$100,000 Veteran Pitch Competition, with Brad Feld, Co-founder of Techstars

All right, good afternoon everyone and good evening. Welcome to the 3rd Annual $100,000 Veteran Pitch Competition. My name is Ryan Micheletti. I'm Head of Global Operations for the Founder Institute, and I'm also a general partner at the Veteran Fund. So it's my honor to be the host of today's session featuring some incredible veteran founders and VCs from our ecosystem. So just Just by way of quick introductions, the Founder Institute is the world's largest pre-seed startup accelerator. I've been leading the operations team at Founder Institute for nearly a decade, helping build a portfolio of over 7,000 companies across 200 cities with the largest mentor network in the world of 35,000 mentors. And so how I got into this role was that in 2012, I launched VetTech, which was the very first military veteran startup accelerator based in Silicon Valley at the Plug and Play Tech Center. Who is one of our partners for the event today. And then fast forward over a little over a decade later in 2022, we launched the Veteran Fund, whose mission is to protect America through venture capital by funding exceptional leaders from the military community. So since day one, our goal has been to unite this veteran entrepreneurship ecosystem to build veteran startups at scale. And in that spirit, I'd like to just take a quick moment to thank some of our partners in the ecosystem. Who helped make this possible, from JPMorgan Chase and Holland Knight to Bunker Labs, Vets in Tech, Techstars, and the Plug and Play Tech Center. So I believe our generation of veteran founders will be the next greatest generation of world and business leaders, and now is the time to empower these leaders to build companies that will positively change the world. So for today, we had over 500 people register for this event, and over 130 founders applied to pitch. The competition was fierce, but we've selected 5 finalists who will present to you today. One winner will receive a $100,000 investment from the Veteran Fund, and 5 finalists will also receive free passes to the Plug and Play's December summit. I'd like to give a big shout out to Johannes from Plug and Play who generously offered this as one of the prizes. The tickets go for about $4,000 each. So because we have a global audience today, I would love it if people in the audience would just say hello in the chat, tell us where you're tuning in from, and then we'll go ahead and get started. Before we begin the competition part, we have a very special guest, Brad Feld, joining us today for an interactive keynote. After Brad, you know, and I talk for a little bit and answer some of your questions, we'll introduce the judges from the competition. We'll then have 5 finalists do their pitch. It'll be a 5-minute pitch with 5 minutes of Q&A with the judges. And then while the judges are deliberating to select a winner, we have our past competition winner Clark Yuan, CEO of Stitch3D, joining us to give us an update on his company. Once we announce the winner, we'll do an optional networking session on Airmeet, so stick around if you want to meet with other veteran founders, investors, and mentors. So without further ado, it's my honor to welcome a man here who needs no introduction, Brad Feld, co-founder of Techstars and The Foundry Group. Brad, welcome to the event and a sincere thank you for joining us today.

Ryan, thanks for having me.

For everyone in the audience, maybe it'd be— let me just set some ground rules here. So instead of doing a normal presentation, I think we agreed that an interactive kind of Q&A session with the audience would be a lot more fun. So for those of you who maybe have a question for Brad, please feel free to put it in the chat anytime. And then, you know, our producer on the back end will send me a list of questions that I can ask. And so Brad, I mean, you're an OG and a legend in the tech industry. But for those who might be new to startups, Would you mind just doing a really quick intro on yourself?

Yeah, I think OG just actually means old guy. Or maybe it should just be old.

I think it does.

Yeah. I've gotten, you know, as my hair gets gray and I get older, I just feel old. I've been an investor since the mid-'90s after I sold my first company. To a public company. And in 2006, I co-founded Techstars. 2007, I co-founded Foundry. Today, I'm on the board of Techstars, have a significant ownership stake there, but my primary energy is around Foundry and the investing that we do there. We're a partnership of 6 partners. We invest at the Series A and later stage. We have about 80 active portfolio companies and we also invest in pre-seed and seed stage venture funds. And we have about 50 funds that are partner funds of ours that we've invested in. I live in Boulder, Colorado. I spend my time in Boulder, Aspen, Tucson, where I am today. No kids, married to an amazing woman for 30 years named Amy Batchelor. And happy to be here.

