Spark Tank - Edition 7

Welcome to the 7th edition of Spark Tank. Today we have a couple founders pitching many VCs. It's like the Shark Tank but for founders and online. No bullshit, it's great pitches. The founders have 5 minutes to show us their deck and prove us that they're investable. Each VC will give them their opinions or we'll ask them questions. We'll have 2 minutes each for today. Uh, so that's, uh, that's gonna be pretty fun. Today's show is presented by razzrocket.com. If you need help with the fundraising, we can give you a little hand with that. So I'm gonna bring the VCs and the founders on stage, uh, for today. Let's, uh, let's bring the founders first, actually. So Nitesh, uh, quick introduction about yourself.

Hey guys, I'm Nitesh. I'm the co-founder of Alchemy. We're building the partner stack for consulting firms.

Adam, a quick intro about yourself.

Hi, I'm Adam Goode. I'm co-founder, CEO of Auric Technologies. I'm here based in Sydney, Australia, and we're building a sense intelligence and turning, uh, mood into a recurring revenue stream.

Sridhar, quick intro about yourself.

Yeah, hi, my name is Sridhar. I'm a software engineer. I'm in Dallas area. We are building a front desk for dental clinic operations.

Mike, VC side, quick intro about yourself.

Mike Fineman, Texas Business Brokers, an M&A firm out of Austin, Texas, and I'm excited to hear the founder stories today.

Can, a quick introduction about yourself.

Nice to be here. I'm a VC based in Istanbul, also investing in the US.

Stefan, quick intro about yourself.

Like Mike, I'm also here in Austin, Texas. Stefan Whitwell, I'm the CEO of a nationwide family office and co-founder of several companies, including an AI automation firm and a venture capital firm called Muck. And, and, uh, looking forward to being here today with everyone.

Ron, a quick intro about yourself.

Hi everybody, Ron Shkeda, live from Berkeley, California. I'm a former VC and I run a small accelerator, uh, a virtual accelerator out of Berkeley specializing in biotech.

Sunny, a quick intro about yourself.

Hey everyone, my name is Sunny, founder of UnoCoin, India's first Bitcoin exchange. I'm also the founder of RazRocket with Charles here. Happy to be here.

Amanda, a quick introduction about yourself.

Hello, Amanda Colbert from Boulder, Colorado. I am the founder of Chariot Communications and a public relations consultant.

And Amanda is going to be useful today for branding feedback, right? Like storytelling, branding, that sort of thing. So that's why I brought her on. So let's start with the first contender. We will have, let's see here, Adam to start with his pitch deck here. So Adam, the stage is yours. You can start presenting.

Great.

Well, as I said, I'm Adam, Adam Goode, based here in Sydney, Australia. And we're building scent intelligence layer for emotional well-being. Our belief is really simple, that lights became programmable, temperature, music, sound, and scent is actually next. So a little bit about myself, um, and my co-founder Alex. I've spent two decades building various technology categories, predominantly in digital advertising and television streaming. Built a billion-dollar business for Telstra here in Australia around subscription televisions back in the day, maybe 10, 15 years ago. And my co-founder is a robotics engineer with deep expertise in hardware and AI integration and scaling manufacturing. Now, the problem that we're solving is that lighting and temperature and sound and so forth, they're all programmable, yet scent is still really manual. It's static. And yet it's really the most powerful for our emotional senses. And that's a problem, not to have programmable scent, is that means we've got these missed opportunities for more sleep, more focus, more energy, and more regulation using scent. And for enterprises, it means that spaces largely are unmanaged and unemotional— on emotional level. So retails and hospitality and workplaces dismiss that opportunity to have wellness using scent, and we're bridging that gap. By building scent that is really that last unprogrammable state. So the solution is the Auric platform. It is the first scent intelligence platform that can be controlled. We have 4 layers to that. The Aromasphere on the left there for homes and small and medium spaces has RFID smart capping systems that identifies the oils and track the usage. An intelligent app that takes a number of different data sources including biometric health readings to, to help program Scent when you need it most. We also have a HVAC solution for large spaces called the Auric Atmos that can control large spaces for enterprises. Now the business model really works under a behavioral loop. So this is a compelling business opportunity because the device is the install base, the connected usage, and the app tracks the engagement. And then the repeat usage comes from the behavior of using the biometrics intelligence that we drive. And then the refills convert usage into the recurring revenue stream. And so our model is wellness behavior becomes that engine room for increased lifetime value over time. The unit economics are really compelling. We've designed the business so the hardware is a low-cost piece of hardware, and then they've got the high margin business on the consumables. The device is around $345, which we, we have about a 30% margin, but the consumables are 87% margin. And so the target really is payback within 6 months that we've found. So why Auric wins is that we built the hardware, builds the network, and the data deepens that moat. We have an international patent on our RFID smart capping system. We have out of the box 8 oils create 4 moods and 26 different aromas across calm, focus, energy, and sleep. And there's growing personalization as the refill intelligence layer starts to come on board. And over time, Scent becomes that programmable layer for various different recommendations. Now, on the Traction side, we, uh, we've proved that concept both in consumer and enterprise. We've generated over $872K in revenue with 900+ customers, um, and sales have also increased as our largest enterprise customer Telstra here is using it across their 250 stores in an enterprise level. Currently we're manufacturing 1,000 units and we're on a television show here in Australia that generated quite a lot of those sales. So the market is really massive, really at that level to be a programmable sensory layer in the next frontier in ambient computing. So connected home wellness, digital sense enables environments across consumer and home just as much as what thermostats and music were. We're currently raising our seed round. We've flipped up to a Delaware C-Corp out of Australia, so we're raising $2.5 million seed at the moment. We're opening that in July. We're just seeking investors now. And that will help us scale our manufacturing and our install base and launch in the US later this year. So we're not a diffuser brand, we're building this sense intelligence layer for emotional well-being. So thank you very much for your time.

There you go.

Thank you so much, Adam. Today I'm mostly going to moderate because there's so many VCs. Uh, hey Mike, starting with you, any questions for Adam or comments?

Uh, well, first of all, I want one, um, for two reasons. Number one is I'm a gadget guy, and I, you know, and I love stuff like this. And I've got incense burning, uh, right now because you compelled me to, and I do have it in my office. So I thought your presentation was great. Um, I would love to get more information on the patent and how I can get one to test it out for you here in the States.

Yeah, no problem. We actually spend— we have a VC in Austin, Texas, Sputnik, with Oksana, which you may know. She— so we spent 4 months there last year on her accelerator. If you want one, you go to auric.au and you can get one. But do email me for— we can figure out how we deliver more, more units that are coming into the US at the moment. Now on the patent side, it's the full platform. So the international patent covers the software layer, the RFID smart capping system, and also the intelligence of way that we've used scent research to actually help configure scent when you need it most. It's an interesting device. When people get it, it's a bit like a coffee machine. You kind of want to make lots of different coffee experiences, but ultimately you can only have one at a time. So we find after about 4 or 5 days, the sort of, um, the rituals start configuring when you want scents. So looking at your other data sources, your calendar, so you might want to wait. For example, it's quite early here in Sydney. I've woken to a focus ritual just to get me going for this pitch. But then as the day moves on, it might move to an energy ritual to get me out and do some exercise. And of course tonight it'll make a sleep ritual. So the patent is really looking at the whole ecosystem. It's across 6 layers. So if you want to get into the deal room, you can get into the detail of the patent.

