Charles Cormier hosts six founders pitching startups at Spark Tank, including an AI employee platform, surgical head displays, and an energy-efficient hardware company called Axel Plaas. Investors including Sean Nasiri and Stephan Whitwell grill them on product-market fit, go-to-market strategy, and defensibility.
Chapters
Welcome to the 8th edition of Spark Tank. Lots of founders today, 7 founders and 6 VCs that are gonna present their startups, and the VCs are gonna give them a quick question and answer. So 3 minutes per founder, 1.5 per VC feedback and questions, and hopefully we should get checks flowing today. So without further ado, I'll bring the team on today, both founders and VCs. So Ilya, a quick introduction about yourself.
Hello, Charles. Thank you very much for organizing this great event. My name is Ilya. I'm the founder of Comback Mobility, and I'm going to present my technology today. Can you see, can you see my screen now?
Uh, no, no need to share it. Uh, we're introducing first Marin. A quick introduction about yourself.
Yeah, hi, I'm Marin Boyd Andrews. I'm from Brisbane, Australia, and I run an AI platform platform for ready-to-use AI employees. I've been developing it for about a year and a half.
Jamie, a quick intro about yourself.
Yeah, I am Jamie Lockwood. I am CEO and a co-founder of a company called HMDMD. We make high-fidelity 3D/4K wearable displays for surgeons to use during— in the operating room.
There you go. Um, Brent, a quick intro about yourself.
Yeah, I'm Brent Williams, and I'm the co-founder and CEO of a company called Haptek Holdings. That produces products, uh, that is audio-based haptic feedback.
Sharif, quick intro about yourself.
Hi everybody, Sharif Bennett, co-founder of Cineblock. Cineblock is an equity crowdfunding platform that specializes in entertainment IP.
Dana, quick introduction about yourself.
I'm Dana Klein. I'm the CEO and co-founder of a company called George. We're a mental health app democratizing therapy for children.
Misha, you're muted.
Hello everyone, my name is Misha. I'm co-founder of a new startup called Attune, which is the wisdom of demand— wisdom on demand for people.
Mike.
Hi everyone, I'm Mike Peña, CEO at Lakehill. We are a cybersecurity company that uses AI to help organizations stop hackers in their tracks.
Axel?
Yeah, my name is Axel Plaas. I'm the founder and CEO of a semiconductor company, fabulous semiconductor company in fact, named Abacus Semi, and we are making chips and processors that make AI a lot more energy and instruction efficient.
Perfect.
So that was the founders for today. I'm gonna bring all the investors on stage for a quick introduction about themselves. So let's start with my partner Sunny. Sunny, a quick intro about yourself.
Hey everyone, co-founder here at Raz Rocket with Charles. Happy to be here. Uh, been in Bitcoin for 10 years, robotics for 10 years, and then AI for the last 3 or 4. Happy to be here.
Bryce, uh, quick intro.
Hey everyone, I'm from the Cal Innovation Fund. We invest in startups with usually deep tech advantages, and then we donate back to Cal.
Sean.
Hey, Sean Nasiri here from JAS Ventures. We are a single-family office, uh, with the family based in Abu Dhabi. We are a multi-stage, uh, sector agnostic fund, uh, besides direct-to-consumer.
Steph.
Hey, I'm Stephan Whitwell, uh, in Austin, Texas, and the founder of a nationwide wealth management firm, uh, insurance agency, a tax planning firm and a co-founder with Charles of a venture capital firm called Mach 10.
Michael?
Michael's reconnecting, but can you hear us, Mike? While you get your setup, we'll just go to the first founder, Ilya, bringing you on stage here with your presentation. Let's go.
Thank you, Charles. Yeah. Hello everyone. My name is Ilya. I'm currently located in Texas, San Antonio. So hello to VC from Austin. We help patients get rid of crutches faster and avoid reparations. Each year, 3.5 million Americans break a lower limb. Too much load can break fixation. Too little load can delay healing and lead to reparation. As a result, nearly $55 billion is lost, not to surgery, but to preventable complications. We use CT scan-based finite element analysis to calculate what load can expedite healing without compromising fixation. Then our app and smart crutch tips guide and measure every step in real time, and then our AI monitors compliance and contacts patients if they don't follow prescriptions. Let's see how it works.
Following instructions, the patient installs the SmartCrutch Tips and syncs them to the app via Bluetooth. After pairing the devices, the specific weight-bearing program is activated. Now it is in the patient's phone and in the SmartCrutch Tips. Step softer.
Step harder. This is a market-ready medical device, Class II, 510 exempt, ISO-manufactured, peer-reviewed, patented, and already helped more than 300 patients to recover faster. A randomized clinical trial at NYU Langone showed that patients using our SmartCrutch tips on average has 74% compliance with weight-bearing prescriptions versus just 21% in the control group which is the standard of care. Together with Professor Wijde Glaad, we initiated 3 randomized clinical trials across 16 hospitals and 31 orthopedic surgeons to validate faster bone healing. And what we see so far in tibia fractures managed with our method, patients stop using crutches by week 6 with healing visible by week 12. Under standard of care, patients stop using crutches by week 10 and healing is visible by week 24. So with our solution, people get rid of crutches a month faster and heal twice faster. We have 20 letters of intent engagement with more than 30 hospitals and early interest from major strategics. It is not just a healing tool, it is a money printing machine for clinics. They can purchase one device for $3,500 and with existing CPT codes earn more than $10,000 within 2 years. We start with high-needed fracture cases and expand as evidence and reimbursement unlock much larger market. To become acquisition ready, we need 3 milestones: complete clinical trials, obtain reimbursement, and integrate with 2 healthcare systems. I build the company through product regulatory, clinical trials, and manufacturing execution. Mike brings Orthopedic go-to-market and scaling experience, and Wider brings world-class bone healing science. Early adoption driven by innovative surgeons at level 1 trauma hospitals. We have raised $3.5 million so far and need another half million to complete clinical trials and obtain reimbursement. Thank you for your time. I'm ready to answer your questions.
Man, I love that, how crisp it was. Uh, probably the crispest, uh, pitch we've seen. Sean, any questions or feedback for Ilya?
Um, it sounds super interesting. Uh, I love that we're going to see a bunch of hardware companies today. Um, overall, yeah, very clean pitch. I think the, the pain point is fairly clear. Uh, I think the price tag sounds a lot higher than I was going to expect for it to be, but I mean, it sounds like you're going through doctors, which means it's going to be primarily covered by insurances. And then the whole plan is that they're going to be able to get it back and continue reusing it.
Yes, exactly. You got the point. It's not just one-time use device, it's reusable device. So clinics can just buy two pairs. It looks like this.
Yeah, so the hospitals and the clinics are the ones who, who own it and they just rent it out to their—
correct, correct. And they just bill the insurance companies for remote push patient monitoring, initial biofeedback training, and device setup. There are three existing CPT codes that they can build.
And then just kind of last question on the tech side of things, um, essentially what is the, the X-ray is like uploaded into your AI application and that's how the AI judges how much pressure over how long, or is the doctor responsible for sort of coming up with the plan that the app tracks? How does that all work?
It's— thank you for your question, but it's much, much, much more complicated So there is extra-articular fractures that allow to go with weight-bearing prescriptions according our foundation, and we don't need any X-rays. We just the only device that can let patients go with the current prescription is 10 to 15 kilo. How patients can figure out what does it mean put 20% of kilo? There are some fractures cases that we need to continue collecting data and then we collaborate with the AO Foundation is the world organization who provide the standards of care and they changing the standards according data-driven results. So we developed just the only device in the whole world that can measure all weight-bearing and steps from the surgery to the full recovery. So we just changing the standards of care. Thank you.
There you go. Steph, any questions or feedback for Ilya?
So Ilya, great use of visuals to show the size of the market. Love how quickly and clearly you showed how your product works. I think you did that fast. And probably one of the best we've ever seen so far on Spark Tank. So well done. That said, you need to get a bright light. Your screen looks very dark. I think that's an important investment to make. On the plan itself question, could you give us a little more color on like the valuation and what's your big picture? Are you building it to sell in 2 years, 5 years, or to cash flow it, or, you know, what's kind of the plan? So I think from an investor standpoint, it's really helpful to kind of have a sense of what am I investing in exactly and What's the big picture plan? You don't have to give me all the details of it yet, but draw me a picture that's going to make me interested so that I want to then find out the rest of that.
For sure. We have raised $3,550,000 so far. It was raised by investors, by Techstars. I'm an alumni of Techstars, and also we have VC from New York City, from Ukraine, and Cyprus. Uh, the previous— the last valuation was $15 million. We have— we accept convertible loan and, uh, and SAFE agreements. Um, $15 cap— $15 million cap was the last valuation. We, we need to raise an additional half a million with the same valuation, and we, we're trying to integrate our solution to UT Health. We're already there. Um, regarding the, um, the last funding that is needed is half a million just to finish the clinical trials that we are doing right now. It, it will take, um, with the, with the current speed of, of the, of the patient enrollment, it will finish by March 2028. And that's why not many investors want to invest at the clinical trial stage because it takes so long. But we're actively working to expedite this process, and I, I, I I think we will, we will improve it. But the current stage shows us that it's better to apply for grants because a lot of grants funding this kind of stuff. But we are open to, to get money from grants or investors and just be able to complete these clinical trials. And then with this clinical evidence, we will be able to easily obtain clinical reimbursement. And then I already spoke with the CEO of Stryker and other C-level management of biggest companies who might acquire us, but all they need is the clinical research that have to be published in well-known journal. Without this data, they cannot.
Ilya, thanks. Sunny, questions or answers?
Yeah, I guess just a short one is, how do you see this expanding beyond kind of tibia fractures, right, into other orthopedic recovery?
Absolutely. A, there are a lot of, a lot of lower limb injuries like mini scars, revisional hip and knee replacements, ACL reconstruction, limb lengthening, a lot of different markets. But unfortunately, medicine is a data-driven business. So first you have to provide clinical evidence, and then insurance will reimburse you each, each single case. So we decided to focus on the biggest need where the complications is the most expensive, which is tibia, which is long bone fractures, tibia and femur. We want to become a standard of care in the, in this niche and then expand.
There you go.
Bryce, I believe you have a couple of medtech investments if I remember well. Any questions or feedback for Ilya?
Um, yeah, I just want to dive into the regulatory approval process and see how we could help there. And then, um, everyone asked already if you're looking for grants. I think grants would be good. And then knowing what your runway is.
Yeah, regarding— thank you for a question regarding the regulatory. Fortunately, we are 510 exempt, so we already passed even FDA inspection. So it's pretty easy was for us. Yeah, we spend a lot of time to implement our quality management system. We develop our manufacturing from scratch, so we know all the details in, in the— and we look forward for the Elon Musk's robotics to, to expand manufacturing here in Texas with a local grants.
Mike, any questions or comments?
Yeah. Can you guys hear me okay?
Yes.
Yeah. I was having some technical issues, so I apologize for that. Um, and I didn't introduce myself. Mike Fineman, M&A, Texas Business Brokers, and then other projects that we don't need to get into now. Ilya, I think, I think you have a great, great idea here. I agree with all the, all the comments, uh, to date. I think that, you know, what you want to do is be clean, crisp, especially for what you're doing, so you want your presentation in terms of the light in front of you and what you wear. Think about all those things. They're super, super important. I get feedback on it all the time, so you should too, but I think it's good feedback to improve. I also think that your deck's almost there. I think you could tighten it up some. I think you might be able to go a few more, a few fewer slides, and I would just do a headline like the one slide that you were talking about in terms of the number of months in terms of recovery, you know, there's a 50% improvement there, and then the other, the other piece was a 40% improvement. So you want to have kind of a tagline that says 40 to 50% improvement on that slide. And so as you hit each slide in your elevator pitch, you can say, "That's huge, 40 to 50% improvement," and then you can move on to the next slide. So they capture the essence of each one, you're a technician, so you're going to have a lot more there and you want to have a little bit less and everything needs to be hard-hitting.
Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Elia. Let's go to the second founder because we have many today. So next up on stage, uh, we have Marion here. Uh, Marion, uh, we can see your screen loud and clear. Stage is yours.
Awesome, thank you very much. Um, our business is built on, uh, like a suite of AI employees that are ready to use for business. We found the biggest challenges that we had experienced, especially during my time at Microsoft. We got early access to AI, and I quickly realized that businesses and people didn't have time to learn AI, let alone prompt engineering and the like. So we built a platform of ready-to-use AI employees that they can work with straight away. We're very human-focused first. A lot of AI is working on the idea of automating everything in the background, but we're finding a lot of employees are falling behind. They don't know how how to talk to it, how to learn the tools, and how to get involved with the AI itself. So we keep the human in the loop with what's going, and these AI employees work right beside their team so they can interact, talk with them, and communicate with the AI employees as they work. All our AI employees are trained on 90 hours, plus they're tested for another 30 hours. So they're highly skilled in either an industry, profession, or a particular skill that they're actually trained in. They all have vision, voice, and text. You can talk with them with natural voice. You can also interact with them in a sense where if you're working with one particular employee and they're not skilled in that, that AI employee will pass you on to another AI employee to keep the conversation going. They're built for founders through to employees. We have a lot of founders that love us because they go, we can't afford a marketer, we can't afford an HR person. So what we find is that they use our AI employees and enterprises are using us when they've got, say, 4 in finance, 6 in HR, 7 in talent, and they go, we'll use the platform and actually grab all the employees and actually put them across the business. They all interact with the business suite itself as well. So we found the biggest challenge, and this is through a lot of my background, I was running global teams in really large corporations, and the employees are really stuck in the guessing game. They were guessing with AI, but we found with having trained AI employees that sit beside them and work with them that they're able to get the real answers out of it and have perfectly structured information right beside them and talk with the AI employees as they go through. Low adoption was the biggest time companies were finding that they were wasting time and people had a lot of missed productivity with what they were doing. Also, our employees are there to answer work and work beside you so that people don't have to understand the tool. They simply jump on the platform and they're ready to start having a conversation with the employees. Working alongside the AI employee means that we're keeping that human in the loop scenario, and businesses are loving it because they're struggling with developing their teams and upskilling them and all the rest. But we eliminate that by just giving them ready-to-use AI. Our AI, like I said, our employees work alongside your team in a sense where not only can they work alongside the team, they can pass within the teams. So think of it like an infrastructure of AI employees within its own business. They can pass along to one another and your conversation just keeps moving. The interface is a big seller for us. We find a lot of people when they see it, they understand it, they go, "Oh great, that's easy to see." We've made it very interactive so they can talk with the voice, add files. The AI can also talk back to them. We have a lot of businesses They love that because we have vision-impaired people or the like. So we bring diversity inclusion into that. The interface is very, very easy for people to get around. Our own employees basically work as an employee also within the business. So not only are they working as an employee for the company, they also have the ability to have something structured beside them. And the employees love it because their teams are then being upskilled at the same time, also interacting with the AI to actually have policies or procedures or documents built into the business the AI already knows about. They're built for capacity, like I said. So like I said, whether it's founders, small business, or enterprise, we find that the founders are very, very attracted to it because it's a saving on cost for them. Small businesses usually smash with their team and they've got no capacity within their team. This speeds up workflows. So something would take, say, 3 or 4 hours to do, the AI employee can do it in 30 seconds for them. We validated this. We need— where we are now, we know that we've built 27 AI employees. There's another 16 in production at the moment. They won't be released until they do the 90 hours of training. Uh, the market demand is really, really clear. Every time we show these to businesses, they sort of go, wow, this is great, we didn't realize this product was available. So we found that really where we're sitting right now is out around market demand and getting it out there and letting people know that this is available to the businesses. The opportunity is really simple for us. We're looking for that capital strategy, and the use of the funds will obviously be broken down into expanding it further in marketing and also developing the team. We currently sit with about 8 developers working in different parts of the platform. We have major milestones ahead. We have a lot of companies offering to white label our company. We're not looking at that. We're looking at an exit strategy probably within about 8 years. But the revenue model is pretty straightforward. We run on subscription, so they get a subscription, and from that subscription, they choose the amount of seats that they they want. So if there's a company with 65 seats, they choose the amount of seats and they go. We're really transparent with that pricing model as well, and it works for all enterprise right down to founder. The AI first is our main focus. We don't want— we want to take— bring back, sorry, what was missing from AI automation. What we found is with a lot of AI automation is that the human was being left out. This brings the human into the actual work and they can work alongside the AI. And get the work done and also interact with the automation in the back. Thank you very much. Hope you enjoyed it.
Thank you, Marin. Uh, let's have Sean on the stage. Any questions or comments, Sean?
Uh, great presentation overall. Um, you know, I think it's, it's a nice play to sort of humanize the AI, give them explicit sort of faces, personas. Um, I guess One comment, I think, you know, sticking with the classic SaaS subscription seat model seems to be an uphill battle at this point in time where the classic SaaS companies are all moving more towards a consumption or some type of token model. But I mean, I'm sure you've tested it, so you know your customer base. But I guess from a high level, just one quick question would be what type of employee is getting the most attention from what type of companies so far?
We find because we've got 27 of them, it doesn't really matter about the industry or sector. We find that the business will use the agent that they want. We give them all the agents, so we don't limit it to say you've only got 10. So the employee can come in and go, great, we've got this, we've got this function, we've got this function with this function, and they just go and use it. I'll touch on quickly on the subscription scenario. We also have the customized agents as well. So we have a lot of companies that come on board and they go, that's great, can we build our own?
And then we go to a token scenario.
For the, for the costing.
And then just to pick up on that, Marin, it's a bit concerning as a go-to-market guy to hear 27, right? You need to pick like one specific channel, one specific agent, and win that. Because I think we had like, I don't know, 30 founders on the show that are building AI agents. Uh, your background's quite capable, it's in HR, right? So I think that's probably what you should pick and triple down on, else you're just being sent to the butcher. I've seen so many AI agent building companies die because they can't focus on one channel.
Yeah, good point. But we do focus on that. So we talk to the companies and what their industry is in, but what we find, they quickly elevate across to the other AI agents because they go, we need that as well, we need that as well. So we find by having it there, they've got more options to move within it. But yeah, we absolutely do focus in that space to get initially through with the company.
Sorry to cut you off, Sean. Stefan, any questions or feedback?
Yeah, I would echo Charles in terms of the go-to-market, you know, I, and maybe this is even Sean's question, but I'd be curious in knowing what pain points you're most focused on or you believe are going to create the most traction initially, because saying we can do everything for everybody loses me quick. I also want to go back to the pricing model because, um, yeah, I, you know, I'd be curious to know, for example, what your target gross margins are, um, and, you know, how you're structuring that to, to kind of make sure that your, your net inference costs don't eat your margin alive.
Yeah, sure. So the way it works with the, for the costing of it, we've costed in obviously the use of the tokens and the use of, of what's going to be taken to actually use the AI within it. We also cost in the developing of it if they 'Oh, we want to do a custom agent.' So we're seeing that a lot of businesses are saying, 'Oh, we need this and we need this as well,' and we just cost it in at that stage there. We've tried to keep the platform very structured in a sense where it's very transparent, as in that's what it costs for a subscription and how many seats you want. A lot of companies like that because as they grow or they lose talent or they lose people within the business, they can go up and down with the platform as well. But it's a really good point, Stefan, in regards to staying focused around what we're actually going to push toward, what market. We've tried to focus on the main things that everybody needs, is usually marketing, sales, talent, and HR. We find that most businesses sit in that space, and that's a big leverage for us.
Sunny, any questions, comments?
Yeah, similar, I guess. Yeah, what is the wedge, right? What is that one angle? But I think the other people have already asked it, so maybe I'll pass on it. But I think clarifying that and figuring out how to double down on that would be super beneficial.
Thanks, Sunny.
Bryce, any questions or comments?
Yeah, some similar ones. The human AI feels a little overplayed. I've heard that a lot. Also, there's a book called that, so I'm not sure how that's like a real differentiator. It doesn't stand out to me specifically. And then how are you scaling is a question. Like, if it's an agent and it's an everything for everyone, then that means you're individually building these agents with your like 8 programmers. Is that a true venture scalability there? And I don't, I don't know.
Yeah, sure. So what we've done, we've actually developed the backend first so we can actually develop an agent within about 30 minutes, but then we send it off to training. We've got developers that have actually done all the hard work. So I can sit there and say, what do you do? What are you working on at the moment? Or what is missing from what you're thinking? And I can build an AI agent that does that straight away. It's structured that way. So it's very, very fast for us. We can do a turnaround for a company have training and have the agent back to them within 3 months if they want a custom agent.
Mike, any questions, comments?
Yeah, I think it was a good, uh, definitely a good presentation. Um, I, you know, I think it almost becomes fractional as part of what you're doing for people. So that's, you know, in terms of the actual savings, there might be a way to depict that. I'm thinking about it in terms of the receiver, the business, the small business that's looking at this I think the other question that they're going to have is, well, what actually does it do? So HR is a good way to explain that. So it's a place where, and I'm assuming that it's constantly being trained on the organization itself. So it knows kind of what's happening. It knows that people have quit. It knows externally what's obviously what's happening also from a legal perspective. So I think helping them understand that, you know, it's not only that you can ask questions, you can do that with ChatGPT. And ChatGPT is trained on you, as you know, everything that you ask it. But I think also it might be able to design programs. I think, I mean, I don't know, but I think based on what you need and then based on the information that it's been trained on that's specific and tailored, it might be able to provide conversation planners. I'm getting ready to have a tough discussion with Charles, and so I need a little bit of help, and it'll say, hey, make sure you don't do it this way. You need to really think about it this way because his style's that and your style's this. And, you know, but then the question becomes, is it an active employee? Is it participative in meetings? You know, is it on the screen? And, you know, and then is it only active in receiving or is it active in giving for that function? In other words, if it's an HR position, you know, can it actually run the HR portion of the meeting? Probably not yet. So I think having a little bit more of a descriptor for a founder or for a small business, medium-sized business operator as to what it does. And then the final thing I would just say, I think it's intriguing, and I think this part of AI is really intriguing. The final thing would be security. So if it's trained on my, you know, you may want to put that in your slides. If it's trained on my entire company, then now it owns everything, including all my trade secrets and IP. How do I protect that? Is this going to protect that?
Awesome. Thank you, Michael.
Thank you, Marin. Uh, let's go with the next founder. Uh, up next we have, uh, Jamie. So we're gonna bring Jamie on stage here. You can see your screen here, and the stage is yours.
Excellent.
Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you today. So, uh, my company, uh, HMDMD— what we do is in our name. Head-mounted displays for doctors, right? So we are in the commercialization stage right now. We got FDA clearance and CE mark back in late 2024. We've been commercialized since the middle of 2025. Last year we did $1.3 million in revenue, and this year we're on pace to do a little over $3 million. We're looking to raise money in a seed raise to basically accelerate the development of our pipeline. Specifically a wireless version of our wearable display. Our go-to-market strategy is really at this point in time is an OEM. We have two major strategic partners, market share leaders in their respective space in the medical world. For surgical microscopes, for both neurosurgery, spine surgery, as well as ophthalmology, our partner is Carl Zeiss Meditec based out of Germany. And then for endoscopes, our partner is Carl Storz, another market share leader for, for endoscopy and laparoscopy. and we are currently commercialized through their sales force today. Up till now, we've shipped them about 200 units. What we do with regards to the problems that we solved are really twofold. The first one is around human factors, ergonomics. I always tell surgeons, you guys should be doing spine surgery, not having spine surgery done to you. And that's really where we play a role. If you've ever been in the operating room, surgeons beat themselves up for procedures that can last 8 to 12 hours or go through a 14-hour day for a cataract surgeon doing 30 to 40 cataract lens replacements in a day. They beat themselves up for the benefit, benefit of their patients. What we do is actually give them a true ergonomic position to operate from. By not having them strain their neck or their body position to look into a microscope or have a line of sight to a monitor, right? So that's our first problem that we solve. The second is around OR workflow. And I don't know if you guys have spent a lot of time in an operating room, certainly don't wish that upon anybody, but it's a very crowded space. And one of the major trends with regards to, to the modern surgeon surgery are twofold. One, the use of multi-imaging modalities— X-ray, MR, CT, ultrasound, real-time visualization, external cameras, internal cameras, augmented reality— all of that in a very confined space around the patient. And unfortunately, none of those companies really work well with the other. So what you have is 6 or 7 monitors in the operating room. And what we aim to do is create what we call a surgical cockpit where all of these imaging modalities can be funneled through our wearable display. And integrated into the wearable display is a speaker and microphone, and you can change those displays with regards to using voice control. So if you want to see ultrasound, you can pop it up, call it up. So that we're working towards having that type of flexibility. What we do well is our foundation is really applying military technology to medicine. So our key strategic partner in manufacturing is a company called Copen Medical. Um, they make the F-35 fighter pilot optics, they make night vision for Navy SEALs, and we're applying their technology to medical. So the first and foremost that we did when in terms of making this is no compromise with regards to image quality, right? It has to be— it's like I said, this is brain surgery, right? So it's, it's got to be precise. And that's what we've done with this type of optics. Never before have you been able to have this type of comparable optics with regards to either a Sony 4K 3D monitor or actually looking into a Zeiss microscope. So that was our first goal that we accomplished. The second is what we call not being disconnected from the operating room or having surgical awareness. And this is where this purpose-built design differs from like, you know, your Apple Vision Pros or your microscope HoloLenses. This is not designed for virtual reality. It is center-balanced. It is about 3 times lighter than an Apple Vision Pro. It does not weight forward. And at any given time, you're never disconnected from the patient, from the operating room, your hands. You can look down and see the surgical site because these are basically designed like baseball shades, right? You could actually flip the optics up if you want, but at any given time you have peripheral vision and you can look down and actually see the patient. Our two major—
one minute on the timer, Jamie.
Sure.
Our major partners are Call Stores and Carl Zeiss. If you look at our roadmap here, we have— our co-founders actually launched the first version back in 1995. We've made significant, significant advancements with our current version. What we're looking to do, and what we think is really the threshold for rapid adoption, is a wireless version, which is why we're raising money. And then ultimately, if you look at the applications we have, we have presence in traditional microscopes. We have presence in minimally invasive spine surgery and exoscopes. We're working with certain robotics companies, and ultimately the wireless version opens up the world for surgical navigation and interventional cardiology. I appreciate the time. Happy to take any questions.
There you go. Thank you, Jamie. Uh, let's start with Sean. Any questions or feedback for Jamie?
Um, you know, interestingly, I, I think, you know, overall solid pitch. I think that last slide probably should have come a lot sooner, especially for like a broad audience. You know, I think if you're talking to specific, you know, medical device investors or, you know, people with medical backgrounds, then, you know, proceed as, as you will. But for like a broad general audience, I'd probably hit the pain point and give them— give the audience something to hold on to a bit sooner in the presentation. So we know exactly what it looks like, exactly what pain points it's solving. And then it looks like— or correct me if I'm wrong— from the hardware side of things, the device still needs to plug into one of these existing types of devices, or is there any hardware inside of the lens that's able to do processing and communicate with other devices?
Yeah, we still— we don't actually make the camera, right? We just display the camera. So we connect directly to a surgical microscope or an endoscope. What we also do though is we can have— we have a junction box that can split it to multiple headsets or take multiple inputs. So we could have an ultrasound machine connected connected to it and you could look at both of them and change your, your view.
I just— another high level, um, I fortunately haven't been into the operation room, but I mean, how much wiring is going around there? I know you guys are looking to fix that, but you got wires, you're going to be plugging into multiple devices, into multiple surgeons. Um, talk to me a little bit more about the—
it is—
it is the question, right? So when you think about all these devices, they are all hardwired to a plug somewhere on the wall or somewhere in the tower. So all of these devices are hard powered, so you have all of those cables around. Plus, at the same time, you have, you know, some sort of connection to light sources and booms. So that's where the transition is really going to be, to where we can make this cableless, make this wireless through an integrated low-field Wi-Fi then that's when the rapid adoption will happen because it is a very jumbled, cabled, sloppy mess in the operating room today.
Stefan, any questions or comment?
Yeah, a couple things. So one, uh, it's a very real business that you're in, and kudos for the fact that you're post-revenue and have FDA approval. Um, on the pitch itself, you started really strong. You know, uh, hey, we're post-revenue, we've got FDA approval, big important problem. But then it kind of fizzled from there and you got stuck in the weeds, and I felt like you were trying to sell me on stuff that I was already sold on. And then worst of all, you didn't really end with a clear ask or a clear sense of like, hey, here's what we're doing, we're raising, you know, $5 million at a $15 million pre. Goal is to focus on commercialization, sell the company for, you know, 10 to 20x what we're getting into today, 5 years from now, strategic, something that gets the investor excited, a clear sense of what the ask is. Um, and, and I think that'll help you when you're out there raising money. But again, a great business. I think a few tweaks on your pitch deck and your presentation and you'll be off to the races.
Thank you.
So any questions or comments?
Yeah, I guess just the big one is, is what does wireless unlock commercially?
Yeah, so what wireless unlocks is the interventional world— interventional cardiology, interventional radiology. So for all of your stents and balloons and all of that, there are no cables in an interventional suite. So wireless opens up that world, which is an enormous market, to the neighborhood of about a, you know, $8 to $9 million opportunity for us, right? And we can't play in that space today with a cabled version.
Interesting, thanks.
Let's go to the next investor. Bryce, uh, any questions or comments?
Yeah, uh, do you have integration issues with different medical devices and equipment? And then do you ever experience lag, which would make this like not a possibility?
Latency is a no-go, so everything that we do has zero latency or no negligible latency to the human eye. There's always a little bit of latency, but the human eye cannot detect it. And that's true with any microscope or camera, right? Um, we don't have any problems connecting to various different outputs. We do it through SDI, dual SDI, HDMI. We have firmware built into our system to where we can take anything. So there hasn't been a device that I haven't been able to successfully connect to yet.
And is there a specific type of surgery you enter with, or this— you're trying to run the gamut?
Like, what's your wedge?
Yeah, so we started with microsurgery because it's the most— it's one, it's, it's more of a niche, smaller market, but it's also the most discerning. You know, you can't have any, any sort of image quality issues or latency or detail when it comes to brain surgery. So we started there. We also had Carl Zeiss, our partner, they were the first to kind of step up and say, yes, we need this, yes, we want it. So we started there. We have since now launched into ophthalmology, which is an enormous market.
It's the most—
cataract lens replacement surgery is the most prevalent surgery in the world. So we just launched with them a month ago at a retina show in Washington, DC. And then with endoscopes and laparoscopes, we've just launched with Carl Storz. Since we've launched Karl Storz in February. We've already received 10 customer orders through them.
My questions or comments?
Yeah, I think what you just said was critical. I think you did a great job, and it seems like it makes sense to me, although I'm not a surgeon. I've met my friends that are. I think, you know, the messages I heard was increases the ergonomics of it, it's wireless, and it It should increase productivity. It should increase the utilization of the doctors, right? The utilization percentages should go up. And then therefore, you're— we're assuming, right, because I would just talk more about this, that then therefore the adoption is going to occur. And, you know, with doctors, there's a— as any salesperson that sits in the, in the surgery, uh, stands next to the doctor and tries to sell them on, on things knows it's really hard to get them to adopt new things to a certain extent, even though that's their nature. And so I would talk a little bit about the $3 million in sales and how that kind of sales influence process is going. Maybe if you can talk about the close rate, you know, every doctor we talk to, we're at it, we're at 80%, you know, the, the 1 out of 5, they, they're just, you know, uh, they don't want to change, stick in the mud, but that happens. I think 80% would be pretty good. So I just complete that one piece of the loop because investors that aren't surgeons and doctors are going to just want to understand, are they really going to buy it? They're going to hear $3 million and they're going to go, really, that's it? Or they may say, wow, I don't know. But I think the other piece will show that. And you were just talking about it. So finish that in your presentation.
Jamie, thanks for the presentation here. We're going to go to our next contender, which is Brent. So, Brent, I'm gonna bring you on stage here. Your presentation.
Thank you. Um, so yeah, Haptak Holdings is an audio-based, uh, haptic company, uh, where we mirror exactly what you hear to what you feel. And we started in the feet, uh, with some footwear devices because there's more nerve endings in the bottom of your feet than anywhere else on your body. So, um, Just a fun quote that I like to always present, uh, by Nikola Tesla, stressing the energy, frequency, and vibration. Um, what we really do is, is we have devices that started in entertainment, um, to enhance entertainment devices, and we saw a huge opportunity. Uh, we were uniquely positioned to buy all the IP and, um, apply it to the health and wellness sector. Um, we are not dismissing the entertainment side by any means, but the health and wellness sector we found tremendous results in, um, in terms of PTSD treatment and, and, and, and, uh, Parkinson's disease, and also potentially in Alzheimer's. Um, we have 4 core products. We've developed this product into insoles, which is our kind of hero product, pedestals, which therapists are using now, um, to help treat PTSD and trauma-focused care, uh, and then we've got the sandals to correlate with the insoles. And then also, we also on the entertainment side have a big rooted foundation in Broadway theater, uh, by way of a lot of our investors to enhance the live entertainment space. Um, the technology, again, back to the insoles, basically there's exciters in here that vibrate into your feet, um, that harness the any audio output that you receive from any device that's either hardlined in and/or Bluetoothed in. So if it's, you know, waves or calming mechanisms and/or music therapy, it picks up that and delivers exactly what you're hearing to into your feet, which drives up into the body. Our target markets, again, entertainment, not dismissing that, but focus is on health and wellness. Our wellness solutions, we have proven that it lessens in about 83% of the population that we have done studies on, lessens anxiety, decreases stress levels, helps treat PTSD faster and less in, in innovative, in invasive, and also the recovery time increases, uh, increases dramatically. We've also done some observations in Parkinson's disease that immediately affects increased gait, balance, motor skills, and just general confidence in, in Parkinson's patients. Um, we also have looked into neuropathy, and again, Alzheimer's is next. We all know what music therapy has done for the, you know, memory retainment. And what are— when you couple vibration with that, which is our product, it increases exponentially and it basically amplifies it. We have science behind it in terms of basically looking at regulating the autonomic nervous system. Reduces the hyperarousal, uh, you know, from a mental standpoint, enhances emotional processing, improves affective tolerance. Uh, it, it, it's essentially— there are correlations between oxytocin levels of reduction and also, um, in improving the tactile— like when you get the tactile, um, Vibration, it translates into tactile hearing. Music, auditory timing, vibration equals— and then music and vibration equals movement and vibration. So we're looking at literally making an impact on the health and wellness scenario of improving PTSD treatment for veterans. We've been working with the Wounded Warriors Foundation. We've been working with other foundations, rehab centers, treating addiction, leveraging the technology to provide less of an invasive form of, of, uh, invasive form of treatment to improve how— and improve the timing of treatment for various, uh, issues. Um, the investment that we've gotten thus far is about $2.5 million. Uh, that was our seed round. Between pre and seed, we're looking up to $10 million right now. Uh, whether that comes in the form of tranches, we're looking at an A1, A2 Uh, we know that we need, you know, about 2 to 3 to get into next year, uh, for production. We're about to start shipping product next week, actually, in the form of our pedestals. We got, we got pre-orders in, in terms of 50 pedestal orders up front. We're producing right now and starting to ship next week. Um, those pedestals will have follow-on product, which is why I said the insoles are our, our, our kind of hero product. For every in-pedestal that goes out, we've got about a 5.5x, um, revenue stream with follow-on product for insoles as a take-home product. So the beauty of our business is that we literally have pedestals that we sell, and for— to clinicians, therapists, rehab centers, etc. And every pedestal that goes out the door there's about 25 to 30 patients.