Yeah, Brad, thank you so much. And you know, something I didn't know about you when I was looking at your bio is you've run 25 marathons in 25 different states going, going towards 50. How are you tracking on that?

My original goal was to do 50 by 50, so get every state done before I turn 50. I'm 58, about to turn 58, so I didn't make that goal, but I'm still a serious runner. I do probably 1 or 2 marathons a year now, so maybe I'll live long enough to get all the states. And I love trail running, which is really a thing I discovered about 5 or 6 years ago. And part of the reason trail running's so awesome is you can run incredibly slow because nobody gives a shit how fast you're going. So for me, 2 or 3 or 4 hours lost in the mountains on a trail is my form of a really good time.

You've hit two really important things that we talk about a lot at the Veteran Fund, which our core values for investing in companies are leadership, purpose, and resilience. And so we really look for founders that not only have that resilience, that adversity muscle built, but also ones that, you know, can, can have somewhat of a mindfulness practice and get out in nature and be able to kind of separate themselves and have a healthy kind of mental state there. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the role of resilience for startup founders. I don't know if you have any war stories you'd like to share or if there's anything that comes to mind, but for us, you know, if you can stay in the fight long enough, you'll eventually find a way to succeed. What's your opinion?

Very much so. I mean, every successful company I've ever been involved in had at least one near-death experience and, you know, I've had some that were quite quite gruesome. I was an early investor in Fitbit. That company grew incredibly fast. We had a launch of a product called the Fitbit Force, which was the first wearable that had actual numbers on it. Before that, we had like blinking lights and shit, but we didn't actually have a display. And I think we sold 3/4 of a million of them in about 30 days. I mean, it was just a crazy successful product launch. But after about 45 days, people started to have, or we started to get reports of people having skin irritation from the product. And, you know, the first day it was 1 and then it was 2 and then it was 4 and then it was 8. And anybody who's ever done the doubling cliché knows where this goes. I mean, it was not good. And about 2 weeks in, we took the product off the market and about 2 more weeks or 3 weeks later we did a full recall. And that recall was ultimately cost the company $100 million. And at the time that we did the recall, we had about $40 million in the bank. So it was kind of existential. The worst part of it was we didn't know what caused this problem. And we did a series of tests over a 3-day period, and the early results came back that there was radioactive material in the product, which of course is kind of terrifying. Like, you know, oh, We sell this health product that causes people's hands to fall off. Not so good. It turned out that there was no radioactive material in the product. It was a bad, you know, false measurement, just background radiation kind of thing. So that was the good news. The bad news is we still had no idea why it was happening. And just to give a sense of how important it is to be resilient, the CEO of the company at the time who's still running the business under Google, James Park, was unbelievably calm through all of this. I mean, I'm sure the internal turmoil was extreme, but he just focused on the problem and worked through it, communicated extremely well to everyone, including board members, employees, anybody involved, and was just deliberate over this period of time that was terrifying. And, you know, came out the other side of it. Turned out that everything that the company had done was legit. But the adhesive they used was the same adhesive in Band-Aids. You look at Band-Aid allergy on the web, you'll see tons of pictures of the same kind of thing that was happening. Band-Aids get away with it because they're FDA approved and we don't because the company at the time didn't, because it wasn't FDA approved. So like, you know, the nuances of these things can be quite dramatic and feel really unfair. It's like, that's, that's just not, not fair. But you know, you work through it. I could, every company that I was involved in that was successful, I could give you a, oh, I'll give you one other story. Rover, which is a dog, dog walking marketplace, dog sitting marketplace that I was an early investor in. It's now a public company. When COVID hit their business, their revenue went negative. I had not had a negative revenue company that was a large company before. I mean, plenty of companies that, you know, have to give returns on stuff and things like that. But their revenue, which, you know, a month before COVID February was very significant. In March was a negative number. It was a negative number because everybody who'd booked and had paid for their bookings or had just booked, hadn't paid. So the revenue that we'd recognized, they had to reverse because when COVID hit, nobody left their house. They didn't need dog walkers. That was pretty existential to a company that's, I don't know, 500 people at the time or something like that. So, you know, you just navigate through it and you deal with whatever's in front of you. And, you know, as I've gotten older, it's not that there's no stress and anxiety, but you just don't let the stress and anxiety get you the same way. You have to learn how to work your way through it.