Hey, Can, any questions, feedback for Adam?

Adam, thanks for the presentation. I would love to see more of the deployment of the hardware parts. Because like, I mean, you kind of, just as you said, you kind of promoted like an already existing machine, like a coffee machine or something. I mean, in the universe, for instance, there are 3 colors: red, yellow, and blue. And out of that 3 main colors, you can create 10 million different colors. So I was expecting like we have this 3 you know, different scents, and with the combination I can, you know, infuse so many different colors matching my data algorithms, etc. That would be more interesting in my opinion.

Yeah, so just on the combination. So first, when you said colors, is the diffuser itself. It comes in white and dark, but the actual scent has 8 oils, therapeutic oils, and in Australia we've had them TGA approved, which is equivalent to FDA approved for therapeutic benefits. And so the, the process of making those oils are 100% botanicals, no solvents, no carcinogenics. But the 8 oils that go into the, the unit will, will create 26 different aromas based on the 4 different mood states. So 26 is quite a lot to actually just have out of the box, but ultimately, because we're tracking your aroma usage, there'll be certain oils that you love and certain oils that you don't use. And then we can upsell and downsell that preference. And this is the really, one of the most powerful parts of Scent Intelligence. We're the only business in the world that knows what aromas you like, when you're using them, and when you're gonna run out. And so the whole business model is driven on that. The oils last between 45 and 60 days depending on the usage. So we've found that 26 different aromas is a really, really good start. But ultimately, after about 2 or 3 refills, you're sort of down to a number of different preferences that you want for your, your day. Or the corporate spaces are actually the really interesting one where people have created their signature scent.

Adam, thanks for the response. Amanda, any questions for Adam?

Thank you, Adam. I do want to start by saying beautiful slide deck, absolutely incredible visuals. A+. Thank you so much. The, I love your product. I too have a diffuser and some incense burning back here too. Big, big fan of your product. I'm probably your target audience. The, as a communications person, what I hear is you're different from a diffuser, but you buried the lead because the last thing that I wrote down was, we are the only business in the world that knows your preferences and when you're going to run out of product. I wish it was a little bit more prominently stated in terms of a unique value proposition. I would absolutely bring that to the top, and it may help show why you're different from a diffuser and how you can generate demand.

Yeah, excellent feedback. I should be doing that, and at times I do bring it further up the front, so I'll make sure I do that next time. Thank you.

Good work. Thank you.

Sorry guys, I was Busy burning some incense. Everyone's burning incense.

Everywhere in this call, fantastic.

I had my Mexican incense, I forget what it's called, but it smells so good. That's what they burn in the Mexican sauna, the temazcal.

Ah, that sounds awesome.

Stefan, uh, any questions or comments for Adam?

Adam, I thought it was really great that you showed how you were going to use the proceeds that you're raising in just a very simple, straightforward way. And a great, great presentation. And I love the product. We're going online to get one here. I had a little bit of a question for you, wondering if you could address the valuation. It seems potentially pretty high, you know, at this stage of company, but maybe there's good reasons. And I think you might, you know, need to present a little bit more ammo to get somebody comfortable ultimately at that valuation.

Yeah, no, that's fair. Our pre-seed has been at a lower valuation, sort of $4 million US. If anyone in this call is interested in coming in while we're closing this current pre-seed, we're certainly open to that. This is why we're opening our seed in July because of the amount of units that coming on board onto our platform. And so when you've got 900 units coming onto the platform, you're also in enterprise, you're also in consumer. We've, we've now got that amazing dashboard to show repeatable purchase and activation. And really the missing part is just to scale that. Once you start making hardware, we're tooling out of China, you just want that machine to just continue to push units out. So we've really pushed that evaluation up, but we're open to anybody who wants to get into the deal room to see the lower valuation where that we're closing. Our current VCs are wondering whether we just do a small bridge while we get people on board. So we're open to the right strategic partners in that.

Okay, thank you, Adam. And one last thing too on that, I think that you're in such a great stage where you're getting lots of And even just looking at, you know, today's conversation here, a lot of positive feedback. I would concentrate on first, you know, developing depth and rapid growth in one of your product areas, like for example, your retail, before you then go, you know, doing the more HVAC larger, you know, larger machines. I think it's awesome that you have that vision for that, and I think that's a super interesting area to grow to. I would just, I would lay that out there as part of the vision version 2 of 3, and attack the first most low-hanging fruit first until you have that cash flow sustainability and even broader depth. And the other thing I would do is work with your team to think about how you can create, you know, essentially use customer orders to help fund some of the manufacturing costs to ease, you know, the cash flow strain of high growth, which is of course one of the biggest challenges you face when you've got a great successful product like you do. So thank you for being on here today. Great job.

I'll be in the US, Austin, later this month and New York for the New York Tech Week in June. If anything—

I'd love to meet up.

Yeah.

Yeah. Let's do that.

John, any questions, comments?

Well, I guess say a bang cleanup here. I'd say, you know, you should distill the comments. People really, really like that you're a data company. And I think that you should really sort of live on that. I think the TAM slide is a little inappropriate because it just talks about your total saturated market. You can throw it in there. But what you really want to do is you want to convince people that you're going to grab a certain percentage of that total available market, accessible market, you know, and, and your data is the story that's going to do that. Um, I think I kind of wonder if, because there are so many, so many scents out there, I kind of wonder what your plan is there. I think you're going to capture different segments of that market with different selections in your platform. And I'd like to kind of understand what you're going to do about that because I don't know, a hotel is different from a swimming pool from a spa, you know, and different cultures if you're selling in different countries, a lot of different preferences. And so just talking to your awareness there might be very helpful.

Yeah, no, really, really good points. There's no real global scent brand as in, in this sort of delivery space. I mean, you have essential oils with doTERRA, Young Living, the sort of pyramid scheme of delivering sort of the, the sort of messy to blend, sort of old-school way of doing essential oils, but not on this technology kind of level.

I think you need to sort of look, look at some established players there, because there are companies whose whole multi-billion dollar play is that they, they are tracking the flavors and fragrances that are going to be popular next year. And there's more than 20 of them. Um, you know, it's, it's a, you know, when you look outside of the people who are just sort of like doing diffusers and, and scented oils. I think in order to hit $100 million in sales, I think you're going to have to sort of look beyond that culture, in my opinion, you know, for whatever.

Sunny, last but not least, any questions, comments?