Hey, Brent, let's bring this to a close.
Um, we have recurring revenue through the way of insoles, is my point. And the use of our funds will be 60%, you know, basically scalability, and the other 40% will be marketing, R&D, and continued studies.
So, all right, thanks for the presentation. Um, I think, yeah, I'm gonna keep my feedback short today because there's a lot of other VCs, but I think like a crisper presentation, generally speaking. Um, first, start with the invention on the first slide so that we understand what that is. Second, probably go with authority, right? Like Sia, the artist Sia, invested in you. You have her on the cap table. That's gigantic. I think you should start with that. I think the presentation today did not do honor to what you're building. I think it's, uh, it's game-changing what you're building, but also address, uh, the science quicker and in a crisper manner, because a bunch of investors could be like, oh, this is quackery, but it's not, right? Like, it actually works, and there's science behind that. And pick like one a niche that you would be solving, whether it's anxiety first or depression, not, not all of them, right? Like, that, that would be, uh, probably better. So let's have our first investor on stage. Sean, uh, any questions or feedback?
Yeah, I mean, I would, I would agree with, uh, your initial comments. Uh, the pitch could be a lot sharper, um, and certainly more compelling. Uh, the product sounds interesting, you know, I mean, like my interpretation of haptic feedback was always around giving real-life touch to stuff that doesn't have real-life touch. And generally speaking, it was paired with like VR, AR. And there's obviously some uses with like people with PTSD and training and stuff like that that I've seen as a common use case. But it seems like you're taking a different angle. It's more associating with sound, music, and frequencies. Which is also interesting. Um, I guess just kind of my one real question around this would be, um, how, how actually— how, how big is this patent portfolio? How novel is this technology? How defensible is it?
Um, we again, we specialize in the footwear area. Because of the nerve endings. So we have 16 patents, and they're very defensible. We own, we own that whole space when it comes to audio haptic footwear devices. There's actually— Apple sidelined something that they were doing because if they would have gone forward with it, uh, back in 2022 or 2023, I can't remember what year it was, but they sidelined a project because they would have been infringing upon our patents.
So that's like a nice acquirer ahead of you. Apple has been known to buy companies very quickly, very quietly, purely for their patents.
Yeah, so yeah, that's how defensible it is. It's very defensible. Um, we've had third parties audit us already.
So, Stefan, any questions or feedback?
Yeah, uh, so Brent, my mom is a music therapist and, uh, I'm a friendly ear and sound is very, very powerful, but I think you've got to be way more focused in your pitch. Focus on one problem. The world is rife with anxiety and here's how we're solving it. Here's the sub-niche we're starting in. Dominate that sub-niche and then you can worry about others. And you've obviously got some traction to Charles's point, tout some of that traction. But don't get stuck in, you know, it was kind of a low-energy pitch. It's got to be crisp, super clear. Focus on one niche to start with. You know, once people are interested, if they're worried about the TAM, then you can say, well, we got all these other things we can do, but don't do it up front. Just be super focused, um, and I think that'll benefit you not only on the pitch side but the execution side.
Sunny?
Yeah, these guys said it, a wellness or entertainment, right? Pick one and then I would drive forward in that lane and then prove success and double down.
Bryce?
Yeah, I just iterate what, um, some others said and then some little things are just like adding more pictures and then less just standard text across it. And then your round slide, it looked like it was do a round, have it priced, do more work, and then do the next round, it didn't seem like there was a jump in the valuation there. And so I definitely recommend proposing jumps in that future valuation. Otherwise, I don't have any real reason to get in now. And you want to make sure this is valuable and then hit that IP point on Apple. I mean, I'm talking to a startup right after this meeting about potential early sell with their IP. We'll probably recommend not selling and growing a little more and then selling later at a much higher valuation. But that's a huge selling point.
Huge.
There you go. Michael, finish this off.
Yeah, I'll agree with everything. You know, Brent, if we were presenting, you'd have plenty of feedback for us, each of us, trust me. So keep that in mind as, you know, we share, we share in very, very positive spirit. I think taking the energy up is exactly right. I think, you know, just, just taking it up. I mean, getting excited about what you're doing. You know, my daughter's also a music therapist, and I think that there's true value in this. And the only thing that I would try to rally around is either it's cool or it's scientific— there's science behind it. And you kind of got to pick one. It's hard to talk about all the things that it does without a lot of validated data, and so that gets a little soft and gets a little cool. And by the way, I think it's very cool. I think it's super cool. I want one. I want one to put in my shoes. So keep that in mind that it's very, very cool, but pick one and go that way. But if you're picking the scientific one, you got to go that way, and I don't know that you can.
It's interesting, if I can ask a question, because I think it's very cool, but at the same time, it's hard not to talk about the science behind it because, you know, a lot of times I get questions like, well, how does it work? Or why does it do that? Or why does it have the effect? And we are doing studies with Parkinson's patients to see like why does it immediately improve their mobility and balance. And so like it's hard to not— so it's like it's hard to— I guess it's hard to pick a lane, um, in terms of do I talk about the science behind it because people need to believe in it, or You know, I think it's cool.
Well, you can have a key message and then you can have a sub-message, but the sub-message of it, science needs to be valid. And so instead of using words, you need to have, you know, in 60% of the cases or 70% of the Parkinson's cases, they've seen improvement in their mobility within the first, you know, 14 days. You know, if you can truly make that, that claim, that's validate— a validated claim, then I'm not saying don't do it, but I'm saying if you're going to talk science, then you have to talk science.
Yeah.
All right, guys, thank you. Thank you, Brent. Thank you, Michael. Let's go to the next contender. Here we have Dana. Dana, welcome to the stage. You can see your screen. The presentation is yours.
Thank you. Um, okay, well, 1 in 2 kids suffer from anxiety and depression, and most go undiagnosed or untreated due to accessibility and costs. Enter George. George is is a mental health app for children helping with the 5 top mental health issues. We are award-winning, leading, uh, with the American Psychiatric Association acceptance badge. And what we've done is we've taken AI with evidence-based therapies and put it in the form of friendly characters that engage the children in interactive activities such as games, conversations, and more to help them identify, articulate, and cope with triggers in a productive manner. Then we've added on real, real-time monitoring from the parent side and the clinician or social service side. So we basically built a cocoon around the child for good childhood development. And this is what our app looks like. As you can see, it's very user-friendly. We are a human-in-the-loop technology, and there's always a trusted adult monitoring progress triggers and putting in their own input. And what makes us really different is that we just disrupt and democratize therapy support for an underserved age population. We support 5 mental health conditions in one app. We use gold standard therapies, 3 of them. We've automated real practical field intelligence from doctors to give to the masses. And then we layered on the machine learning. So it's a very personalized approach. We're non-addictive and we have high retention rates, which is where most health tech goes to die. And we have a really great strict Vero Global patent. And the success rate has been amazing. In just 10 days, we saw 80% reduction in panic symptoms, 100% improved behavior, and 90% improvements in self-management. So we have something for everybody. It's fun, friendly, therapy support 365/24/7 for the child, for the parents. It's real-time monitoring and alerts, valuable insights, less cost and wait times. And for the service providers, it's really just easy delivery of care, interim and continuity of support, and the monitoring and user experience leads to better outcomes. So we do all of this for less than Netflix for multiple users under the same subscription, wherever and whenever they need it while saving the healthcare system costs along the way. And as you can see, our market's very large, but we're SaaS technology, so easy to scale. We go head to head with the big boys and also with the small, very specific techs. So we go much further with accessibility, affordability, a real bond with the child, and much more. And we sell B2B, um, And we leverage partners to do that. And the multiple of 3 for the long-term value is based on our retention rates of now going on an average of 3+ years, and our CAC is 4. So these are our partners so far. We're rolling out in 13 school districts across the state of Washington and Canada and Houston. We're doing good work and we are raising funds, $2 million, uh, to to enhance our moat, to increase our partnerships and revenues from those partners and our sales, and to do exit, uh, uh, get prepared for exit, and to return, uh, our, our 10 times at least for our shareholders. And we're led by Dr. Metcalf, who is a psychologist and mother herself, who was really worried about seeing kids anxious and depressed at 4 and 5 and couldn't find the tools that she was looking for, and they, as they were starting to commit suicide at 7 and 8. I'm Dana Klein. I typically return 25 to 500% ROI, and we hope you will join us in empowering families, supporting therapists, and transforming the futures.
I love this presentation, very crisp, probably a second best we had. Just a couple questions and comments. So one, why are you the are you the right person to build this? Two, what's your go-to-market plan to get the $11K? And three, how can you talk about sensitive topics like child suicide without like scaring people away?
Oh, okay. Let me see if I can remember all the questions.
Okay, so are you the right person to build this? Let's start with this.
Well, okay, so the, um, well, I've had mental illness in my family and I know if you don't address it early, we We specifically targeted the younger age group because it's preventative in nature and it's also underserved. And Dr. Metcalf is the co-founder and she is— she lives the day with it, day in and day out watching these children. And there was not a tool that connected all the dots to the child.
PM questions. 11K users. I've done edtech extensively. It's hard. How will you get there?
Well, we have 16K now, but they're freemium. Most of them are freemium. So, and so we're working at converting those. We're leveraging our partners. And each one of our partners has at least 2,000 to 5,000 potential users. So we're going after them hard.
There you go. And the last question: how do you abord the tough topic of suicide while, yeah, trying to scale this off the ground? Because it's a super important topic, right? For context, I've been listening to Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point book. He talks about children's suicide in there at the high school, I believe, close to Baltimore. And also, yeah, I've read Nick Metta's post. He's a prominent guy in my industry, and he faced that directly, right? And very hard topic. I think he, he, he has a formula to talk about these tough things, right? But how do you face that?
Well, we have a couple of things. So the first one is we have a because of the real-time monitoring, you can— the idea is that you are measuring the child as the child is going through their journey. So you'll be able to see the warning signs. The other thing is, because of the real-time monitoring and the machine learning, the George actually learns the child. And so if something's off, a notification goes in real time to the whatever trusted adults are connected to that child. So we— and then we have the 988 button that also pops up if there seems to be an issue. But we, you know, we, we are not live therapy, but we can connect with the live therapist. And the idea is that we, we connect all the dots and triangulate that child.
Sean, any questions, feedback?
Yeah.
Overall, Great presentation. Uh, you had some good clever, uh, hooks in there. Um, I guess my question is just kind of more around high level how the product actually works. It seems to be a website or an app. Yeah, website and app.
It's an app. It's an app.
Okay. And then are the kids meant to sort of interact with it on their own, or is it done in supplement with a therapist or teacher or parents?
Good question. So right now it's on the app stores. And so there's— it can go— or— and so what makes it very interesting is we're multilingual, multicultural, male, female, and it's the child's own journey like Minecraft, you know. And so it's an app and they enjoy it and it's a time user experience. So we're a coach, not a crutch. So the child— and we use white hat technology, so there's, there's no addition— addiction issues.
And is it like branded as a mental health app, or is it just branded as an app for children? And then you said you go B2B model, so how exactly does that— you work through channel partners?
