Visible Hands — a pre-seed venture capital firm, backing overlooked, formidable founders who are transforming the future — announces its fourth cohort of 15 entrepreneurs for VHBOS, a hybrid Fellowship for Boston-based founders. The Fellowship program, created in partnership with the Barr Foundation, will provide $5,000 in non-dilutive funding and hands-on, business-oriented workshops to the 15 founders who are representative of Greater Boston’s rich racial and gender diversity.
VHBOS, a Boston-based fellowship program, has officially launched its fourth cohort for 2026. This selected group of 14 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.
Each of the cohort’s entrepreneurs will receive $5K 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.
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 14 founders and startups who make up the 2026 VHBOS cohort:
🏔️ Company: Shera Care
Shera Care, Inc. is a public benefit corporation building a new model of specialized perinatal intensive mental health care that centers patients, families, clinical excellence, equity, and community. Shera seeks to expand access to specialized perinatal intensive treatment, strengthening the continuum of care between traditional outpatient therapy and crisis care.
👋 Company Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/shera-care/
🏔️ Company: Adept Scientific
Adept Scientific is building the laboratory execution intelligence layer for life science tools. Its AI-powered platform gives scientists real-time, hands-free support as they run complex laboratory workflows, while providing manufacturers with visibility into how their products are actually used in customer labs.
👋 Company Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/adept-scientific/
🏔️ Company: Stage Zero Health
Stage Zero Health helps self-insured employers end late-stage cancer identifying high-risk employees early and navigating them to guideline-based screening through their existing health plans.
👋 Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/stage-zero-health/
🏔️ Company: Scouter Technologies
Scouter is building technology to support the future of skills assessment in hiring. Scouter has begun with a flexible monitoring solution, hosting candidates on the Scouter platform to support modeling tests and case studies, while ensuring no outside sources, like AI, are used.
👋 Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/onscouter/
🏔️ Company: 360ed
360ed is an education technology company building a global STEM learning platform that makes science engaging, interactive, and accessible to learners everywhere. Combining augmented reality, gamification, and curriculum-aligned learning, 360ed transforms complex STEM concepts into immersive experiences that inspire curiosity and deeper learning.
👋 Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/360ed/
🏔️ Company: LIORA Health
LIORA Health is a care advocacy platform pairing women navigating complex chronic conditions with credentialed care advocates who support them before, during, and after medical appointments, including joining visits virtually. LIORA combines human advocacy with AI-powered data and insights to close the gap between diagnosis and getting real care.
👋 Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/liorahealthadvocates/
🏔️ Company: Mentyy
Mentyy is a platform that enables colleges and universities to connect their students to local mental health providers when campus resources hit capacity. By providing students with an immediate, guided pathway to licensed professionals outside the campus system, Mentyy turns a broken, manual referral process into a fast, trackable pipeline, giving universities the ability to expand care without expanding headcount.
👋 Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mentycorp/
🏔️ Company: Qinvicta Inc.
Qinvicta is a deep-tech security company focused on building next-generation cryptographic engines across silicon, embedded software, and GPU/CUDA platforms. Starting with NIST-certified Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC), they develop high-performance silicon IP, embedded software, and cryptographic primitives designed for performance, efficiency, side-channel resilience, and crypto agility.
🏔️ Company: Miloverse, Inc.
Miloverse is AI powered Roblox for animation with a multimodal assistant (Milo) where kids can easily create quality animations by sketching & giving voice commands to Milo (a conversational AI buddy). They can build Social Worlds, create avatars, browse, share, make friends & collaborate, the same loop that made Roblox sticky but for animation with safety baked in the foundation from Day 1.
🏔️ Company: Drul
Drūl brings quantitative, pathogen-level saliva screening into the dental office, with results in minutes. Saliva carries biomarkers for gum disease, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and oral cancer, which makes every dental visit a screening opportunity that healthcare currently wastes. Drūl originated at Johns Hopkins and runs commercial pilots in dental practices today.
👋 Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/drūl/
🏔️ Company: Varsity Office Hours
Varsity Office Hours is a sports recruitment expert network that leveraging NIL funding and proprietary knowledge of college athletes to support high school students seeking college recruitment and scholarship oppertunties.
👋 Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/varsity-office-hours/
🏔️ Company: Kofimi Technology Inc.
Kofimi Technology, Inc. is a health technology technology company spun out of Dr. Valencia Koomson's lab at Tufts University. Kofimi leverages semiconductor technology and AI signal processing to deliver innovative vital sign monitoring devices for pediatric and adult patient care.
👋 Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/kofimi/about/
🏔️ Company: Biometra, Inc.
Biometra is a healthtech company building the operating system for healthcare AI. Born out of Harvard and MIT and built by clinicians and operators, Biometra addresses what comes next: hospitals are about to onboard an AI clinical workforce, and no institution has a system to govern it.
👋 Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/biometraai/about/
🏔️ Company: CargoB
CargoB is the first electric cargo bike-sharing service of its kind outside Europe, designed to simplify urban transit and eliminate the daily headaches of city driving. Founded around a kitchen table by neighbors and working parents Dorothy Fennell and Zack DeClerck, the company offers frictionless, on-demand access to a fleet of e-cargo bikes built to haul groceries, gear, and everything in between without relying on a car.
👋 Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cargob/posts/
