Spark Tank - Edition 9

And we're live, uh, Spark Tank Edition 9. We have a bunch of co-founders today, a bunch of VCs in the room. So VC side, we have Ron with us today, we have Sunny, we have Mike, we have Stefan that's gonna join us in a second as well. And we have founders, uh, starting with Michael, we have John, we have Ahmad, uh, Semai, Christian, and Tino. So a bunch of intriguing founders, some of them here for round 2. So let's start with a round of intro. I'm Charles Cormier, founder of Spark Tank. I host a bunch of podcasts and pretty good at GTM and fundraising. I head GTM Ventures and RazRocket.com with my co-founder Sonny here. I also have a fund called Mach 10 Fund. We invest in YC companies. So Michael, maybe you can start with an intro and then everyone can follow course after Michael.

Thank you for the opportunity, Charles and Sonny. I appreciate it. Uh, Michael Lyon, COO and co-founder at Gun Sense. Uh, we are solving the global pandemic of gun violence and mass shootings and threats in general.

I'm Ron Chigueta.

I run a virtual tech accelerator for startups out of Berkeley, California. I've worked with about 150 startups and enjoy it with technology of all kinds.

Hey, I'm Jon Bon. I'm the founder and CEO of Future Proof Music School, where we are training the dubstep stars of the future.

Hi, I'm Mohamed. I'm the founder of Kreative, a no-code platform that allows anyone to make high-quality video games.

Hi everyone, my name is Sunny. I'm Charles's co-founder at Spark Tank, also Raz Rocket. I'm also the founder of Uno Coin, which is India's first Bitcoin exchange.

I'm director at Humanoid Global. Happy to be here.

Hi everybody, Mike Fineman. I'm the owner and founder of Texas Business Brokers M&A firm. Plus I also founded a restaurant company. We've got a small chain of restaurants and also an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur. As much as I can. We can. Yeah.

Yeah.

From Austin, Texas.

Happy to be here.

Some feedback on your side, Michael. Maybe you can mute yourself or someone.

I think it's stopped now.

Samay will fix his mic. Chris, you can go next.

Hi there, my name is Christian. I'm the founder and CEO of TimeCharge. We build infrastructure for next-generation mobility all the way from EVs to robotaxis and now even EV tolls.

Tino? Muted. Semi, did you fix your microphone? Quick intro about yourself.

Yeah, I think it was— I think it was—

yeah, okay, I'll, I'll repeat.

Yeah, not, not working. Um, all right, let's go with, uh, I mean, yeah, T-Note, uh, I don't think could do the intro. Um, yeah, let's, uh, go with the first pitch. Michael, uh, do you want to share your screen? So we can bring it on stage and you can start presenting. John, we're going to go with you. You can start presenting and Michael will go second.

Okay, that's fine. So I'm John Von Seggern. I am a musician and an educator and an AI developer. And I'm the founder of Future Proof Music School. So as you can see, we are leading electronic music education into the AI era. We're going to be providing personalized education at scale for electronic music producers by using AI. And myself and my co-founder were formerly the team that built Icon Collective's online school. I don't expect that any of you know of Icon Collective, but it was pretty much the leading school in electronic music education here in LA for the last 10 or 15 years. I went out of business last year because they were— got badly overextended during COVID So now I'm leading the team that is rebuilding an AI-enabled version of it. Um, the school's only half built today. We still have a lot of courses to build, and we have more AI development to do, which is why I'm raising money. But we've bootstrapped it to this point. We have 48 students today and we're making $4,000 MRR about. So I think we've, we've built the foundation and we want to raise a seed round to go further now. Uh, we're raising a $250K SafeNote, a $3 million cap. The 20% discount. So I'm just going to tell you a little bit more about the school. So this is our primary thesis: the best way to learn anything is by personalized one-on-one tutoring. That's been known since ancient times. The problem is it's too expensive for most of us to hire a personal tutor to teach us something. So AI is providing the capability to provide this personalized tutoring at scale. For much cheaper. So the primary breakthroughs there are voice AI. Uh, voice is very important for music education because you need to be able to work on the music and kind of flexibly talk to the AI at the same time. Uh, if you're just going to be typing things into a box, it's very difficult to communicate about music. And so by using, uh, AI tutoring, we're able to deliver personalized tutoring at a much lower price point. Um, so the school's been launched since last spring. We launched it when it was barely operational because even though we still have a lot of content and technology to build, we do have very good human teachers now, and we decided to go ahead and open and start making money while we build all the technology. And as our technology gets better, then we'll be able to switch over more and more to having, uh, the AI deliver the education. At the moment, the AI is more of a supplement to the education. So our projections of how big this could be— we only have 48 students now, which is small, but, um, the main school that we're using as a reference here our main competition is this school called OwlArt. They are in Europe, they're from Spain, and they have, they have an online school that teaches more house and techno and pop music. They have 30,000 paying students now, and they've achieved that by doing promotion deals with well-known established artists. So that kind of shows like the reasonable level we think we could get to. So we're showing here, if we'll— the profitability as we grow to 5,000. I just want to show that's very realistic because we know what the size of the market is there. As we grow, we will be leveraging AI more and more, and we'll always have human staff, but the human teachers will be more for the higher tiers of the education, the students that are paying more. So this is the product that we're selling. It's a combination of an AI music coach and human artist mentors in a very engaged online community, which is something we also have a lot of experience with from our past experience. Um, this is showing you the product we're developing, which is our Cadence desktop app. It directly connects to Ableton Live, the music production software that most people use. And it can in real time give you advice. It can actually hear and analyze the music that you make, give you feedback how to improve your mixes, or any kind of basic techniques you need to know can tell you right there. Um, the landscape— so I mentioned there's a school, AllArt, in Europe that has 30,000 students. They have grown that by basically doing artist endorsement and content deals with very well-known artists in house and techno. We would like to, or we plan to extend this model to American EDM. My partner Protohype, my co-founder, is a mid-level American dubstep star. And Max— this is Max Pote. And between us, we have a lot of connections with large artists in American EDM, so we're planning on taking part of this raise and making some deals with, uh, really big EDM artists. There isn't really another school quite like this. Icon Collective, our former employer, was in this lane, but they're gone now, so that leaves us space. And our team— this is me and my co-founder. So I have built the technology and designed our programs and primarily work with the backend and also the financial. And Max is my marketing director and my top instructor and also has a lot of— he runs our social media and he has a lot of connections into the EDM world. We also have a number of the top mentors and course designers from my previous institution, Icon Collective. Once they went out of business, Max and I went and recruited the best people that we worked with before. So we have several of them on staff now. And I should mention too, besides using AI to deliver a good chunk of the education, We also use AI extensively on the backend. We have an AI assistant that writes us reports and keeps tabs on our students and our marketing and retention and reporting. So that's all, that's all automated. So, uh, Max and I are able to get a lot more done than 2 people normally would. And, uh, again, I want to emphasize we're already making money, although not much money, but We are already making money, although we haven't even really built the most important parts. We only have half the curriculum we need, and our, our AI works, but it's not what it will be when we develop it further. We— our vision extends much farther. And with this raise, uh, we're going to finish the AI tutor and build out the curriculum and then do these endorsement deals. With major EDM artists. And here is what we're asking for. So the biggest chunk of the money again is for these artist endorsements. The reason we're betting so heavily on this, I should say, is that, um, I have personally worked in marketing at Icon Collective and other schools in our space, and I know from experience that in this kind of area, artist endorsement really carries far more weight than anything else. You could spend millions of dollars on ads or, you know, SEO or social media, and it wouldn't do as much good as making one course with somebody who everyone respects. So that's what we're— that's what we're counting on for the marketing.

