Spark Tank - Edition 11

Welcome guys to the 11th edition of Spark Tank. We've got a bunch of founders today that will pitch us their business. They're gonna share their screen and walk us through their pitch decks. There's about 4 to 5 VCs on the other side that will have questions or comments for them. So without further ado, let's introduce the founders. So Dev, if you can start with a quick introduction about yourself and your company.

Uh, thank you, Charles. This is Dev Taneja. I'm the founder of Unjob.ai. It is like Quick Commerce but for services. So just like you go on Uber and book a ride, here you can go and book for editors, designers, and any kind of white-collar services. And we assign the freelancer from the backend based on the ratings and reviews.

All right, Jeff, uh, quick intro about yourself.

Hi, my name is Jeffrey Fry. I'm in Austin, Texas. I'm the founder of Keep Safe Care. Um, it is a re-engineering of the private duty space in the United States primarily. So, uh, private duty is where you hire an agency to put a caregiver in your house to take care of your parents. Eric.

Hi, I'm Eric Burgess. I'm based in Southern California, the Los Angeles area. I run a company called Credtent. Credtent's focus is on being the, uh, trust infrastructure for the AI economy by bringing content creators together with AI companies for full cycle licensing, certification, and valuation.

Brent.

Hi, I'm Brent Williams and I'm the co-founder of Haptek Holdings, which is an audio-based haptic feedback, which basically we deliver vibrations based on audio sounds.

And—

Augie. Hi, this is Imelda Alejandrino. I'm co-founder and chief innovation officer at Augie. Auggie is a browser-based native environment where people connect, collaborate, learn, engage after a long meeting or event ends.

Braden? I'm Braden Young. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Slash Experts. We help connect your customers and prospects to close more deals, and I'm out in San Francisco.

Amir? Yes, it's Amir from Vitalveda. I'm the founder of Vitalveda from Australia, Brisbane. I'm presenting Vitalveda, a fitness gamified application.

Antonio?

I'm Antonio Forenza, founder and CEO of Aware. It's a San Francisco-based company. Aware is a wearable that tracks continuously your mental wellness and helps you with emotional self-regulation. Think of Oura for your mind.

There you go. Alex?

Hi, I'm Alex Golan, co-founder and CEO of Applied Bioplastics, where we make the world's first drop-in bioplastic on modern equipment that saves both producers and consumers money.

There you go. Let's go with, uh, the VCs now. So, uh, we have a couple of friends of the show here. Sunny, a quick, uh, introduction about yourself.

Hi there, I help startups grow through fundraising and GTM. I'm one of the co-founders of RazRocket and Spark Tank Show. Happy to be here.

Uh, Mike, quick intro about yourself.

Yeah, Mike Feinman, Texas Business Brokers M&A firm. I'm the founder and managing partner, restaurateur, and Just a serial entrepreneur, constantly trying to do, get stuff going.

There you go. There's also a Ford VC that is going to join us today. I just made room for him on the chat today. And so, Antonio, can you start with your presentation? Of course.

Okay.

Do you see this?

Yes.

Okay. Do you see that, Charles?

Yes.

Yeah, okay, good. Hi, I'm Antonio Forenza, founder and CEO of AWARE. So a couple of years ago, I was stressed out and overweight. So I said, enough is enough. I got myself an Apple Watch to track my calorie burn and exercise, and I lost 40 pounds in 12 months. So I asked myself, how can I lose 40 pounds of stress? I got fit, but I was still stressed. And so I, I asked this question to myself, and I realized that wearables today can track your cardiovascular health and sleep your metabolic health, but there's really nothing to track continuously your mental health, which is one of the three core pillars of longevity. So that's why we built AWARE. Now, like me, 3 out of 4 people experience sustained stress affecting our general health, but only 1 out of the 4 does something about it. In fact, mental health today is very reactive, episodic, and subjective. And so that's the solution we are bringing with AWARE. It's a wearable that tracks your mental wellness continuously in a proactive fashion, invites you to do mindfulness exercises when you need it. And it provides an objective measure of our mental well-being. So Aware is a discreet, stylish tattoo-like patch that sits behind your ear and measures continuously your brainwaves, your brain activity. And then through our proprietary machine learning algorithms, we can detect your emotional states in real time. And help you with the emotional self-regulation when you have a dysregulated nervous system. So specifically, the beta version of the app is right now sending a soothing vibration, a nudge, when it detects you are under stress and invites you with some mindfulness exercises. 3 years ago when I created this company, I saw EEG was prime for a consumer product. It's very old technology used in a medical field. It's ready for a consumer product. Of course, LLM is an incredible tool for combining biomarkers with context data to provide actionable and personalized tips, and the consumer market is ready for it, for a wearable like this. We have been growing it pretty rapidly, 35% month over month since we launched our beta, 660 users, multiple patents, also multiple paid pilots with the longevity organization, clinical and research applications. The market opportunity is massive, $140 billion, and we can reach $100 million within the next 4 years. This is the business model. It's a subscription-based model when you buy the wearable for a fixed price. These are our early adopters and some use cases that I— that we are tackling. It's a unique team of neuroscientists, hardware and software engineers, and we are going to raise a $3 million seed round to miniaturize the wearable, keep improving the software and, uh, 20% is going to allocate it to growth. At Aware, we are building the wearable, the platform to measure our brain continuously outside of the lab and in everyday life. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Antonio. Uh, you've probably studied the Whoop model, right? Have you built some of your business model based on that?

Yeah, absolutely. So our business model, it's Kind of in the middle between Whoop and Oura. So it's $300 for the device and $12.99 for the subscription.

Interesting. And where have you seen some potential failures in the Whoop model and how do you feel that you will avoid these? For example, the Whoop model, right? I'm a power user of Whoop, but I was quite dissatisfied with the fact that I had to wear the device 24/7. It was quite uncomfortable and you sweat, it smells bad. Then they try to hook you on a yearly basis, right? Like, how do you make sure that these things don't happen with what you're building?

So comfort is, first of all, it's very comfortable. You don't feel that you're wearing behind your ear. I'm wearing it right now, actually. And it's very light. It's much less invasive because it sits behind your ears, very discreet. So if you don't want to show, especially women with long hair, they like the fact that it's very discreet. And in terms of, what was the second question, Charles?

Well, it's just a user experience, them trying to hook you on something for a year. And also, just to top that off, right, there's tons of competition. There's like Apple Health. In your case, I think you're, you're distinguished from that, but why wouldn't Apple Health try to launch something? Then there's Eight Sleep, right? Like, why do we need something to track our brain, sort of?

Yeah, we are very complementary to any other wearables. Like I said, most of the wearables, they track your cardiovascular health and sleep, your metabolic health, but is really nothing for mental health. So we see more like complement to these, all these existing platforms. Like Oura is also becoming a platform, Apple, Google. So it's very, a very complementary biomarker to what already exists specifically for your mental wellness, right?

Hey, uh, James, I want to bring you on stage, uh, for a couple of seconds. Antonio, um, can you do a 30-second version of your pitch for James? He was out while you were doing it, and actually he could be very relevant for you.

Of course. Hi, James. I'm Tonio Forenza, founder and CEO of AWARE. It's a San Francisco-based startup. AWARE is a wearable that tracks continuously your mental wellness and nudges you to self-regulate your emotions in real time. So stress management. It's also a platform that we offer to clinical research applications for monitoring your brain outside of the lab and in everyday life.

James, quick intro about yourself and yeah, questions or comments if you have.

Sure. So my, my name is James Bates. I have a family office that invests in health tech and fintech. So this would, at a high level, fit that mandate. I do not understand this well enough to, to really, really make a pitch. Unfortunately, as I was transitioning, I missed the whole pitch, so I only saw a few minutes here.

Well, let's go to Sunny then, and James, you'll jump in on the next one. Sunny, any questions?

Yeah, I like the vision. I mean, but this feels kind of like a category that lives or dies on accuracy and habit retention. So, you know, if the signal quality is not strong enough, I suspect the user might stop trusting the product fast. So I guess my two questions are how accurate is it today and what makes like users essentially stick around?

Yeah, so it's very accurate. You know, we started with 10 years of academic research mapping EEG signals into emotional states. EEG is the gold standard for stress arousal, for example. We also have multiple publications where we publish all our accuracy results. And in terms of retention, so it's, I would say, unlike other wearables, it's really hard to— there's so many triggers in our life that trigger our stress. So it's much less so obvious to know when, what triggers your stress.

Does it record voice?

What's that?

Does it record voice? For example, if I just had a stressful call,, and the wave patterns also, like, coincide with that, will it be like, oh, stress?

Yeah. So, it will in the future. The beta version, it's only EEG. So, there's our basic biomarker, but there will be a microphone and a speaker as well. So, think of it as a seamless experience. It's going to be a screenless experience. You're going to interact with this AI coach, and it detects when you're about to go on stage or you're in fight or flight, reminds you to do a breathing exercise in the moment. So, it's a, It's gonna be much more interactive and much less so depending on the screen.

And maybe some speakers will like walk me through the breathing exercise. I like that, like that's my stuff. And that's why I told you from the start I was interested in this. Michael, any comments or questions for Antonio?

Yeah, I think on your website you talk about competitive, you know, kind of how it fits in the landscape. And I would probably include Muse in that. I'm a new user of Muse, so I'd probably have more to say later about that, but I think it talks about, you know, being able to do the same thing. Obviously your device is going to be more comfortable, but I would talk about that. I think the second thing is, is that, you know, you really started off strong with the experience and I would carry that through, Antonio. I think you did a great job, by the way, but I would carry that through in that what everybody's asking about is what's the experience. And so somehow You gotta give that to them, and I know you don't have a lot of time. And then the third thing that I'm— my questions are future applications. So I'm going to turn it to you with that question. What, you know, what more will this do where it becomes one device versus having to wear 18 devices?

Yes, good question. By the way, on the competitors, like, unfortunately I had to cut this slide, but there are other Neurotech devices out there, and you're right. It's just that our form factor is one of the innovation. It's the only one that you can really discreetly wear it all the time. So it's specifically for continuous tracking on emotions. We had to come up with a form factor that people feel compelled to wear every day. But so other neurotech devices are in the form of headbands, headphones, earbuds. They're good for specific use cases. So on, on the applications, so we are discovering by onboarding all these B2B partnerships, and on these slides is a bunch of them that we've been working with, is a way for us to discover many other applications for EEG. So for example, delirium, we have been collaborating with Stanford for the last 16 months. There is seizure detection, sleep apnea. So we see this Aware more like a platform. In fact, tomorrow we're gonna announce the research platform is a tool that allows people to analyze their own brainwave data. So it's really, we see as a platform that continuously tracks your brain health throughout your life. So we start with stress management and emotional dysregulation, but the long-term is really tracking your brain health throughout your life. There's a lot of applications like also traumatic brain injury and many others for which EEG has been proved to be a technology. They're not part of the platform yet, they will be.

Yeah, I would just say real quick, I would just say you gotta go there because everything's gonna be just a little patch in, 2 years. So that's not the competitive advantage that's going to give you longevity.

Yeah, I, I would, uh, go on and focus as well, right? Like, not stress, but I think the second one after would be focus. How, how cluttered is your attention and, and your mind? I think there's a lot of potential. Antonio, eager to continue speaking with you about this. Let's go to our second contender because I know some of us need to, uh, run today. So up next we have Braden, let's see if we have your deck here. Braden, the stage is yours.

Awesome.

