental, software, health and wellness, financial technology, retail and travel sectors.

Environment

• Sophia Wennstedt, co-founder and CEO of U.S.-based Blip Energy, spoke about how her company is helping property owners mitigate surging peak energy demand, with a smart battery that charges when the electricity grid has extra capacity, and is used when the grid is congested. This optimizes energy costs for users and reduces operating costs for utilities. “Our business model aggregates batteries within a building and across the network and sells that capacity into energy programs to support the grid,” Wennstedt said. “We share a portion of our revenue back to the property that installed the batteries. A 50-unit building in New York can earn $50,000 annually in our revenue share program.”

• James Omisakin, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at U.K.-based Compare Ethics, discussed his company’s AI-powered sustainability compliance platform that reduces costs by helping retail brands simplify, streamline and scale the way they make accurate green claims. “We’ve built the missing link between the company’s own supply chain data and complicated regulatory requirements to help provide an automated assurance for the company’s green claims,” Omisakin said. “Through one platform, they can minimize risk, reduce compliance costs by up to 80% and increase revenue.”

• Lyndsay Mason, founder of U.K.-based For The Creators, addressed her company’s omni-channel circular fashion marketplace, where women can rent and buy high-quality clothing, wellness and beauty products for each stage of motherhood. “Women face countless new needs but lack a single destination for maternity clothing, beauty and wellness essentials,” Mason said. “Legacy parenting brands focus on baby products, leaving her overlooked, while mainstream retailers see maternity as a niche that fails to move their bottom line. This creates a massively underserved opportunity—one where a dedicated platform can win.” For The Creators offers clothing rental memberships and the ability to buy products that aren’t suitable for rentals.

• Natalia Tomiyama, founder and CEO of Germany-based NÜWIEL, presented her company’s electric mobility solutions for cities. Tomiyama described the company’s eTrailer, which can be connected to and synchronized with any bicycle and knows automatically when to speed up, slow down, brake and stop, to help reduce traffic jams and air pollution. “We sell the eTrailers to businesses and generate recurrent revenue via service and rentals. With growing e-commerce, there are postal and parcel operators in Europe and worldwide that can benefit from the eTrailer.”

• Constanza Gomez, co-founder of U.S.-based Sortile, spoke about the difficulty and costliness of textile recycling, and the negative impact on places like her home, the Atacama Desert in Chile, which is often the destination for textile waste. The company offers a device that uses machine learning algorithms and sensors to identify key characteristics in textiles in under one second, with a more than 95% accuracy rate, which is essential to textile sorting and recycling. “We’re taking what would have been classified as waste and turning it into useable feedstock for recyclers, adding a new revenue stream to their operations,” Gomez said.

Enterprise Software and Software as a Service (SAAS)

• Jamie Sonneville, founder and CEO of U.S.-based Agri-Trak, spoke about how her company digitizes small farm operations with a smart platform for real-time labor, crop yield and cost tracking to optimize productivity, sustainability and profitability. Most farms struggle with business visibility due to pen-and-paper manual tracking and transient workforces, which has led to nearly 150,000 family farms vanishing in under a decade, according to Sonneville, who is a 5th-generation apple grower. “We've created a true ‘FarmOS’ for farmers to collect and access their data in real-time so they can analyze their operations in ways they never could before,” she said. Agri-Trak offers a trio of apps: A mobile timer for workers to check in and out and record tasks; a tablet app for managing crews and production inputs; and a desktop web dashboard, where field data is aggregated for reporting and analytics, as well as payroll.

• Cloe Guidry-Reed, founder of U.S.-based Hire Ground, presented her company’s B2B software platform, which lets enterprise buyers source and manage third-party vendors while optimizing their procurement process. Many companies struggle with this, due to outdated and manual processes, compliance and sustainability verification challenges, according to Guidry-Reed. “We deliver real-time risk monitoring, automated supplier credentialing and seamless integration into existing operations—transforming supplier inclusion into a driver of business growth,” she said.

• Ricky Regalado, the CEO and founder of U.S.-based Route, discussed how his company helps the fragmented commercial cleaning industry by connecting small, medium and large companies to source deals and provide business management tools to help grow and scale operations. Regalado spoke about the industry’s size and his own experience scaling his local cleaning service to a national company: “It’s a $93 billion industry with over 1 million companies in the U.S. alone. 75% is made up of the smaller players—I was one—until I grew into the upper 25%. I know the problems and opportunities for the big and small companies.”

• Jacob Makuvire, founder and CEO of U.S.-based SWYE360 Learning, spoke about how his company’s AI software platform helps schools optimize spending to enhance student outcomes. He cited a Texas school district’s $2 million savings using SWYE360. “With one click on one dashboard, districts now have access to powerful insights to view usage at an individual student and teacher level, correlating that usage to student learning outcomes and, thus, optimizing their spending and driving learning outcomes.”