Yeah, I mean, I've commented in the past, I love this business. I was going to ask you, what, what did the 900+ customers teach you that kind of change the product the most?

Yeah, I mean, the 900, a good third of them came from a television show that were on a home renovation show. They skewed a little bit older, which was interesting because we were more in this for the health-conscious biometric data. So we realized that the product kind of skewed into that older market. So we had to do a few adjustments to that. We've realized that even purist sort of aromatherapy users really like our 100% botanical play. I think you can't underestimate the amount of scent that's out there that's kind of carcinogenic and filled with sort of nasties. I think what we've learned is to go through the process of having it, you know, endorsed by, you know, a government body for its therapeutic benefits has been a real good value to, to not only increase the price point of the oils, but also, you know, increase the breadth of people who are very conscious about what they're breathing in or smelling in their homes, in their workplaces. So we've really learned that.

Thank you.

All right, well, thanks guys. Thanks for the first pitch, Adam. We're gonna go to next contender on the list. Here we have Sridhar. So Sridhar, I'm gonna give you the stage here. We can see your screen, you can start presenting.

Yeah, hi everyone. As I said, my name is Sridhar. I'm the founder of TensorLynx AI. I'm gonna talk about the actually dental clinic on the business side of the things. You know, the typical dental clinics is run by a dentist. They might have a hygienist who is gonna do the diagnosis. But to provide that care, there are a lot of the administrative work goes into the dental clinics. And if you're spending an hour with the doctor, you're spending 4 hours of administrative work to provide that care, uh, be it talking to the patient and scheduling the right treatment and collecting their insurance information and probably, uh, getting to see if that would be covered and getting the procedure done and then submitting it for the claims and getting the payments and if there is handling the rejections. There is a ton of like the work goes on and obviously you would have a staff doing that in a typical US clinic and the problem gets like the administrative problem gets worse if you have like multiple clinics and if you're managing this manual work across the clinics and a lot of patients. So a friend of mine introduced— I'm a software engineer by trade, an AI engineer— where a friend of a dentist friend I ran across, they had 9 clinics and I looked at their problems and looked at their operations. I mean even getting to the, not to the full administrative, administrative side of the things. What is staggering is that actually 38 to 40% of the calls go missed. That means that it's a missed revenue and not providing the care for the patients. Like, they might be calling after hours, and some patients would want to speak in a language that is native to them, and you're in a demographic area, you need translation services, and not, not all of them available all the time, so you need to hire that one. And not only that, once you are providing the care for the patient, you need a lot of follow-ups, right? And some of the patients don't come in for a treatment either because their insurance is not due or things like that. And you have to understand that these are the businesses end of the day and they pay for the doctors and you need to keep your chairs filled. And anytime the patient doesn't show up or doesn't follow up, you're leaving the revenue on the table. And when we look at all of this, hey, can we solve this using AI? And that's what we did. Like bringing, like taking some of these workflows using our AI agents. So this is like the problem that we're solving, that actually essentially the dental clinics are leaving close to $150K revenue. Like the administrative cost itself in general, like 30% of the cost. Like if you're a dental clinic making $500K revenue, 30% would just go on to that administrative cost, be it staff hours, inefficiencies, and things like that. And if you're reducing that by half, using AI, and that is a value add. And also if you're bringing the new revenue by being available, reactivation, and, and, and reaching out to the patients proactively without having to do manual work, that will bring like 5 to 10% of the revenue. So these are the problems you are solving. And, and I'll tell you what, I mean, we actually build this by working with the dental clinic owner, and we have proved that Like right now we deployed our solution to 20 clinics and we last month itself we're able to manage 1,500 appointments just by AI. We onboarded 300 patients. So even if you just take the number of like $150 an average for a cleaning and that's the like close to like $30K to $40K is what we are like bringing the revenue in managing the revenue for the clinics. And they would and we are pricing—

1 minute left.

Well, sorry, our pricing is based on the, um, the subscription, um, and, uh, they would just pay for a month $600 and they get an ROF like 5 times. Um, and we are in a bigger market, uh, there are like 150,000 dental clinics out there. Uh, even if you just take the administrative costs of like $60,000 you're spending towards it, that's like $9 billion market. In that, even if you take some percentage of it, like you're paying only $600, that's the market we want to capture, like $1 billion. So even if you— there are 150,000 clinics out there, if you capture like 7,000 clinics and we are providing this operational manager for them to manage their operations, that's just like $50 million. So right now we are close to like $200K revenue per month, sorry, per year. And we, and we wanted to scale it up right now. And our unit economics are good too. Like it is like a dental clinic or owner, they would hire like receptionist that can stay for 20 years as long as, because they would need that support to run it. And if our, think of our AI agent is like a staff that's going to augment and help them. And the LTV is quite high, 5 years to 10 years. Even if you take conservatively 5 years, we have got good LTV for the money they're paying. And we want to scale up, uh, going to 170 clinics, 140 clinics, uh, in a year from now. Like month 15 to 16, we would break even. And we are raising, uh, uh, we're raising close to like 800K, uh, to support our operations. And we have an amazing team. I'm an AI developer, and we have an operations manager who is coming, who's managing like 30 clinics, joining our board. and we have a healthcare advisor that is joining our board as well, and, and all the engineers. So, so far we've bootstrapped, not, not raising money. We have clinics revenues, and we have like a million interactions reported on our platform. So we are not just a simple voice company, we are just an operational layer company. Uh, that's all.

There you go. Uh, Sridhar, thanks for the presentation. Maybe fix your microphone because we keep hearing you like bang, bang, bang in the microphone, like, uh, We hear you breathe basically in the microphone, so move it away from your mouth.

Okay.

Mike, any questions or feedback for Sridhar?

So what was, when you were selling it to the dentist, I guess it was 17 clinics, what was kind of their initial response? How hard was it to get them to adopt and how long did it take to transition?

Yeah, I would say initially it was pretty tough because they didn't know what AI can do for them. And also in their mind, AI means voice. They didn't realize that the AI can do a lot of heavy lifting for them on the administrative side, be over any channel. Like you could actually do an engagement on the SMS side, the patient would engage them and you can do like a lot of workflows that are just administrative work. So just educating them and showing them that the results is what the conversion we had. Like a lot of them come with the mindset that, hey, this is like a chatbot or this is like a voice agent. Maybe the patient won't want to talk to it because, you know, the IVR systems, things like that, people hate it, like talking to machines. But these are actually adding a real value. They emote the emotion and they can act like a real staff. And as long as the narrative is changing, we are able to demonstrate with a value add that, hey, we are bringing like this much revenue and also the patients love it because they're available 24/7. And that's the conversions we have seen.