Now I'm going right into a product demo. I'm Braden. I am the CEO and co-founder of Slash Experts. I'm a third-time co-founder. For some reason, I love starting companies, but my previous company, Sendoso, is where we had this idea. So this is the actual Sendoso site. What we noticed is that a lot of folks who weren't customers yet were prospects would basically end up on this page. They've already done research on G2, they've already read reviews, maybe they heard about Sendoso from a friend, they click here, and the goal, like any B2B site, is to take a demo. But maybe I wasn't ready yet, maybe I needed more information, so I'd go and have more conversations, and most of the sales cycle was happening before I would even go and talk to sales. So what we wanted to do was solve for that middle ground, solve for those back channels, as prospects were looking for information, they didn't have a lot of spots to go. So what we built was something called /experts. So over here on this page, it might be my fourth visit to this page, and rather than have that button say talk to sales or take a demo, it could say talk to a customer. So on this page, this is our tech— this is our /experts page. You come here and you have a ton of folks that are existing customers of Sendoso who are willing to have a conversation with a prospect, somebody looking at this tool. So I can see Alex here, he's open these times, Rob's open these times. I can filter it by location, by language, and I can book a call directly with somebody who's already using this tool, Sendoso, in this example. And that can be my very first step in the sales process. Now we quickly learned that maybe the very first step didn't make sense. Maybe it should be the second or third step. So this page can also be used post-demo as follow-up.. It can be used basically anywhere in the sales cycle to help accelerate the deal and help make the deal a bit larger. We've seen that when an expert is attached to a deal, the deal is usually about 20% bigger and the actual process moves almost 2x faster, which is pretty cool. Another use case for you, Warmly, another customer of ours. So you go to their main page and right underneath all this amazing social proof is a logo, talk to a Warmly customer. You can press that and here's everybody who's willing to have a conversation, who's already using this tool, have a conversation with that prospect to say, hey, you know, I love this Warmly product, you should buy it. It's a very simple way to kind of move the needle before you talk to sales. Now, something we always get asked is like, how does this work on the backend? So we plug directly into your CRM where we can pull experts, folks that we think would be a really good fit to have conversations with prospects, we can recommend them. You also decide what a payout might be to those experts. So if anyone does a call, it could be a— hey, it could be $100. In this use case, it could be cash, it could be an e-gift, it could be a physical send as a thank you to really start to automate those references so they're happy. References also control how often they take phone calls. So I'm sure, as all of us have done reference calls, you're sort of like, hey, I did the deal close, did it move along, did it not? Uh, so they control how often they take calls and they also control their calendar in terms of like maybe it's one call a month, maybe it's one call a quarter, and they get thanked automatically, which makes it a lot easier for folks to be experts for you at the end of the day. The last thing we're building is we learned early on that this works really well top of funnel, but it also works really well kind of post-demo, as I mentioned. So this is Carly, she's our agent. She is keeping track of my pipeline. Everything is taking place there. So I can see every single deal that I have that's operational, and I can see emails that she can send to those deals, basically trying to incentivize those opportunities that live in my pipeline to talk to an existing customer. Uh, we've had some good traction. I pulled that slide up. We're at about half a million in sales. Uh, we'll close this, this year out about a million bucks, uh, in ARR. We're excited about it. We have about 40 customers at the end of the day and are moving along. That's it for me.

I'm very bullish on that. Um, just that in your demo it says connect with, uh, us. What did it say, Ben? I'm just gonna reshare screen.

Connect to the next one.

Can't we say in the copy like, uh, talk with someone that used us or something like that?

Yeah, so that this is determined by the company. Like, Warmly has like talk with a customer.

Yeah, that's way better. That's just like one quick comment to help the brain understand like quicker.

I like it way more too.

Yeah, I, I love what you're building, dude. Like, uh, this is— I mean, I've been in sales and GTM for the past 10 years, and I'm, I'm pretty sure Sunny's boiling hot about this as well. Like, or clients— and I would argue, like, after the discovery call, they immediately want to speak to a client of ours, right? And if we could have a link to book with one of our clients, that's just genius. Um, it's intriguing, the pay them part, right? I understand why you would have that feature. Do you take a cut out of that payment?

Yes, we do. Yeah, so there's— we're paid in two ways. One, there's a fee on like on top of the payment, uh, or— and there's also a kind of a platform cost. So we, we could do outcome-based pricing as well, where if we're taking a fee, it just depends on one or the other. If it's a lower SaaS cost, then it'll be a higher fee per call. We've noticed that not everybody wants to pay their experts. Like sometimes there's a discount in contracts to be an expert for them, a reference, that's fine. I think for us it's like, we'll just have like a higher platform cost.

I think this is genius. It's a micro niche, so a bit concerned about the TAM, but the question is, do you feel most B2B companies would eventually have that in their process?

We feel that most B2B tech is a good place, like that's where the majority of our customers are from right now. The bigger kind of, uh, TAM for us is all these new AI techs. There's tons of them that don't really have any social proof yet but have raised a lot of money and are looking to really grow really fast. They might have like 1 or 2 or 10 like true believers in them that have used the tech. That's where a lot of our deals have been coming from lately, has been folks that are just trying to back into these big rounds of funding and they're trying to grow their pipeline. And there's tons of pipeline tools, but You still wanna talk to someone who's using it and sometimes you might not be able to find anyone online who has used these new tools. So we've seen those folks begin to come inbound, which is pretty cool.

I think it's genius. One, your Sandoso background, two, I mean, I'm a sales guy. I know what works and what doesn't. So we would use you today and that's actually an initiative me and Sunny were talking as of— It's being set up. Yeah, I'm super fucking bullish on this. Sunny, what do you think?

Oh no, I love it. I think we had our livestream earlier this week and I just couldn't get over how you just like see these simple human behaviors and you somehow turn them into these like GTM levers. And the best part about it is that you're not inventing new demand, you're just building around how people already buy. And I just, I think that's so insightful. And yeah, I mean, excited to lean in more after the call and see how we can perhaps use it in the field today.

And then—

Absolutely. Yeah.

Awesome. Invest in or find investors. Uh, James, any comments?

Oh, I think it's a phenomenal idea.

Thanks, James.

I mean, I'm—

can you hear me?

Yeah.

Hello?

Yeah, I think it's a phenomenal idea. I, I absolutely love the idea of connecting with experts. Um, I guess I am curious, how long are experts willing to do it, to be, to be that reference? I mean, doing it once or twice. I mean, today we go and go to our clients and convince them to be a reference. They do it once or twice, they're good. They do it 3 or 4 times, they're like, we're done with this, we're not, we're not doing this. But you see a burnout phase for them, or how do you, how are you seeing that so far?

We do, yeah. I mean, like, there's, there's, uh, typically if someone signs up to be an expert, they decide how often they take these calls. So if if they're booked from a, from an opportunity or from a prospect, it— like, most folks sign up for, hey, I'll take one call a month. That usually becomes once a quarter after a while, after they get booked. Uh, and then, like, if you want to totally drop off, like, we've seen that happen. But a lot of the time, these folks are tied to a contract of, like, hey, I'll be a reference for you. And, like, the minimum they can go is, like, once a quarter, which, which is fine because typically, a lot of the time, those pages will get looked at, like, hey, here's all the folks you can talk to. And like, they won't book a call, but we'll see the deal close. And so it's, it's enough social proof sometimes with folks. So like, oh, if I need to have a phone call, I can. Which at first we didn't take credit for that as a company, and then we started being like, we need to take credit for that to actually prove that these pages actually help close deals.

And, and how often do the experts like not show up? And so that, that could be a negative as As it's going back up through the funnel.

Yeah, there's a call right now. So you can do a video call, but like we actually like we default to Twilio dial-ins, which actually work far better because as folks are on the go, sometimes they don't want to do like Zoom calls. And so we made that switch early on and that has actually reduced like the no-shows are— it's less than 5% because a lot of the time, like the person they're connecting with is like somebody they want to meet. And so like it's like— and they could probably sell to you as well. And so like, that's been kind of a, but like, as we scale, like, that's something we need to get very good at multiple reminders, like a GLG or like an Alphasense does.

It's a good point.

Totally. Yeah.

Mike, any questions or comments?

Yeah, I'd be interested in kind of the cost benefit and not necessarily for the client that's using it, but for both, like, what is it? And I know it's hard to say, 'cause it really depends on the industry or the company, but you know, what does it cost for the client and then the expert, what, you know, I mean, for them to make the calls, there needs to be a pretty good benefit, right? And then the second question is, I think it's brilliant and I think it's probably a way of the future for sure. And I think it doesn't always have to be video calls. It could be also, can I text with this person?

Yeah.

Um, and, and, and depending upon the check size, it may be a texting campaign. Um, but what are your thoughts on all— on those two things?

Yeah, you nailed it. We don't see much success when you're— when your ARR is below— or when your ACV is lower than $10K. Like, like, like, $10K+ really seems to be the cutoff for us because of your— and then also, if you're a— if you're a PLG-type product, like, it should be offered way down the line. Like, if it's like a free-type product where you're just trying to get folks signed up, it doesn't work well there either. Uh, so we've— we've learned that, uh, in— in terms of of, uh, you know, like where we see this going. I think that eventually, like, could you not skip sales, but like, could, could someone sign up for the product and their first step is talking to a customer and they sign up and eventually they talk to like an AM? Like, that's what I envision towards the future, is like there doesn't need to be a demo type process. If you can get your— talk to an actual user, that's more beneficial sometimes than like an actual sales rep.

Hey, uh, just two more questions on my end. One, do you have competitors in this? And two, what if people try to bypass you? It's like book the call with the person straight up?

Yeah, like competition-wise, we see a lot of our budget come from G2 folks who are testing out G2, who love it, and like, we— they might try to use us. We also have— Influitive was a big one back in the day that folks used that got bought by a PE firm that's no longer around. Ditto, maybe. These like community-type platforms, uh, are very, very cool, uh, just they're not as specialized in trying to get deals to, to close. So, but I would definitely say we compete over the same dollars.

Thank you so much, Braden. Thank you. Our next contender, uh, we have Alex Bloom. What I like about Alex is that he has no pitch decks, so that's going to be pretty epic. Let's go, you have this thing.

Awesome. So hey everyone, I'm Alex, co-founder and CEO of Applied Bioplastics. Here's the thing about sustainability commitments in manufacturing: everyone has made them and no one has a viable path to keeping them. Every major brand—Unilever, P&G, IKEA, Target, pick your name—has committed to reducing their plastic footprint. They have 2025 and 2030 deadlines. Their investors are watching. Regulators in Europe are now requiring disclosure. And the problem is that every drop-in alternative to fossil-based plastic has the exact same catches. It requires manufacturers to retool. It requires them to single source. It has different shrink rates, different processing temperatures, different tooling specs. A single retooling project runs $12,000 to $18,000 months and usually costs about, you know, several million dollars in capital at minimum. So brands are stuck making commitments that they literally cannot fulfill. At Applied Bioplastics, we have solved that problem. We make Biofie, a bio-based fiber reinforcement that drops into the exact same injection molding equipment and compounding lines that manufacturers are already running today. Same machine, same process, same supply chain. A brand owner can put anywhere between 30 to 90% bio-based content into their product line without changing a single piece equipment. That's genuinely the first time this has been possible with a bio-based thermoplastic. The business model is also super straightforward. We sell Biofii upstream into the plastic supply chain to the compounders who blend resins and sell to manufacturers. They add Biofii to their existing blends and sell a higher-value differentiated product on the other end. Here's the part that matters most to you, the, the, the investor. We are, to our knowledge, the first bio-based thermoplastic in the world that actually improves margins for both the compounders and the injection molders in the supply chain, as well as takes home the highest margin in the industry. So not just ESG optics for the brand at the top, real margin improvement for every operator in the chain. That is what breaks the adoption cycle. No one changes materials to be green. This is a commodities industry. They change materials when the economics work. The economics work here. The global plastics market is roughly $600 billion. Our beachhead is the brand odor mandated transition that's already underway, being driven by both European regulation, investor pressure on consumer brands, and retail sustainability requirements. We're at commercial scale today with paying customers after 7 years, as of— oh gosh, today it's our 7th anniversary. Anyhow, we're at commercial scale. We've only raised $3 million, and we will be the first independent bioplastics company to become profitable ever within the next 12 months. The reasons why is that we, we started from sales and operations, not from the lab. I spent a decade in sales at Amazon, Oracle, and Cisco before building this. We're not here to publish research, we're here to sell product. We're raising now to scale our commercial production and expand into Europe, into Europe and the United States. By the way, 100% of our revenue, which grew 534% last year, was done in India. Now that sounds bad, but let me tell you, it is the most price sensitive market on Earth, and we took home the highest margins in the industry. So if you back companies that are solving real industrial problems with business models that don't depend on subsidies or charity or governments to work, I'd love to go deeper with you. Thank you for the time today.

I was trying to find myself in the backstage. I, I look just like Mike. And anyway, I'm there. Um, Alex, I like this. I think still you would have needed a deck presentation because humans, uh, they need like visual content. And especially if it's like bioplastics, some investors might be intimidated and their brain gets lost, right? I think you did a very good explainer. I started, uh, catching thread around like, uh, second 30 or something like that, and I got it, but I would also like to see visually, like, your process, right? Like, what makes you a bioplastic and why is there no competitors out there, if you can answer that question. Uh, and do you have like some kind of patent on the, the process itself?