Yeah.
And then they tell the kids to download it?
Yeah, well, what's made— what's been very interesting too is that it is safe for any child. And when we sell the family subscription, it's for multiple kids, so the, so the whole family can be on it. And so it makes it even more interesting because any child that also has other disabilities or terminal illness, let's say, there's a whole emotional component. And so we're now, when we're talking to the healthcare and behavioral health, one of the things that are coming up is that we can go across the whole healthcare system for pediatric care because there's such an emotional component to growing up.
Just to play devil's advocate here, could you make the argument that the reason why kids are having so much anxiety and bullying and issues at such a young age is due to access to technology? Technology too early and that screen time and access to phones is a major primary driver for the next generation. Just to play devil's advocate here.
And that's exactly why we meet them where they're at. So the thing is that one of the spinoffs is that the children are learning the difference between good and bad messaging. This makes me feel good. That does not. So we're on— they have timed user experience and white— black hat technology is when what social media uses that looks for vulnerabilities and keeps you addicted. We use white hat. It's a very specific intentional technology. And so between the white hat, the scrub language, and the timed user experience, we address that. They start, they feel good on our app and it's a whole different ball game. So, but the idea is that one of the main problems is that we don't nurture children the same way because the world is different. So every generation grows up differently. And so you have to address them differently. So this, we're in the tech age. And so we have to use technology, we have to use tools.
Stefan, any questions or feedback?
Yeah, I, uh, I, I, I, this couldn't be a more important problem for us as a culture to figure out the answer to. Um, and, uh, you know, I think trying to do that in the context of a profitable company is a, is a really powerful discipline. Um, uh, because a lot of charities are just, you know, struggling on a funding standpoint. Um, I guess two big questions that I, I have is one, it's not clear to me what's really different about this versus others because there's actually several other apps similar to yours that I'm familiar with online that seem to be very similar. Um, and secondly, was wondering if you can talk a little bit about kind of your longer-term vision from a business standpoint, given that you're raising money.
Okay, so what makes us different is that we address 5 mental health, uh, 5 mental health conditions in one app, and, and then some. And, uh, we use real practical intelligence, and we automated that for the masses, and then layered on the AI. So you don't find that anywhere because that is, that is the trade secret. That's one of the secret sauce. We also have a very big safety pattern, and we address an underserved age population. So we've got quite a few differentiators, including the price, the accessibility, and the mission is that no child's left behind. As a business case, we—
I think that everybody is saying the same things today. Those are buzzwords that everybody's using in every app and every industry, and all your competitors are going to be saying very similar things. So I would just, again, as a supporter of what you're trying to accomplish, I would encourage you to find a way to answer that question in a simpler way, in the context of a, yeah, a much simpler way of some kind without using any of those lingos. And I don't think IP protection protects you because you don't have the money to spend to defend it. So I just— my two cents on that.
Sunny?
Yeah, as a father of three, this is obviously, you know, something I think about, and I'm happy there's people like you out there doing this. I guess my big question is, how do you balance early intervention with, like, safety and liability?
How do we balance it? Well, We will— we've got the machine learning that picks up on any kind of cues, and we've got the real-time monitoring from— there's always a trusted adult, and they're always in the loop, and they're part of the monitoring process. And as you watch the real-time monitoring, you can see if the child's going in a different direction, and you can pick up on that as well. As well. So, and we have the notifications, real-time notifications. But we have the clinician connection as well, which is, uh, also another differentiator.
Bryce?
Uh, yeah, I would see if you have any government grants coming in or access to that. I think that would be something to look into. There's usually a lot of support there. I really like the style of your presentation thematically. Um, it's really cute. I would shift that a little bit on your investor slide and then have a little more details on the investor slide because kiddish with investor always just feels like it rubs me wrong. Might be a preference thing. And then I'd really mention the traction and have a little more on that in your slide. I think it sounds like you have really good traction and that leads to the scalability, which will lead to the returns for you. But yeah, overall, really cool. Love what you're doing.
Mike?
Hey, Dana, 4 things, okay? And I thought you did a great job. I think number 1 is at the beginning, I have a little bit of the big funnel, and it's sad, the number of kids that really need this. And thank you for doing it. I think it's, you know, I absolutely think you're doing an amazing thing. Second, so please do that. Second thing that I would say is I think this whole notion of how you're different is critical. Whether or not you can protect your IP, I mean, you need to make sure that you raise enough money so that you can. I know how hard that is in terms of, you know, just noticeable differences and ends up that now it's different, you know, the IP is not protected. But talk about pricing, you know, you could have a nice neat little slide that says, look, this is why we're different. Number 3, I would reference some of the data that you had in there. Just make sure that maybe even at the at the bottom it just says, you know, this is based on, you know, 500 people or 1,000 people or 10,000 people so that it's got some credibility. And then the final thing is just on the presentation. I think you want to give yourself the best chance for success. And, you know, again, you would listen to us and give us feedback. So we're just giving you shared feedback. You got to get rid of the "us." I think, you know, just anytime And I do it too. I'm trying, you know, I've been working on it for about 40 years, but you know, as you use a pause, it sometimes gives you even more credibility versus saying, so just slow down a little bit. The camera likes you. So you have that, you know, you have the camera likes you. So I get a light in front of you so that the camera can see you. And then I would position whatever device you're using. So you're looking straight at it. Because I think also, especially with what you're talking about, you need to really connect with, you know, we're trying to connect with our kids and get the kids that are bullying to stop it. And the kids that are being bullied, which I was bullied as a kid, the kids that are being bullied to know how to deal with it. And I think this is all part of what you're trying to do. So address us straight. So look at the camera, but I think you did a great job. And, you know, I pray for you to be very successful with this.
Thank you, thank you, uh, Dana. Great presentation. Let's go to the next founder. We have, uh, Sharif here. Uh, Sharif, I saw your pitch last week, it was pretty good, so stage is yours, my friend.
All right, I want to make sure—
wait, hold on, sorry, I'm not used to this format, so presenting Yeah, just, uh, you can click on the slide on the left and we, we can see the main slide right now.
Okay, so can you see this change?
Yes. Okay, yes, we can.
All right, all right, what do you got here, about 3 minutes?
Yep.
All right, well, thank you. Well, hello everyone, thank you for your time, it's greatly appreciated. My name is Sharif Bennett, uh, Chief Business Officer slash Chief Evangelist Officer for Cineblock. Here's a slide with myself and my co-founders Prince, uh, as well as Julian, and our Chief Technical Officer Tom, as long as well as our strategic partner Jethro. So what Cineblock is, is an equity crowdfunding platform that specializes in entertainment IP. Entertainment IP can be a very broad term, so I want to sort of whittle it down for you and talk about one particular component of it, which is filmmaking, right? Everyone loves movies. Everyone loves TV shows. But if we think about what the typical filmmaker journey is, it's quite difficult. What happens is that an independent filmmaker generally asks accredited investors, someone with a net worth of $1 million or more, to invest in their movie. The inherent problem with this is that, one, there are very few people with a net worth of $1 million or more, and two, there's an even smaller percentage of those people people with that level of wealth who invest in those films. So what filmmakers have done over the past 10, 15 years is move to platforms like Kickstarter, GoFundMe, Seed and Spark— you might be familiar with some of these— uh, to basically do some of that bridge financing. So what happens is that filmmaker goes onto those platforms, uh, generates a campaign. People who know them, support them, or even like the idea then, uh, donate anywhere $10 to $20 or something like that. That filmmaker then gets that money, and then the person who donated gets the satisfaction of donation along with potentially a t-shirt or a coffee mug. How we differ, how CineBlock differs, is that we are— we have moved from the crowdfunding model and moved towards equity. So we deal entirely in investible media. People will not be making donations for any of the campaigns on our platform. They will be investing. Additionally, how we differ from some of the other platforms out there is that we take any issuer— that's what we call people raising funds or filmmaker— through a specific boot camp, anywhere from 4 to 2.5 months, in order to generate the type of audience necessary for a successful equity crowd raise. I always tell people, platforms don't bring investors systems do. Additionally, we are backed by, or should I say, we partnered with FINRA and the SEC. It took us 2 years to get that accreditation. So we also, on top of being able to offer legally compliant offerings, we also have our transfer agent and cap table management, allowing us to sell or white label our solutions to other businesses as well as monitor finances for them. From a structure standpoint— sorry, I was just talking there, not going through the slide. Forgive me. From a structure standpoint, uh, we go— we charge anywhere from $3,500 to $10,000 for our onboarding fee, depending on the level of, uh, interest that that filmmaker wants. Uh, we then take 6% of that raise along with 2% of any of the assets. People always ask me, how do you think this idea is even viable? Because not too many people are, are really doing this, right? Oftentimes people say, this is the first time we've ever heard of this. What I always tell people is that, well, it's already happening, right? If we take a look at Kickstarter, since their inception, since 2009, they have had 88,000 film and video campaigns and raised just under $600 million. So this is already happening. The problem is, is that people are just donating and not necessarily investing, right? If we take a look at the entire total addressable market for media and entertainment, it's north of $2 trillion and continues to grow. In terms of— a little bit of our competitor landscape. Apologies. So in terms of traction, right, we are pre-seed. We just launched this January. We have raised just under $340,000 thus far. We're looking for our next milestone of $150,000. Uh, we are doing a SAFE agreement currently, uh, with a cap at $20 million and offering a 20% discount, uh, for any investors at this time. Uh, since our launch in January, we have one campaign, uh, up and running right now. Our second one is slated to launch on May 26th. We have signed agreements for 15 additional filmmakers to come onto our platform perform and raise funds, which will be completed by the end of this calendar year. Thank you.
Thank you, Sharif. Let's bring our first investor on stage. Sean, any questions for Sharif?
Uh, good, good pitch. Uh, this happens to be a space I know reasonably well. I launched one of the very first equity crowdfunding platforms back in 2013. And, uh, the first Regulation A+ generator with a Y. Okay, based out of LA. And then I launched Start Engine as their director of investments, which was the first Reg A+ platform.
Sure.
I also know the film finance space a bit. Um, we invested in a film distribution company. I found that was where the real value capture is. Um, so I have a series of Quick questions. Um, are you doing these as Reg Ds or Reg A+?
Apologies for not, uh, stating specifically. So we are Regulation CF, so up to $5 million annually.
Okay, so unaccredited investors, she's got to do KYC, AML, you don't have to do proof of funds or anything?
That is correct.
Um, and then what is, what is the payout model? Are these films paying back investors, uh, when it gets picked up by a distributor since you're doing indies? Is there a waterfall, like, like a more larger motion picture?
Sure.
Um, how is that handled?
Great question. We leave that up to the issuer. We offer them, uh, basically two methods. Either one, you can offer up equity in your project, right, and that's just a percentage of the IP itself, or you can keep all the IP and do a rev-gen model and say, all right, give me $100, I'll give you $125 back, X percentage of distribution when this, uh, kicks off. Or, or is successful.
And how are you sourcing the films?
Yeah, through a variety of partnerships as well as word of mouth. So we're going to begin our search engine optimization, uh, process here very soon. Once again, we're still very new, so we're still dealing, uh, with our test cases, uh, right now. But it's going to be, once again, uh, LinkedIn, email, partnerships, etc.
And just my one last tidbit of just a tip. I find using the term issuers doesn't resonate as much with people when you're telling your story. Might want to explore around it. It's just, uh, could be stylistic, but we found that a lot of people in the industry move away from it unless they're on the phone with FINRA and a broker-dealer. But when you're talking to a broad audience Um, you know, call them filmmakers, call them believers, call them creators.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So my two cents.
Yeah, yeah, love that, love that.
Stefan, questions, comments?