I, you know, I think that one of the biggest challenges with AI It's just like with, you know, uh, promoting on social media, uh, it's hard to kind of prove, you know, and you could look at kind of, and I think you have a, a pretty good, uh, sample with 17. It's somewhat valid, but I would say from a presentation standpoint, I would try to ground it a little bit more because there's ranges in there, and instead it should be a from-to. Here's what was happening before from a financial standpoint, and here's what the P&L looks like afterwards. Ranges kind of make someone say, well, is this real? Is this not? You know, maybe there's click-through, maybe there's not. Maybe there's engagement, maybe there's not. So the only thing I would suggest is ground to get a little bit more in reality, so it'll add to the credibility. Or else, or else it's going to be kind of like, okay, I could put this in place, but is it really saving me money, or is it just changing my business.

Makes sense. I think we are like 30 clinics now. Uh, we, we, we, we are— we're at 30 clinics managing close to 1 million interactions on our platform.

All right, let's go to the next one. Uh, Sridhar, disconnect your microphone because there's the wind thing that is super annoying.

Um, sorry about that.

I didn't see much about the competition because recently, a few days ago—

is it any better?

But my company called Patient Desk raised $4 million and they are doing exactly—

I can't hear you guys, I'm sorry.

Can you hear me, by the way?

Uh, yes, we can.

No, StreetArt, can StreetArt—

Can you guys hear me?

Yes, yes, we can.

Oops, it's super annoying, I can't hear you.

Uh, yeah, Patient Desk raised $4 million, it's a Y Combinator company and they're doing exactly what you've been doing. How are you going to differentiate from those guys? There are a lot of similar offerings in the market now.

Sridhar is off, let's go with the next founder, Nitesh, we're gonna bring you on stage a bit. Sridhar, you back?

Yeah, I'm back, sorry, sorry about that, I just plugged out the microphone and it didn't listen.

Okay, perfect, cool, repeat the question, Cam.

A few days ago, a Y Combinator company Patient Desk raised $4 million. They're doing exactly dental clinics. How are you gonna differentiate from those guys and also similar startups?

Yeah, sure.

I mean, there are a lot of startups. We, we started in 2023. We are not like a newbie. We understand the operations very well. And also our proposition is not just the voice. We actually handle multi-channel, which the others don't. And two, actually, we are— our workflows are very much embedded. Our AI understands the, the operational manager perspective, like the operators, providers, scheduling, and how the reactivations, how the treatment plans. We are very much embedded and our way is very customizable, and no one in the market provides that level of customization because we had early start and we worked with the DSO to understand their operations. So that's why even actually we replaced some of the competitors at two of our customers, mainly because of the, the amount of the depth workflow they're looking for because every clinic is different and every operation manager would want certain way. And we have seen from the competitors like RNE and Patientis, the churn rate is high. Like that's the feedback we get, whereas we don't have much churn rate.

Yeah. Okay, Sridhar, I totally got it. But then in that case, I think you better put this differentiation factor into the presentation.

Okay, sounds good.

Amanda, any feedback?

Of course. Hi, Sridhar. Thank you so much. I can tell you've put a ton of time, energy, and effort into this product, and it really shows. I also can imagine how this would scale beyond dentistry, offering a lot of promise for growth. My main question is more, more of a statement in alignment with your messaging and your branding. We know that AI is transformative for healthcare when it's used to augment human expertise. Do you have any messaging around a hybrid human-machine model? Do you have a way to protect your brand against AI hallucinations? And how do you position your product as supporting the actual patient experience versus making it more efficient for the care providers?

I mean, that's an excellent point though. Like you touched on some of the early problems with the technology, like especially in this case AI, the hallucination. We dealt with that in the very early stages of like using the models to like onboard the patients. It gets many things wrong. And as you know, these foundation models itself are like getting better, but also we add a lot of guardrails to take care of that. And as you know, like the healthcare is a little bit different. It's not like a regular retail where you can just have it go and running. This is like we sensitive, we deal with the PHI data, which is which is like, um, sensitive data. So we are— our stack is built such a way that the guardrails are present and the security present. We are HIPAA compliant and SOC 2. We double down on those when building the stack. And the operational layer combined with the agents that are like performative and also can handle the PIA data is what makes us different.

Step in, uh, any questions or feedback for—

yeah, yeah, Sridhar, I don't think you answered Amanda's question, at least not to my satisfaction. You, you know, you're, you need to be able to tell a story from the perspective of the end client in a moving human way that causes the dental owner to go, oh wow, this is really amazing for my clients, as well as, hey, it's also going to cut costs. And, you know, I think it's really important that you really give further thought to figuring out how you can communicate that, because continuing to talk about, you know, AI process and all that other stuff, it's all great, it's transformational, we get it. But, you know, and the other thing to Ken's question, right now it's a big enough market that you may not run into other competitors right away, but you will relatively soon. And, you're gonna need to find a better way to differentiate yourself rather than saying we're better, which is essentially the answer you gave, Ken. Our process was better. But everybody's gonna say that. So you have to find a better way to communicate that, that's gonna sound authentic, that's gonna sound believable. Because just saying, oh, we're better, and then throwing around a bunch of AI, we understand, you know, operations. Well, they're gonna all say they understand operations. So, look, I think you have something that adds a lot of very real value for them. But I think that, you know, if you're raising money to scale, what you're missing is the time invested to really think through the marketing and go-to-market component of your business plan, which has got to be, you know, approaching it from a very different perspective, which is really the client perspective, client experience, and the owner experience. There's no doubt that you have done a lot of work and have a very successful model already. With 30 different, you know, folks. The other thing is, I, and I don't know if I misread it, but I thought I saw a slide up there that said you're going to break even around 140— is it 140, uh, shops that you break even at, or 140 practices? Yeah. So I, I will also push back on that and say, you know what, the marginal return on something like this should be insanely high. So I don't understand, as somebody who uses automation and AI, how it can take 140 clients before you're breaking even on that. Because it's not like you, you know, you have, you know, millions in hardware that you had to, you know, to invent or create. I mean, the marginal cost of that should be a lot lower. So maybe you can address that because that's gonna, I think, really kind of raise people's eyebrows unless your cost of acquisition is just so high. But then that goes back to my question about what's your marketing plan. So just some feedback. I think you're gonna add a lot of value, but I wanna make your time on here worthwhile. And I think you've got some questions that would really help you if you could develop some better answers to.

Thank you.

Sridhar, any answers to that? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, that's great feedback. And I didn't actually touch on the GTM. You know that the pain point is really with the multi-clinic owners who are running these operations at scale. And those are our sweet spot. 2 clinic owner to like 10 clinic owner who would feel the pain of like running these operations at scale and where it can enable them for this, right? So that's our like, uh, like the ideal customer point of view going towards them. Um, and in terms of like, um, like how do we like— why the cost is so high? Well, actually when I say 140 clinics, um, it's actually like if you are taking one EDSO with the 10 clinics we may not need like 140 clients. It could— it is just probably like 10 clinic owners who has like these multi-clinics, and each clinic we charge close to like $600. So, so even with the 60% margin, that's what we want to break it because software costs are high. Not the software, because the model costs are high right now and the cloud costs are high. Along with that, the software engineering— because we're startup, we have like 8 people working on this problem, and the main, main cost of the staff cost So to break even, it would take that, uh, that stage like another 16 months.