Of course, yeah. So I chose not to use a deck today, although we've got like 40 available, uh, because most of the time people try to read my slides rather than listening to me, and this is the 3-minute pitch, so I I'd rather the attention be right here. Anyhow, while we're talking about that, yes, we do have patents, we do have trade secrets. And I'm sorry, there was another part to that question. Say again? Yeah, so yeah, right.

What makes you a bioplastic? Because from the videos that I watched was like bamboo and cellulose, right? I would have loved to hear more scientifically how it makes your bioplastic and why. The other guys haven't done that. Like, why haven't Shell done that yet?

Yeah. So a couple of things. One, it's really hard to show bioplastic, right? It looks like plastic. But I will say that, you know, our bio-based content is between 30% and 90% in basically every application. What we're using is dried agricultural waste that has not been processed in any way other than being ground and dried, right? So moisture content's really, really low. This is important for it to bond to whatever base plastic is in there. So essentially, we're taking ag waste, which is really inexpensive, and bonding it to any other type of plastic to make a functional composite that usually wins on both price and performance specs. So like tensile strength, bending, other things like that. At the core of the technology is a proprietary blend of, of chemicals, all of which are off the shelf, um, that essentially compound those two things together. Essentially what we're doing is we're exploiting, uh, uh, the, the natural bonding properties of cellulose. Cellulose likes to stick to itself. That's why wood is hard. That's why trees stand up. We disperse it properly within the plastic so that there's gaps, but all of the fibers touching itself. And what happens there is you're creating a reinforcing matrix. This is the secret to our strength. The ag waste is the, the secret to our pricing. And the reason no one else has come up with this is, well, there have been teams trying all over the world for, for decades, 3 decades in fact. Investors have burned over $4 billion on failed bioplastics companies. Factory after factory is shut down. Why? Because they did not focus on adoption. They focused on making the best plastic possible. Ours is not the best plastic possible. It removes 70 to 90%— or sorry, uh, 30 to 90% of the plastic from the plastic. That's the environmental story there. That's the carbon story there. But at the same time, it's not the absolute best, most sustainable possible plastic in the world. But those don't make money. This does.

And the definition of bioplastic is that it, uh, it emits less emissions, right? No, the definition of bioplastic is that it's bio-based.

We are USDA-certified bio-based, um, at at least 30 We're also FDA approved for food contact, so we make like toothbrushes and coffee cups too.

Okay, but at the end of the day, what does that mean? Like, being approved for the consumer, for like Earth, does it mean something?

It means that the US federal government has evaluated our materials and concluded that they do in fact contain a bio basis, right? They, they have looked at the fiber content we put in there and said this contains at least 30% biomaterial, right? And like I said, we do go up to 90%. It all depends on the application.

Okay, but is there like an end application to it? Does it save the planet Earth in some way? Yeah, yeah.

And I don't generally bring those into investor pitches because frankly, investors don't care, right? It's, you know, my carbon percentages are amazing, but, you know, look, our stuff generally, because we're using recycled plastic and ag waste, which is carbon negative, depending on how you do carbon accounting, which can be complicated. We can save up to 100% on the carbon. And as far as microplastics, the proportion is exact with the amount of fiber that goes in because it's removing plastic, therefore no microplastics. So reduction in microplastic goes from 30% to 90%. Okay, intriguing.

And do you have scientific proof that it has the same properties as plastic, is as flexible, as durable? Etc.

Not just that, we also have UL certifications, ASTM certifications, and paying customers who've been using our stuff for a couple years now and keep buying more every month.

Okay, so yes or no, you have like the, the certifications of scientific proof that has the same problem, right?

UL and ASTM are the governing bodies for those things, and that yes, they have certified our products.

Okay, Sunny, questions, comments?

Yeah, I'm curious to know, I mean, you talked about the price sensitivity part of it, but why has India worked so well as your wedge market? Uh, maybe I'll just rattle through a couple of them. And what is— and then like, what has to be true to repeat that in the US and Europe? And then finally, like, I guess, how defensible is your patent and trade secrets?

Certainly. So look, the reason we started in India is a proof of concept. Um, it's my personal belief, and I've been advocating for this for 8 years, that if you can't play in India, you you can't play. You don't belong in the bioplastics market. You're too expensive, right? Because the vast majority of people on this planet don't have a choice when it comes to their plastics. They have one thing available. Spent a lot of time in India and Bangladesh. There's, there's a single toothbrush that's available at the store sometimes, right? So you don't have a ton of choice. You can't choose a greener material. And to expect the companies that produce these items to choose a greener material at cost to them, it's insane. That's not how the world works. That's not how capitalism works. So If you can't play in India, you can't play. That's why we started there. We didn't want to scrabble around and, you know, with all the other bioplastics companies making packaging in centralized locations in factories that are going to fail because they represented supply chain risk. We said, let's go implement in the hardest place in the world. So to duplicate that success, we need resources. As I mentioned, we've only raised $3.2 million in 7 years. We're trying to raise $3 million right now. I have achieved that 534% growth in revenue year over year with one salesperson and, you know, me and my co-founder, of course. So we've proved that this works. We've proved that the unit economics are favorable. We proved that we can hire a sales rep and they're going to produce $30,000 to $60,000 in revenue every month. And if they're based in India, they're making $1,200 to $3,500 a month depending on experience. Right. So highly profitable. Need more sales reps. That's why we're raising. Oh, and defensibility. Um, just a quick anecdote. Um, a few years ago, a chemicals company that I will allow to remain unnamed, uh, saw me pitch. Uh, this was about 2022 at Greentown Labs in Houston. Uh, they attempted to replicate our technology. Uh, 2 years later, they called us and, and apologized, um, and, uh, and asked for a JV. We did not have a legal team nor staff in the country that they, they to propose the JV, and so we politely declined and said we'll come back to you. But, um, a research team from an extremely well-funded, uh, chemicals company spent several million dollars in 2 years trying to replicate what we do. Um, I can explain why we're so unique in it from a chemical basis, but, uh, but it is very hard to replicate.

Uh, Mike, any questions? We're gonna go for—

yeah, I think I, I, I, I agree with the what people have said up to this point, what Sunny said and what Charles has said, I think, you know, listen, I enjoy listening to you and I think you have a good presence in the way you present stuff. You need visuals. And I think your goal is to kind of like make plastic sexy again. And I think you could really have a good time with that. And I think, you know, you can show some cool slides of, you know, the plastics that are gathering throughout our globe. And so I would really, I would challenge you on that, but I think there's a way to create a deck where you can get them focused on you. And I don't think people are going to be focused on the deck, frankly, with you presenting. I think you're a very good presenter. My question is, what's the downside? Is it as strong? And I think Charles kind of started getting onto this question. I mean, what are the risks? What's the downside of this material? So there's a couple of things.

The first one is it's not a perfect plastic. As I mentioned earlier, there's going to be VCs out there, they're going going to say, hey, there's still plastic in this plastic, I'm not going to invest in you because you're, you're part of the, the group that's destroying the world. And that, you know, my counterargument is we're removing a very high percentage of the plastic. And oh, by the way, every other attempt has failed. This one's succeeding, right? Um, I'm sorry, you asked a second question. What was that? Oh, the, the strength, the downsides, right? So, um, that, that's one downside. Another is, um, heck, I mean The processing temperature is the same, it drops into the same equipment, but if you don't follow the processing guide, your plastic won't come out right, right? So we've had this happen over a dozen times in the last 4 years of selling our product where we will send it to the customer, we'll send a sales engineer, we'll have them implement, and then somebody who wasn't there that day turns up the temperature on their, on their machine, right? And they'll burn our plastic, right? So you, you have to follow the guide. It's very simple. You dial up this temperature, you dial up this barrel speed, and you're good as long as you followed the guide and did those.

Is that different than any other plastic processing? Okay, well then that's really not a risk. Um, that's really not a risk then.

I think that's, um, you know, one of the things that's the downside for us is a, is a small company that doesn't own any physical assets. It's hard to find, uh, investors or debt, right? They want to see a factory, right? But the thing is, those factories, like I said, I mean, you can read several articles I've posted on this, just Google me, but The factories are what kill bioplastics companies, right? Trying to scale out of a single pilot facility where the unit economics already don't work, right? That's a huge downside, and you're reliant on governments to help you out, and most of the time they get tired of helping you out for over a decade. And like I said, nearly every bioplastics company has gone bankrupt in the last 30 years.

Got it. James, any questions or comments for Alex? Not for now. Uh, let's go to our next contender then. So Alex, thanks for pitching today. Dev, we're gonna have you on stage. Try to keep it, uh, under 3 minutes, and the stage is yours.

Hi team, so this is Dave Taneja and I'm the founder of Unjob.ai. As you can see, we have built a platform to book freelancers in one click. So what is happening in the world right now is that there are too many freelancers, there are too many marketplaces like Fiverr, Upwork, and everything. But when a client wants work, they have to filter out with hundreds of portfolios and they have, they have to spend weeks and months on that. So what we have done is we have standardized the entire market. We have found out over 200K vetted freelancers with us who are working on predefined deliverables. That means just like you book an Uber or an Ola, you can now book, uh, or book a freelancer on Anjob or buy a service, and the best freelancer available is assigned automatically from the backend based on his ratings and reviews by the old clients. Uh, this is our team. Uh, I have run a business for 4 years, currently in the process of acquisition, and my co-founder Tushar has spent 8 years in tech, worked at Amazon, you know, Adobe, Rakuten, and more. Uh, these are a bunch of advisors that we have. The problem is very simple. The market is very trust deficit. In India only, we have more than 80 million plus businesses, small businesses who are registered, who entirely depend on freelancers. The entire creator economy, which is supposed to go as high as $500 billion by 2027, is entirely dependent on freelancers, and we do not have an efficient way to hire and book them or judge them. And again, the price-quality mismatch is there. There are a lot of scams in the industry, and we have decided to solve all of that throughout, through our platform. This is how the UI looks like. You choose a service, you choose a subcategory, then you choose that kind of service that you want, and you just buy. And the best available professional is automatically assigned instantly, and the work starts immediately. The work— we are the only platform in the world right now that is guaranteeing you the quality of the work also. So you can see the kind of work that you can expect at this service. If the price doesn't match, we either give you the full or if the quality doesn't match, we either give you the full or partial refund depending on the case-to-case scenario. This is a pro plan that we are planning to achieve after raising this fund that any company can just type a prompt in the future with that flow plan that I need to build a marketing team in, let's say for Lenskart in Spain. So our AI will filter out the best freelancers throughout the world who have the best ratings and align them in an Anitin-like flow. So like you can have a global remote team in minutes ready to work for your projects. This is how the freelancer dashboard look like. They can scroll infinite content or other projects. So it's like a productive scrolling. They have over, like we have over 100K+ projects on the platform. With over— they can build their portfolios, they can apply to mandates, they can also list their services. The market size is actually way over this, uh, this has to be corrected, but we plan to acquire at least $3 billion in the next, uh, 4 years. This is a USP. Not just that, we assign the freelancers the work, we also earn on the execution of the project. So let's say you— we assign a project by a client to a freelancer who has to make AI content. So we are not just earning a commission on the project, we are— the freelancer is also working on that project through us on our platform. So we have all the APIs of Cling, Google, VO3, all of these will be connected to the platform. So whenever they work, they also get B2B rates. I will give you an example ahead for this. This is the competition landscape. They can build a portfolio, they can find clients, and they can also execute the work all in a single platform. That means the entire ecosystem in a single platform. We work on 3 different models for payments. One is the commission that we take on every booking. Second is a subscription fee that we charge from the freelancers and from the hiring, hiring party. For the freelancers, if you want to get automatic bookings, then you need to have a subscription. If you do not want automatic bookings, the platform is entirely free to use. Then the API margins that we generally have, if you want to execute the project on the platform itself, for example, the platform— for example, let's say the example of ChatGPT. If a freelancer normally has a subscription of $20, we get the price at $1 for the same amount of tokens, and we give the freelancer at $5. So again, the freelancer saves 75%, we still save 80% on that. And this is the GTM. I'm a creator and we know a lot of other creators are dependent on freelancers because they have to post like 30 times a month. And that is our primary target right now. And all these portfolios work as growth loops because all these freelancers share to their clients, uh, their portfolios that they make. So here's the roadmap that we have. We launched in December. Uh, we just launched our AI recruiter beta version and we have crossed around, around 200K users on the platform, very close to 200K. And we have done around $12,000 in revenue so far. This is, we didn't have any budget for marketing, I'll be honest, because we spent everything in the development of the product. So we focus on organic marketing. I started in February. In the last 3 months, we have gained a total following of over 6 lakh on Instagram. And I teach people freelancing and how to get clients and stuff. And we are getting like 40 million plus monthly views on a daily, on a monthly basis. And these are some of the best brands that have hired from us or content creators who have trusted our platform or used them. This is the early traction. We are like getting 20x user growth every 90 days. And it's just been a few months since we started and I think it's going good. For this round, we are raising— we have previously raised around $55,000 last year. Uh, in the next 2 months, uh, we have a runway of 2 months, so we're raising a $250,000 round next, and we have got a commitment for $50,000, and we're looking for a strategic angel or a seed VC who can invest the rest $200,000. These are our 18-month projections. And we want to become net EBITDA positive by the end of these 18 months after we raise funds. Our primary use of raising this— using this money is that we want to acquire new customers because since our commissions and our margins are so small, uh, we will actually thrive once we get repeat orders. Yeah, that is all from my side.