And we're also going to close on—

all right, so I'm about done here. Um, This is just our— so what we're trying to do with this raise is build out enough of the schools so we reach profitability and be in a good position to either do a raise, or perhaps we won't even need another raise. We'll see how it goes. But, uh, that's the pitch. Anybody have any questions about this?

Yeah, it was good. I personally like it. Um, the only comment that I would have is If you keep talking about like an iconic, right, or icon that closed down, I think it's a double-edged sword, right? It's good that you picked up like their business and their ex-staff, but it could also be a warning story, right? And I'm telling from experience, um, as a founder, sometimes I started a business and I was like, yeah, these guys failed and I picked up their thing, but then they actually failed because there was no business or no scalability there. So what do you have to say about that?

My former school was very successful, but our founder made a big, big bet on expanding just before COVID started. He built a new school that was 3 times larger and started these new programs, and he just couldn't make— he couldn't get that kind of growth after COVID hit. And my online division of the school actually remained very successful throughout. If it would have been spun off as a separate company, it would have been highly profitable. And that's the part I'm trying to rebuild.

Ron, uh, any questions on your side?

Yeah, John, obviously you and your co-founder are very talented and you have a lot of experience. Um, I'm going to be real brief. Uh, it— show but don't tell. You already have like all these people there, you have things going on, you have a partial implementation. Um, this campaign is probably going to run for a while to raise this money. I think you and your co-founder should try to fill in the most— at least be able to demo the most interesting parts about your plan and show the potential that you have and convince us all, including future students, that you— people need to go to the school. Yeah, just, just lay it on us, man.

Sunny.

Yeah, I guess that's—

if artist deals are slow, what's kind of plan B for growth? Um, we're running SEO and social media, and we're doing Meta ads with testimonials from students. We're only— we just have been the last couple months getting together a lot of video testimonials, and I'm about to launch those, so I'm pretty excited about that. I do think the artist endorsements are going to work out, though. We already are in touch with a number of artists. We just need some cash to lead with. And then the other one, um, sorry, so what makes this more scalable than ICON? Um, because we're using AI. So at the moment, the AI is helping and supplementing with the education, but our vision, if we get this money, will be to build more and more of the education into the AI so it can actually provide much more of the education autonomously. So So as we grow and the AI improves, we'll have more students that are just on the automated tier. The more advanced students will graduate to working with artists.

Mike, any questions, comments?

Yeah, so I too am a musician, and I actually have in one of my albums an EDM song called Down Under. So I kind of get it, and I know you know, kind of this area in terms of AI and AI-created music, and there's kind of levels, right? So there are some apps that are out there that you literally can put— throw some words in there and it'll create a song, and it'll create an electronic music type of production. What does— so I get that, and then sounds like you could scale it down a little bit where it'll give you less and less support. And it sounds like you guys are in the realm of providing education. I'm assuming that education is, hey, here's how you can compose it differently where it'll be more powerful. You need to add a hook or a bridge. I'm sorry, you need to add a bridge maybe in this because it's a little too basic. Is that what it's doing? And then also the other follow-on question is, what does it mean when it's an AI supplemented? And so then therefore, how human intensive is it to provide this instruction?

Okay, those are good questions. So the first question, we're not actually using generative AI to make the music, and that's not what we're teaching. That is an extremely controversial area, and we could possibly get blackballed from the industry if we led with that.

Yes, you can.

On a more practical level, the kind of people that are coming to us to study are not really interested in that at all. In fact, I mean, I've offered, I offered a workshop in AI-generated music. People aren't really interested in that. They're interested in harder techniques. That's why they're coming to us really. So we probably will have courses about how to use generative AI. I'm working on some stuff, but it has to be integrated very carefully and that's not really the core of what we're teaching. As far as what the AI tutor does, so our AI tutor is able to, It's able to draw info from our curriculum and the student's personal record and the screen of what they're working on. And then between those things, it's always trying to give you the guidance that you need at the point you're at. We do have courses where you're watching videos and doing projects. The AI then can talk to you and answer any questions you have, or— and always aimed at your level. Also is very important. Once we have this app deployed, then it'll be able to work directly with you in Ableton, and it kind of— it's kind of magical. It kind of watches what you're doing, and you kind of be, what, how do I do this? And it'll just chime in and tell you. So it's very cool.

Thanks for your presentation, John. Let's go to your next contender, Michael. Uh, bring you on stage here. You have your presentation. The stage is your Thank you so much.

I appreciate the time. So, Gun Sense, we are solving the pandemic, global pandemic of gun violence, mass shootings, and threats in general. So nobody really needs an explanation about gun violence and mass shootings in the US. It's on a pandemic level. It continues to increase exponentially. So our privacy-first solution is a visual gun threat detection company. Um, it basically will look out 100 feet today, uh, radius at 360 degrees. It is looking for the presence of a weapon using AI that's very different than AI in general, as you see out there today. It doesn't use large image libraries like everybody else does. It's privacy first, so it doesn't violate any privacy. So it can be installed anywhere— indoors, outdoors, bathrooms, locker rooms, doesn't matter. It detects weapons in real time. The AI lives on the edge. It is 100% edge-based system. It's looking for the presence of a weapon where a weapon does not belong. Once detected in about 200 milliseconds with almost 100% accuracy, 99.2% today, it basically alerts first first responders over the FirstNet authority, which is a government backbone guaranteed first responder only network. That alert goes out, bounces off our cloud, comes back as what you see in the middle of the screen, which is a floor plan of an office building. And you can see there, there are a number of different signals on there. The red signal being the perpetrator, and it's live in real time over Android and iOS. We can see two first responders on the field in blue shields. We can see medtech people in green shields on, on scene already. So it's live situational awareness. It also goes out to the general public. They get a different application also over iOS and Android. So we like to call this the 1890 rule. The average mass shooting in the United States from the time a 911 call is made is about 18 minutes. That's the time it takes from that call for first responders to show up on scene. The average mass shooting takes 90 seconds. So obviously, we've got a major disparity in the marketplace. Total addressable market, $355 billion US, about $1.1 trillion globally. You can see here, made up of commercial buildings, retail, whole hotels, casinos, schools, some military, houses of worship. This doesn't take into account retail— excuse me, it doesn't take into account consumer and a few other options in there. We're a B2B play with TD Synnex. We are a channel play, but we have seeded the market. Today, the gun detector is $2,400 plus $50 a month MSRP. Um, we have an SOS panic button that's $20 per button and $30 per month, uh, for, for monitoring. Um, so about $365 a year. Uh, sales forecast, um, the first year we're just about to go to market with our first product, uh, about $38 million in revenue. $71 million gross profit. At scale, year 3, $650 million, 92% gross margin, north of 50% EBITDA. So a very healthy company outside of the gate. Here's the team, or part of the team. We are a team of 8 serial entrepreneurs, approximately 15 exits between us. So we, uh, We've done this before. So intellectual property, we have a huge moat with IP that covers the AI, covers the hardware, covers a number of different applications, and you will see some of those issued in the next year or two. Long roadmap. So where we are today, the SOS panic button today is available in stock. And will be going out in the next couple of weeks. The gun threat detection device is ready, will be going out in the next 2-3 weeks. We have a 2026 Q3 that we're shrinking the model so it will be available for OEMs, licensing, military, automotive, automotive, and more. We've got expanding detection libraries, knives, Knives, knives, shops, and shanks, including threat detection of mannerisms. We'll be adding audio as well to that. We will be a smaller SoC system in 2027 for a wearable that will go both military and consumer and open our market exponentially. So strategic engagements, we have a Global Fortune 10 that we're working with currently. They have about a billion square feet across the planet. We also have Ford, Hyundai, and several others. As you can see, some numbers on there, they're pretty, pretty significant. Market traction: 850 customers to date, all waiting for these pilots to go out. You can see a few names there with strategic partnerships: Amazon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Motorola. Um, that's only a handful of the 20 or 30 that we have. So the opportunity, uh, is, uh, for us about a 10x projected year 3 revenue multiple, uh, 22x return on our current investment of $50 million. There are several large exits in the space, and you can see those below. We did raise a pre-seed round that's closed. We, we were raising $1 million, we raised $1.5 million in about 3 months late last year. We have a $3 million bridge round that's currently open. It, um, we've got about $500,000 in committed and in the bank. Um, we're all anticipating opening an A round in the very near future, as soon as large POs come in from our Global Fortune 10 customer and several other large customers. That $50 million round will go towards fulfilling sales and growing our market with M&A and marketing, as well as—