Ron, any questions, comments?

Thank you.

I hate to pile on top of you, Sridhar. Like, that was, uh, I could be, I could be a little more forceful. I'm a little too forceful sometimes. I, uh, I'm, I'm gonna try to put a different way though, because just to make sure it gets through, you know, of course we all just think you're great. That's not personal. But, uh, yeah, I mean, you're your language is very unemotional. Like, you're just— we're getting a lot— I'm getting a lot of AI buzzwords. And that, when the people say I can't differentiate, it's because we hear those words all the time. And when you get out of the bubble and you'd realize that the only people who love you are investors, you gotta understand, these people are buying your services. They don't want their patients leaving because they're talking to a machine all the time. And people don't love phone, you know, telephone sort of like help people. You got— I mean, is AI different than that? In my experience, it's not that different when I'm on a chatbot or anything like that, or SMS. I know who I'm talking to. And so that, that customer delight is going to be your retention as you try to build out. And so that's why I think everybody here is hoping you'll take that super seriously. You have all of your, all of your productivity is in numbers and you've got a good ramp, which is fabulous. But everybody here wants to know why you have that ramp and is that ramp going to hold when you need to, when you need to go up 40, 50% a month in terms of revenue. Is it that the, are the dentists just talking to each other like, you know, you got to get on to this, it's much better than that, you know. It's got to sort of keep the patients knowing a little bit of love. And that's what I just want to amplify that.

I don't know, fair point. Actually, that's why I want to touch on one thing though. A lot of people think that AI is voice, which is plain wrong. The voice—

Yeah, but even SMS is not really warmer. It's not like I love talking to my— I'm on Claude hours a day. I don't love it.

No, I like—

I'm not one of these people who's going to kill myself. I'm going to be like, Thank God I'm done with that.

There are two parts to the story. One is the patient engagement part, which I think is— you guys are absolutely right, right? There's still people, some of the demographic doesn't still like talking to a machine. As soon as they hear, they cut the call. And that's not going— that's going to change the perception, right?

You gotta have to go— you know what, you got to rewind, and next time you pitch, you're just gonna have to do that better because it's, it's okay, it's fine not to pitch perfect, but It was missing and we'd need to hear the whole pitch again.

Any questions on your side or feedback?

Yeah, okay.

Yeah, I guess, uh, well, first of all, I think, uh, the opportunity is an interesting one. Uh, I would love to, you know, circle back, maybe spend some time with you on the deck and see if we can help you a little bit. But I guess one of my biggest questions always kind of goes towards like the moat, right? So what's with every dentist that you bring onto the platform Does the platform get better for every other dentist or is there some sort of flywheel or network effect?

Yeah, it is actually because some of the, okay, the workflows are a little bit harder to understand for the outside world and some of these workflows are very specific to the way you're running. Like if you're using one platform and solving that one workflow for a dentist, like enable, let's say we onboarded a few, a dental group yesterday, 7 dental groups. Group, we solved one workflow problem for him, like how do we activate root canals for a patient, certain procedures, identifying them and able to like reach out, reach out them for recare, activating them. And same workflow is applicable to now for all the other dental groups. So that's like a value unlock as we like add these workflows on our platform, that's gonna immediately unlock the existing customers as well.

All right, let's go to our next contender. We have Nitesh. Thank you for, uh, pitching on that one. Thank you to all the VCs. Nitesh, uh, can you show your screen, uh, so that I can bring it to the stage? There you go, stage is yours.

Hey guys, I'm Nitesh and we're raising— this is Alchemy. Alchemy is the partner stack to turn relationships into deals. For consulting partners. So a quick intro about me. So I grew up in Dangadi. It's a small town in the far western plains of Nepal. At 15, I became obsessed with getting into all 8 Ivies after I saw this BBC article about a kid who'd done it. The only problem was that none of my teachers knew about SATs, or they don't know what an Ivy League is. So I had to travel to the capital to buy books and prep myself. At 18, I got into Dartmouth. I went back during COVID and I built one of the region's first 3-story I-beam steel buildings to the point that we had to import a lot of the tool steel and the tool and welding part into the region. And prior to this, I was a consultant at Rollenberger. So today, the consulting pyramid is breaking. AI is eating the analyst tech with ChatGPT and research and Perplexity, uh, Dicks, Dick Building, all of that, which is analyst tech, is being eaten by so many different tools out there. Um, consulting is a unique business that's really sold on relationships. Uh, cold outreach isn't a huge thing. Um, it's all about whom do you know in your network, what problems do they have, and how can you help those people solve those problems or take some of the blame. And the problem is that partners cannot scale relationships because there's no stack there to scale that. Every partner should know about their key accounts, what issues they have, which people do they know in those key target companies that they can reach out to or any one of their partners can introduce them to so they can sell more projects. So the insights we found after building AI for consultants for more than 6 months is that increasing productivity is bad. That's because consultants are paid on utilization rate. So any AI that increases the utilization, increases the productivity, means that's less billable hours, which means that's lower utilization rate, and consultants hate that. So when you're selling any productivity-increasing tool, partners will actively block it because from, from, for their economics, it actually hurts the firm's long-term revenue. And so what's the solution? The solution is to sell partners what they want. It's to help partners map their network. It's to help them prep every target account before the meeting. And it's to help them sell more projects. And what does this look like then? It looks in a way, you know, taking apart all the different accounts that they have, key accounts, key targets, Understanding them in depth, understanding what their problems might be, reading a lot of SEC analyst reports, analyst calls, mapping out the org charts, influence maps, pairing them with the partners network, and then finding the warmest path and helping them prep for that. And so what Alchemy does is it helps partners find the warmest path into any account from the partners network. It helps them prepare for meetings in short amount of time. So in about 3 minutes they get a very dense meeting prep deck, prep brief that would take an analyst a couple of hours. And it is an always-on—

What's the 1-minute feature?

That's always spotting accounts that already move. And it does that by constantly learning everything as it goes. So over time really the brain, the firm becomes the mode. Because Alchemy is always learning. It has a graph of all the career board alumni project history, and from every meeting, every input you do, it updates its brain and its memory. So, um, why now? Because currently customers have no choice. There is AI stack for analysts, but there's no AI for partners. And now we have AI that can reason across private and public data. And so there's an internal mandate for partners to increase their revenue from 20 to 40%. And while the big firms have built internal AIs, there is a huge opportunity out there to build for boutiques that cannot build it themselves. That's the— it's a $300 billion plus industry with 30,000 firms. and we can target about $60 million in ARR. The team, um, go over this, um, you know, so the competition is that there's analyst tools, there's CRMs, there's Centric.ai, but there's nothing that kind of bridges all of this together and it's sort of purpose-built for consultants, uh, and for partners. So the team doing this is me and my co-founder, uh, That's us. My co-founder is an AI platform engineer at JPMorgan. Previously he was ML financial docs at Orpheus. And I'm a former consultant myself. I run a blog at Chris Montlet and I've done AI consulting for a year now. And so the axe is we have, we're building the operating layer for the next decade of consulting. We're raising $1 million at a $10 million post-money SAFE to get to 20 paying customers in 18 months. We have a working product, we have a lot of interest, we are actively negotiating LOIs. We have interviewed over 50 consulting partners, and raising this helps us, you know, go to the next milestone of 20 firms, um, in about 3 to 4 months, an FTE to help scale the sales part and increase our GTM.