Dev, thank you. I like your background, like your presentation. Just to give you a bit of context on my side, I've hired over 2,000 freelancers on platforms like Upwork in the last couple of decades with my various portfolio companies. So quite well positioned to talk about my experience and obviously Upwork stock, which is $9 and took like a 10x fall. That's— and also they're terrible company. I've used them for quite some time and experience has always been bad, you know. But they were always the main market player, so that could potentially give you a place there. But how will you make sure not to reproduce Upwork's mistakes? And also, I felt you could have talked more about the AI part, right? I'm not so bullish on on humans as workers. I'm way— I'm bullish on freelancers, but I'm way more bullish about AI agents and/or freelancers using AI agents. So tell me, one, how to not reproduce the Upwork mistake, and two, how will you identify yourself and create a market for yourself there?

Upwork has made this biggest mistake that they promise that whenever you onboard, there expectation that whenever you make an account on Upwork, you will get clients. But on our platform, we have said that we will simply recommend the best freelancer. Our main focus is to give the best freelancer and the best quality to the client. We are not here to serve everyone. Those who will work good, those who will follow the policies of the platform, be active on the platform, build their portfolios, scroll their, uh, keep their response time as short as possible, they will get good reviews., and they'll be recommended more. One. Second, AI is going to take over multiple jobs. As you know, the next 5 years, the landscape is going to totally change. And that is why we are building this, because as AI agents come into place, more people will lose their jobs. More people are slowly bending towards freelancing. And after COVID, we have seen that a lot of the new generation want to work remotely. So, uh, that is one of our game. Use AI. We want you to use AI. But use it on our platform or with our platform because we are not going with the AI wave. We are above the AI wave. It doesn't matter what kind of service wins. After 5 years, you might be only making like— you, you still need a human to guide the AI, right? Whatever AI tool will come or whatever AI service will win, you still need a human that will execute it.

So I still think you're not answering that clearly, right? So My problems as a business owner that hired a bunch of people on Upwork was that they would always ban my profile for some really silly reason. They didn't have their business model together, right? I would have happily paid some amount on a monthly basis and they had all these stupid rules, right? I think that that was a main issue and a main pain point, probably sure it still is. I'm probably sure they haven't evolved much in all that time, right? For the AI question, you know, maybe a market you could carve for yourself would be a Fiverr-ish market in which you could take what a human does and automate it with AI and sell these services and give a percentage to the freelancer, right? Sell some automatic service. So something that I click on as a business owner, I buy it, $10, and as soon as I buy it, the agent executes it for me. I think that, that would be sexy as a business model.

Uh, but, uh, you have to understand, Charles, that AI is definitely coming over and AI, all the VCs are investing into AI tools that actually help you increase your productivity, which is good, and reduce your cost. But the human that is getting displaced is a far bigger problem than any AI is solving right now.

Yeah, but you're not the prime minister, you're a business owner. That's not for you a problem to solve. You need to make money first, right? So, and by— like I said, if you sell an agent from someone's profile, that creator, that freelancer would get a cut off this. I think that's pretty genius, uh, if you understood the idea, right?

Glad to revisit it. I'd love to explore it.

On it. Sunny, any questions or comments for Dev? Is—

I was gonna say, you've got 200,000 users but then about $12K revenue. I guess what's blocking that gap from closing?

So, uh, essentially we launched like 5 months back and we were not ready to accept payments much. And in India, the order value is very small. It's like $2 on average, $2 to $3 on average. So it took a lot of time and we also changed the business model a lot of times. So technically we are free till March end. So majority of the revenue is from March end to, uh, till now June.

And then one last question is what, you know what, I know, uh, you mentioned that you have a big following as well on social media, which I think is awesome, right? You to have distribution before you even have your product, but what happens to your growth loop if you ever stop, you know, creating content yourself?

So my growth is not dependent on content, I will say, because all of this is almost word of mouth. I haven't told anyone yet that I'm building Unjob through my socials. So this is organically. I do promos once or twice a month, but that is all. I don't tell people that I'm the founder of Unjob. Officially, uh, because that creates this mindset that I'm trying to sell and people then stop engaging on the platform, on the content. But I want to gather that audience, freelance audience, and slowly, slowly redirect them to the platform, build trust. Uh, until then I will raise funds and start acquiring users. My main goal is to get content creators, that is a client who can hire 30 times a month, so that those will give me a repeat, uh, lot of repeat purchases, and that will drive my EBITDA.

Thank you. Mike, questions, comments for Dev? You are muted. Muted, Mike.

Sorry, how different are the, uh, freelancers' fees? So that's the first question, and if they're very different, then you may want to have dollar signs by them. And then do you provide reviews so that they can be reviewed based on the service they provide? And I think that Charles talked about the competition, but those are my two questions.

So for the freelancer fee, that means the fee that the freelancer has to pay to be on the platform?

No, what they charge for the commission. Okay, not the commission, not the commission, but what they actually charge.

So it varies from freelancer to freelancer. We have two plans. On the free plan, we set the pricing. We have fixed standard services that starting from $2, it can go as high as, uh, $200 depending upon the kind of service that you want. And we assign the freelancer from the backend. They select the bucket that they want to offer or the service that they want to offer. Okay. The second is if they want to offer a custom service, they can take the pro plan and then they can upload any kind of service and with any kind of pricing that they want. For example, let's say I'm a content creator and I am also a freelancer, and if I want to sell a service for $5,000, I can create it on Unjow Pro plan, I can send it, I can add it on my LinkedIn bio, or I can share it with my audience and they can directly book me from there.

When will you deploy in the US, Dev?

We will just be launching in US in a week. Currently we are just in India. We were just settling it up. This app was launched a week prior. Till back then we were working on MVP. Now that we are fully ready, so now we are focusing on marketing.

And why are you the right guy to build this as a content creator, like a CEO of a company, right? You're against like people with huge backgrounds in building platforms. And marketplaces for freelancers? Why are you the right guy to build this?

Because I have been doing freelancing myself since 8 years, and I have seen clients who haven't given me payments of $70,000-$80,000, and the amount is so small that we do not go legal for just a small amount. So I have faced this problem myself. I understand the pain in the market. There is a huge trust deficit, uh, in India and outside India when working with international clients. Uh, no one, I think, better than me can understand this. And we have also got this community of like 400K people on my personal Insta that I've been following. These are all freelancers who are learning from me or have been in the game for long. Plus, I have— before that, I have run a startup for 4 years. I, at that startup, I never hired a full-time employee. We scaled into 50,000 customers. It all ran into freelancers. I found it very difficult to hire and filter out those people. I understand both the sides and now I think I'm the right person to mediate and become a marketplace.

Love that. James, any questions, comments for Dev?

Yeah, I guess I'm struggling to know why Upwork doesn't approach it the same way. So from a competition standpoint, obviously somebody like an Upwork is, is direct. Um, and the way you're addressing the, the AI marketplace is, is good, but why wouldn't Upwork just mimic it if you start to be successful? I guess I'm trying to understand. Yeah.

So there are two answers to that. The first is that the bigger the company, the more difficult it is for them to, you know, be flexible and adapt. That is one. So we still have a big market in India and the Southeast Asia which we can capture, okay? Because majority of the US clients or UK clients hire from India or the Southeast Asia, and there is no mediator here, which is a gap. The second part is that most people go to Upwork to just either build their portfolios or to find clients. But on our platform, they are here scrolling content. There are hundreds of ideas. They are seeing what kind of other people are building in the industry. They are learning from it. They are inspiring from it. Then they are building their own portfolios. Depending on how much the person or freelancer is ranked with how much reels, uh, how much of their content is getting liked, saved, and shared. Similarly, the algorithm is recommending them to the clients. So on the— they're also here not just for finding clients, but also to learn.

Isn't that what Dribbble already does? Like, why try to compete with these guys and create like a social media for freelancers?

So Dribbble is primarily for design, right? Uh, we have everything from design, editing, writing, uh, your AI content, tech, everything. So it's, it's going to be your professional profile in the future. This is the alternate way of work. Unjob means alternative to jobs. So it's way bigger than a marketplace at the moment.

Well, Dev, thanks for, uh, presenting today. Um, love the company name, by the way. Unjob is a great one. AI. Uh, so let's go to the next contender. Uh, up next, let's see, we would have Ogi. Uh, Ogi, I'm bringing you on stage here. Uh, do we have your screen shared? Yeah, yes, yes, yes. All right, you have the stage. Fantastic.

Before I continue, I want to share a riddle with you that'll help you with your mindset. So how many creative directors does it take to change a light bulb? Does it have to be a light bulb? And that's the mindset I want you to look to have as I'm going through this. So consider every event, every community, every learning experience is a potential destination. And what Augie does is that we take one-time interactions into destinations that people can come back to. So what's happening today? As you can see, we are in these tiles of video conference. Meetings end, but value shouldn't. Organizations have invested billions in events, learning programs, communities, team collaboration. But as you can see, when you're in these type of environment, people usually don't have their screen on, they're distracted, they're multitasking. So some of the key insights that I want to share with you is communication happens during the meeting and usually engagement happens over time. And that's how relationships are built. It's not, not on your first date. If you will, and organizations need more communication and a continuous one at that. So here's our solution. We've created a persistent digital destination. Events end, engagement doesn't. So what it is, it's a browser-native instant adoption. There are no downloads, no plugins, and it could work on any device. As a matter of fact, I just had a meeting today off of my mobile phone. While I was at the library. Live human presence. What you're seeing there in the bottom left screen are what we're calling video pods. Instead of you being stuck in the square, you can actually move around and interact with the environment that you're in. It's AI-powered as well, as far as building the space, curating interactions, and real-time insights. That really drive better outcomes. And we're also talking about spatial intelligence. What you're seeing there on the screen is actually a game show that we had, a global game show. Our contestants were in South Africa, England, as well as in the Americas and Asia. So you can navigate, meet, and collaborate naturally in a 3D space. So why now? As you can, as you can see what's happening to our environment politically and economically, AI and hybrid work and ROI are now converging. These are the three forces that's making organizations no longer want one-time interactions. They want an engagement that continues. So AI is actually making the digital destination smarter in every interaction. And as you can see, we have here the, um, the cost around digital engagement, but I'll get into that in a second. So traction— what tractions have we had? Um, we've had, uh, Accenture was the one actually that asked us to build this. They wanted to do a global event and that lasted about 2 weeks. And then Chevrolet came on board. They have an HBCU marketing summer internship program and that lasted 3 months and where the students and the mentors came in and met in Auggie. And recently was Ricoh. They wanted to have a sales tool and the sales tools allowed their customers and their sales team to go into this permanent space where they can actually meet as opposed to traveling as well. So the enterprise validation has netted us $650,000 before the SaaS. And so we're actually creating a new category and what we're calling it is the persistent digital destination. So the entire market is about $100 billion. The immediate opportunity right now is anywhere from $10 to $15 billion. But where does Augie sit? Augie can capture 0.25% of its share of $100 million in this space, what they call immersive digital reality. And so where are the revenue streams? Well, we've already shown you about the enterprise build, um, out of 3 netted about $650,000. And now where the funding is going to go to is is the self-service SaaS. And the idea with this is that you can select an environment like a menu, enable features as you need it, and deploy instantly without any setup required. And third revenue stream is upsells and expansion. Every time we talk about Auggie, they always ask, "Can it do this? Can it do that?" And just like a website, if you think about it, we can build it. So where are we today in our investment opportunity? So we've had our validation and we took a pause while AI took front stage, and now we're capitalizing on AI creating more revenue for us. So for this year, we are looking for a founder's run of a round of a half a million. You're thinking, that's so small, but we already have these built. Think about real estate. Once you build the building, you'll have tenants come in and out. And it could be as simple as changing the sign on the door. And that's exactly what we've done to one of the spaces we currently have. In 2027, when we want to go full board with all of the inventory that we have, that's our seed round. And hopefully in 2028, we'll have our— we'll be the category leader. So here's a thought. Every company has a website today. Every company will have a digital destination tomorrow. So the idea is taking every website and creating an Auggie as a go-to place in the future where people would return over time. Thank you.