Hey, Mike, bring this there close, please.

Okay, um, and then just as our CEO said, just every building has a smoke detector, soon they'll all have gun threat detectors. Thanks for the time, appreciate it.

Perfect.

Um, yeah, I mean, gun violence doesn't need an explainer, but every pitch deck needs a story, right? So maybe— I mean, all of us have stories, right, like with guns and schools, unfortunately. And maybe if you could start with that, I think that would be impactful without going too deep, right? Because you don't want to shock emotionally people, of course, uh, on the front end. But just like a story, right? Like, this could have been prevented if, um, two, who are the competitors in there? Because we had various clients in that space, and it's, it's much needed for sure, it's great, but there's a lot of incumbents in that space. So how do you measure up, uh, VSD existing or established solutions in there?

Yeah, good questions. Thank you. So, um, as far as competition, um, uh, ZeroEyes, um, is one. They're probably the 800-pound gorilla in the room today. Um, and there are several others in that space. Um, the, the problem that they have is they are all cloud, uh, cloud-based detection. So in other words, they're bolting on to existing CCTV cameras of unknown, uh, accuracy, speed and bandwidth. We've got many instances where they failed to detect weapons or they've generated false positives. The problem starts right there, and they're in the cloud, and AI is in the cloud. Now they've got to transmit over cellular, possibly gigabits of information over cellular up to the cloud, for the AI to do inferencing. They've got the added problem that they don't scale. They have, for every 4 4K cameras, they have to have an NVIDIA NPU. They have to have a significant amount of memory. And in this market with memory being heavily allocated, what used to be $200 for a 640-gig drive is now 2,800. So it doesn't scale. They need humans in the loop to look at this vision. So the time is ticking. And if you've only got 90 seconds from the time the first shot is fired, you're already behind the 8-ball. So we are 100% edge-based. With alerts going out within 2 or 3 seconds at most and situational awareness being given to first responders in the field. First responders can now be in the field at the scene within a minute or two. We're active.

One quick comment real quick before I let Ron talk. Sometimes it's great to be like complementary, being like, oh, these other guys are already there, but we do that in complementary And it's one of these spaces in which having layers of security, if layer 1 fails, then it's layer 2, then it's layer 3. I think that's a good way to pitch it. Ron, any questions or comments? You're muted.

Yeah, thanks. Sorry, I also felt that like the 18-minute, 90-second sort of disparity was not quite, uh, it sort of created more confusion than answers. I think I do feel like the people who were there are always going to be the ones who are really going to be dealing with this, uh, unless you're detecting— unless you're moving your gun detectors to periphery and giving people 2 or 3 minutes after the gun's detected and that kind of thing. Also, I think— see, I would like to see a story too. I'd like to see You're talking about what happens when the gun detector detects somebody who gets told, and then how are the responders going to actually stop this? I think that I would like to hear more about that. I don't think first responders are the ones that are actually dealing most of these. The school's got to shut down, or the organization's sort of got to get alerted, and people there respond. That's actually all what happens. So, yeah, a clearer picture of what you guys hope to do with it would be great. I mean, The panic buttons are great, but actually, I, you know, I just looked it up. There's quite a few of those. So, uh, it, you know, the detectors, what do they do beyond that, etc., etc. So, uh, yeah, so yeah, the actual process would be great.

Yeah, yeah. So a good point. I appreciate it. Um, so once the weapon is detected, the alert goes out, and that 18 minutes is just the average across the United States. Some of them are shorter, some of them are longer. But as soon as the weapon is detected, and let's take the good example of schools and mass shootings in schools, this is not the first time that a young male has brandished a weapon. We see this in communications with FBI all the time, that these kids will boast to their friends that they have this weapon, they'll do it in a parking lot. And we're indoors, outdoors, we're at perimeter, we're inside, we're outside. So once we've detected a weapon, it may be before— well before the gun violence actually culminates. We send a simple API out to the school. They get the alert, they get the maps, floor plans, and a digital twin showing where the threat is in real time. We have the ability to send that API out, lock doors, turn on alarms, uh, whatever it might be, um, in, in real time.

You've got a ring, you've got a ring of these detectors around the institution, correct? More, that gets a lot more, uh, that is a little more spendy and, and more, you know, more privacy concerns, etc. Anyway, I, I think, yeah, walking people through the story, I'm not gonna— we won't do a debate here, but yeah, I just, I think the story is still could be clearer, and I think you can do a lot better next time.

Okay, thank you.

Mike, any questions?

Yeah, Michael, I would say, um, I think it's, um, I think it's, it's brilliant, uh, but it's— there's other— I mean, it's happening, um, elsewhere. So I think really focusing on what makes you different, which I think you've got to talk about the risks of, of this investment. I think it's important to get that, get the elephant, you know, right there in the room. Talk about how protected it is, uh, the competition, all the things that we're all kind of circling around. Um, one suggestion just from a presentation standpoint, Michael, make sure you're looking at, at, at us because you're kind of looking down. I think it's really important from a credibility standpoint, and I think also it'll help you in terms of tightening up. Uh, you know, when you get cross-examined here, you want to be as tight as you can with your answers, try to get, get in and get out on the answers, and it'll help when you look at us.

Okay, I appreciate the feedback.

Sunny, questions, comments?

I love Mikey Michael.

I know on my live stream with him I got a bit teary-eyed, so I love what you guys are working on.

I agree with some of the comments in terms of, you know, just polishing up kind of the, the flow and the investor deck, but overall, I mean, yeah, your pitch has my heart for sure.

Thank you, Michael. Thanks for showing up. We have, uh, Stefan also that's gonna join us as a VC, just arrived, so let's So let's go with our next contender. We have Ahmad. Ahmad, the stage is yours. You can present, my friend.

