We’re in the middle of YC’s W17 batch. As companies launch they’ll be doing a Q&A on Hacker News – aka Launch HN – in addition to being included in a roundup on the blog. Here are the companies that have recently launched.

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Hogaru

What do you do?
Hogaru is an office cleaning company for Latin America.

How does it work?
A customer visits the Hogaru website and is able to get a personalized quote to meet their needs, or is able to call the company for a quote directly. The customer can book from 1-6 days a week and is able to get the same cleaner to clean their office on a regular basis.

Why is it better than what’s currently on the market?
In Latin America, a business that needs a cleaning company can either look for an informal cleaner that may expose the business to legal or labor risk, or book with an legacy cleaning agency which require you to book 6 days a week, rather than on a part-time basis.

Hogaru cleaners have a strong background check and have people in place to deal with cleaners that are sick or leave their job. Cleaners are fully employed by Hogaru rather than contractors.

In the long term, in addition to cleaning Hogaru plans to provide more value to the office managers to make their offices better.

Where is Hogaru available?
Hogaru is currently available in Bogota, Medellin, and Cali and is expanding to more cities in Latin America in 2017.

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Elemeno Health

What is Elemeno Health?
Elemeno Health is building the first personal assistant for frontline health care teams.

How does it work?
We make it simple for hospitals to gather their best practices, checklists and videos and make it accessible in a few clicks to the entire team. We add gamification to promote learning. We measure and report results for speeding up their quality improvement cycle.

Who are the founders?
We’re a doctor and a game developer, each coming from successful careers in their respective industries to join forces.

Prior to founding Elemeno Health, Dr. Roy-Burman was Medical Director of the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit and Director of Transport, Access and Outreach for UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital. He is an institutional leader in efforts to elevate healthcare delivery in the inpatient setting, with focus on interprofessional workforce engagement and standardization of best practices.

Ed Nanale is a veteran game developer who has shipped 20+ games at Electronic Arts, including SimCity and The Sims, with over 2 million online users.

What’s your traction?
In 7 months, we’ve gone from an product concept to an functional MVP and our first paying customers. Our work is being recognized by clinical leaders nationally. We have been invited and will present at the American College of Medical Quality national meeting in DC on March 31, and also at the Pediatric Academic Societies national meeting in SF in May.

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Playment

What does your company do?
Playment is on-demand workforce for human tasks. Unlike Amazon Mechanical Turk, Crowdflower, etc., we fully manage the entire project with guaranteed enterprise grade SLAs (quality, turnaround times, etc.).

Who are your customers?
We serve companies that need highly scalable, quality assurance and data tagging operations with quick turnaround times and high quality. Currently, we serve customers that fall into three categories: product catalog quality control and enrichment for e-commerce companies, content moderation (Trust & Safety) for companies with user generated content (UGC), and image recognition training data sets for AI companies. In 2016 we have executed 200,000 man hours across 50 projects from customers such as Flipkart, Paytm, Olacabs and Myntra. We started in the Indian market and are now expanding globally.

What is the primary problem you are solving?
We are solving the problem of data operations at scale. Say you are an e-commerce firm, you have merchants that upload thousands of products and you need to verify if these listings are correct before they go online. You could hire 100s of people in-house to do it or outsource it to BPOs (Business process outsourcing companies). Managing variable volumes of work with a fixed ops team is a lot hassle and not the most cost efficient way. With Playment, you could write an API to get instant access to more than 100,000 workers and verify 1000s of listings in few minutes.

What is the primary reason people use your product over a competitor?
Mechanical Turk doesn’t assure quality. With Playment, you don’t need to take the hassle of designing tasks, reviewing submissions or banging your head over the appalling quality of work. Send us data and guidelines (SOPs), we take care of the rest. Our workflow product can support complex tasks as well.

Why did you decide to start the company?
We experienced this problem first hand at our last job. All three founders met and worked at Flipkart, India’s largest e-commerce company. We outsourced our e-commerce catalog operations to a 400 person team. We struggled to scale the team as millions of products got added to the catalog while managing variable volumes and overhead costs. The idea of crowdsourcing data operations seemed natural and we felt that this could bring drastic efficiency in the massive $100 bn+ BPO industry.

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Hivy

What are you making?
Hivy is a platform for office managers that allows them to organize their projects, collect employees’ orders and feedback, and seamlessly purchase everything they need to keep the office running.

Who are your customers?
Hivy is running the offices of prestigious startups like Slack, Seatgeek, Gigster in the US and Typeform, Deliveroo, Devialet or Teespring in Europe.

What problem does it solve?
There’s software specifically built for every team in a company, except the office management team. They are stuck juggling between multiple channels to communicate with employees and vendors, and are sometimes using inappropriate task management tools, IT ticketing software, or spreadsheets to track their work.

How does it work?
Hivy allows employees to make orders/suggestions in one click from their desktop, Slack, or the office iPad, and they get notified of the progress of their request. These requests are collected for the office managers in one simply designed board, where they can also work on their own projects, make purchases, and manage vendors. No more emails, spreadsheets and post-its!

Why is it better than what’s currently in the market?
Unlike project management tools and IT ticketing softwares, Hivy has interviewed over 300 office managers to build a product addressing all major facets of their job (request management, purchases, vendor management). To use our software, office managers don’t need to change their habits, but they can chose to order from vendors in our marketplace that are recommended by other office managers in their city.

Why is this valuable?
In order to retain talents, companies are spending more money and energy to foster a great employee experience. Office manager carry sizable employee happiness budget that can range from $10-25k/employee each year. Hivy helps them optimize their operation and the costs associated with it by providing them with valuable data and finding budget friendly vendors.

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Bulk MRO

What does your company do?
We are a one stop shop for Industrial Products for Enterprise Customers in India. We supply any product – from a fastener and safety glove, to a microscope and gas analyzer.

Currently, enterprises manage hundreds of suppliers to procure the products they need to run their business. We solve this pain point by providing one easy-to-use place to procure everything.

Who are your customers?
Our customers are large enterprises across multiple sectors (Manufacturing, Oil & Gas, Power, etc.). Of our 100+ enterprise customers, 22 are Fortune 500 companies. (e.g. Ingersoll Rand, Exxon, Reliance Industries, Tata Group, Unilever).

What is the primary problem you are solving and why has no one solved it before?
Buying industrial products is complicated. Most suppliers are small, mom-and-pop retailers while most enterprises are very large with complex requirements. Coordinating orders across multiple vendors is also time consuming. We make it easy for both sides by putting it all in one place and simplifying the ordering process.

Why did you start Bulk MRO?
Customer’s asked for it. We have worked with many large industrial enterprise customers in project execution and management. We saw the challenges our customers faced to procure the most basic items – they had to deal with hundreds of suppliers with very low reliability. We saw an opportunity to simplify this process for them.

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