Thank you, Imelda. I like you, I think you're creative and everything, just that I think that VR— I wouldn't call it a fad, but definitely like after after 2021, uh, you're gonna see decline in the market, right? I think, uh, businesses weren't sure about like if this COVID thing was gonna last, and then they tried a bunch of things left and right. Um, I had a bunch of clients in that space in VR. Most of them didn't last, you know. Uh, we had— yeah, I had a guy that was about to book on their show like 2 weeks ago that had like a an avatar thing that you move and you see your employees and everything. I work with a company called Spot that did that, and I think it was like short-term fad. I, I used it a little bit on my end. I, I think it was fun to see like my employees work in real time, but it didn't reproduce like the real experience. Me, I'm a Nate, uh, screen slash computer kid anyway. All of the work that I do is behind a screen.. And once a quarter I'll meet with my team, right? Like physically organized mastermind to just work together. So my brain also took me to, oh, is it a tech problem or is it a human behavior fundamental problem? And yes, tech can influence human behavior, but if your employees are, uh, you know, disconnected or uninterested, distracted during Zoom calls, then maybe the problem is them actually, not really the, the technology. And then all the tech companies brought back their employees to the office itself. So as an investor, I'm just not bullish on that.

Um, any comments on what I— oh yeah, yeah, definitely. Um, hybrid is now part of the ecosystem, right? And yes, people are going back into the office, but it's not limited to people just working. We're talking about events, training across globally without having to fly them in. As a matter of fact, we have Accenture on deck who's going to do the SaaS model. We also have PG&E who've been my client in my marketing firm for at least 10 years, and now they're looking for a solution for their supply diversity, bringing in their vendors from different parts of California and actually nationally as well. So now we're looking more at an educational training when you don't want to fly in everybody globally as well. And if you're looking at events, right, as a matter of fact, I am actually talking to Salesforce for their Dreamforce for next year. So what is preventing people coming from Dreamforce? As you know, San Francisco gets totally run by, by Salesforce, but there are people that just can't make it. They would love to. So this is not to end Zoom. Zoom will always be there, but then look at us, we're going to be talking for the next 2 hours and the next thing you know, we're done. The idea here is that If you had a permanent virtual space where, let's say, your investors can go, said, you know, I really need to see what he had before. What we did for Rico is that we actually had things that you can download. You can download a PDF, you could watch a video, you could share your screen, right? You could do live presentation. You can take, uh, like I said, if you have whatever you can imagine, it could be done.

So any questions or comments for Imelda?

Yeah, I guess what's most impressive is that you're not really selling a feature, right? You're, you're trying to create a whole new category, this like persistent digital destination, and you've got real enterprise logos backing the idea. So that, I think that's super bold and well positioned. What made you pause the business while AI took front stage? I was just a bit curious on that note.

Well, it took some time for companies to bounce back, and the enterprise that I was offering, um, it could cost anywhere from $150,000 to $250,000 to build it, and it would take about 6 months. So that wasn't flying at all, especially, you know, uh, post-pandemic. So the idea came is how can we leverage AI to a point where It's actually a fraction of that. And not only is a fraction of that, I mean, to keep like the biggest build that we have, to keep it running 24/7 is anywhere from $1,200 a month. Think about rent, right? Once you buy the property and you own the property, what are you going to pay for, right? Property tax, but then your renters are going to keep paying. And so that's the idea of a permanent digital destination.

Yeah, I know. I love that every customer keeps asking, can it do this? So that pull is the clearest sign, right, that you've struck a real nerve in the market. Why only $500K for the founders round if demand is this strong?

Oh, really? We're shooting for $2 million, but the $500,000 will get us to finish our SaaS model, right? We work with several companies like TurboSquid. You actually pick the 3D space, we take it, we shake it up. It's already been built. We brand it, we add the solution to that. So the thing is, is everything else is out there. We're taking what's available to and shaking it up and forming it into auge, right? Now it's just a matter of synthesizing all of that that's out there.

James, any questions or feedback? Yeah, I'm, I'm curious.

So I think I've used your platform right around the pandemic, and my, my feeling at the time was that it didn't give give that immersive experience that's— that eventually someday I hope it'll give. And so I'm curious, as you're relaunching it, are you hearing— what type of feedback are you hearing that people actually are looking for this type of space? I understand the concept of a nice virtual reality destination conceptually someday, great. I've just never seen it actually work, um, not from Meta, not from anybody, quite frankly. And, and so I'm just, I'm curious about why people would jump now. It's a lot cheaper to maintain, to open up, all that I get, right?

So, well, it takes a second, um, I actually, uh, Microsoft is one of my clients before as a marketing agency, and they do have something like this. And one of the other women business owners that I know that do about 100 events for them a month, she said, Imelda, we love the business, but their platform is so bad. It's not as intuitive. And what we're doing now is that it's as intuitive as it is your mouse and your arrow keys. And there's no download. Once you get invitation, you're in, right? And so there's not a lot of upfront rigmarole, uh, and why we're launching it now, because if you look at the generation that's coming up, and they're going to be my managers soon, right? When they look at this, they're like, oh my gosh, this is old hat. It's like video game to them. They actually make a comparison that feels like a video game. And so the whole idea here is that even though we say immersive, this is a digital destination. This is not like those VR, what I call a VCR on your head, right? And you're immersed in it. This is actually a, uh, web-based communication tool.

So I understand this follow up to Charles, if that's all right. Um, so, so I, I understand that point that, that it's going to be really easy to use. I, I guess what I'm challenging is that visitors will go, and that's, that's, that's my question.

I'm just intrigued to see where, uh, Meta glasses are going. I think that's exciting. Um, that the only thing obviously is they haven't launch like any VR stuff yet, but the video feed call is obviously coming on these. I think that can be cool, way more than an Oculus or an Apple headset that you have to sit down, you know, and then you're competing with video games in that niche or porn. So it's like, you know, it's, it's hard to, to fathom. And I know that you're building something around along these lines, but yeah, just, um, uh, Mike, what do you think? Uh, questions, comments, so that we can, uh, pass the other founders as well today?

I think there's really two things at play here. I think one is the technology. I wear contacts and I believe in— sorry, my wife's feeding the dog, so you're gonna hear the dogs bark. They're gonna be famous on Shark Tank. Um, I, you know, I think that the, the, the technology is going to change so quickly that everybody's looking at glasses. It's going be contacts, and you're going to be able to, you know, tune right into your contacts and be able to see what you want to see and add gestures to move it around. I'm a bit of a futurist, but I think that's maybe 7 years from now, maybe 5, because it moves so quick, right? 10, 100, 1,000. But I think the other thing is, is that, you know, COVID did prove that you didn't have to all be in the same place. And I spent, you know, a bunch of years as head of training for Taco Cobell when it was an $8 billion company. So I understand how important immersiveness is and also post an event to keep it and drive it in over time, or else everything has a shelf life. So I really see the value in that. But my concern is that people are actually coming back together again now post-COVID. And I'm not sure— I think there's a need for it. But I'm not sure, you know, I think people want experience and they want the social interaction post-COVID as well. So I think that's a bit of a challenge. I think it's supportive and I understand what James is saying, but I think at the end of the day that it's definitely, there's a need there and it's not going to go away. I just don't, I'm not sure it's going to explode. I think it's, there's going to be a lot of against the grain because it's going to be going in the other direction.

If I could just follow up with that, uh, what's interesting is that it's not necessarily, uh, I'm not unseating Zoom, I'm not unseating at all of the virtual, uh, what I'm creating here is a place where people can go back to and have conversations and move around freely, right? And as follow-up, this could be a lot more effective. What I'm working with, uh, with PG&E is that they have a monthly meeting and they try to cram everything in half an hour. And usually it's like, let's follow up, let's follow up. But also, as a woman-owned business, certified woman-owned business, you go to a networking event, you have all of these business cards in your hand, but there's no way to follow up with them. And there's no cost-effective way of following up with them. This is a place where the organization could say, look, we're gonna do a follow-up. As a matter of fact, we're gonna do a follow-up for the WeBank conference in Utah next week, and we already have people signing up. So it's, again, you know, does it have to be a light bulb, right?

Imelda, yeah, I'd love all these big logos that you've signed as well. It's very impressive. Awesome. Let's go to our next founder here. We have Eric, uh, for another time on the show. Uh, Eric, the stage is yours. Always love seeing your, your deck and your company here. 3 minutes.