It seems like there's, you know, as a startup founder, there's a never-ending list of things you need to do as you're building your company, and that anxiety can grow and grow and grow. I mean, outside of trail running, like, do you have any mindfulness practices that you utilize or ones that you would recommend for startup founders?

Yeah, for sure. I've been a couple of things. One is I've been a long-term meditator. I found one day though, after meditating for 765 days in a row, and I happen to know that because the thing I use, which was Insight Timer or is Insight Timer, you know, every day would say, great, your streak continues. You have this many days. I realized I was meditating for the streak, not for the meditation. That's fucked up. So, um, I purposefully the next day didn't meditate so the streak would end. And like, you know, one of the interesting things about all of this stuff is actually understanding why you're doing it and what the benefit of it is for you. For me, again, meditation has been, uh, uh, extremely helpful, uh, in lot— in lots of different, uh, cases. Another thing I've done, uh, 2 times in my life for extended periods of time was therapy. And both cases, it was extremely helpful. The most recent being a 10-year stretch that I finished in the last 12 months that was really important as a lot of things were changing physiologically for me as I was in my 40s into my 50s. I was very different, like how I felt and how I responded to things and what mattered to me was different than what mattered in my 20s and 30s. So sort of doing the inward work, whether it's coaching or therapy or self-reflection or journaling, like spending the time kind of studying you. I'm really fortunate in my relationship with Amy in that the two of us talk a lot about each other and we're very good partners for each other. We're good at compensating for the other strengths and weaknesses, the other stress points. It's not that the world revolves around me or the world revolves around her. It's that we're in the middle of trying to deal with this complicated thing called life. And I think sort of acknowledging that whether you have a partner you can do that with or you don't, again, recognizing that it's just personal work and committing time and energy to it. One last comment, I'll try to dig up the blog post and toss it. I wrote a blog post a while ago about life as a VC. So different than life as an entrepreneur. I think life as an entrepreneur is way harder than life as a VC. But even life as a VC is challenging, especially in down markets, but also in regular markets. And the post that I wrote, the title of it is Something New. That's the important word, new, is fucked up in my world every day. And kind of, I learned at some point, this is again, part of being in the moment, not reflecting on what's happened, not anticipating what's going to happen. Just dealing with the moment. There, somebody found it. Thank you, Johnny. Dealing with the moment and whatever it is that comes up and not being afraid to confront the stuff you're afraid of. And that's mostly what that blog post is about. It's so helpful. I used to be afraid, you know, I used to constantly be trying to reflect. I think about the past and I'd be like, what should I have done differently? Too late. I mean, you can learn from it, but it's over. You gotta deal with what it is. Or I'd be anticipating or trying to control or protect the future. Can't, you know, like you can anticipate things, you can hope for things, but the future's gonna bring what the future's gonna bring into the present. And so back to this notion of mindfulness, like that's a big part of it is you're just dealing with now.

Yeah. And that's a great lesson learned from mindfulness and meditative practice. One thing you've mentioned that I wanna dive into is the why of what you're doing. To us, again, leadership, purpose, resilience. Purpose is really key for us at the Veteran Fund. Montana Bilger, who's one of our finalists for today, is asking you, what are the top 3 traits of successful startup founders?