Okay, thank you. So hi everyone, my name is Ahmad and I'm the founder of CreaTiv, where we aim to level the playing field by building a platform, a SaaS no-code UGC platform that enables anyone to develop and publish commercial quality games, animations, and simulations. When I share this mission statement with anyone, the first impression I usually get is, This sounds too good to be true, but I'm here to tell you that it's too good and it's true, and I'm going to show you exactly how. I've been in the industry for 20 years at this point, where I've seen it from multiple different perspectives as a startup studio director at two startups in the Middle East, shipping multiple titles on mobile, PC, VR, and consoles. As an engineering manager at AWS, leading the messaging team at SQS, the workload management automation team. I do teach Unreal Engine at the Vancouver Film School. And I provide consultancy to the Big Four consulting firms on the Middle East gaming market. My projects have been featured on BBC, CNBC, IGN, Kotaku, and others, and won several local and regional awards. So I've had my successes, but most importantly, I had my failure, and the common thread between all of them is that today we have a very untapped market, which is not players, it's actually creators making commercial-quality products is still as hard as the day that I started. And that is despite several attempts to democratize development, because development is only one part of the big problem. Today, you need to also account for content that will actually go in your game in terms of building characters, vegetation, etc. There is the polish layer that players expect to see in today's modern AA and AAA content, as well as the ability to develop and publish on multiple platforms, not only PC-only platforms. So in order to solve all of these issues, I'm developing Creative to level the playing field with a single end-to-end solution that addresses all of them. Let's take a look at Creative in action. So you download Creative on one of multiple platforms where it's available, say Steam or PlayStation. You can develop or discover existing projects, and the whole thing is available in 20 languages from day one. The moment you start, you select a starting point for your Scene. These are not templates, these are procedurally generated open worlds created in a second by Creative. On the left, you have a simple toolbox where you control all aspects of the level, and then you peek into the available theme pack library where you drag and drop content that is pre-coded and pre-optimized and comprehensive. Now you can control things like water turbidity. Is it Caribbean blue versus Red Sea blue? And what's the global wind intensity in the whole scene? Using a simple slider. Now you can able— you're able to add mountains, move them around, copy them and paste them easily, and even create roads and rivers and Terraform Terrain. Adding characters next, so you're able to interact with cloth animation, rigid bodies, walking on uneven terrain, rope physics, and destruction. So eliminating the technical challenges of game development today. For the art direction, your game can be realistic but also stylized or anime. And then you can't code in Creative, but you can program, which is what matters. So you're able to place triggers that will execute actions for UI, object manipulation, etc. For the gameplay, you choose the top-level categories, but you're also able to drill down and choose particular gameplay elements that you need for your game from that genre. Selecting everything would be like having a pizza with all the toppings. Is it a good idea? Nobody knows, but that's what differentiates one from the other, and this is how you can think about it. When you're done, you publish to the built-in Discover Store where you see other people's creations. You click on one of them, you see the metadata, screenshots, and videos. And people can buy your game or play for free if it's free. And when they launch it, they see a fully featured menu system for your game that you can brand with your own fonts, colors, backgrounds, and music with all of the bells and whistles expected from a high-quality title. And here's what you can build in Creative today. Let's take a look. So up to unicorns and fire-breathing dragons, and that's how we level the playing field. It's for artists who can't code, coders who can't art, and visionaries who can't do either. Uh, we're not trying to compete with existing solutions today like Roblox and Core and the UGCs of the world where the focuses on interactive social media platforms, or with a new wave of text-to-game AI generator where they're charging you per request and it's probabilistic, not deterministic, so you're spending time conveying your intention instead of actually creating, or the traditional high fidelity and high cost solutions such as Unreal Unity and CryEngine that will lead to many years of development cycles and multiple millions of dollars. You don't have to choose between high fidelity and low cost with Kreativ because it offers you both. And we're addressing a market size that is $4.5 billion in potential ARR. We, uh, in this particular market, I mean, we're trying to monetize through two main ways, and it's available today actually. So from the creator side, on this we offer subscriptions of multiple tiers, monthly and annual. But then also on the player side, we monetize through virtual coin packs where people can buy coin packs and then spend them on the actual in-game, uh, items.

30 seconds.

Yep, and we've already launched back in February, uh, we've generated $20,000 since then, and, uh, yeah, won the Game Developers, uh, pitch competition a couple of months ago in San Francisco. And we've ran a successful pilot with Ethos Lab, which is an after-school community center here in Vancouver, where the whole school licensed the platform. And last week we signed an agreement with Savvy Games Group to provide access to 1 million students in Saudi Arabia across K-12, 5 universities, and 15 incubative studios. We're available right now in early access. The target is September for the general launch. And yeah, the ask is $2 million for pre-seed round with SafeNotes as well, 6 months to release, followed by 12 months of support and maintenance. To conclude, uh, here is the outro video, just 20 seconds. Thank you very much for your time.

Very good. Yeah, probably one of my favorite pitches as well. Ahmad, just, uh, one comment, um, the visuals, right? Like the branding, I think the engine's visuals are so great that it makes Your own branding looked like 1980s, so maybe just rework like the logo, the presentation. Your pitching skills were excellent, the presentation. I'm bullish on you. I, I can see this. Uh, so let's, let's talk after the show. Ron, uh, any questions or feedback for Ahmad?

Yeah, it's very clear Ahmad's sort of done this before and he knows how he comes across and used that well. So kudos to that. So I guess interesting, I noticed you had Steam on your pipeline, milestone pipeline, but it didn't really discuss it. Like, it looks almost like you're going to try to compete with Steam by offering content through your own network. Like, how, yeah, how was, how real is that? And how do you feel about that? Because Steam is, I mean, people want to, people play their games and that usually you do it through Steam now.

So, uh, so with Creative you can do both the playback of games but also the creation in one app. And this app is available on Steam, actually it's in review this very moment. I'm expecting their final decision very soon. So it will be available not only on Steam but also on EGS as well as PlayStation.

So you'll be able to make a game and publish it on Steam then?

Yeah, and on PlayStation. Yes, the Steam, Steam is one case. Also, unlike Roblox where you can only develop on Windows With creative, you can develop wherever creative itself exists.

Okay, good to hear.

Very cool. Sunny, uh, we had a client that did something similar, right? Avalon. Uh, any questions for Ahmad?

Yeah, no, I was the one who invited him to the show.

I was really blown away by, by his work and love the way he pitches. And, uh, yeah, and yeah, big, big fan of his work. So I think no, no critical comments. I, I agree with you, Charles.

I think the, the deck obviously leaves a lot to be the imagination.

So happy to actually help you with that as well, maybe on a follow-up call.

Mike?

Yeah, I think it was close to, close to a master class in, um, in, in the way, in the way to go about it. You, you hit all the senses, and I wish you absolutely the best of luck. I think it's, uh, I think it's going to be great. I'm going to try it.

Thank you, Michael.

Stefan?