Great, thank you, Charles. I'll do my best at the brevity component. Hi guys, I'm Eric Burgess. Uh, I am the co-founder of Credtent, and Credtent is building— built the trust infrastructure for the AI economy. Essentially, we're a neutral license licensing platform that is connecting AI companies with the credible content that they need from an ethical perspective, legally, uh, to reduce their risk, and of course profitably for both sides of the, of the situation. So while, you know, the first thing that most of the big AI companies did, the frontier models did, was what I call move fast, steal things, uh, it's, uh, it's all coming kind of coming home to roost now, uh, with the $1.5 billion penalty that happened last year with Anthropic paying out on the class action lawsuit Now people are realizing it is in a situation now it's licensure litigation, and there's over 100 suits that are out there right now from various companies, uh, and it's getting not just— it's getting beyond copyright, it's now into trademark, which is much more settled law. And so what we've built is a platform to be able to get the AI companies back on track licensing content effectively and actually improving the efficacy of their models by actually giving them highly credible content. Uh, our challenge here has been reported on now by Forbes. I just got interviewed for the Wall Street Journal as well as, um, Puck, and I'm being interviewed on the Variety podcast coming up soon. This is coming to a head in a big way, especially as these companies start to IPO and they're responsible as publicly traded companies. Now, we built this specifically, myself and my co-founder Dr. Galen Buckwalter, who was the founding scientist at eHarmony, because We have a long experience, not just in quantifying what's challenging to quantify, but also in content specifically. I'm a writer. Dr. Buckwalter is the lead singer of a punk band. We're also creative technologists that have been building enterprise platforms for a long time. And for the last 10 years, we've been a research-as-a-service company focusing on bringing people like Nike— help them with their resilience training. We've helped Red Bull with their marketing. We've helped Logitech with their HR, and we've worked with a lot of companies to bring basically human understanding to products and understand the value of content. We actually built the Earned Media Value Index that the marketing industry uses to judge the cash value of social media actions and endorsements. And of course, we apply that same kind of an idea for, for what we're doing here. And, you know, while Dr. Buckwalter brings the research component, I also bring the Hollywood connections. I worked at Disney for— as a writer-producer for 7 years before I started building enterprise software. Software. And so what we really decided we needed is we need a neutral place for this. We need to be Switzerland, uh, for licensing. And so what we've done is come in and helped people understand how to talk about this. Even we set up a badge system that is commercially available for free, but people come to us to certify their work. PBS asked us to build that. We built it also out for the Writers Guild of America, which has just gone out of beta into public space. Uh, it's advocated for by the Academy Award-winning screenwriter Billy Ray, who won for Captain Phillips. He got us into the Writers Guild, and now we're working with the Creative Coalition on AI, which is essentially all of the Hollywood guilds coming together. Our badge system— our goal is to get this at the end of every film so people understand, was the, was the film that they just saw, is it human composed, is it AI-assisted, or is it AI composed? And our badge system now is working in Hollywood. It's getting into the publishing industry now. We've also just done a pitch to be able to bring our badge system to the Barnes Noble chain as well as independent stores. We're working with the American Booksellers Association to bring it there, and now we've just started talking to Sony Music as well as APM Music to bring it into the music industry. So people have this validation of saying whether or not their work is indeed human composed. And if you look at the research 75 to 80% of people, uh, consumers say they want to understand if there's any AI in the movies that they watch, the books that they read, the music that they listen to. But once you get past that, then there's an opportunity there for people to actually embrace AI because they don't feel like they're being deceived. And so we've created our independent creative registry. It gives creators an opportunity to get consent and compensation. They can opt out if they choose. We have a universal opt-out list. We send to about 25 different AI companies. We've been doing that since late 2024, and that's built up at the beginnings of relationships which are now turning into licensing relationships. And we also do this human-led certification, which involves not just a technology but also our research on how to ask for provenance information through a survey process. And it's something that we are advancing as a patent because we don't believe that there's any reasonable way in which there's an opportunity for, um, basically found— basically people to just use AI technology to detect AI technology. You need people with context. And so everything we build has what I like to call an expert in the loop, not a human in the loop, because not all humans are the same. So that's part of our certification process now in place for screenplays. We have our own versions of AI detection models. We work with all the best models out there— Pangram Labs, Originality AI. We bring them all together and they give us free access to their tools because we help them benchmark. So we're really about bringing a lot of different companies together to be able to make sure that the AI economy does not suffer, but we make sure that creators are also getting paid. We've already started to put together a library of highly credible partners. Our goal here, of course, is to bring the AI companies highly credible content. So not only do they get training rights for the back end of the system to be able to get their predictive models going well, but also what we call generative results referencing, which is essentially display and citation rights specifically, so that in the future, instead of them trying to run through the Encyclopedia Britannica's information through the mystery meat, uh, black box of a large language model, they can use RAG to be able to get directly the, the, the correct results. And in fact, with— by working with our content partners, they can get content that is specific ages and is diction that's appropriate. For example, Rosen Publishing Group has 12 lines of business, tons of educational content, and not only do they get that content in the short term, they get long-term relationships because everything we build is recurring revenue. Everything is a— one minute. Okay, great. And that gives them an opportunity to be able to get continued content over time, brand new content, human composed and certified. So it's a huge part about saying we're setting standards for the screen. The— for the— for books. And now we're getting into the music industry as well. How do we make money? We like do the licensing and component process, uh, for the AI side of things. We're helping them with compliance as well. And on the creator side, of course, they pay for services— our content valuation, our certification process. And ultimately, the cert— the screenplay process will get to the film, uh, film badges at the end of the film, uh, where we'll be charging at the end of that process as well. We're raising $1.5 million right now against to SAFE with a $10 million cap at a 20% discount. Um, our projected, uh, ARR, which I think is actually fairly low, but we expect to be able to get above $1.175— $1.7 million over the course of this next year. 70% of our, uh, spend is all going to be on marketing and sales specifically because the platform is built, the process is great. We close 80— probably 80% of the people that get on the phone with us now, and we just want to expand what we're doing. And of course, I have shown you that the, uh, this badge is indeed— or this, uh, slide indeed has our AI-assisted badge because we believe disclosure is a key part of building the trust.

I think that's it, right?

Yeah, well, there's a bunch of supplying— there's a bunch of extra materials, but, uh, I always like your presentations.

You're very good speaker and And very convincing. Couple of questions. How did the Elon vs. OpenAI suit change the direction, if so, of your company? Well, the interesting thing about—

so Elon— Grok basically does not respond to our opt-out requests. They're the only company that doesn't. I think that's changing though now because they're changing the way they're doing these things. And as it happens, Galen has an in for somebody in Elon's inner circle. So we're expanding the conversation there to be able to bring this to Groq in hopes that that maybe gives them an opportunity to catch up.

My point is more like if OpenAI won against Elon, they'll certainly win over pretty much anyone.

Oh, well, no, I don't think that's true at all. First of all, Elon was— I mean, forget the merits of his case, which were silly. He was outside the window of, you know, statute of limitations. So, I mean, there was just a— there was a completely technical reason why that didn't happen. The reason the AI companies are going to fail on this is because they're already paying licenses for a lot of content out there. They're already paying the largest companies around. And so what we do is bring what I like to to call the middle powers of content together so that we actually have an opportunity to be able to negotiate prices with them. And the bottom line is Perplexity is already licensing deals. Some of our customers actually already have deal— have deals with one frontier model, and they're seeing— they want us to be able to expand what they can do, and they also seek us to be able to help them with renegotiations. This is a new opportunity for us is because right now OpenAI is about to renegotiate with about 4 major companies. 2 of them have already contacted us to use our certification services to be able to make sure that the valuation is sufficient. So that's a big part of this, is us setting fair market values. We intend to be nothing less than, frankly, the ASCAP for digital content, basically.

And you give them, you get them better prices, you get these LLMs better prices, and you get them all of their partners at once, right?

Yeah, that's the goal. I mean, is to help basically— I mean, look, if you, if you register your content on our platform, we'll give you a basic valuation based on just the volume of your content. But what we do when we do a custom valuation, which, which, you know, we have plenty of people that paid for it. We just did one for the folks that own The Ed Sullivan Show and a ton of other, you know, shows. He just wasn't— he's getting a doc— he's getting inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. So it's the perfect time for them to ask for evaluation.. And so this is helping us. This is helping not just give them licensing, but if they choose to sue at some point, we've provided them with a third-party validation of their price.

I like that. Yeah, I'm bullish on what you're building. As usual, we need to find a way to, uh, to work together. Um, my, my last, uh, question, um, yep, I'm gonna find it again. I sort of lost my train of thought, but I had another pretty good question for you. Um, Mike, what do you think about Eric's business? Any questions or comments?

Yeah, I mean, uh, Eric, God, God love you, what you're doing. I mean, I think what you're doing for humanity, for society, is absolutely critical. I don't know much about it, so I can't really provide a lot of feedback, but what I can say is go as fast as you can. And just try to own it because I think maybe others will try to do the same thing. And also you might be an enemy for a lot of people, so have good security because what you're doing is important.

But he's lowering prices and he's making all of these publishers easily accessible. So I think that's a win on— that's very important. You need to have them win as well. So I found my question again, Eric. What if if these LLMs just run on synthetic data and they don't rely at all on publishers? What's your take on that? That could be pretty threatening.

That's threatening to the other side of the market. So our, you know, probably the biggest competitor we have is Protege, which is a company that's primarily built on health data, and they just did a $30 million round with Andreessen Horowitz leading it. The thing is, they do the sort of scale side of data, so they'll get you, you know, 1,000 hours of animals walking on the Serengeti. That's not our space. Our space is highly credible content. It's Hollywood content. It's, it's Big Five publisher content, and it's, it's, you know, Sony Music and, you know, Universal Music. It's, it's really the best content. So for synthetic data, it's going to work probably just pretty well, I think, for that kind of commoditized video content and maybe audio content. It's not going to work well for creative content because the more you get, the more you get into synthetic creative content, the further and further away from that human touch. And if we're ever going to actually get creative people on board with AI, we need to make sure that AI is actually paying for things. And we do blanket licenses. We don't do royalties because frankly, what the outputs right now, you can't look at those and really determine royalties on the basis of that. So we're, it's an education part on both sides, but I'm glad to say the creators are coming on well and the AI companies are realizing that we are not an enemy. We are here to try to, you know, make this work for both folks. We love AI. We're not anti-AI by any stretch of the imagination. We just believe that creators should be compensated for their work and they'll embrace it better and it'll do wonders for the brand of AI.

There you go. Well, Eric, thanks for— Amir, you have the stage. Just unmute yourself and you can present.

Yes, hi, hi, it's Amir here. Introducing Vital Veda, uh, back in the COVID time, I was downloading and using a lot of fitness applications, and I was noticing that all these fitness applications are lookalike. They are all educational. And I was thinking, okay, now is the time to introduce something new in this space, creating motivations and, uh, bringing something that it's not exist before. So basically from the problem, I noticed that but, you know, it lacks like motivation. So there is no elements that engage users to come and do this using these applications every day. So observing the market, the engagements, how the TikTok, for example, engaging the user, how Duolingo actually doing it, how the Candy Crush is doing it. So gamification is— was the fact that I was invent into this solution for the application that we released. So basically, the concept is very simple and straightforward. So you gamifying your rep. The way it works is that got the AI movement scoring. So the application come up with the AI-enabled camera that user put in front of itself, do this movement as instructed on the application and then start actually scoring at the real time, come up, uh, to the live challenge and leaderboard, seeing their position, how, what the score you get, and the price that is actually driven by the revenue of the application and getting injected to the reward pool of these, uh, concepts. So how it works, very So it's a place that the coach can come and introduce a physical activity, a program that goes, for example, for 7 days or till to the month, what you need to do every day. Uh, then the user, the athlete come and join the browse the library of all this program, which one they like the most, then start actually to join, start to participate. AI start to track their movements. And start to just giving them the grade. And then at the end, if they win, if they are in the top of the leaderboard, of course they get the rewards that has been designated there. So the element, the advantage that our application have is the Move Master AI coach, which has been built by us. The camera tracked every joint in the real time, 27 points. As you do the exercise, the computer visions compare yourself with the benchmark, which was the coach in the first place, and start scoring it. Instant correction feedback, no variable needs. All the consumer needs is a smart camera— sorry, a smartphone with the camera to you just start actually using this application. The business model also is very simple. At the moment, we are offering these services on the freemium basis. So then we were converting this to the premium subscription. Obviously, the premium subscription, there's more advantage as the scoring, the AI scorings will actually come up with the more comprehensive dashboard. The second thing is that for every single game, the or challenge that the user wants to participate, like a Udemy type of program. They need actually to pay entry fee and also the brand advertising that, you know, we're placing there to just, you know, for the people who wants to actually get engaged with our audience. The traction so far, it's a new concept. We launched that back in August 2025. 85,000 people joined. We got a smart contract as a Web3 kind of solution at the back end. 6 smart contracts controlling the back end engagement from the reward pool, from joining to the participations, from the price that is going to be giving away. The seed has been completed and confirmed. We had the investment from the VC, about 200,000. And, uh, so why this is a good solution for now? Uh, obviously, you know, the use of the smartphones, the, you know, the, the in-depth, uh, imaging processing that they, they have, uh, also the, the fact that, you know, after pandemic, you know, it tends that more user was actually shifting themselves to do the exercise in their own space. The application, the fitness application has a boom. Everybody was actually just, uh, trying to see, okay, what a solution is in the market to come up and keep themselves active. The, the factors that, you know, this loyalty program is based on the Web3, uh, loyalty, uh, tokens. 30 seconds. And also it's not actually, uh, so we see a concept like, you know, it comes to the market like to be, uh, play-to-earn, move-to-earn, but this is actually getting engaged to. And so the sustainability model of this application is very important for us. Uh, you're raising $1.5 million, uh, as we want actually to dedicate that more to the awareness, growth, brand sales, uh The product is live, it's been completed, but they, uh, we need to scale that. We need to make sure that you are staying top of this game and also bringing enough resources to support this growth for us. So why this is a good concept as an investment? This is a category, it's a new category that has been introduced in this space. It hasn't been existed before, engaging the user to, uh, be, uh, you know, creating a motivation. And 85,000 people joined. We haven't paid any, uh, marketing, no pay, uh, uh, cost for acquisition. It was just pure referral, uh, word of mouth, and also the social media, uh, you know, engagement with the audience that start bringing this, uh, user to our application. Thank you very much. I'm here to— thank you, Amir— answer any question if you have.

Yes, yes, I have a couple for you. So I think the presentation generally needs better design and possibly, uh, more practice as well. I think, uh, demo at the— at first, and I was about to suggest the the same to email the right, like a quick 30-second video sometimes that's really like polished and at the, an agency built at the start of the deck could be way better than like presenting something yourself, right? Like just convey what it does clearly. And that leads to my next point is that I had multiple founders come to me either for go-to-market services or fundraising the last years with similar and/or same ideas, uh, some of them that scaled pretty impressively that maybe I could connect you to. But it's a competitive niche, right? There's a lot of people trying to rebuild better workouts. And I'm speaking as an ultra athlete myself. I work out like 2 or 3 times a day, right? So I'm obsessed about these things.