So I used to use a phrase when I talked about founders I wanted to invest in, which is I was looking for people who were obsessed about what they were doing. And I use the word obsessed or obsessive very deliberately. It's got negative connotations, but it's also got very positive connotations. And I used it to differentiate from passion. I think passion is incredibly overused in entrepreneurship. It's really easy to fake passion. If you're an introvert, you bias towards being passionate. And if you're an, sorry, if you're an extrovert, you bias towards it. If you're an introvert, you bias away from it. So it's not a very good way to sort of characterize people and their styles. I've shifted from using the word obsessive to saying that you, the founder, were put on planet Earth to work on the problem you're working on right now. It doesn't mean that it's the only problem you'll ever work on your whole life. Lots of entrepreneurs work on many different things, but right now, the thing you were working on was what you were put on planet Earth to do. And as a founder, if you don't feel that way, if you feel like you're working on something, you're like, eh, think hard about whether you're working on the right thing. And part of the reason that that's so important is it comes back to the near, you know, near-death experiences of companies and just the day-in, day-out stress of being a leader in an entrepreneurial company. It's really, really hard. And all of y'all, I expect, know it's really hard. Saying it out loud is really important. This shit is really hard. And doesn't mean it's not rewarding. It's incredibly rewarding. Even if you're not financially successful on this particular company, it can be incredibly rewarding, but it's really hard. And why would you spend a minute of your life working on a thing that didn't matter to you? At the level greater than almost anything else, certainly from a work perspective. So that's one. Second, I think the best entrepreneurs, best founders I've worked with are emotionally accessible without being emotionally needy. And what I mean by emotionally accessible, there was a long period of time where leadership, leaders are trained to show no weakness. You must show no weakness. You must lead from the front. You know, you must be the one that, you know, takes all the punishment and never complains. And you have to always, with the people you're leading, you know, have a positive approach to life and never show your weaknesses and never show your fears and da da da da. I think that's nonsense. I think that's a way of leadership in an entrepreneurial context that's not particularly helpful. And I think it's not—

I just wanted to highlight that because, you know, A lot of the stereotypes for veteran leaders is that they just take orders, their heads down, like they don't kind of think outside the box. But I've actually experienced, you know, the exact opposite. Certainly, there are people that fit that mold. But some veteran leaders that I've met are extremely, like, have extreme high EQ. They kind of recognize the need for that emotional accessibility. So I'm really glad to hear you say that.

Well, and I'll just end with, you know, my, my, my my own sense of working with leaders, including a number of people who are leaders who have been in the military, is reflective of that. I think there's a cliché, like we have so many clichés in our world, right? Like here's what this type of person should be and here's what a tech bro is. And, you know, here's what Silicon Valley is today and here's what, you know, and we have terrible examples of leaders who are incredibly successful or present themselves as incredibly successful. And are miserable fucking human beings, right? They might be incredibly wealthy or they might have positions of immense power, but they're not fulfilled as humans. Well, they're all going to die just like us someday. And so what's the point? And so, you know, the leaders that I think have been the best entrepreneurs and that, you know, that I have the most respect for are the ones that do become emotionally accessible. And it's not just on the surface. It's not just, oh, this is hard and it's difficult and I'm miserable today, or watch me behave in a self-destructive way just because I can, but I'm showing you how hard this is and I'm going to make lines about that. But actually, as leaders embrace the people that they're leading by being a human in the context of that and showing their strengths along with their weaknesses, and then being able to hear other people's weaknesses, fears, and insecurities. And instead of diminishing them through that, learn how to lift them up, learn how to help them become better, learn how to help them culturally navigate through that.

Amazing. Well, you know, you couldn't have set our thesis back better, any better. And it's really incredible to hear you kind of talk about some of these tough issues. I know we're just about out of time here, but speaking of clichés, I'd be remiss if we didn't talk a little bit about artificial intelligence on this call. So, you know, just kind of cutting through the noise because there's a lot of it out there. What are some really practical ways that the founders on this call could start utilizing it for their startups? Have you seen some really killer use cases that might give them a leg up?