Yeah, what a, what an amazing, uh Just really great presentation. A couple things you did well that I really liked. You did a great job of articulating how you fit into the marketplace vis-à-vis the other competitors. I think that's incredibly important, and you did a great job at that. Also, I like how you thought about not just creating the game, but holistically the other aspects of it, like polish and commercializing it, to really think more holistically about the whole experience. Um, so, you know, the one thing that it left me wanting to know a little bit more about was, you know, what does it take to get from here to where you're making $10, $20, $30 million a year? You know, what, what does that process look like? What are your thoughts on that? Um, you know, a lot of people like to raise a lot of money to spend a lot of money on marketing, but, but there's often very, very mixed results. So, you know, if you had a little bit more that you could share as part of that, that walks us through that journey, would be interested in your perspective on that. But again, I really like how you presented it. The visuals were awesome, and you covered so many of the important questions in a way that a lot of people often don't. So my other judges will tell you, I often don't hold back, and I'm not shy, but But, you know, compliments to you, great job.

Thank you very much, really appreciate all your feedback. To answer your question, a couple of years ago, I was trying to raise pre-seed funding for this, and I was told repeatedly, this is too good to be true, too big, too ambitious, you'll never be able to do it. So I told my wife, you know, listen, if there's a chance in hell that this will ever see the light of day, we need to invest our own money into this and prove that it can be done. Now, 2 years later, it is done. I'm a solo founder of the company, I'm working with a great team that I've been working on day in and day out for the past couple of years, the biggest issue is not just the development part of it, but also like the go-to-market and the marketing and competing for attention with all of these platforms. We're not committing directly, but attention is a currency in this case. So funding at this point is still— it has been fully bootstrapped. I'm looking for proper funding. And we're talking about way smaller amounts than the typical amounts that, you know, we're discussing for these kinds of platforms. So I think what it needs is for somebody to believe in what we're trying to do and the results that we are so far and the potential for what it can be in the future. That's all what it takes.

Well, please share that with us offline or whatever. I'm sure that everybody here would like to learn more about that. And again, great job.

Thank you. Thank you.

Let's go with the next contender, Christian. Christian, let's see, you have the stage here. Just unmute yourself and the stage is yours, my friend.

Awesome, thank you very much. Well, my name is Christian, I'm the founder and CEO of Tamcharge. A bit of background about me, I wasn't born in the US, I was born in Venezuela, came here when I was a kid, didn't speak a word of English, so somehow grew myself to be a startup founder. Um, this is my second company. My first unofficial startup was, uh, about investing, which ultimately ended up being seed capital for TimeCharge later on. It was a bunch of friends that we put together about $1,700, and that went up to be all the way to $212,000. Uh, that exit allowed me to then start focusing on TimeCharge. And what TimeCharge is really about is building infrastructure for next-gen mobility. What that means is that currently we know that Ubers and taxis are becoming robotaxis and cyber cabs. Delivery is stopping from a delivery guy to now delivery robots, and even Fry's is now moving to autonomous. But there's one big problem that all of these fleet operators are currently facing: scaling equals millions. Every new city these operators want to go into, they have to spend hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, into every new city they go into. This makes the entire process operationally a hassle super slow and a huge CapEx every new city. And that's exactly what TimeCharts solves. What we do is an open infrastructure solution in a world where all the OEMs and all these fleet operators have to manage all the warehousing, permitting, overhead, power, construction of all these depots. Right now what TimeCharts does is we'll get both the investment as well as the operation of this as pretty much as a general contracting area of this and we'll do all those solutions for them so that they can have a plug-and-play station. The business model behind it all is an infrastructure as a service, so they can either do it through infrastructure access fee per demand, or they can also do it based on contracts, on years of contracts that we can do with them, and also all these added value services that we have here. Now We have a lot of traction to prove this. It's actually a bit outdated as of last week. We have over $100,000 in sales. This is just in 8 months that we went to market. We have autonomous delivery beta stations in actually all throughout Texas, but specifically in Austin because we were recently accepted into Capital Factory accelerator program just this February. We have over 40 gas stations that already signed all across the Southeast of the United States. We're ready to do a huge deployment, about a $20 million revenue runway that, that will run us through over the next 36 months. And right now we have over $3 million in signed commercial LOIs for all those locations. Something that is very fun, what I said about last week, is that we have a delivery company that also do robotaxis. I won't name it just yet. They are doing a deployment in Miami, our hometown, and they're deploying about 50 robots. They selected Timechart to be their infrastructure partner, and we're doing our first pilot just next month. This is our team. I already spoke a bit about me already, but we have John, we have Max, and Ethan. Combined, they have over 15 years in both financing partnerships, companies like Rivian, Oracle, and also Hyundai, and we're extremely lucky to have such a great team put all together. We're currently raising $2.5 million. This will still be our seed round. Everything prior to that has been just bootstrapped by me personally. All this funding will go towards the growth of the company. We don't want to spend it in any specific assets and/or deployment because we want to be a capital-light company in a capital-heavy industry. So that is Timecharge pretty much. Thank you very much for your time.

Thank you, Christian. Why are you the right guy to build this? Great presentation, by the way.

Yeah, thank you. Um, so I have both the sales and technical background on these instances. Uh, this is the second company I built specifically on this instance. I worked on the EV world for about 2 years before this. I know some of the ins and outs of the industry. I've sold multiple locations already for just EV. So now it's the time really for us to focus on fleets, and this really, this background will be the best for us to position ourselves into the best company possible.

And is this the right time to get in with so many competitors and the EV revolution well underway?

So it is, not only just because of the huge growth on physical AI as a whole, goal, but also because we're trying to navigate away from just on-demand EV usage, which is a huge problem that we saw across all the EV charging companies that we can already talk about 30 competitors right now, right? So this is the perfect time for us to start getting early customers that are going to be both mid-size and big-size customers onto this specific platform before all these other companies start realizing that and jump into the board. And of course, I will have more resources and more capabilities in order to get those contracts. So definitely, as early as we get, the better for us.

Ron?

Hey, Christian, obviously very talented. I love your personnel slide there, um, a lot of experience there. But I mean, several things you said to me, um, kind of made my head spin. I, I want to be a capital light company in a capital intensive industry. I mean, the whole service that you're providing to the cars, the car companies that you're working with, the delivery companies, is that you're relieving them of the need to deploy CapEx, correct? But you yourself are not investing any money in CapEx. And I'm just like, that sounds like a lot of magic. And I think, seriously, I would really like to hear how you're going to pull that off. Because you're basically pulling money out of nowhere, and that's always like— that always sort of, uh, right, you know, gets me going. So that, that's my main comment.

Yeah, just to maybe just answer on that. So on the main slide of how we get the investment is very similar to how gas stations figure out 80 years ago, pretty much with the franchising opportunity, right? So what we get is we'll find the investor that will invest into that location and we'll get the customer to go into that specific location, right? So that is really the, the turnkey.

I really think you got to lead with that because that's basically your whole thesis, right? And then we'd need to hear some details on that because obviously there's many franchises in the world and not all of them are getting millions and millions of sites. So, uh, but thank you for the answer that I, I don't want to take too much time, but that's great.

Okay, Mike.

Yeah, so I get it, it's a shared kind of infrastructure platform. And it assumes that the utilization of the current resources are at such a high level or so expensive. And I get that assumption, but that probably needs to be kind of spelled out a little bit as to, you know, is that true or is that not true? But it also assumes that the big fish will be okay with this because it enables competition because it makes it less expensive for new players to come in. So I don't know if I was some of the larger players, if I would allow it or figure out a way to thwart you. So I don't know if you've thought about that.