So it's like, how can you make it better than Apple, you know, very much confidence that our solution is a very much very for a first time that is being presented in the market. I, you know, it's our space, obviously. I'm actually observing and checking all the competitors who is in the market, what they're doing. But from what we have done, it's new and it's actually a very creative models to getting people engaged. I very much agree with you, there And that's actually most of the question comes, oh, there are lots of fitness applications, but we are not a fitness application. We are applications to engage people to just actually having fun, you know, providing some physical activity as a game. And for that kind, you're— it's a new trend. It's a new application that has been in the market. And that's why we get actually a good response in a very short amount of time, right?

So what would be the main feature, would you say? Is it the AI form tracker, or is it the Web3, uh, get money, uh, if you move yourself more?

Uh, okay, we are not actually, uh, claiming to be, uh, get money. It's a reward that is actually coming from the revenue of the applications. Obviously, yes, as a Part of the gamification is the reward that it creates motivations in getting engaged, bringing engagement and bringing people on board. And yes, as a core advantage was this AI feature that definitely helps us a lot because it makes the application to be real. You cannot actually come up with a very fake type of movement, the accuracy level, you know, the dataset that has been created by the users and also by the coach and getting compared and then start giving you a very precise score as a return.

And before I let Mike speak, talking about your revenue, right? Like in that year that you've launched, out of all of these users, I believe you said $30K or $80K, which is crazy. Uh, what's your revenue off this right now?

Look, the business model was, uh, as a fact that we were actually, uh, having a proof of concept, bringing this to user to see how they getting engaged. Obviously this is, uh, Web3, so we can validate every single, uh, join movement participation. Till today we had about 190,000 of Participants has been recorded in the, you know, the backend things. And now we start actually bringing advertisement marketing. So we, the more the application has in-app advertising and also we secure a good partner that is going to be the very first paid challenge that we are going to run next Hey Mike, any questions or feedback for Amir?

Yeah, I have a bunch. I have a lot of experience in this space, as Charles knows. I've done everything you could do in a fitness, in a fit, in the fitness industry. So, uh, but the quick question, and then I've got longer questions real quick. Are you charging right now? The 85,000 people, are they paying?

No, we are not actually, but we are creating a CPM. So obviously that actually valued the marketing revenue that you're generating. So we start generating a marketing advertising. Got that. Got that.

And then the other really quick, uh, uh, kind of rifle shot question is they're scored based on form, based on reps, based on, uh, is that how they're scored?

And then, and then that's somewhat tallied and and comparing the camera, they will actually point 27 points of your body. So then it was bringing a benchmark from the coach and yourself while, while you're doing that particular set. So this dataset were getting compared one to another and then start actually say that, okay, you know, if the coach has the 10 reps, how many you did? That's one metric or the accuracy, you know, if the coach is 100% of the being a benchmark where you exactly position yourself compared to the coach.

So, so Orangetheory kind of does that, but they do it based on your biometrics, you know, based on your heart rate. You've heard of Orangetheory. Um, you know, I think, um, I was excited when you first did your intro because I was thinking I always had this idea of people would play dodgeball and that's how they, you know, they go and spend an hour competing against each other. I think that's what people really want to do. I think people may get a little intimidated, you know, on the list of how do I, how do I rank. I'm not saying that doesn't work, but, you know, the thing that I would be interested in is the churn of the 85,000. And the thing I would challenge you on is there is a lot of things out there, maybe not looking at the way you're looking at their form and their reps and, you know, and comparing people. I think there's a real challenge to say, does that really engage people? Is that the way they want to compete? And that would be kind of my, my challenge on it. But I think it's— you're doing, and I think the competitive piece is a key core to motivation. And I think we lost him. Yeah, it's a— are you there? Yes. I think it's a key core. So I think that's the right thread that you're working on. I mean, Charles is probably the most competitive person I know, right? I mean, being competitive is what motivates people, and then having, having pools of people so that they can compete with their peers from an athletic prowess standpoint. I'm just a little bit challenged on whether it's how many reps I do, how I want to compete against people, or if I want to try to hit them with a dodgeball virtually even.

Of course, but this is a different type of, you know, gamified solutions. Obviously, you know, it comes, for example, if you like dancing, even you can actually come and present something here to come up and do your movement and see, you know, who's actually doing a better movement. So it's all movement actually, uh, based because you're, you know, that's what we are capturing from, from ours and from our AI servers.

So Amir, thank you. Mike, thank you. I know that StreamYard is lagging a little bit at this point, uh, but yeah, Jeff, can you hear us loud and clear?

I can hear a lot clearer. Okay, this is, this is— so, um, I'm the co-founder of Keep Safe Cares. Stacy Burlo is my other founder. And just as an aside, um, this is my 10th startup, and we are not asking for money, but Charles wanted me to present because he liked the idea. So essentially, what, what are we doing? Um, we kind of re-engineered a $220 billion industry that's growing 5% a year, which is caring for other people. So, uh, there's a big demand called the Silver Tsunami. People are aging, you know, baby boomers are aging out, 4.5 million a year. They need care. There's a huge problem with caregiver turnover, mostly based on pay. Um, so what we did is that we've fixed the unit economics for running a private duty agency. We also fixed the economics on doing a franchise, and partially it all has to do with, um, efficiency. So this is it. We re-engineered Private Duty and made it more efficient, and so everything flows from that. And I'm sorry that it looks like all the wording is a little bit off on it, but what we did is that we took everything that you can run a Private Duty agency, uh, by automation. You could call it AI. I'm an engineer, I still call it automation. And put it in the cloud. So essentially, by doing that, you get rid of the whole back office. You get rid of all the people that you need to schedule, hire, pay. They're gone. It's all done on the cloud. And because you could do that, one thing happens that's super important. And the super— by lowering the cost of becoming more inefficient and becoming more efficient, you reduce overhead. And by reducing overhead, you could pay more, your caregivers more. And by paying your caregivers more, this is what happens. You, um, you reduce caregiver no-shows, which is 25% in the industry, caregiver turnover is 83%, which is insane, and you get higher customer satisfaction score. And, and here's where the real difference is, is that just doing that, reducing it, right, creating a good piece of software, what do you get out of it? How much more can you pay your caregiver? Well, the industry standard is like 40 to 45%. We pay two-thirds, so that's 67%. So as an example, if we're charging 35, the caregiver is making 22. Our competitors are paying 16. So, but that, that's a big thing. So I, I, I went to the Genghis Khan School of Marketing, which is how do you leverage your unfair competitive advantage. And I know the VC said that in there, and I can't remember who it was, but you said that. I said, aha. Yep. I know that one. So here's how we do it. So, um, clients leave our competitors because, uh, caregivers can't get paid enough, right? So they leave and then the competition doesn't pay caregivers enough. So if they do pay them the same of what we're doing, they have to raise the rates so much that they leave. And then finally, the clients leave because I call it the carousel of caregivers. You're getting a new caregiver in every, every 2 weeks. And one thing old people hate— and I'm getting there quickly, by the way— is new people coming into their home. They can't stand it. I mean, that is like anybody that's over 65. Who is this new chick in my house? I don't know who she is. I got to retrain her. So what we did is that— so we fixed the unit economics to make it profitable, and we're actually more profitable than all the franchises out there per hour. And they run on a census. And since it's a weekly amount of hours that you get, so on average we make between $825 and $850 including all the overhead costs for a franchise, including the corporate fees. So a franchise that does 1,000 hours is making $8.5K a week. Multiply that out, that's $400-some K a year. And our— the other goal that we made, which is really important, and this is really important, is the Ultra Light franchise. So our franchise— now that's how we kind of fund ourselves, is through franchising. Our franchise costs about one-fifth of what it is. We do not charge a royalty. We charge a flat fee based on your census. And then because we've reduced your costs so much, your overhead's down. So you have a very thin, uh, employment structure. You have a territory manager and then one admin, and then we call a Care Ambassador. So everything's about mitigating costs so you can pay your caregivers more. We also change the relationship with caregivers. So the difference is that most agencies hire the first caregivers there. We have an online system that's incorporated into our CRMs that we recruit all over the country, so it's already integrated into it. So we have a, a sister company that actually can hire caregivers for individuals, but that's difficult for most people to do. So we integrated the recruitment aspect, which a typical agency pays $7,500. I'm month for, and it's included in your fee. So ultimately, remember Genghis Khan, in the end there will be one. And we, we win on two things. Our long-term— we pay our caregivers more and we make more money per hour. So we have a hybrid system. Not only are we franchising, we're also opening up company stores. And the cost for us to open up a company store is about one-tenth of our competitors.. And we have a competitor just up north in Waco that does mostly company stores, and they just got a big— and Pincus put a big amount of money into them. But even their people are coming to us that run and say, hey, can I run your, your operation? And, um, again, I'm not looking for money, but here's what we've done. Last year we did like $1.2 million. We're on a run rate of about $1.8 million in revenue. But next month we're going to sell two territories, Tennessee and New Jersey. New Jersey will come in at $900,000. Tennessee will come in at $800,000 for a franchise. So that's $1.7 million profit, essentially. And now we got to train them whatnot. They got to do it. And we make our money $2 an hour on a franchise, and we make $10 an hour on a company store.

That's it. Jeff, thank you. Um, I think the presentation, dude, needs some work, although I'm, I'm bullish on your concept because we spend time together, right?

So yeah, the fonts went out of place. It actually looks much better when it's in there.

You need Sunny.

Um, yeah, yeah, I need Sunny.

Technically, we could present this slide to, um, yeah, potential franchisees, right? And I'm bullish on your models. I studied the economics as you laid them out for me. I'm not sure about Genghis Khan reference as well in the care domain, although I obviously I dig it like as a super capitalist, but in your case I'm not sure if I'd use that.

I don't do it to a franchise, I do it to investors because investors want you to somehow dominate your industry. So the one thing— and so this is what we did, we made a pivot. There's a lot of pivots, and the last pivot is we call it generational themselves. So instead of somebody exchanging— and franchising, most people exchange one job for another. They leave a $200,000, $250,000 job and they buy a franchise and hope to make $250,000. Hey, they own it, but they're just exchanging one job for the other. The model that we change is that we want you to get an $800,000 investment and make $5 million a year, year after year after year after year after year, once you grow out your territory. So it's a totally different model that we're looking at. Instead of just buying one franchise, we want you to buy an area and we'll help you develop it.

Well, you have a franchise guy which on the call here. Uh, so Mike, uh, I, I heard—

was it Taco Bell? Taco Bell, and I'm a Fazoli's franchisee. Oh, fantastic. Also have sold a lot of your businesses. I've sold, uh, Nurse's Next store. So, you know, so yeah, so I've done, I've done all that. I think what you're doing is absolutely breakthrough. I think it's, um, a real challenge to number one run those companies, and it's also pretty, pretty sad because, you know, you, you, you lose revenue when people die. Um, it's just, it's, it's, it's, there's no business like it. Yeah, I think also that, um, It's tough on the care, you know, the caretaker side. They really care and they love their clients, and that's really the value. It's the connection with their clients. And then from a coordination standpoint, who needs that? I mean, why not do something like what you're talking about? So I think what you're doing is a big idea. I do agree that the presentation is— you're kind of like you're Einstein You know, I mean, you're super smart and your head's everywhere. It looks much better on my computer.

The fonts are all over.

I could do it without it. They say that the reason why Einstein— my dad used to say this, actually. I say they— the reason why Einstein's hair was like this is because his brain was so active that it was like, you know.

And but yeah, business, by the way.

Yeah. I need a lot of that. But, um, you know, I just think what you're doing is important. I think getting organized, having a really strong 5-year vision, and having real strong 5 years of milestones, and then a current year with strategies and tactics— that's the kind of stuff that I spent a lot of time on, um, you know. And then the enabling culture, I think, will, will get you far beyond where you're at. I mean, I think where you're at right now is, is a shame. You should be, you should be much bigger, and I think you, you will be. But I think getting really aligned and coordinated and strategic and, and, and, uh, and, and clear is going to be important.