No, I think the signal-to-noise ratio right now is way out of whack. And there are lots of things that are emerging that are interesting applications of the, you know, what's being labeled AI. There's a lot of entertaining things sort of in that, which is what's being labeled AI ended up being called generative AI, not AI. And of course, the holy grail of AI for anybody that studies this is something called AGI. But I find it kind of ironic that somehow the G got in the wrong place, and I'm not sure whether that was deliberate. Or whether that was good marketing or whether that was just an accident. Fundamentally, there's a whole bunch of fairly obvious use cases that are gonna just play out in ways that are not dramatic. I mean, customer care is an example. All of the content that companies have internally about their products and their organizations You know, when you can query with natural language a database like that to get the answer without having to have a person in the mix or having to know how to construct that query, you just type in English and you get back a good response. Like, that's all really super interesting stuff. Is it magic AI things that you can use to transform your business? I don't think so. I think it's another evolution of the technology substrate that we all use. And it's in some ways the same kind of technology substrate evolution as cloud computing or as web-based computing. Like it's profound and can have really serious implications. But I think there's too many people looking for like that magic thing. And I wouldn't look for the magic thing. I would focus on your business and then be a user of the stuff that comes out in ways that are productive and effective for you. And I'll give you one quick example of a company in our portfolio that I think has done a really nice job with that, which is a company called Whoop. I don't know how many people know of Whoop or use Whoop. I was, as you heard earlier, as an early Fitbit investor. So I've been investing in wearables going back to 2010. We think what Whoop does is remarkable from a performance perspective relative to all the other wearables that exist, including Fitbit and Apple Watch and others. They recently released something they call an AI coach, And what the AI coach is, is it's a way to type a question to Whoop and have Whoop look at your data specifically, as well as all of the information it has, um, uh, in the context of then giving you a response that's a very highly personalized response driven off your data. Previously, you might be able to figure out that response by looking at 7 different data points, or they could write algorithms that would show you something. But here, they're really using that to surface something that changes the user experience and really simplifies the user experience. I think those are the kinds of near-term application opportunities for many companies. And exploring that kind of thing and figuring out how it works in the context of your customer is key. Maybe if I end with an exclamation point, just start from the perspective of your customer and work backwards rather than start from the perspective of magic, you know, magic technology and work forward.

I love it. You know, I really appreciate your time and wish we had the full hour. But Brad, thank you so much for joining us today. I know you've got a hard stop here coming up. And also thank you for supporting the veteran community. It really is a pleasure to have you on here and thanks for your time.

Totally my pleasure. Good luck with the competition. The 5 finalists, and I hope this has been a useful 30 minutes for everybody and good luck.

Yeah, thanks so much. Take care. All right. At this time, I'd like to welcome our panel of VC judges to the stage. So we've got Mike, Tim, Joe, Craig, come on up. For everyone in the audience, what we're going to do now is we're going to do really quick introductions and then bring up our first pitch for today. So our first pitch is going to be Ian. But why don't we just start off with an intro from Craig? Craig, first of all, before you jump in and do your intro, I'd like to just take a moment to recognize the incredible work that you and Kelly have done at Moonshots to really pave the way for folks like the Veteran Fund and others in the ecosystem to help grow the startup ecosystem for vets. I don't know if it was you, but I remember back— this has got to be like 2012, 2013 maybe— The first time I heard about Ride Scout was someone was presenting at the Recology Center in San Jose. They had just opened up some really like state-of-the-art like recycling facility. I remember hearing it was either you or Joseph pitching Ride Scout. So, you know, come full circle, you're an exited founder turned VC. Now you're giving back to the ecosystem. And this is the exact virtuous cycle that we want to see with all successful veteran-led startups. So Without further ado, do you want to do a quick intro on your side?

Sure.