We have. So there's a couple of different instances here. So we already talked to most of the major players in the, in this stage, and they're currently investing about $500,000 a year just in overhead. For people in-house to find all this real estate, find the right real estate, and then pretty much just execute on each new city they go into. So off of balance sheet work, you can already do a value proposition there, and they wouldn't mind that much on, on offsetting that for a lot of third parties. They actually already do that, but they're the ones still finding all these locations. So you just have to ultimately call a company like ChargePoint or EVgo to come and install the chargers, which they will ultimately even pay for, right? So we're offsetting a lot of both CapEx and operational resources that they will usually go into any specific deployment already.

Thanks, Stefan.

Any questions or comments?

Yeah, so, uh, one thing I really liked on your uses page was the fact that you were most of the money that you're looking to raise is going to hard assets and not into some of the soft costs. And I thought that was really a very smart thing and showed sophistication in terms of, you know, the investors you're targeting. That said, you know, kind of similar to what Ron raised earlier, I'm not sure I know what business you're in because, you know, You're, you know, you're not providing the infrastructure, you're not providing the capital, um, you're kind of a broker, you're kind of a franchise agent, um, I, I'm just not sure I know exactly what business you're in. So, you know, from an investor standpoint, you, you want to kind of get the sense that, hey, we're solving a very specific problem that's got— that, that where the answer is going to have long legs and And here I'm just not sure I know exactly what— like, I think you've got a talented team. I think you're, you're, you're proving yourself very successful and entrepreneurial at figuring out certain kinds of deals. Uh, but I think if you could get more clarity around exactly what problem you're solving for whom and what single business you're in, that'll be easier for people to then go, okay, got it, here's a check.

He really briefly mentioned his software your infrastructure is backing everything up, but very short.

Right, there you go. Hey, Chris, thanks for your presentation. We're gonna have Richard up next. Rich, I can see your screen, so passing you express mode here. So stage is yours.

Okay, nice to meet everybody. I'm gonna do things a little bit differently than going through a deck. We'll do kind of a live demo. So my company is Captain Compliance. We are a data privacy and compliance software company, and we are stopping businesses from what I'm about to show you. So, um, if you're cruising around on the internet, you may be seeing ads like this: have a CarGurus account? Up to $5,000 in compensation may be available. If you use CarGurus, your privacy rights may have been violated. See if compensation's available. Another very well-known law firm, you probably see the billboards everywhere, Morgan Morgan, is getting into this data privacy lawsuit game. They're running ads like this: The Athletic may have shared your user's personal information without consent. If you have an account, you may qualify. So what's happening is lawyers are using AI legal tech and they're realizing they can sue companies and it's starting to cost them a lot of money like this $18.7 million with Aspen Dental's privacy class action settlement. So what Captain Compliance does is we protect businesses from these privacy lawsuits. So I'll just showcase a visual examples. Here's a client of ours, TaylorMade Golf. If you've— if you're a golfer, you're probably familiar with the brand. What happens is there's certain tools and ways that you can automate and showcase compliance. One of those is through a cookie consent banner. So what we do is we make sure that our cookie consent banners actually work and we handle the integration for clients. Right now, 85% of these cookie banners do not respect users' privacy choices, and that's why the litigation is exploding. So we built a tool that actually integrates through a tag manager, and if you, uh, want to opt out— so in California, for example, requires one of these 'do not sell or share my personal information' buttons— when we toggle this, this turns off our targeting and tracking. So if you're running Facebook ads through a site, if you're running TikTok campaigns, if you're running LinkedIn marketing, anything like that, it will all be blocked. And it's really important that you actually respect users' consent choices, otherwise it gets really expensive. Another live example of a client of ours is a telehealth company. They knew they needed to do something about their compliance. They didn't get on it. They had no banner, no privacy policy or anything like that, and they got hit with a $5 million class action lawsuit. Then they called us the very next day and said, "We're ready to sign up." So while we weren't able to get the old lawsuit completely dismissed. We are able to help clients who are with us if they do get one of these demand letters or they get one of these suits, that we can showcase that they are in good compliance. And in most cases, we can get those cases dismissed for them by providing an audit. So we provide the cookie banner that I showed you. We also have this tool of what we call is a cookie transparency page. It's like a trust center and it showcases is it'll scan, so you see it was last scanned today, and it'll scan and showcase all the different tracking technologies and what's happening on the, on the website. So if they're running Google Analytics, it'll showcase that. If somebody adds an AdRoll cookie and they start running that, it'll automatically scan and display it. And that's really important because a lot of these lawsuits are around not proper displaying or disclosures of certain ad tracking technologies and things like that. So our software automatically handles that. And then California, which is the biggest driver of our business, has a new, uh, Data Broker Registration Act and requirements where they say any data subject— so think of any individual— if you're a California resident, you can go to any business and you can say, you have my information and I want you to erase it. If they don't erase it, these businesses are subject to a $7,500 $1,000 fine. So what's happening now is we just signed, uh, JD Power, for example. They're getting 1,600 of these requests, um, a day from companies like Incogni, DeleteMe, uh, Cloaked. And they're democratizing the opt-out process for individuals, and they're making it really difficult. So we stand as the intermediary helping the businesses handle and deal with these sort of requests. And We also have a tool that automatically updates privacy policies as new privacy laws come out. Indiana, New Hampshire, and Kentucky are all states that came out with new privacy laws just this year. So we automatically will create updates and keep businesses in compliance. We are a startup where it started building the product and the team in late 2019. 2023. We brought in our first paying client in August of 2024. We just added another $600K in ARR in the last month and a half. So we are now at $1.8 million. We have a few more big deals in the pipeline about to close. So we're pretty much doubling We were at $1 million a couple of months ago. Now we're going to be at about $2.5 million by early July. And we're scaling up and just we're super excited. And the biggest driver of our business really is privacy lawsuits and litigation. And more or less, that's it.

Good stuff. Smooth as butter, the presentation. Presentation. Uh, 2 questions: why are you the right guy to build this? And 2, what's your main GTM funnel?

Yeah, definitely. So, um, there are about 50 different law firms that are going out and they're suing businesses over these sort of things. So, uh, my last company was a digital marketing agency, so, uh, we have a lot of content that we're pushing out every single day. So that's a big part of our strategy. Um, and then we educate people so that there's definitely a big education component to this. So we're doing educational webinars and teaching people, here's privacy lawsuits, here's what's going on. We did a webinar last week and we're getting 6 new clients just from that. So that's important. And then we're just, we're tenacious, right? We have grit. We work harder than everybody else. We actually care. And there's been a few exits in our space. One company in our space sold for $1.7 billion a few months ago. And a lot of the founders have just kind of stepped away. So we're still founder-led and we have that drive and passion.

Love it. Ron?

Yeah, I feel like you're solving the unemployed, underemployed lawyer problem, which is great. I got a little excited because I thought at first I thought you were going to actually prevent identity theft, but that's too big a problem. So I guess So you're pretty confident that you can insert yourself into the database infrastructure for all these different webs, all these different clients, because deleting their data seems complicated to me.

It's a big, big part of it. So like companies like Cloaked and Incogni and Optery are helping on the identity theft side. And then we're the intermediary that's helping businesses comply with those requests. So depending on the client, like JDP is a big data broker client we're working with now. Like they have a lot of in-depth integrations and California has a new requirement starting August 1st that they'll be fined $250 per day per violation. So it's going to get really expensive for those who don't comply. And that's where we come in and for the superhero team.

