With SynGen, co-founder Philip Coelho hopes to play a critical role in this breakthrough by supplying tools that harvest stem cells and immune cells from umbilical cord blood, bone marrow and other sources. 

NannyMe is a business and mobile application created by a few Sacramento high schoolers. Similar to the rideshare app Uber, NannyMe receives babysitting requests, then pings nannies (local high school students), who can accept or decline the job. Since NannyMe launched in December, about 75 families have signed up with the service.

Daniel Morash doesn’t like to see spoiled food go to waste. In 2012, Morash and his brother, Dave, spent millions to launch California Safe Soil with one goal in mind: convert leftover organic material from supermarkets into a nutrient-rich soil amendment farmers could use to grow crops.

In 2011, Jon Coss was on the hunt for funding. He had an idea for a system that could leverage Google Analytics to detect and prevent fraud and abuse in government programs. But this infrastructure-as-a-service model was new back then, untested and hard to explain to venture capitalists.