Well, thank you both, you know, you and Mike and the whole team, uh, for this opportunity. I know I speak for all the judges when we say that. And, and what an awesome group you've assembled. I don't know if I've ever been in a Zoom with this much reach where I'm seeing Bali to Fort Worth and like everything in between. So, um, I'm Craig Cummings. I am an Army veteran.

Veteran.

I was in the Army for 17 years, then I got out. That's right. I'm a quitter. Left in my 17th year. But I had to scratch the proverbial entrepreneurial itch, which I did alongside some other veterans and, and had some fast success and exited a company that put a cell network on the battlefield for the first time ever. Then I partnered with Joseph Kopser and built Ride Scout, which we sold to Mercedes-Benz. And that's what got me to Austin, Texas and And during both of those journeys, I was partnered with Kelly Perdue and he would send me a deal and I'd send him a deal. And next thing you know, we said, let's just, let's grip hands. And in 2014, we started Moonshots Capital to do, you know, SPVs largely. And then in 2017, we started with our first fund. Now we're in our third fund. We've, about a third of our companies usually have a military veteran on the team and we don't have a mandate in that regard. It just, like all of us in this room, we're drawn to that DNA for all the reasons you discussed and you and Brad discussed. So I'm super excited about today's competition. Back over to you.

Yeah, thank you for joining us, Craig. Up next, Tim, you know, thank you for joining us. And I can't believe this is the third time that we're doing this competition. So for those in the audience who have not been to Tim's MilVet Startups Conference in San Francisco, It's one of the best conferences for veteran startup founders and investors. And Tim, thank you for the generous discount to everyone who applied. So for the folks who did not apply to the pitch competition, this doesn't apply to you. But if you applied, if you're one of the 130 founders that applied, we sent out a discount code to be able to join the conference next February in 2024. It is going to be an incredible year. I think it might be the best one yet. So Tim, would you like to say hello and do a quick intro?

Sure, I want to echo what Craig said. Thank you all for doing this event and for lifting up the ecosystem overall. And just like Craig, just want to be a valuable, thoughtful contributor to the ecosystem like you all are. And really looking forward to helping figure out who are the pitch winners today and really looking forward to listening to the pitches, most importantly.

Awesome. Thank you, Tim. All right, Joe, let's go to you next. So it's great to have you here and thank you for jumping in here. I know Ernestine was unable to make it and so, you know, appreciate you joining us with such a short fuse. Would you like to do a quick intro?

Sure. I'm Joe Adiego. I'm Ernestine's partner at Brave Capital. And as you know, Brave Capital has a very close association with veterans with the MilVet Angels. I started my career as a business operator, 25 years. I did 2 IPOs during that process as an executive, and then I supported the DOD and SOCOM in particular while I was an investment partner at In-Q-Tel, the intelligence community's investment arm. I learned about investing there and then I went to Alsop Louie and now I'm at Brave Capital.

Awesome. And thank you for joining us today. Looking forward to getting your perspective on the pitches. So last but not least, Mike, it's great to see you for like the 7th time today. You want to do a quick intro on yourself and maybe talk a little bit about the Veteran Fund?

Sure. Yeah. And I do want to say first, you know, thank you, Brian, for putting putting this together. Craig, Fam, Joe, thank you for joining us and helping us select the winner today. Thank you to all 130+ applicants. It really was a really kind of tough decision to boil down from 130 down to 5, and good luck to the 5. So my name is Mike Shcherbakov, 5 years active duty as a Marine, 10 years as a founder, had some wins in the health and wellness space, ended up launching an accelerator program which now is spans across Southern California. We also give all veterans a fellowship to go through that for free. So that's fi.co/veteran, really focused on the early-stage founders who want to kind of go from zero to one, ideation to MVP. At the beginning of last year, myself, Ryan, we have two other general partners, incredible backgrounds, Justin Ahamma and Lisa Song Sutton. The four of us as general partners came together and we planted a flag in the ground with a single sentence tagline, and that is protecting America through venture capital. And what we found is along the way, the startups that we've invested in and will invest in, the LPs, the investors that have joined us, the venture partners, the partners, they either hear that tagline and want to be involved and say, "That's something I want to be part of," or they don't. And either way is fine, but we really are drawing in the folks that resonate with that. So our core thesis at the fund is we want to see a veteran or military spouse on the leadership team. We love dual-use technology, an opportunity to focus on commercial and government, and then we like to lean into national security and defense tech. We started this pitch competition 2 years ago, so this is our 3rd annual, and it's a really great opportunity to kind of expand the aperture a little bit and maybe invest either within that range that mandate I talked about or expand a little bit outside of it. So really excited to hear from the 5 founders that are pitching, and again, thank you to everyone that's joining us today.