• Tomas Uribe, co-founder and CEO of U.S.-based Mavity, addressed how his company offers an AI-powered operating system for design and marketing teams that connects companies with on-demand creatives to streamline asset creation. “Meet our most powerful innovation yet: The Asset Builder. Powered by AI, it allows teams to create pitch decks, corporate assets and full websites with just a brief description and brand details,” he said. Small and medium-sized businesses spend more than $34 billion a year on design and marketing, according to Uribe, and Mavity is targeting businesses with approximately 50 employees that spend an average of $5,000 a month on these assets.

• Yun Yao, the co-founder and CEO of Canada-based Soralink, presented how her company leverages AI and smart sensors to assist manufacturers in preventing critical machine failures. “At Soralink, we help prevent costly unplanned downtime by detecting machine failures before complete breakdown. We have our proprietary sensor that we adhere directly on the machines themselves, with preconfigured cellular connectivity, and the whole installation takes less than five minutes.” The global market for predictive maintenance is about $12 billion, Yao said. Since March 2022, Soralink has deployed more than 300 sensors, helping prevent more than $3 million in costs related to machine downtime, according to Yao.

Health and Wellness

• Farah Kabir and Sarah Welsh, co-founders of U.K.-based HANX, spoke about their company’s consumer platform bringing together medically designed women’s reproductive health products, prescription treatments and community-focused content. They spoke about HANX’s intimate wellness products and online pharmacy products, and the company’s progress in creating an online clinic that enables gynecology appointments, diagnoses through postal kits and personalized treatments. “The global women’s health market is expected to reach $1 trillion by 2040,” the co-founders said, and cited 755,000 delayed gynecology appointments in 2024, with half of women on waiting lists experiencing longer wait times than the NHS target of 18 weeks. “There is a clear gap in the market for HANX. No one is owning the gynae health space that offers both direct-to-consumer and retail presence in the U.K. and U.S.”

• Emilie Faure, founder and CEO of U.K.-based Juniver, addressed her health company’s AI technology that provides personalized digital interventions for lasting eating-disorder recovery. “People with eating disorders are desperate to get better but 90% don’t access the care they want and need. Eating disorder claims have surged by 65% in the past year, and healthcare costs for people with eating disorders are seven times higher than for those without the condition,” she said. Faure explained that the Juniver platform leverages recent research and evidence-based protocols into one care model, with micro-interventions for urges, evidence-based education, personalized tools, peer support and an AI-powered chat functionality.

• Jenny Wordsworth, founder and CEO of U.K.-based OVUM, presented her company’s one-stop shop for fertility wellness that provides educational resources, products and services for improving fertility outcomes. “Infertility—it’s tough, it’s a disease and it is fast becoming one of the biggest global health problems of the 21st century,” Wordsworth said. “People are seeking to maximize their chances of conception and they’re demanding better-quality products and services to support that journey.” Wordsworth presented about OVUM’s patented preconception food supplement to improve egg quality, the first fully-recyclable pregnancy test and the future launch of a male fertility supplement.

• Dr. Amber Hill, founder and CEO of U.K.-based Research Grid, discussed her company’s automation engine for admin-free clinical trials. “The problem is that $400 million is spent on admin alone in clinical trials, per trial, per year, that runs through to phase 3. We have thousands of hours being wasted across the most talented people in the world,” Hill said. “And still, 84% of trials don’t reach the people they need to reach, contributing to about 90% of them failing. We solve for these bottlenecks by automating these trials from months to minutes using artificial intelligence and process automation.” Hill presented Research Grid’s systems that automate sourcing, compliance and the workflow behind pre-trial processes and the operations of trials themselves.

• Luis Suarez, founder and CEO of U.S.-based Sanarai, spoke about how his company connects the Latino community to mental health professionals in Latin America and the U.S. to offer culturally sensitive, Spanish-language emotional support at accessible prices. “We see a global opportunity to partner with healthcare providers and payers who struggle to find Spanish-speaking therapists, engage Spanish-speaking communities effectively and prioritize health equity.”

• Peter Monteza, co-founder and CEO of U.K.-based MyARC, discussed his company’s platform that enables fitness content creators to train their fans at scale. “Online fitness is booming, and fitness creators with their large fan bases are best positioned to dominate this $60 billion market. They just don’t have the tools for it.” He presented about MyARC’s ability to automatically personalize training plans to each fan’s individual ability without human input. “In our vertical, you’re either an expensive 1:1 coaching platform or a generic cookie cutter training app, that is static and does not adapt to your needs,” Monteza said. “Fitness needs to be personalized and it needs to be accessible in order to win this space.”