With that, let's go with the judges. Uh, Mike, any questions or thoughts here? You're muted.

It's an interesting, um, thanks for sharing. Um, it's an interesting dilemma, which is that AI makes us more more productive. And so hence we spend less time getting the same thing done. And so now the objective then begins— it's really kind of two options. One is charge more because, you know, charge for the output. Um, at the end of the day, the fact that I can do it more productively shouldn't matter. But if you're on a fee-based, of, uh, hourly type of system, that's hard. That's hard to do because that would be lack integrity if you didn't do that properly. Or the other objective or fix which you're coming up with, which is to get more productive also on getting more business. And so the more product— you know, in other words, get more, even more productive is kind of what you're saying. So if I'm reading it right, I think if I step back for a second, I think that when you were presenting, like if you presented that that deck, and this is just directness. If you presented that deck to Bain or to Andersen or, or, you know, even some of the small, which is probably you're going for something maybe smaller in terms of the consulting houses, they would look at that deck and go, if my, if my interns or my college recruits, my MBAs that I brought in from Dartmouth sent, you know, sent me that, I'd say, get out of here, get it right. You know, I think there just needs to be more I think the problem needs to be set a little bit clearer. I think there needs to be some visuals. I think it needs to be more of a consultant-type deck to communicate to consultants. So that's at that level. But then I think also there's got to be a way, um, if it's even true, to better position that because we're becoming more productive, that means that we— our billing is getting smaller per job. So therefore we need to be even more productive to be able to get even more more jobs. And to me, it's not completely packaged in a way where it's making sense. And I understand that's great that you have LOIs, and that's wonderful. Uh, be interesting to see kind of what they're expecting, because I would say, you know, give me some— I, I wouldn't expect you to make me more productive as if it was kind of an earnout type of situation. I would say you need to prove that you can raise my revenue. And I thought, were you going initially, and then I'll shut up, but I thought where you were going initially, Nitesh, was that this is a way to kind of externally bring in business even outside of my house, right? Even outside of the partners that I have in my house, to be able to somehow bring in people externally in a very productive way that fits into ergonomically to the projects I'm already doing. So me, it didn't get all the way there. So I didn't completely walk away going, I get it, I understand the problem. And this solution hits the nail dead on the head. But that could just be me.

Can any questions or comments for Nitesh?

Yeah, just comment, to be honest, like, the problem definition is quite spot on, I think, like, likes of McKinsey and all that consulting companies are bleeding now. But at the same time, Y Combinator recently at this final batch, like a call for startups, and one of the categories that they invited is like service companies.

AI native service companies.

Which, yeah, which used to be not scalable, but they think now thanks to AI, like advertising agencies, etc., can turn into really highly scalable companies. I think it might worth looking into it. But good problem definition. And then at the end, like a big claim, like becoming the operating layer for the consulting business. But in between, it wasn't convincing, Tesh. Like, I didn't see like a unique solution or approach. I didn't see the connect from the problem to the ultimate goal. To be honest. If you're raising now, I mean, to be honest, I don't think you'll be able to raise from, you know, investors who don't know you. If you're raising now, you're probably raising from people who already know you, who already trust you, think that you're a smart guy and your brother, etc. But otherwise, I think you really have to fill that gap from the beginning to the end to convince investors.

Amanda, any questions, feedback?

I do. I have a very similar feedback. I will say I appreciated your story arc. I heard problem, insight, solution, your product, and why now. So it's easy to follow. I think I left with more questions than answers. So instead of echoing the feedback that you just heard, I will say I am a consultant who is interested in turning my relationships into deals. So again, I'm likely your target audience here. Uh, this is an operating system for consulting firms and it consolidates everything from pipeline to outreach. What does the final product look like? How would somebody like me touch it? I'm looking for like the tangible experience and how this can truly save me time and make me more money. That being said, I think it's a cool solution. I wish you the absolute best of luck. I am— this is a product that I absolutely could use and rely on. I'm missing that use case. I'm looking for that tangible experience to know that this is worth my time.

Any questions, feedback?

Yeah, uh, Nitesh, I, I feel like you've got a, uh a high-integrity soul as a human being, and you really want to make a difference. And so I'm going to say this: don't waste your time on a losing industry. I think so many consultants somehow manage to get paid for doing shit. I absolutely— it's unbelievable. And, and they have so many integrity problems today that they're in trouble. And they're arrogant. They think they know more than you. And so I think that you're not going to get their attention unless you have a solution for their bigger problem, which is their model is in trouble. Okay. My daughter is currently working for a very high-end strategic consulting firm as a co-op. And every time she asks people above her questions and she was excited about this aspect for mentorship, she doesn't get it. Instead, they just say, oh, just ask ChatGPT. And I think it's gonna route to your point, the whole base layer of that deal, and they're not gonna be able to charge in the same way. So they need to reinvent themselves. I think you have bigger fish to fry. There's people like Amanda in many different industries who are gonna say, hey, how can I use your superpowers or your vision for this, which I think we need a little more definition on per her comments, to help us think more broadly about who we can do the next deals with. Because that may not be specific just to consulting, but to any kind of a service business that's out there to grow. So I would just stop completely, rethink how you can take your superpowers and redeploy them to help people grow their business. But I wouldn't focus specifically on consulting firms.

Amazing feedback. I'll add one small comment there. If you ever have time, you should hit me up on LinkedIn because there I explain why I'm doing this.

And of course, reach out to me, be happy to connect with you.

Yeah, yeah.

Questions, comments?

So I just want to say, like, this is the most amazing feedback round I've seen yet on Spark Tank. Uh, great job. I think if you really listen to this, you can come out with a killer deck if you can deal with all of this.

Yeah.

I'm gonna add one little thing though, is that I also am not sure about the technology behind it. It almost sounds like a meme system like Cloud Memory or a RAG system that's just storing and accessing all the document customer documents and sort of creating customer timeline for CRM type value. Yeah, I'd like to, I just wanna make sure it's something that's actually something that can't be knocked off too fast by somebody else. I mean, you can get a moat by getting ahead of them, but these days you wanna know.

Just one idea, Nitesh, like I wish I had specifically a bot that trolled all of our data and every day said, hey, here are 10 contacts that you don't know, people you don't know, but you're one or two steps removed by, and here's the logic for each of them, why I think you, you could help them, or there's an angle to get in front of them or something. That'd be crazy. Based on— based on— wouldn't that be amazing?