Can I— I appreciate that, but can I tell you what's going on now? I mean, this is where you're— so, you know, we, we really started franchising last year. We, we— so we, we ran our first one as a company store right? But it was a franchise. I said, if we're going to do this and grow fast, it'd be a franchise. So we had that aha moment where, you know, selling one franchise— ah, so we're like one-tenth the cost. So somebody can buy a whole territory, say like the Houston MSA, for what it would cost for two Visiting Angels franchises. But you only get two. With us, you get 20. So if each one of those are generating $1.5 million a year and free— not free cash, but there'll be about $400K. You're generating— you're creating generational wealth. So this is the pivot that we made. And, and I also created a mini MBA. I've done a lot of startups. I know a lot about business. I failed a lot too. So I don't have 100%, you know, I have a checkered past, which failures teach you a lot. But the one thing that we do is that people love the fact that we have a system. We have a system that you come in, and I know systems. I studied that. Again, I love Taco Bell. I love the story of Taco Bell, by the way. And so the system of what you create for success. So our, our plan is 1,000— Michael, hold on to your panties— 1,000 locations in 3 years.

Well, how can I help?

I love what you're doing. Let's talk. Let's talk.

Seriously, after that one, let's go with the the last two founders, guys. Uh, thank you, thank you. Match made in heaven. Um, Brent, round two, let's see your, your presentation, and, uh, eager to see how it improved. All right, uh, thanks. So, um, Brent with APTX Holdings.

Um, what, what we're in the business of is really harnessing, um, audio and sound into back.

You want to share your screen, by the way? The presentation, we can't see it. Is it not shared? Well, I can see myself and you on StreamYard, but, uh, the PDF needs to be open, right? Or whatever your presentation. Yeah, it's, it's on. I have it open. Uh, we can't see it because you're not sharing your full screen. Um, you're just sharing the browser tab. Yeah, hang on. Is that any different?

Nope.

Okay, is there a setting?

All right, so unshare the screen. Unshare the screen. Yeah, the blue icon at the bottom. Yep, click on it. It says stop sharing. Okay, perfect. Reshare it again and Chrome will ask for the full screen. There we go. Now I'm good. Let's see. I can't see it.

That's so weird.

And Phil, are you here? Do you want to take over? Yeah, I'm here. All right, let's go with your presentation, Brent. Uh, once you fix your stuff, you're, you're gonna be last. Uh, Brent, uh, Phil, you have the stage, you can go ahead and present.

All right, thanks everyone for staying to the end. I'm Philippe Laporte from Siberian Systems in Montreal. Uh, I've, I've got more than 20 years in the, in the software industry before I founded this, um, across California, Silicon Valley, Europe, and and, and where I'm from, Montreal. Um, after that, I went back to do a master's degree, and then I got well-versed into several advanced topics. And that's when I got the idea for, uh, Cyberian Systems Verifiable AI Inference. We are providing the trust layer for AI inference using cryptographic and mathematical game theoretic, uh, tools as well as zero-knowledge proofs. Those are all teams of technologies that are involved here. We are pre-seed, so, uh, I'm, I'm going to address this towards the end. So when we have the AI inference, we have no proof that the, the actual inference was done on the given model, given input, and given outputs. We have to just trust, uh, for example, reputation. And, uh, the compute providers, they give you their logs, but there's no mathematical proof that it actually ran on what they claimed that it run. So we make the AI inference provable. We, we issue a tamper-evident cryptographic receipt, which is a Merkle root receipt, for every inference. We also prove and verify, as I was saying before, that the model ran on the given input and the given outputs. And no compute provider offers this today, so we are the layer that integrates with the compute providers to provide this certainty. And this is the case for both hyperscalers or smaller players. So the 3 players, the 3 steps of the system is that we execute the model on the compute provider. These are independent compute providers. I'm not talking about OpenAI or AWS or anyone big. We're talking about smaller ones that have a small GPU park, or they're tapping into distributed devices. They kind of tap into idle resources like routers at home, desktops at work that are idle at work. They have different kinds of, of, of way to run their computation. Once this computation is done, we verify it mathematically and we issue a receipt that it was done and the receipt is good forever for accounting, and it's tamper-evident. You know, that's the kind of things we look always in cryptography, that you cannot repudiate that it did happen the way that it did happen. And no, why no one else can do this? The hyperscalers, as I was saying before, their trust is their brand reputation. They'll charge you the premium because of that. But what we want is having cheaper compute for equivalent and equal results. And to have that, we need to provide this trust layer. And also, one thing that nobody does either is provide the audit trail that I was just mentioning. So, and we operate independently, of course. Anyone who is auditing the work of any other entity needs to be a separate entity. Otherwise, you know, it doesn't jive. There's no— it doesn't work if you're not separate. Uh, and we have a live product. We, uh, I went with the running code first and then, uh, start looking into a market study and who we should engage first with. Uh, one foray that we've made is with a partner who, who does governance, risk, and compliance. So, um, we kind of add addition and complete the port— the, the picture for them so they and pitch us to their own existing clients. And also anybody who's doing this AI inference is a potential customer as well as potential their partners. As I was mentioning before, these independent compute providers, there's maybe 10, 15, 20 of them. They can all be partners and eventually we can run an auction between them to see who's going to give us the cheapest price for inference. And on top of that, we add our proof verification and accounting margin. As you can imagine, we have a live product demo. We have— I felt like it was a good idea to file patents here. People have all kinds of different view of software patents, but this is for the design, not the particular implementation. Of course, this is the way you got to go with these kinds of patents. We are in Quebec, Canada. I built this by myself. We have no funding, we're pre-seed, and we have near zero infrastructure cost. The market, okay, so I want to cut this down for you. We're doing inference, we're not doing training. Training, as you know, OpenAI trains ChatGPT, costs $4 million, takes a lot of resources. We're not involved in a training phase, we're only involved in the inference phase. Now in French you have real-time and non-real-time kind of batch. Real-time will be your conversation with ChatGPT. You want your answer right away. Non-real-time, deferred batch is what we're after. For example, medical image analysis. A medical office will gather several images and they'll send it for batch processing at night. Or even PayPal may run fraud detection differently. Referred a bit at night. So all these kind— this is the scenario we're targeting here, and that's why the, the inference business is $100 billion. Now there's, as I was saying before, there's the hyperscalers, and we're going for the compute providers. We want— there's also the angle here, which, um, the ecological angle, which is instead of building ever bigger data centers which compute, which consume more more energy, we can use these idle resources and existing data parks from the smaller compute providers. So that's our ecological angle that I didn't put in the presentation. And therefore, and so as I write, as AI moves into regulated high-stakes decision, proofs stop being optional. So, you know, someone is going to— someone wants this accounting to be done. So that they can refer that this computation happened on that day with this model, given input, given output. Uh, we asked $500K pre-seed so that we can continue, uh, doing the, the work, uh, and more go more into discovering customers, adding possibly a salesperson to help me out because I'm mainly an engineer but I'm doing, uh, you know, I've got like 20 outreach already, and we're, we're doing outreach in stages, different, different kinds of profiles, identifying the market opportunity in different, in, in different areas, and trying and seeing what kind of response to different kinds of contact means that we get. Thank you, Phil.

It's fascinating. I'm a Montrealer as well, so I got a soft spot. Plus, your background is like incredible. I've looked at your LinkedIn and you're probably the guy to solve this. Um, one of my contacts and friends is a guy called Linley. He runs inference, uh, Cambridge Inference, right? So he's solving like something similar to you. I will connect you with, uh, him. I think when you talk to VCs, you need to talk like in a more simpler language because you use like very technical keywords and they can lose you very quick. So if I'd have to sum it up, right, like OpenAI, Anthropic, these companies need to prove that their AI is outputting correctly and they don't have a proof right now. Or enterprises, right? And you provide that cryptographic proof that the agent or the model did what it said it was supposed to do, right? Can you explain in layman's terms what you do?

I'm gonna work on that pitch with the tone that you just described. I'm definitely gonna come up with that. But if you're giving me the chance now to kind of restate it, it is exactly like you're saying. We have big players that go by reputation. We want to work with smaller players that charge 50%, 25% of what the hyperscalers charge. But then there's the trust issue. The bigger guys go with their reputation and you trust that. Now how can you trust the smaller players who are cheaper? And that's what we provide. We provide this trust layer by mathematically proving that the work was done on, like I was saying, on the given model that was given and inputs and outputs. And we prove that mathematically and we issue a receipt that you cannot change, you cannot tamper with it, that it's good forever, that this would happen, that this happened. So we want to be, we want to for you, you think about these compute providers where we have these, these smaller compute parks and then smaller resources and smaller facilities, and we, we want to help them also because they have their own marketing and sales activities. And we're going to add on top of that, we're going to be adding for all of those guys at the same time. We're going to be this layer which, which integrates their product and adds our verification so that the end product is competitive with OpenAI and Amazon.

Got it, because there's no existing solutions right now to prove that the, the model behaved, uh, correctly. Like, what, what's the existing stack for this right now? Uh, there's several players.

The, the field is called zero-knowledge proofs. There are several players that have solutions that are, uh, theoretically and academically correct, but they, they're too, they're too, uh, hungry on the compute side. Uh, you know, like the worst thing you can do in terms of energy or compute that you expend on verifying a task is just to redo it. You just redo, you just redo the, the whole computation, and if you don't get the same result as the one that you dispatched it to, then you know they cheated, you know, they, you know, they did something wrong. Uh, so what we, what we have right now is a game theoretic, game theoretic deterrence. Um, I'm going to go back to the zero knowledge proof, sorry. Uh, but our own invention and, and, and innovation at, at, at Sovereign Systems is game theoretic deterrence where we, we re— we replay a, a small percentage, a random small percentage of the computation So that whoever— because you can think that you're playing a game here. There's someone who did the computation, but at the same time, maybe they just rolled the dice and send you, uh, number 3 and never did the computation, and they're trying to— they're trying to cheat you, you know. So you're playing this game, uh, I'm gonna re— I'm gonna replay randomly, say, 20% of, of the computation, and if I find anything wrong, you lose you don't get the money for it. And so how do we make it even more deterrent? So if they wage, you know, if they stake, you got to, you have a stake in here. If you stake only once the possible reward, then people will say, oh, I'll take my chances. Maybe this 20% replay will not catch my cheat. But if you, then you increase the number of times. When you arrive at 5 times the stake being 5 times the size of the reward, you arrive to a Nash equilibrium, which is in game theory means you're even. Anybody who's acting rationally cannot do more to cheat you and you cannot do more to prevent the cheating.

And so, yeah, I'm— Before you continue, Mike, do you have one question? Because I know you need to run.

Yeah, one question. I'm sorry, Philippe, I love what you're doing, My one question is, how crowded— I think Charles kind of came to this— how crowded— I know the space isn't super crowded now— how crowded is it going to be in a year? And how, you know, how quickly is that going to happen?

Yeah, so let me finish the answer to Charles Cormier, to answer that also. The ones doing this zero-knowledge proof which is the ultimate technology, they cannot do it in an efficient way. They cannot do it in a way that is, uh, that, that, that requires less compute than the entire job itself. So these people are trying to do that, and, and they're, they're, they're, they're, they're making advances in there, but they, they— it's more academic, or it's more, um, it's more specific to a given problem or to a given industry. I want to have it for all industries that do AI inference. So it's really targeting— like I was breaking it down, it's not training, it's inference, and it's not real time, it's batch. You know, it's not your ChatGPT, it's not a conversation, it's batch. So that's a very well-targeted subset of the entire thing. And within this subset, there's no other technology which is doing right what I'm doing right now. And when you talk to people in governance, risk, and compliance, or anybody who needs to survive an audit, or who needs to survive someone saying, hey, you didn't compute that, you didn't do that work, any kinds of these situations are mine to catch, you know.

Yeah, I like that. Yeah, I'm bullish on this. Thanks for your pitch, Phil. We're gonna have another follow-up call. Mike, I know you need to run, but who was your favorite today?

Oh my God, um, I gotta go through my list here. Um, sorry, I wasn't—

Antonio, Braden, Alex, Dev, Ogi, Eric, Amir, Jeffrey, Brent, and Phil.

Yeah, I, I, I think probably this one. I think this one. I think Philippe's really got something that, um, He's quick to market, early to market, and he's going to be maybe the standard. And if he's a standard, he's going to own the market.

Yeah, I go with Brayden first because, yeah, it's a field I'm super familiar with, super investible. I can see product market fit. I already know that this can work and this is super investible. His background was huge. Antonio, because it was neurotech. I love neurotech and I'm super bullish on what he's building. And Phil, uh, on third, uh, one, because Montreal, but spent some time in SF, engineered a bunch of things, and I, I fully understand the, the problem, and I'm eager to help him on that. So yeah, thanks for everyone for tuning in. That was a long, uh,