Launch
Irvine-based Mind Brain Parenting is leading the conversation on social-emotional learning.
The company’s flagship product, 52 Essential Conversations, received the 2018 Parents’ Choice Award, which recognizes quality children’s media, including books, toys, music and software, among other learning resources.
The 52-deck card game for children 5 and older provides guiding questions in self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, responsible decision-making, and diversity and inclusion.
Founder and Chief Executive Jenny Woo said the award means a lot because “the kids, parents and people from different perspectives really found a solid benefit in what I created to support children’s and families’ mental and emotional wellness.”
The game retails for $25 on Amazon.com.
Woo’s company is incubated at the University of California-Irvine as a UCI Applied Innovation Wayfinder startup. She’s a doctoral student in the school of education and a cognitive neuroscience researcher developing interventions to strengthen human connections through conversation and compassion.
She received her MBA from University of California-Berkeley and a master’s in mind, brain and education from Harvard University’s school of education.
The company was founded at the start of the year and commercially launched the game in April.
It has been self-funded.
— Sherry Hsieh
Growth
Ladan Davia felt that low unemployment and record levels of job listings were obscuring some stubborn truths for most job seekers.
“Applying for jobs remains stressful and difficult,” Davia said, “especially in an age when applying online has become the new normal and employers are flooded with resumes, to the point where many stop evaluating candidates based on merit and depend entirely on referrals.”
Davia, who graduated from Chapman University in 2014, said the “new normal” skews against candidates who “don’t come from privilege or prestige, or have the benefit of a large network of business contacts.”
Since she couldn’t arrange introductions for all job seekers in need of “digital empathy,” Davia did the next best thing: She developed an algorithm to convince companies and recruiters she was delivering qualified job candidates.
She put jobs platform Beeya.com Inc. into development in 2015, staked with $200,000 from friends and family to hire programmers to develop an artificial intelligence-powered meta-search engine to match job seekers with jobs suited to their skillsets.
Meanwhile, Davia was putting her TV-major communications skills to work, wooing top job sites, including ZipRecruiter and StartWire, to give Beeya clients access to their listings.
“We get paid from our affiliate partners because we’re driving traffic to their websites,” she said. She also licenses the proprietary matching algorithm directly to big companies for their own internal hiring systems.
Davia took Beeya.com live in February 2017 and said she now has six full-time employees, over 10 million listings, and is about to cross the $10,000-per-month revenue threshold.
She’s also seeking future growth with partners that advocate for the most-challenged job seekers—ones with no digital access, the homeless, or even those with criminal records.
“Finding a job should be based on merit alone,” Davia said.
— Pete Weitzner
Funding
Alliance Ventures, the strategic venture capital arm of Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi, has invested in the latest round of funding for Irvine-based Enevate Corp., an advanced-lithium-ion battery technology company.
Terms of the funding deal, announced last week, weren’t immediately disclosed.
“We share the common goal of making electric vehicles easier to use and adopt in mass markets,” Enevate President and Chief Executive Robert Rango said in a statement.
Enevate’s last reported funding round was in 2012, when it raised $24 million. It was founded in 2005 and is near UC Irvine.
— Mark Mueller