Yeah, two things. Um, I, uh, I think it's important if you're going to talk about a SAFE to talk about the valuation cap, because otherwise a seasoned investor has no idea kind of what, what they're potentially going to be investing in from an evaluation standpoint. The, uh, second thing is, uh, I think for a platform like this to work ultimately, um, you know, I, I think what I would want to see is a little bit, you know, some examples of how you're going to pitch that to the public, um, and to make sure that it's not too focused on what you're doing and it's really more focused on what the public wants. Um, and the other is to, um, I, I think in the beginning you're going to need to worry about content, like how do we find good deals to sell to the public? Because if, you know, when you can develop a track record of people making money, that's going to really help you fuel more success down the line. If people aren't making money on those films, your thing's going to die. Like it's just not gonna have legs. So I, I think somehow part of what I would want to hear in that pitch is what your angle is about how you're going to be screening, because everybody wants money, right? And it's kind of a chicken and the egg. You've got to have good, really compelling stories so that somebody experienced like Sean is going to be like, yeah, those, those probably going to do well, to sell to the public so they make money. If the public's making money, more of them are going to want to invest. More of them are investing, then you're going to have an easier time getting more good deals. So how you kind of break that chicken and egg, I think, is critical. Simply having a great platform by itself, I don't think will by itself drive success. So somehow addressing that, I think, would be really powerful. But you're a great speaker, very clear, easy to understand. I think you've got, you know, it's a really interesting space. So, you know, keep it up.
Sharif, do you want to address that, by the way?
Yeah, yeah, a couple of great feedback. Thank you. Did I not say $20 million, uh, cap?
Maybe you did.
I didn't hear it, so, uh, you did. Sorry.
No, no, no worries. Um, yeah, so attracting filmmakers. Yeah, so that's, that's what we're in the midst of trying to figure out now. Once again, we're, you know, we're brand new, so it's, it's a lot of me just on LinkedIn doing podcasts. That's how I met, uh, uh, Charles and Sonny here. Um, and then, yeah, so a lot of outbound things is going to take place this summer, fall. We attend, I attend film festivals. Festivals. I speak at those. Um, but part of it too is filmmaking is one niche, right? Um, and so, you know, we're entertainment IP. So it's the same thing for video games. We can do raises for anything under the umbrella of entertainment.
Um, but to your point, yeah, I do think that's something critical that I'll have to, uh, yeah, chicken egg is hard to crack. Um, Sonny, any questions or comments?
Yeah, great presentation. Uh, you know, we've spoken in the past, but I was gonna ask you one question. What makes investors come back after their first investment?
Yeah, that's a great question. How does it become a repeatable sort of model, right? And I think, um, what we've found is, uh, and it's part of the boot camp, it is, that we're offering, um, what will— what the filmmaker is going to have to do is really understand that reaching out to their own, uh, community at first is such a big sort of the main method on how they're going to have successful campaigns just to get the word out. Right. And then from there, the hope is that there'll be people who then say repeat, like, all right, well, I invested in one film. This was pretty cool. Let me then hopefully invest in another. But hope isn't something you ever want to say to investors.
Right.
So we just have to literally prove it out.
There you go. Bryce, questions, comments?
Yeah. I don't know a lot about your sector, unfortunately, but I thought you did a really good job. You had really crisp points, really crisp slides. And then congrats on working with FINRA. I've worked with them before, that's nearly impossible.
So, oh my God, I'd rather have 10 root canals.
Yeah, yeah, that's good. Mike, questions?
Hey, Sharif, well done. I, I don't know what I can add because I don't know the business. I was gonna say you need more slides, so I think— but then I realized that you, uh, you were, you were going and rocking and and forgot to flip the slides. Yeah, but it didn't matter. He's talking, but it ended up not— no, but it ended up not mattering just because you are a very, very good speaker and you have a lot of credibility in the way that you speak. So, so I wouldn't— I don't, don't lump it at all. It's great. You did great.
Sharif, thank you for the presentation. Let's go to our next contender. We'll have Mike on the stage here. Uh, we have the 3 more contenders today. Hey Mike, do you want to share your screen? Oh, I got it here.
Perfect.
We can see it loud and clear. So the stage is yours.
Alrighty, thank you so much. I appreciate it. I'm Mike Peña, CEO at Safehill. We're a cybersecurity company that's trying to help organizations expose attack paths.
Mike is lagging out. My gut DDoS attack.
Um, so before I kind of get into who we are, I think our story is really important. We're second-time founders. We sold our last cybersecurity company in 2001 to a VAR, or a value-added reseller. That's like a software distributor, if you will. Um, Hector Monziger, my, my co-founder here, he's, uh, known as Sabu. He was the former leader of Anonymous, which was a a hacktivist group about 10, 20 years ago. Uh, they were like political hacktivists. Uh, he was the gentleman who hacked into the Tunisian government during the Arab Spring and released all those documents to WikiLeaks. And, um, you know, the FBI arrested him and they said, you're going to work for us, you're spending your life in prison, right? So he did his time with the feds, and, and now he actually has a really successful podcast called Hacker and the Fed. You guys should check check it out. It's with Chris Tarbell, the FBI agent who arrested him, and it's the same FBI agent who brought down, uh, this— the Silk Road. Um, he's been on Lex Fridman and a few other podcasts. So we are definitely, uh, cybersecurity industry veterans. This isn't our first rodeo. You know, we just sold our last business. So what is it that we're trying to do? Well, you know, major breaches are happening all the time, especially now that we're really in a cyber war with Iran and, and some of their allies. Every day there's more and more breaches, and it really doesn't matter how many tools you have in place. If you're not taking a proactive stance to your security, uh, you know, testing and checking to make sure that everything's working correctly, you're going to get popped. And so, you know, how are CISOs, or Chief Information Security Officers, struggling dealing with all of this. There's a lot of noise, budgets are really tight, you know, AI is really accelerating risk, right? And it's creating new attack surface for organizations of all sizes. And so how do you manage all of that in one window? How do you have a CRM or some sort of a tool that gives you visibility into all the ways that you could possibly be breached. And that's what we've solved here at SafeFill with our platform SecureIQ. So what we try to do is we bring in information from all your existing tool stacks. So we orchestrate, but we also validate, um, that the tools are working correctly, that there aren't any exposures that you're unaware of. Like let's say a misconfiguration in your email security controls or in your EDR for your endpoint endpoint protection. A lot of times customers are paying every month for these tools unaware if they're actually set up correctly or if they're working right. So we help you identify that with our platform. But more specifically, recently we've had a lot of success with, um, vibe coding. And so what's this idea here? The idea is that if you're a developer at an organization, you've been tasked to build ship more product faster, right? And so folks are using different models to create code. But the issue is some of that code is vulnerable. It's not safe. There are attack paths or vulnerabilities within the code that's being generated. And a lot of the old enterprise tools like Veracode or Checkmarx don't get you all the way there. They don't validate if the findings are false positives. They don't identify attack paths, right? They may identify a vulnerability, but it's when you string a few vulnerabilities together that creates an attack path for hackers. That's what our product does, and it does it with a dual-agent architecture. One agent tests your environment or the code, and another agent validates or QA that the first agent did the work correctly. Um, and so we've had some pretty successful benchmarks that we've hit with our product. Specifically, we've been able to benchmark against Expo and beat them, which is a Sequoia-backed business, almost $120 million in funding. And we're now benchmarking closer to Anthropic and their Shannon Lite open-source product. So the idea again is you have one unified window that looks at all possible threat exposure attack paths, whether that's through your code cloud security, social engineering of your employees, but that this happens on a continuous basis. Right. And so that's the product that we've been delivering to our clients. It's a big TAM. This number has actually changed. It's closer now to $200 billion. And that's because application security makes a huge part of it. And so if you can be part of the developer's workflow and, you know, incorporate what you're doing from a security perspective, into their workflow, it just makes it stickier and it broadens the market. How is it that we make money? So, you know, we're a SaaS company, right? So we have 3 basic subscription models, the first being the most basic, which is your threat exposure management system. The middle option is more involved with internal network and cloud configurations and that sort of thing. And then our dev option, which is the most popular option today, and it's what we're selling the most of. That's where you're able to test your code in real time, your cloud environments, your apps, APIs, etc. And what's interesting about how we test code is we're doing it right out of your GitHub repository. So you're never sending us code. You know, we're not sending code out to Anthropic. We have our own model that we're building in-house off of the Quin open-source model. So that's a big sticking point for our customers that we're not sending data out to these large OEMs. And because we use our own hardware, we recently got into NVIDIA's Inception program or whatever it's called. They hooked us up with a bunch of hardware, a bunch of software, and that's really allowed our models to, to, to hit these big benchmarks against some of the big OEMs. This is all that matters. Everything else is just nonsense, right? So we've been around for almost 3 years, but the product didn't launch until January of last year. So January 2025. So we're about 17 months in, and since then we've done $2.1 million in total bookings. And that's because we have several multi-year contracts, 24-month, 36-month contracts. We're up to $700K ARR. That's changing this month. We're going to be at $850,000 ARR. We're about to close another contract this week, hopefully, or next week. Our average, you know, contract value is $63,000 per year. So we really know how to sell into our customers. And I think that's our experience as previous founders and, and having customers that trust us in other incarnations. That's really helped us with this business.
Bring this to a close, Mike.
Say again?
Bring this to a close.
Yep.
Um, so customers love what we're doing, lots of traction with our customers. We have a, a freemium model that, that's going to help us put Helix, this product that I talked about, free in the next quarter. Um, I, I believe we're going to be at 1.5 ARR by the end of the year, our first year really since, since we launched. Um, and we're, we're, um, we're raising $5 million as part of our seed round. We just closed, uh, $2.6 in our pre-seed last year, and that was led by Mucker Capital, Chingona, and Techstars. All right, all right, perfect.
Well, thanks for the presentation. Uh, Sean, any questions or comments?
Yeah, uh, great presentation. Um, you guys clearly have the right team for this job. So that's great that you guys are multi-time founders and you have, you know, one of the best and well-known hackers on your side who also has distribution through his podcast. I guess kind of more where I'm getting at it, you know, cybersecurity is obviously a massive category. Is this essentially kind of just meant to combat sort of like what the mythos Vulnerability showed, which is just like, all right, we just ingested everybody's code in one screen. We found all these vulnerabilities. We were able to achieve a couple things, but at the end of the day, if there was a red team or another AI monitoring it, all those exposures could have been caught or countered. Is that kind of what you guys are meant to do, or what pain point specifically within the cybersecurity stack is this meant to replace or solve, and how's that going to get you to a $172 million in, I think, 5 years?
Great question. Well, in terms of Mythos, um, I'll believe it when I see it. My researchers haven't had a chance to look at it all. You know, it is what it is, right? Like, we're taking it at face value currently, so I don't know how we're going to compare against them until we actually, like the rest of the world, gets our hands on it and can test it. So yeah, so that's how I feel about mythos. In terms of the problem that we're solving, uh, what we do is ethical hacking. And up until a few years ago, it was a subset of information security. We were like the weirdo, um, you know, hacktivists or enthusiasts that, that did hacking the same way that before the PC came out, it was people soldering motherboards together. And then, you know, personal computers became a thing. That's what's happening in our industry. And so just last year, our—
looking for holes to poke, right?
Exactly. Just last year, our, our subset, we got a name. We're called continuous threat exposure management. That's how Gartner's referring to this, right? And so how do you fill that gap? How do you help companies become proactive with their security and testing on a cadence and looking at the financial risk? Um, you do that by creating a CTM program. We have a platform that operationalizes it, and it helps— it's actively test their tech stack, right? You're paying $20,000 for SentinelOne every month. Is it actually working? Or is it misconfigured? Right? Because you're going to get popped. You're paying for this other tool, your SIEM. Is your SIEM actually monitoring all the TTPs, tactics, techniques, and procedures? Or is it not? That's what customers have very little insight on right now, other than doing a once-a-year manual pen test with humans, which is great. But those tests are void and null the moment a new CVE is disclosed 2 days later. And now with AI, there's CVEs being disclosed, or vulnerabilities, every day, it seems like. So we help customers kind of stay ahead of that.