Financial Technology

• Seke Ballard, founder and CEO of U.S.-based Beta Financial, spoke about his company’s credit-scoring solution for small businesses that fosters financial inclusion and access to capital through AI-driven technology. “The information asymmetry between small businesses that need capital and the banks that have capital drives billions in credit defaults and added operational expenses,” Ballard said. Beta Financial’s BetaScore uses AI to compile information that is useful to underwriters and small business owners. “BetaScore means reducing identity fraud through business and owner verification, reducing defaults by making smarter loans, increasing deal flow by improving the throughput of individual credit analysis and increasing approval rates without increasing staff.”

• Karen Houghton, co-founder and CEO of U.S.-based Infinite Giving, addressed how her company’s fintech platform enables nonprofits to raise money, manage their cash reserves and conservatively invest and grow. “Traditional banking doesn’t serve small- to mid-sized nonprofits well. Because of this, many nonprofits face financial limitations,” she said. Infinite Giving helps nonprofits with services including opening brokerages online; launching donation pages and receiving stocks, cryptocurrency, and other types of assets; and choosing cash-management and investment strategies.

• Eric Woo, co-founder and CEO of U.S.-based Revere, presented how his company is reinventing how allocators manage their alternative asset portfolios through AI, workflow automation tools and custom reporting. “Today, the reporting and management of $22 trillion of private market assets, which represents 15% of global assets, are plagued by manual processes, disparate data silos and other inefficiencies. We deliver a full-stack solution to address these problems.” Revere offers services including the automation and organization of unstructured data into meaningful and tagged data elements and an analytics platform that delivers insights and custom reports with one click, Woo said.

• Zuhair Shamma, co-founder and CEO at UAE-based Zest Equity, spoke about how his company is digitizing private market transactions, building tools to streamline and ensure greater transparency in how entrepreneurs, funds and investors transact. “$1 trillion in wealth is expected to be generated within the Gulf Cooperation Council alone, yet transactions often involving millions or even billions of dollars are still being executed using informal tools such as email and even WhatsApp,” Shamma said. “We’ve built a platform designed to simplify and streamline private market transactions,” that digitizes onerous parts of the process, provides modular and customizable infrastructure and is securely built on a legal and regulatory framework.

Retail and Travel

• Rory Richards, co-founder and CEO of U.S.-based GroceryList, discussed his company’s marketplace that connects immigrants worldwide with local merchants across Latin America and the Caribbean, allowing them to purchase groceries and essentials for their loved ones back home. “Our online logistical marketplace allows immigrants located anywhere in the world to shop for groceries and other daily essentials online, from local stores in their cities or countries of origin, and get those items delivered to their family members or loved ones in less than one hour using our in-house designed supermarket rideshare system,” Richards said. GroceryList is currently active in Jamaica, where it has more than 350 store partners and 2,000 delivery agents, according to Richards, who cited a total addressable market of 27 million immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean, who contribute to more than $150 billion in remittances to their respective countries on a yearly basis.

• Gonzalo Carozo, co-founder and CEO of Uruguay-based KSI Vision, presented his company’s use of AI on store and shopping center security cameras to generate real-time customer data and increase sales conversion. “Only 5% of retailers use customer behavior analytics to increase sales,” which contrasts with 94% of e-commerce retailers, Carozo said. “We track every interaction of customers with the physical stores. To obtain this information, we leverage the existing security cameras that already are in the stores, and with AI and a computer vision, we create the digital twin of the stores with real-time analytics, used by retailers to increase sales.” Carozo cited an example of a retailer that experienced a high rate of abandoned checkout, which was solved after it changed the store’s layout using KSI Vision’s design tool.

• Felix Manford, co-founder and CEO of Ghana-based Tendo Technologies, spoke about how his company addresses the challenges faced by aspiring online retail entrepreneurs in Africa by connecting independent resellers to suppliers. The African retail market is “offline, manual and unreliable, from sourcing to order to managing stock,” Manford said. “Tendo is empowering existing trusted retail channels with infrastructure so they can actually take advantage of digitized commerce, reliable supply chains and improved working capital.” Manford presented about Tendo’s digitalization of supply chains for retailers in the region, including inventory management tools and data-driven demand prediction for distributors.

• Hanin Alsubaie, co-founder and CEO of Saudi Arabia-based Darent, addressed her company’s vacation rental marketplace platform, which helps travelers search for properties with a focus on local experiences and provides a secure payment system and property insurance for hosts. “Tourism in Saudi grew by 32% last year, making it the fastest-growing country in terms of tourism in the Middle East,” Alsubaie said. “Today, there is not enough accommodation supply in Saudi Arabia to meet the current and growing demand. We have built the leading platform in the region with 10,000 listings by 7,000 hosts across 22 cities in Saudi Arabia.” Darent provides a marketplace for guests to book accommodation and an operational management system for hosts that includes calendar management and smart pricing.