I guess I'm, what I'm asking is when you get a client, they have all these different kinds of data infrastructures that they're storing this data you've got to delete in. And how do you deal with that? Because that doesn't really scale super well. Like, you've got to have people on site to actually implement that, right?

Well, it, it depends on the client. So like the healthcare client we're setting up, and, uh, we're having like almost like a ticketing system on that. We also do the cookie consent and things like that. We integrate through Tag Manager, and we have a full-time onboarding person who handles that. For the client. So, but the enterprise clients were charging enough to make it worthwhile to have the initial individual handle the onboarding.

Mike, I think, I think you get an A+ in defining the problem. I think you did a great job doing that. I would suggest maybe some traditional go-to-market type pages in your, in your deck to make it clear and a little bit more on the branding. On each page so it's clear who you are. And then can you share what makes you better than the comp— than your competition, why you're going to win?

Yeah, definitely. So there's a player in the space that have 14,000 clients. They're worth over $5 billion. So, and it's a big enough market. Think about any, any business or website, right, is a potential client. One of the biggest differentiators is actually handling the integrations. So exactly what Ron was asking about is, is doing that. A lot of the tools, what they do is they just provide the software and that's it. And those companies are being sued because those software tools, if they're not set up right, don't work. And most of them, half of them aren't even built to work in the first place. So that's one of our biggest differentiators. And we're just leaning into just being an easy company to work, work with. So if a company says they want to pay monthly, we'll let them pay monthly. They want to pay annually. Than paying. We had a client today paid $90 grand because they wanted to pay upfront for 3 years. So it's about being easy and like, we're not locking them into long-term contracts that they don't want to be. We're not hitting them with 5x price increases, which is what one of the enterprise players is doing, and it's pissing off a lot of clients, and we're becoming the beneficiaries because of that. And then also, like, in the case of one of the data brokers, they're getting over 1,000 requests a day. Their current software can only handle 200 of those requests a day. So that's the other one of the big differentiators, is just having software that actually meets the client's needs.

Hey, one quick one for you, Dredge, before I let Steph ask you a question. Uh, what kind of insurance policy do you have in case you get sued and you mess up something and the company just like goes really bad for them? They'll obviously waterfall it on you.

Definitely. So in the early stages, we definitely had a server issue that froze a couple of the banners and I took it on myself. The client said, you know, we lost this much. I personally paid out of pocket to that client and said, I'll reimburse you whatever you lost. That client is still a client today and hopefully they'll be a client with us forever. But we use Vouch for insurance. We have policies, but we try to learn from any of the mistakes. Mistakes that we've made. And we use like a load balancer now. So when servers are overloaded, it'll ship to different locations, things like that. So I think like any startup, people think, oh, it's just like this, but really it's— there's waves and things that go back and forth and you learn from those mistakes. And that's what we've just been doing and adapting really fast.

Steph, questions, answers?

Oh, you're You're on mute.

Sorry about that. What are you looking to raise and when are you going to be break-even? And what does your average client dollar contract look like?

Yeah, so this month that we're actually profitable and next month will be pretty— yeah. And then we—

well done.

Yeah. It's been 3 years of grinding, and I've had an exit a few years ago and poured a bunch of my money into it. And now it's— we got a term sheet. We're going to end up probably turning it down just because we're growing so fast. Like I said, we're about to double from low million to over $2 million in a few months. So we're trying to figure out what to do, and it's all dynamic. We were looking at doing 2.5 million, but then as we're growing and we're offsetting that with just client capital, um, so, uh, somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million probably, and just plowing all that right into marketing and just fueling growth and bringing on another engineer and, uh, sales support, but not going too crazy. So, um, yeah, and then we'll be, yeah, coming— we're, we're finally up a on that J-curve. So it's been, uh, it's been a grind.

What valuation are you looking to raise that money at?

Uh, was targeting, uh, $15 million, uh, pre.

Let's go with, uh, our next contender, Richard. Thanks for pitching today. Uh, we have two more contenders, um, today. Semi, let's test your audio and video. Uh, we can see your screen as well.

Yeah.

How is my audio?

We can hear you. Yes, it's perfect. The stage is yours, my friend.

All right. Hello everyone, this is Semih Sekaş. I'm the CEO founder of PeerBee. This is my second startup, and prior to startups, I worked in the corporate world from software engineer all the way to VP of Engineering. I managed hundreds and hundreds of employees, so one thing I always cared about was productivity and making sure time and money is always well preserved. So that is all PAB is about. Um, the average knowledge worker uses 9 different tools on the— to do their job. Slack for messages, Asana for tasks, Notion for docs, Zoom for meetings, Google Docs for writing, email for everything else. And none of them talk to each other. You're the human glue. You're the one copy-pasting, switching tabs, summarizing meetings into tasks, reminding people of deadlines. You end up becoming a project manager when you just want to do your actual job. I'm sure this sounds familiar to most of you, and that's why we invented PRB, which is— I'm gonna tell you 3 different products. One, first product is the smartest project management, communication, and collaboration, uh, platform. And the second product is AI workforce, your AI agents working for you and doing stuff. And the third product is The chief of staff. In a way, it is like Cloud Cowork and that knows your entire company, your every project, every person, every priority, and is available to every single employee 24 hours a day. Well, these are not 3 separate products. Actually, I'm talking about Peerbee, one and only single platform that has all these components. It is like a sweet, sweet, fully integrated home that is replacing this fragmentation of multiple tools that are making it really, really messy for us to work on. As a result of this great product, employees can save more than 2 hours every single day We have customers that are automating more than 80% of their manual labor. The market is huge and it keeps increasing by 15.3%. And we do wanna get a good slice of this market because there are more than 400 million businesses that are ideal candidates for us. We are typically going after SMBs of the world. We have been recognized by several partners, several competitions, and we are currently right now with Supercharger Ventures trying to make a jump to European market. And we have more than $3 million active in the funnel. We had more than 300% MRR increase in the last 15 months. Our next release is coming with a bunch of great features, including Lucy, your chief of staff, and we already have 50 customers that are waiting eagerly. Our team has more than 80 years of cumulative software experience. We know AI, we, we know how to implement it, We have proven exits in our team and we have built a 30-year founder relationship. We are seeking $2 million for the next round because we want to get to 100,000 paid subscribers, which is more than 1 million MRR. And currently we are in Middle East, in US, and we want to start European Latin American expansion. Most likely the endgame is going to be a strategic acquisition for PirBee. There are multiple companies that we are already talking, but it's not time yet. The time has come for PirBee right now to scale. So thank you very much. I will be happy to answer any of your questions.

Thank you, Zeman. Why isn't the revenue not more emphasized, right? Like, I know your revenue, you shared it to me today, was pretty impressive. I was like, wow, that's great, that's traction right there. Why haven't you shown that in the slides?

That's a very good question. I'm still preparing the slides right now and and I just got invited to this program an hour ago.

Last minute, yeah.

I'm managing it, but we have— our MRR is $52K and we plan to double that number with our coming release.

Right, so $52K is pretty good. It's more than 95% of startups that come on this show, right? So I think that should be featured earlier. You have You're a software engineer personality, right? So I feel that, yeah, that would help a lot. Um, and I'm bullish on you. Ron, any questions for Semih?