Stefan, questions, comments?
Yeah, what a What a great space. Can you give us a little bit of a kind of a 5-year picture? What's your vision for the company, the ownership?
I love it.
So we built this model called Helix, and this is— this would be like the competitor of Mythos, essentially. And today we're benchmarking against Anthropic. So we're doing almost as well based on the open source models that they have, like, like Shannon, for example. We're beating competitors like Expo. They're a Sequoia-backed company. They've raised over $120 million. We've only raised $2.6 million.
Why?
Why are we able to beat these guys? It's because our platform takes a holistic perspective on an organization. And so we identify different attack paths. Are you going to get popped through email? Are you going to get popped through misconfigurations at your endpoint? How is it that you're going to get popped? We take all that information, we have over 6,000 attack paths that we've discovered, we put it into our model, and now our model is able to compete with a giant OEM generalist model because we're highly specialized, right? So our model can't compose a sonnet, it won't draw a picture, it won't tell you how to lose weight, but it'll hack the crap out of a website API or code. That's what it's good at, right? And so here's the plan with with it. After the seed round, we're putting out a freemium version of Helix just to train the model and land grab as many accounts as we can. We're then pushing those customers into a subscription model as low as $25 a month flat. We don't tokenize our pricing simply because we're building our own hardware through the NVIDIA partnership. And then there's two ways you can take the business. One is because we we're really good at identifying attack paths, we can start simulating future attack paths and tell clients, hey, based on your cloud configuration, your network, we think this is how you're going to get breached, you should fix that. Or if we get really good at identifying vulnerabilities in code, why not be the platform that writes code? Why not be first at their own game? Right?
So any questions or comments for Mike?
Yeah, I guess, did this customer usage create a real data moat, or is the edge mostly an—
absolutely no, 100%, right? So, so one of the biggest issues that we have to deal with is AI models are psychophantic. They'll tell you what you want to hear, right? And that's why we have a dual agent architecture. One agent does the work and the other one validates it to prevent drift. None of that means anything without our customers using the thing every day. Which has really helped us advance, right? And I think that's why we're starting to beat some of these large OEMs. So again, if we go freemium with it, it's just a bigger data set for more training, right? Um, that's the goal with it.
Great question. Bryce and Nick, questions, comments?
Uh, yeah, I'd say, um, you're, you're very like enthusiastic and driven in the questions. You're like, oh yeah, we're gonna beat them, here's how we're gonna do it. Like Show me that when you're giving the presentation, 'cause the presentation was more like, oh, here's the slide, I'm just going through it, I'm just going through it. Like, no, gimme that excitement and energy. It sounds like a really cool product. We have invested in something similar, so I'm cheering for you and also cheering for that company.
But yeah, good luck with it.
And I would just say bring that competitive fervor to the pitch.
Yeah, you gotta wait for the second date sometimes. If not, you're a little desperate, but I hear you. I agree with that 100%. Mike.
Yeah, you know, I agree. Just take the energy up a little bit at the beginning. You know, when I was first listening to you, I was like, okay, I'm going to need to maybe recommend that Mike takes his energy up, but then you did it. You do remind me of all the CEOs that— CIOs that have worked for me, where you're a little different though, because the CIOs that work for me, I'm like, stop, stop, because then you go down into the, you know, the rabbit holes, but you do it productively. And you also do it in a way that's very digestible. So I think really very robust, very great presentation. And you've forgotten more than I'll ever know as it relates to what's needed here and what it does. But I think it sounds very powerful. So good luck.
Thank you. Appreciate it.
Thank you all. Thank you, Mike. Let's go to the next contender. We have 2 more contenders.
Today.
Misha, you're up next. You have the stage, my friend. Go ahead. Uh, just that you're muted, so quick unmute.
Thank you very much. Um, my name is Misha. Uh, thank you for having me today. I want to share my startup that is basically 1 month old. Um, I'm a serial entrepreneur. I've been building ventures backed by VCs for for the last 10 years. I built modular micro hotel launched in 10 countries. My last big thing was immersive platform for trainings and team building used by Fortune 200 companies, sold it, and I've been running, been running an AI consultancy, building AI products for clients including in education. So I have a team behind And this is the problem that I found that is, I believe, worth solving, and I think I have an angle for it. So people are looking for answers, for wisdom and guidance every day. 2 billion people, about 2 billion, found that in Christianity, in Bible, in sermons, in all the commentary, in the wisdom of the book, of the word. But this wisdom is actually locked behind, behind hundreds of books of the Bible, hundreds of books of the commentary. It's not really accessible. I mean, you can read the Bible, but you cannot really match it to your, you know, particular question in the moment. So what I'm building now is an app where you simply ask a question about your life situation, just describe what happened, what's happening, and you're getting the exact quotes from Scripture and from thought leaders that you're following, pastors or many other people who created that body of wisdom around the Scripture, speaking to you exactly in the moment. So you can do that like 10 times a day. Basically pastor on demand. And I think, like, I think of it as a different kind of experience because you can do research right now. And that's, you know, Google, you can talk to chatbots, intelligence, but chatbots are not source of wisdom. They are not like life. They're not, they don't have that authority and that angle. They give just shallow, safe response. So what I'm building is like without any chatbots, a retrieval system that, uh, process like preprocessing all the text, uh, looks by meaning, not by keywords, uh, and with a huge focus on actually not on just Bible text but on comments of people, uh, that are followed of pastors. And the business model is basically twofold, like synergistic. Yes, there is a B2C app, but I'm not looking to grow like through just, you know, putting money in, into marketing of that. The idea, the actually the big distribution idea, is that I'm now selling, I'm just cold calling executive pastors and CFOs of churches and actually closing deals like from the get-go because my offer to them is simple. You have all this dead content, sermons, archives of your leading pastor who is followed by tens of thousands of people. We're taking that for free, we're putting that in the app, white labeling it or creating your dedicated branded section in our app, and you get a new way to engage your followers, new revenue source, new donation source, etc. So they are like all into that, and that's basically the flywheel of how we grow. Like, I— this is B2B path with B2C existing and supported, uh, like at the same time. Uh, and basically the, the most important thing here, actually, like one of the key features here is denomination-specific. So, uh, all our competitors, they do just generic, uh, generic Bible, you know, search or just generic Bible retrieval. But Christianity is 45,000 different denominations that are very particular in their differences. So basically what I'm building now is the system that responds to that, that turns that fragmentation into barrier into strategy. So we're selling to the church, not just that your voice will become, you know, more accessible to people. But also the whole hermeneutics, the whole prioritization of what should be responded— like basically the, you know, the answer to the question, "My son is gay, what should I do?" is very different in Protestant church and Orthodox church. So responding to that. And this is, so yeah, this is like comparing to the competition. I want to rush Actually, you can stop here for a second. So yeah, these two key points. Yeah, okay, this is a massive market if the right angle, if there is a right angle. Our competitors are making hundreds of billions a year, some of them a month. So obviously all the Christianity, billions of potential users, churches are paying, are ready to pay for this directly or just pass it to users. We're raising $200K, I'm raising $200K now to basically build an app, put it like, create all the first partnerships. Basically a couple of months away from launch. And that's that. And you're the first people who are outside of my close circle who are hearing about this.
Thanks, Misha. I love the design of the presentation, right? Like your architectural background and like design background shows. A couple of comments. The presentation itself, maybe a bit more practice, right? So that it flows more. I can see the market, right? Like the religious quote unquote market is great. Personally, as not an atheist, but as someone that finds wisdom in other places, I may not be the right client or investor for this. I still see the market. I would have loved to see the GTM as usual. right? Because it's easy to say, um, I can see how you could sell to pastors and ministries, right? But I want to learn how. Is it like Facebook ads? It's Insta ads, right? Is it remarketing?
Cold calls. I'm doing cold calls.
Okay, cold calls. And what is your background in cold calls, right? Like, why are you the right person to, to build this? Or have you done cold calls successfully? I've owned a call center with 200 employees, right? So So tell me a bit more about that.
Yeah, no, I'm not a perfect, you know, cold call sales guy for many reasons, but I do have that guy in my team and as advisor with my co-founder in my previous company. He started the company called Connect and Sell and basically is a genius in that and training me on that. I'm just pushing through this, through the first barrier of first partnerships and I'm selling by being very open. Open of where we are, but they like it so much that, you know, we're still moving forward. But obviously, you know, I'm, uh, I'm not the ultimate salesman for this.
Yeah, why you're the right guy building this would have been fun, right? Like, where did you get the idea from? Maybe a little slide indicating that these types of apps are just like going up, right? Uh, and it's definitely going up nowadays. Uh, so Sean, any questions or feedback from Misha?
Um, I mean, listen, I think anytime you're building anything in AI software, the name of the game is going to be defensibility. And if I'm just being honest, I feel you can probably prompt any of the leading LLMs to reference Bible and a handful of, uh, spiritual figures that of your choosing. And I also feel like, because I've seen my friend do it with a fitness app, um, you can also vibe code a half-assed version of this as well, um, in a weekend by just being like, hey, here are the religious people I follow, here's the books I care about, um, anytime I ask you a question, you know, these are who you're going to reference, um, But that's just my two cents on it. Um, I would— it did get me thinking what could actually be interesting and profitable is, um, if you create your own AI sort of spiritual guide, reverend persona, uh, brand yourself as a church, and now you have a tax-free business, um, and you can create a kind of persona that's virtual first in a, in an AI world, and, you know, spread your gospel to the world.
But yeah, mega churches are really profitable.
Churches and religion is a great business, I hear.
Yeah, but I can answer to this real quick because the defensibility is in the content. We take that content that is not available, that is not indexed, that is not in the ChatGPT of that pastor of that mega church and cater that content to their congregation.
That's a white label is a good angle. White labeling it is a good angle and then selling into the reverends who already have a big brand, who already have distribution so that they can do like their own AI persona. But then there's also apps where you upload some of people's writings and a couple YouTube videos and it creates like the, the fake persona of, of them as well.
Yes, Sunny, questions, comments for Misha?
Ah, yes, maybe a comment and then a question. So it's funny because the AI usually claims to have all the answers. We hear, um, you know, the source material actually might. So how do you build trust that you're retrieving wisdom and not just like reshaping it?
Not reshaping wisdom?
Yeah.
Oh, right, uh, because there is no, no generated text, uh, it's just quotes from the scripture and from, like, if you follow Jordan Peterson, for example, you may respect. He did the whole, you know, commentary on the Bible, so he may be a voice, you know.
Have you studied competition though? Like, my wife uses this Bible app and I'm pretty sure there's a GPT in there.
Yeah, and Bible, yep, exactly, 30% of of content is hallucinated, and you talk to, uh, about— up to— up to—
okay, they feed the real Bible, uh, content. It's not paraphrased or hallucinated.
Okay, okay, Bible app, right? Yeah, yep, yep.
That's—
but there is a chatbot. You're talking to a chatbot.
Yes, but it doesn't paraphrase it, it cites it as such, right? And also it's a bit I mean, I'm not sure what you mean. I mean, I haven't studied. It's— there's like the New Testament, like it seems the word is always like being changed in some degree, right?
Well, I guess what you're talking about is again like the denomination-specific configuration. Like again, if you're asking ChatGPT GPT, you're getting generic, safe, surface-level response. For like, for example, Orthodox, there is a different number of books than for Protestant, and the values, let's say, are different. So, and there are many quotes in like Old Testament that are not surfaced by ChatGPT just because that's a very different protocol, so like safety protocol. So, um, if, uh, like for many, many denominations, there is no product that caters to their specifics. And these differences between denominations is actually kind of the fuel of the faith, if I may say so. It's like the main thing many people are carrying.