That'd be incredible.

How would it work? LinkedIn, exactly. LinkedIn network through an API, like you have to scrape. It's all kinds of nasty things involved.

Yeah.

Any questions or feedback?

Yeah, no, I thought— I guess my main question was, well, how big can this get? Like, what's the, what's the, like, top-line market size of this if you do win?

I'll leave that question to the VCs who know more than me about that.

Well, I mean, I, I think— I, I mean, in my view, the market size question is arguably perhaps the most important one. So I think you should try and get your head around that one. Um, but also I'll follow up with some feedback as well in the deck, and I'll summarize a lot of the comments that were made on this call. But yeah, it seems my instincts say that this could be massive if you win, but it'd be good to get a sense of what that— how big that win could be.

Yeah, let's go to our last contender. Uh, thanks, uh, Nitesh, for the pitch. Let's go with, uh, Simon, uh, or our friend Simon, friend of the pod, client. Simon, uh, let's see if you— we can see your screen. Let me—

yeah, yeah, how are you?

Yeah, I'm good. Just that your screen for some reason— yeah, showing. Let's see again. There you go.

Yeah, got it, got it.

Nice.

Yeah, thanks, Charles. Hi, VCs, my name's Simon. Look, I'm here to pitch X-Vision AI. So X-Vision AI is essentially software-defined infrastructure. So the device on the right here has perception built in, it has compute built in, and it has action built in. So this thing can see, can think about traffic, and can, can act in real time. So why is that important? That's important because of this headline. Right, there's 1.35 million lives lost every year on roads, and that's just not acceptable in anybody's language. This number is actually coming down, and the latest stats are a little bit lower. So it means that the road authorities and the, you know, the people that are making decisions are, you know, the decisions they're making are working. But the problem is they can't scale that solution. Uh, you know, to upgrade an intersection, to add in, uh, the safety aspects, uh, costs about $1.4 million in Australia. In the US, it's very similar and takes 18 months. So it's 18 months of disruption, uh, on the roadways, 18 months of disruption, you know, causing commuters additional congestion, increasing the safety aspect or increasing the risk for that 18 months while the roadworks are taking place. So you know, that whole model is not sustainable. We can't scale out safety aspects or safety solutions fast enough to actually make a big dent in that $1 million lives or 1 million lives lost that I was describing earlier. So that's where our product comes in. The lifetime value per intersection of this product is $355,000. So I'd love to jump into, you know, the detail behind this, but we just don't have enough time on this pitch. But essentially that value comes from a hardware refresh. We've got the hardware that I described earlier is replaced a couple of times throughout the 25 years. There's a software subscription. And there's also data services. So this is analytics and those sorts of things that come along with it. The product is profitable from day one. And really, this product is, you know, hardware is the wedge in that, you know, the hardware gets us onto the pole, it gets us that slot on the pole or on that intersection for the 25 years. But software is the business. The, you know, the real revenue drivers and the real profitability in this business comes from comes from software. So a little bit about myself. I've been involved in certification of products for a long time and have done this on a lot of road, a lot of road products in the past. I've got a bit of a challenge with my pitch this morning. I've also got kids getting up and, and having breakfast and moving around. It's early time here in Australia. But essentially why that's important is because that background in certifications really produces our moat. So this product needs to be certified to get onto these poles, uh, or to, to actually enable a lot of, uh, the more valuable use cases and the more valuable software modules. So where we have today competing for small pilots and innovation budgets, as soon as we achieve certification, we can enable the modules like enforcement and speed and red light cameras. We can enable a whole heap of more, a whole heap of modules that actually really flip our revenue. So our, you know, our IRR turns from something like $4,000 a year to something like $14,000 a year and more in many use cases. So the lifetime value just increases. This is really our inflection. We're at a point today where the product is profitable standalone, the company is profitable standalone, but we need to get this certification to flip from being, you know, a profitable business to something that's wildly successful and, you know, able to be deployed really, really easily. And the key to this is getting that certification flips us from being from competing on innovation budgets and for trying to seek out new funding within you know, the road authority's budgets to being part of their existing OpEx budgets. So as soon as we get that certification, we are now replacing the existing sensors that are on this roadway, replacing the existing infrastructure that's on this roadway with a single unit that's much easier to deploy, much easier for the, you know, the teams to do that deployment. They're no longer taking 18 months, they're getting it done immediately, but we're also then tapping into their OpEx budgets. Today we're closer to 200 live deployments. This deck was put together a couple of months ago, so we've probably doubled from where we were. Here we're putting about 10 to 15 of these in every, every couple of weeks, although we're trying to keep small at this stage until we get certification, because we're just— scaling without certification is increasing risk. So our current fleet value is somewhere around $10 million. That $10 million, as soon as we achieve certification, flips into $25 million because we can enable those software modules that we currently cannot enable— the, you know, the enforcement modules, some of the other safety modules. Competitive landscape— there's a lot of other guys. It's a fairly competitive market. But if you look at all of these columns throughout this slide, You know, these are all of the existing product solutions. We can compete on a one-to-one with all of these players in the top here. The thing that they cannot compete on is we do all of these functions with one product. That's xVision AI. That's my pitch, Charles. Yeah, no problem.

Can, any feedback for Simon or questions here? Yeah, sure.

Simon, thank you for the presentation. Like, you pretty much built everything for getting this certification, you know, it's like the breaking point for you guys. But the thing that I didn't really understand is like you said you're operational in 6 countries and probably each country will require different certifications. Also, the part that I didn't really understand, you showed the value creation for one unit, but is this problem applicable to different geographies from US to Europe? And whether, you know, what's going to be the total available market with reference to this one unit value add or savings? In that regard? That, that's the part that I didn't see. And also, you have a damn heavy competition from really established companies, and I wonder if you talk to them, try to partner with them, try to use them or piggyback them as a supplier, and what were their feedback? That, that's the part that I, I'm curious of.

Yeah, well, there's a lot to pitch in a couple of minutes, so some of the answers to some of your questions are definitely there. It definitely, it is a competitive market. However, we have a lot of engineering advantages over many of these other competitors. Therefore, I feel as though we'd be able to take them on. And I mentioned it at the end, we can take them on one-on-one in their own domains and compete. What they can't compete with us on is we're able to flip domains. So we're able to replace 2 or 3 of these guys with our one product. So yes, you've got, you know, NoTraffic, which is, you know, $70 million, just raised $70 million, uh, you know, to do analytics at traffic lights. We can do that, but they can't do the immediate control, they can't do the speed and red light camera, um, you know, enforcement. So, you know, being able to do all of those things is, is really our, our edge. Um, our moat comes from that certification. So you're right, in each country there is a different certification My background is in certification of engineering products, and I know ways to accelerate that process and accelerate that program and keep the cost of that, that whole program low. Once we get that, that's the mode.

Any questions, Steph, or comments?