Hey Semih, thank you. First of all, kudos for just answering the call, throwing that deck together, and coming out here. Just like, uh, that's really out there, and, and great job there. Um, but I'm gonna be super— I'm gonna respond and be super vulnerable. I don't know what SMB is. I think I— and so just on the, on the off chance that somebody doesn't really know your world, I think you should spell things out. I think I'm not going to get too many details, but my biggest issue is I still don't really know what you do. Like, I know that you're facilitating workers, and it seems like it's office workers. It's not people who are going to remodel my house. It's not people going to make my pizza, you know what I mean? But I think for me coming from the outside, uh, first-time deck, that's common. But yeah, I'd like you to sort of like scope your mission very carefully and make it extremely clear about what workers and in what context are they getting this extra efficiency.

It's like AI CRM, right, on the short term?

Putting all these com apps together. I got that.

Yeah.

But a specific picture walking through what's going to happen with these workers, how does their day go? I think that would, that would attract more investors.

Very good.

AI CRM on the short term, right? And eventually, Agentic CRM. That's exciting stuff. Like no one wants to care about CRM.

That's, that's, that's an acronym I know, you know, and then tell me how you're gonna like kick Salesforce.

Yeah.

Mike, any questions for Sami? You unmute yourself first.

Sorry about that. Yeah, building on that, I mean, I think you're talking about kind of like crowd process management in an organized way in tandem.

Yes, employees together working together. And, you know, what makes it two people working together being able to assign tasks and execute on them and being able to communicate. So we have accomplished exactly the same type level of collaboration with AI employees.

And that's, and that's what I think you, you kick off with. It becomes almost like a, what if you as a department head with 100 employees like you had could organize them this way? How much easier would your life be?

Tell a story. Tell a story. Start with a story, right? Like, that's how humans think. Uh, first humans feel emotions, then they think, right? So I think if you can start that way— Steph, any questions, comments?

Yeah, uh, great, uh, great business, and, uh, kudos to getting that revenue traction. Uh, I agree with Charles that highlighting that would would be really important. Um, how are you different than monday.com, or is that one of your competitors?

Yeah, um, that is one of our competitors. Um, we are different in several ways. One, we are an all-in-one platform with, uh, uh, different services such as employee well-being, uh, time tracking, um, proposal preparation, as well as automated workflows. And we have AI employee concept, uh, and as well as an agent orchestrator. So we are different in terms of horizontal and vertical on the agent side.

Got it.

I think that, um, uh, I would also— like, I would lead with kind of what the other guys said about, you know, the, the human story, but then I think it's also important to think of 1 or 2 things that you could tell them in a story way example of how you're different. Like, tell me something cool you could do with your platform that you can't do with others. Because a lot of the buzzwords sound so similar today that you can get lost in the noise. But if you tell me a story about a very specific cool thing you could do that I can only do on your platform, I couldn't do on the others, I think would really help make your story come alive.

Great feedback. Thank you, guys.

Not sure the connection is holding up. Can everyone hear? Can everyone hear everyone?

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

Okay. Yeah, I saw my 4G crash in Mexico. Someone took a tower down. Um, let's go to our last pitch. Uh, thanks, Mike. Um, Tino, I know you have an investor meeting, but yeah, I told them I was 3 minutes late, so, um, I've got 3 minutes.

So anyway, yeah, so, uh, thanks for having me. Um, so what we've done is, uh, we've rebuilt the cabinetry industry because, uh, the, the current industry is super antiquated. It's huge, but it's super antiquated and inefficient. And so we're addressing the design-build industry, which is broken by design. So, you know, for each and every handoff, you need— you have lots of manual translations, a lot of manual work, lots of coordination time, and that causes cost overruns. And it also causes, as a byproduct, millions of dollars of idle equipment. That's what we tap into. So what we're doing is we've digitally integrated that entire industry to tap into this in these three forces that are coming together. There's a post-pandemic boom of renovation, a lot of real estate turnover, uh, post-pandemic. And then, um, the advent of AI allows us to tie both the design with localized manufacturing. What we've done is we've integrated that entire process into one digitally connected step. That reduces cost by 40% and makes it faster to deliver, and we've eliminated a lot of manual activity that decreases our cost of sales. So the way it works is, as you design, you're getting dynamic real-time pricing and you're creating the manufacturing instructions dynamically for local manufacturing. And we're showing a $600 million general contractor how that will work, how they will get their pricing and their budgeting even as the architect is creating the drawing. And so the EVP at Cahill, he was so excited that he copied on the email that he used to invite me to present, and there were 14 other people. So ultimately, it's a huge market with no dominant platform. We aim to be that dominant platform. And at 1% of our SAM, we can be at almost a billion dollars and multi-billion dollar valuation. So we have real revenues. We're growing our revenues. Our pipeline's grown to almost a million dollars, and we're ready to go in 35 metro areas with 50, over 50 manufacturers. So these are some real projects. So The cabinet customization allowed to hide a pipe that was behind that bookcase on the right. And ultimately, it's customization, it's DIY customization. We take 35% of each order. Our average order value is $26K. It ranges between $5K to $50,000 north, north of $50,000, and we take about 80% of our take. So what we've done is we've integrated software with the supply chain, and, and then the data that we accumulate, we're going to leverage that, and that becomes our barrier to competition and our moat. I put together the team that— probably the only team that can put this together. I've got, you know, 40-year veteran in cabinetry industries. He exited his company and then joined Baru. Donna's a Stanford-trained marketing pro, and David is our fractional CTO and also an investor in Baru. So because it cash flows, because we take a full third of merchandise revenue, we're going to be cash flowing rapidly and we'll be able to use that cash flow to grow. But to get into market and to accelerate our go-to-market, we're raising $500,000 on an $8 million pre-money valuation, and that should take us into a steady state where we can grow through internally invested cash.

I love this. Uh, Tino, how much time do you have, by the way? Should we do it express? Uh, let's go with, uh, with Ron. Ron, any questions, feedback?

Uh, I'm actually— sounds like a great business. I would like— if you're pitching for investors on a note, I really think you should walk people through a little more slowly. Exactly what's happening. I can see it's really inefficient and needs a lot of help, but details here will be super helpful.

I thought it was great. I thought you, you nailed it. I think that the one thing when you talk about— when you first talk about the 35%, it seems like this is an everybody wins proposition. So you get paid 35% and they save 10— they— everybody, everybody saves 10% on their side too. So I just throw that in there because this, this sounds like a win-win.

It is a win-win.

Hey, Tina, I'll let you go to your next call. Uh, Ron, Michael, who are your favorites today? I think I'll go with, uh, with Ahmad's presentation for sure.

Yeah, I actually, I want to, I want to give kudos to Sami for showing up like that on the spur of the moment. Yeah, yeah, that together. I just want to, I, I think we got to encourage that on Spark Tank. You know, just like get out there and let's try it out.

Yeah, I had another guy I was supposed to show, he— but he didn't actually, on the fly right there. So yeah, kudos. Semi Mike, any favorites today?

Or Ahmad, and then, and then Tino, I think in that order.

Tino, do your job. Yeah, I did.

There you go.

That's hard to do it too, that fast.

Yeah, yeah, no, it's express like that. So thanks for everyone for making