Mike, any questions for Misha?
What makes this— you know, I think we're trying to kind of get to what makes us special. And I think it, it, it personalizes it to your faith, I think, is what we keep— is that right?
Exactly, exactly. That is the, that is the main— so two things. First is this, uh, that, uh, system of weights, and it's called hermeneutics, right? That, uh, yes. And the second is that there is no intermediary really between you and the word of source of wisdom that you trust. So there is no chatbot, there is no like— you just ask, you know, your book or your pastor a question and get direct quote. Again, not the surface level, not the same one every time, but specific to your life situation right now.
And maybe I missed it, what was the price point for the B2C?
Yep, yep, no, it wasn't a slide, but So, uh, let's say the average— I want to average about $10 a month, uh, with like some lower tiers like $5 up to— but I'd say my— our competitors, uh, basically that provide, I believe, more shallow and generic experience, not catered towards particular denomination, charging up to $7 a week. So, uh, the you know, there can be a good price point, but I mean, $10 a month, that's where I think it's—
one more thought that maybe in the future for a phase 2 would be, you know, there's a way to, you know, maybe— I don't know if it's Claude OS that you would leverage or what you would leverage, but to understand— understand you, right? Plus the question you're asking, plus where you're trying to pull the information from. To give you an answer of this is what they think, and based on you, here's what you should and should not do in this situation. Might make it really personalize it a little bit more.
Thank you, Misha. Thank you, Mike. Let's go to your last contender, Axel. Glad to have you on the show again. We can see your screen, we can hear you loud and clear. Stage is yours.
Wonderful. Thank you very much. Yeah, I think even today we've heard a little bit about this new thing called AI. And probably everybody has heard by now that the GPGPUs that are used today are a little bit on the power-hungry side. And companies start building nuclear power plants right next to the data centers. And that's, of course, not really sustainable. That's not something that is cheap. Both the TCO and the purchase price is too high for both of them. So something's got to be done about that. And the only way to do that is by making sure those data centers are more instruction and energy efficient because by 2028, 12% of the US electricity generation would go into power for data centers. That's not sustainable. And we see a bunch of trends actually that basically say that something's changing. And one is repatriation. Of workloads for AI into on-prem data centers. And the second is there's an issue with data sovereignty and data secrecy and security. And if you look at the data centers that are on-prem, they are much more power constrained. Usually you see 1 to 5 megawatts of power available and very little cooling. And so that, of course, means one more time the underlying strategy has to be to have more energy and construction-efficient devices that carry the workloads for AI. And that's exactly what we are working on. And those are the things that I believe are going to make sure that AI can be used in the future because the demand isn't going to go down. As we've seen every single time, once we started having the internet, the demand for compute keeps just going up and never, ever down. And so as a result, we need to do something that makes AI more digestible for applications that are both in the backend, which we are not targeting at this point in time, and the greenfield opportunities for on-prem data centers and what is commonly called the smart carrier edge. And that's if you include some of the bigger data centers at the smart carrier edge, they go from 1 to 15 megawatts. So that's a little bit more than the data centers that are on-prem for small to medium-sized companies. And we believe we've got a very good chance in penetrating that market for the AI servers because, again, that's something that NVIDIA and AMD can't serve and we can because we have different underlying technology that is patented. And that allows us to scale out more linearly. We're a fabless semiconductor company, meaning we're asset light. We don't have a fab. Our fab is TSMC, like AMD and like NVIDIA. And one of the many things that we do differently is we have internal switches, external switches. We've got universal ports that connect processors to accelerators to smart memory. And by doing that, we have an order of magnitude improvement in power performance and utilization against the current paradigm, which is the CPU and the GP— GPU. Using that, we can build a data center in a box, and that allows people to easily build AI data centers that are much more energy efficient and instruction efficient than what's out there today. We have a whole bunch of memorandum of understanding, letters of intent signed with the Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 OEMs. We've got one defense contractor. In fact, we've got the D-I-U, the Defense Intelligence Unit, signed up. They are interested in what we're doing to secure the communication between ground stations and the satellites up there. And we're at this point in time based in San Jose with an office. We have another office in Germany, so we're global. And we have all the connections to the server makers that are all in Taiwan. And we're going to use those to make sure that we have access to those that actually make the servers that house our chips. The benefit is directly clear if you look at this today. So you got a GPU connected to the CPU. If the two GPUs want to talk to each other, they have to do that through the CPU. And therefore high latency. We have direct interconnects at much higher bandwidth and much lower latency between all of our chips. And they're basically Lego-like. You can effectively exchange one for another type and they still will play together. If you have a look at current data centers, we can save over the life of them for about 3 years, we can save $1.5 billion in electric power alone, but there's much more to it and I don't have the time to go into all of that. But in the end, we've got commercial pipeline here. You can see WWT, Silverdraft, Micron, Elitra, and, and, and, whole bunch more. I can go through all of that in more detail if required. But well, why now? Because data centers are coming up that won't be able to be powered up therefore not deliver anything performance-wise to the AI. And they will have to wait until power is available, even if they have power delivery agreements in place today. I've got the experience, I've done many, many times here at Entrepreneurs, about 40 patents granted. If you look at the team, the team is very experienced, augmenting what I don't do, they do better. And to In total, we've got about 60 patents, more than 10 startup exits, and global presence. And comparison to NVIDIA, Groq, Cerebras, Tensorrent, we come up on top in every single comparison. We're going to be there in about 21 months with a prototype. We're looking for $30 million in our Series A, and most of the money goes, of course, to R&D, to personnel, into the office, And considering where the industry is today, we believe that in 3 to 5 years we'll be worth more than $600 million based on comps we have identified in the industry, and therefore will create a nice return on investment for all of the investors that chip in money today. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Axel. Um, Yeah, just to go through these slides quicker. I would have loved to see that slide here quicker, uh, or earlier in the deck at least, because it communicates quite a lot, right? Less than 100 watts and so forth. One question for you: what's your take on the Cerebras IPO?
Fantastic. I mean, I, I know the Cerebras founders very well. They, they did something in engineering that nobody felt was possible or doable, right? In fact, what they are doing is they make a chip that is as big as a wafer. And everybody told them you can't do it. And I love the fact that they said, screw that, we show you that it's doable, right? Now, is it a different architecture? No, it is just more engineering. And, you know, more, I wouldn't quite say more of the same, but it's a fantastic feat that they did. And I don't want to diminish that. However, it's not a different architecture. We have a different architecture, which means the underlying foundation is different. So where they have a limit of scale-out, we really don't have that scale-out limit because we're adding something to the von Neumann and Harvard architectures that are prevailing today. We are adding something to that that they didn't. So therefore, despite the fact that they had an incredible run with the engineering problems that they all solved. They still have the architectural issue where they foundationally and fundamentally can't get past the memory wall issue and they can't get past the interprocessor communication wall issue. And we can. And that's the foundational difference. And that's patented. And so therefore, we are very well protected. In fact, we have a VC wanting to back us in case somebody's suing us. Us, and that VC is only there to back us financially in case we need to sue somebody or somebody sues us with regards to this patent.
Sunny, any questions or comments here?
Yeah, I love what Axel's working on. This is crazy. Um, Axel, I've been thinking about this over the last few weeks, right? So if your edge is direct chip-to-chip communication what workload best shows the gain, you know, from removing the CPU as bottleneck?
Right, so it's the interconnection, not only chip to chip, but also all of the cores on the chip, right? So let's say you've got a very large matrix, because if you look at high-performance compute and AI, it literally is all matrix mult, right? And so these matrices are incredibly big, and they are bigger than you can squeeze into a single chip. So what now has to happen is that every single compute element element has to be able to talk to each other at compute element. Because remember, matrix-multiply is row by column, right? And so therefore, it's mathematically is borderline trivial, but you have to have the access to all of the other data points that are possibly in other chips. And so what's important is the on-chip and the across-chip communication has to be at the lowest possible level of latency. And that's That's what we are doing. So effectively what we are doing is we tile the chips as if they were Legos. And you can even interchange them, which is what makes us applicable not only for the training or the inference, but also when you combine both in agentic AI. Because agentic AI combines both. Well, it's more than just the training and the inference, right? But you've got a bigger problem of data flow control and then the math itself. And we can do that because our chips have all the same pinout. And therefore, as I said with Legos, you can combine them and put them together as if they were Legos. And that is our foundational advantage. And it's a fundamental advantage, it's architectural. It has nothing to do with the engineering in it.
Mike, questions, comments to close the show off? You're muted. So I wish you would unmute yourself to hear your comments.
Thank you. I did that. First of all, thank you. Very, very well done. I would just say two things. I would say one, I would suggest, you know, and again, it's, it's just a suggestion, but I'd wear an Oxford, you know, just, you know, you're, you're asking for $30 million. So I would just, you know, just a small thing. And, and I think, you know, keeping as crisp as you can. If there's ways to use a few less words, uh, to be more crisp. I think you did an amazing job. I think what you have is absolute— I mean, you're sitting on a gold mine. I was surprised when you said $600 million. I was thinking $1.5 billion, $2 billion, because it's not a market that's shrinking, it's a market that's growing at, you know, at 10, 100, 1,000 pace. But really, really well done.
Thank you.
Hey guys, uh, yeah, Maxl, any closing remarks in a couple seconds?
No, I think you're absolutely correct. We, we took a comparison of all the comps, right? And so the floor was $600 million, so that's why we took a floor of $600 million. That's why we did that.
We—
and we, in fact, we just did that, right? I, I got an intern on board to just do everything and redo everything we have in our marketing, in our pitch material, because all of the nuggets were else and distributed all over the place, and he has now consolidated all of that, right? And so yes, would I like to use fewer words? Yes, I would. The problem is I first have to describe that we are not competing with NVIDIA, because if we say we compete with NVIDIA, everybody would say you're out of your mind, you're mental, right? And I want to get—
I don't think so. I think NVIDIA doesn't have a moat, actually. I'm one of these guys— hey guys, let's just like close the show off because it's already been like 2 hours and a half here, or almost. Let's go with our winner, pick a winner here today. On my end, if I can start, I would go with Mike first. Mike, I like your presentation, love what you guys are building, already raised funding, already having traction, right? Ilya, the first guy, because he's wild, like a Muay Thai fighter as well. And third one I would pick, yeah, Dana's company, Dana Klein, because it was a crisp presentation as well. And I love what she's doing here. Sunny, who did you like most for today?
There's a bunch of them that I really like, but yeah, Axel, I love, love every time what he says.
It's amazing.
Mike, who did you like most today?
Yeah, I think Axel and then Mike in that order. Axel, I think what you're doing, what you're sitting on top of, and the credibility of the way you presented it.
Axel, you listen to many presentations. Who was your favorite today, or did you not?
I listened to all of them, and so the issue is I try to only judge what I'm, you know, capable of and what I'm an expert in. So most of the presentations are beyond what I understand. So I really have no understanding of any of the faith-based stuff or anything medical. And while I admire what's been done, I really can't judge it. So I really—
judging the presentation, then one quick presentation. Did you— who did you like most today?
I like the presentation that was, that was shorter than the allocated time. That was, that was my favorite.
That was, that was Ilya. That was Ilya. So, kudos Ilya for that. Brent, any favorite of yours today from the ones you listened to?
I did like Axel.
There you go.
Nishant, which presentation did you prefer Thank you, Ilya, stick to me. And Mike, uh, which one did you prefer?
I like Sharif's, uh, presentation.
There you go. Well guys, thanks for tuning in today for another, uh, Spark Tank. That was Edition 8. Uh, thanks to everyone that's been on today. People can find us
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