Simon, really, What I like about your product is it's easy to understand what it is and what you're doing and easy to understand what an upgrade it is from kind of the 1950s infrastructure that seems to govern a lot of our intersections. I think if, if there's a way to tell the story in a little bit more of a telling story way when it comes to the company what we're trying to raise, you know, here's what it's for, but here's kind of the bigger picture. Like, for example, one of the things that went through my head is, well, you mentioned 35 years. Well, I don't know what the world's going to look like in 35 years. I don't know that streets may be a concept in 35 years. We may be transporting in the air over the street, you know. There may, you know, the whole— there's so many things that could potentially change That is hard for me to think as an investor, 35 years, but I love the fact that you've said you're already profitable, that you can give me some credible ways that you're going to be increasing value. Um, and, and so I think you need to focus a little bit more on kind of the near term. If you go too far out, I think that's going to add some risk that just takes away from the strengths of what you have right now. Um, and, uh, but I, I think you've got a really great product. You'd be happy to talk about I'd love to, you know, talk with you offline and, you know, maybe give you suggestions on a few things you can do to even further strengthen your pitch. But really high value. And I think the governments today do a very, very bad job of fully utilizing information as it relates to traffic. And I think there's some huge potential at a systemic level, like I'm just thinking in the US of how traffic patterns and traffic information and saving lives and so many different elements could be heightened by upgrading the overall infrastructure, but we don't have the budget for it. So I think the other thing you need to do is think about, okay, we're assuming we're going to get this much money, but what if, what if just privately— this is what I would be telling you in private, not part of your public pitch, but privately— how, how could you do it for like a quarter of the amount and still make really good money? You know, if governments are suddenly facing significant budget cuts, how could you? Because I think they're going to need what you do. But I would encourage you to really think through some pretty big— think through kind of from a chess standpoint, the potential for some really good changes, but some also big challenging changes. And the good news is I think you have the fundamentals there to figure out answers to those, but I would really want to know that you've done that thinking before I wrote a check as an investor.

Mike, any questions, feedback?

Yeah, I think, I think it's a big idea. I think it's also a definitely a window of time idea. You know, I mean, 30 years is not a long time. It also saves a lot of money in this infrastructure that everybody's having to upgrade because it's all old and tired. I think these intelligent transportation systems are new and exciting, at least in the States. I'll give you an example. In Monterey. They just, uh, there's big news that they just did when I was on Highway 68 in Monterey to try to manage all that, all that traffic. And I love that it saves lives, it does. And I love that it saves money, it does. And, um, and, and, um, but, but I believe that there— and you know better than me, I mean, that one slide with all the, all the competition, you can't see, but me because, um, but that one slide, uh, that, that's critical. And I think, uh, hit home a little bit harder. I mean, take a victory lap there that you have one device versus, you know, it's 1 to 5 or 1 to 4. That's a big deal in terms of it makes us maybe a little bit less expensive. It's not probably 20% or 25% of what the 5 costs, but it's probably maybe 30 or 40, so you're saving 60. What does that mean? And, and I would go as fast as you can because these are going to start— I mean, I think this is going to start happening everywhere.

Amanda, any questions or comments?

Yes, well done. I think this is a very sophisticated pitch and it has real-life application, and you did a great job exemplifying that. I have to find something, right? So the, the question that I'm left with is autonomous driving expected to reach significant and large-scale adoption by 2030, 2035, with a majority of cars being self-driving by the late '30s, early '40s. How does your technology evolve with this trend of autonomous driving? Is this a temporary fix, or are you going to start to really integrate with these systems as well? Because, because I think future-proofing proofing is going to be huge for your positioning.

Yeah, Amanda, actually it's something we've already thought about, and we've already got the vehicle-to-everything communications built in there. And there's other use cases beyond what we're talking about here that we can bring online as those— what would I say— as those trends evolve. But yeah, great point.

Yeah.

Sunny, any questions, comments?

No, I'm good.

I've asked questions in the past, so I think I've got my answers. Yeah, good job.

Um, let's announce a winner, guys. Uh, so we're gonna bring everyone on stage, or as many people as we can on stage. Uh, Sunny, I'm just gonna leave you out for that one, bring you after that. Um, uh, yep, let's start, uh, with, uh, Can. Can, uh, who was your favorite pitch today?

Uh, to be honest, like, uh I mean, all of them were great. This is my first time, by the way, uh, announcing that, but I think Adam and Simon were quite good and convincing in that regard. Um, I will say Adam, let's say.

Yeah, I'd say Simon as well on my side, and Adam. I think, uh, Sridhar and Nitesh will work on their presentation presentation. So there's like a lot of potential there. Uh, Stefan, any, uh, favorites today?

Uh, I would— I think the best pitch would be Adam, but Simon's got a really strong business, and I think a few tweaks and it would be a— you know, he'd be right at the top.

Mike, muted.

Sorry about that.

I think Adam— I think your presentation was very clear, very concise. You know, big idea. Simon, I think your idea has so many benefits. And, you know, I think it's hard, like you said, to do all of that in such a short period of time. But I think those two took the COVID off the ball as far as I'm concerned.

Ron, any favorites for today?

Well, you know, I've seen Simon pitch before, but I want to sort of just say, like, he really worked it pretty hard. This time is much better. Better. So I'm gonna vote for Simon just to sort of illustrate that, you know, come around again, it's gonna really help you.

Amanda, who is your favorite?

I think it's a tie between Simon and Adam. Both did incredible, great pitches.

Simon, you listened to a couple of pitches, uh, which one was your favorite?

Yeah, I like them all. Uh, I think I caught the end of Adam's, but it sounded fairly convincing to me, so Adam You, uh, you've taken it today.

It's the Aussies today, mate.

He got us— he got a sale today too because I just bought one.

Yeah, no, thank you for that.

Thanks for that, Adam. Any, any favorites, uh, today from the pitch you listened to?

Yeah, I, um, I'm definitely gonna reach out to Simon. I really enjoyed that, um, as well. I thought that was— it's always good to to see a hardware play in pitches. And I must admit, I mean, there's a bit more hardware going out there in pitches at the moment, so I really get it, really like getting an understanding of how people are communicating that, especially around the moat. So yeah, well done.

Nitesh, any favorite on your side from the pitches you listened today?

I'm assuming I can't vote for myself, but I think Adam had a pretty interesting pitch, so I go with Adam. It's the Aussies today, as he said.

Yeah, thanks for showing up today. Thanks for having the courage. Uh, Sridhar, any favorites today?

Yeah, I mean, it's a lot to learn from Adam's and Simon's presentation. I loved both of them. Um, that's all.

There you go.

I'm gonna just bring Sunny real quick. Sunny, any winners, uh, on your side today?

Sunny did an amazing job.

There you go. All right, well, thanks everyone for showing up today. The next edition next week of Spark Tank is, uh, next Tuesday, Tuesday, 4:30 PM EST. Thanks for