Meet the 2024 VHBOS Cohort
Visible Hands — a pre-seed venture capital firm, backing overlooked, formidable founders who are transforming the future — announces its second cohort of 10 entrepreneurs for VHBOS, a hybrid, nine-week Fellowship for Boston-based founders. The Fellowship program, created in partnership with the Barr Foundation, will provide $10,000 in non-dilutive funding and hands-on, business-oriented workshops to the 10 founders who are representative of Greater Boston’s rich racial and gender diversity.
VHBOS, a Boston-based, nine-week fellowship program, has officially launched its second cohort for 2024. This selected group of 10 founders who are representative of Greater Boston’s rich racial and gender diversity will work over the next few months to take their startups to the next level in a hybrid-model fellowship program, with financial and hands-on support from the Barr Foundation and Visible Hands.
The Barr Foundation has granted each of the cohort’s entrepreneurs $10K in non-dilutive funding to financially empower them to work on their startups, and Visible Hands will be providing company-building services throughout the fellowship, as well as the opportunity for additional venture capital funding from the firm after successful completion of the program.
“We are proud to partner with Visible Hands as it launches its VHBOS cohort, providing early-stage entrepreneurs greater access to capital, resources, and connections, so they can expand opportunities for prosperity,” said Lisette Le, director of Barr Foundation’s Racial Wealth Equity Initiative. “This kind of targeted investment in underrepresented entrepreneurs is a promising strategy for closing the racial wealth gap in Greater Boston.”
Visible Hands is excited to partner with the Barr Foundation for another year toward a Boston-specific program for 10 new founders, especially in honor of VH’s own birthplace.
“We at Visible Hands are thrilled to partner with the Barr Foundation on this exciting fellowship,” said Daniel Acheampong, Co-Founder and General Partner of Visible Hands. “Together, we can empower emerging entrepreneurs and drive positive economic and social impact in their communities. This fellowship represents an incredible opportunity to cultivate the next generation of change-makers and fuel a culture of innovation and progress in Boston.”
VHBOS is an extension of the Visible Hands mission to support overlooked talent, in partnership with the Barr Foundation’s efforts to create more inclusion in the Greater Boston startup ecosystem.
Here are the amazing 10 founders and startups who make up the 2024 VHBOS cohort:
Laura Vitale, Modality
Modality’s AI-enabled infrastructure, training, and safety mechanisms help five million qualified mental health paraprofessionals find more work and create a 12% cost reduction to healthcare systems overall through cost-saving diversions and preventative care.
Ashley Sherwin, Giving Credit
Giving Credit is designed to meet the credit needs of financially excluded communities by rewarding and amplifying peer-to-peer lending. The web-based platform eases the process of negotiating and tracking peer loans, rewards users for participating in peer lending, builds mainstream credit by reporting peer loans to credit bureaus, and insures peer lenders against loan loss.
Piyali Chakraborty, Ashmi Health
Ashmi Health is an AI-powered Health and Nutrition coach for women’s hormonal health. It listens to user questions and provides empathetic, evidence-based answers through text, images, and videos. It also offers scientific recommendations of natural ways of balancing hormones — nutrition and supplement recommendations tailored to the unique hormonal needs of our users.
Johar Singh, Astra Wellbeing
Astra Wellbeing is an SMS-based Wellness platform, specializing in improving healthcare employee experience through positive support. It offers a range of wellness resources that help healthcare organizations manage processes for fostering employee recognition, boosting employee engagement, and improving access to mental health support — in turn, improving staff wellbeing and turnover.
Vivian Kocsis, Audience AI
AudienceAI is for video creators, such as YouTubers and brands creating video ads, who want to increase their views and predict the actions of their audience. AudienceAI provides data summarizing the emotions, engagement, and attention of their audience, second-by-second during the video. This data has a high predictive power on YouTube metrics, such as views, click-through rate, average view duration, average percentage viewed, and audience retention. We help creators test their videos before the release and give advice on how to re-edit their videos to maximize performance and virality.