Awesome, thank you, Mike. So let's go ahead and kick off the competition with our first pitch, Ian Garrett, CEO of Phalanx. Before, uh, before Ian comes up here, let me just kind of set some of the, the parameters here for the judges and the audience. So each founder will have 5 minutes to pitch their company, and the judges will have about 5 minutes to ask questions. And because we have, you know, 5 pitches, I'm going to try and keep a tight watch here on the time. After each founder has pitched, the judges will then go backstage and be able to decide who the winner is, and then you all come back up here on the stage and we'll announce the winner. So Ian, it's great to see you. Thank you for joining us today. Whenever you're ready, you could say hello, share your screen, and kick this off.

Yeah, super excited to be here and really appreciate giving me the opportunity. Is the screen up and running? Awesome.

You're good to go.

Well, we can all agree that cybersecurity is confusing and difficult to deal with. And guess what? It's the same exact problem for cybersecurity professionals. Hi, I'm Ian Garrett, co-founder and CEO of Phalanx, and we built a platform to help security teams deploy data loss prevention in less than a day and to take proactive steps to reduce cyber risk. Last year, DDoS breaches cost organizations an average of $4.35 million per breach, Due to traditional data security being based on rules, which takes up precious time, data being stored in silos, so it's impossible to know where sensitive data is located, and the fact that most controls are reactive instead of being proactive. Much of this issue is driven by the fact that 98% of organizations take more than a few weeks to set up a traditional data loss prevention tool. Imagine spending more than $500,000 on a tool that you couldn't even use for months. Phalanx helps companies by ensuring deployments take less than a day. Using identity-based security so organizations don't need to rely on a perimeter, and by providing both visibility over all the workspaces as well as actionable insights to prevent data loss and drive value on day one. The application of identity-based security to data loss prevention and our specific implementation of it is our secret sauce. The best way to think about Phalanx is by thinking about your physical office. Just because you can get past the front door doesn't mean you can just open every filing cabinet or walk into every room. But that's exactly how most data security systems are set up today to protect data. Phalanx allows you to digitally tie people to the data so that, that they're supposed to have access to, so that when someone gets past that front door, there's more layers of protection to that data. Phalanx finally lets security managers understand where all their sensitive data lives, who's accessing it, and what the cyber risk associated with it is. And better yet, this isn't just concept art. We have a fully functional product that's complete and are actively selling it. Our customers quickly deploy our software via software centers to their employees and take actionable steps to de-risk their businesses in our centralized dashboard. We have two primary verticals where Phalanx shines: financial services and the government community, specifically the contractors. We sell, we sell Phalanx on a per-user basis, so we're scalable alongside our customers' growth and flexible to channel partners. We have two models. The first is direct and it's focused on selling to the mid-market and later to large-scale enterprise. And the second is our channel partners, which are managed service providers and other outs— outsourced IT firms, which is how we reach SMBs. The second model provides an amazing opportunity because outsourced IT firms have no simple data security options that weren't siloed prior to Phalanx. This also provides a significant moat as we will be selling data loss prevention in a space that traditional data loss prevention tools can't offer a solution. Our go-to-market is 3 major phases on how we become the dominant DLP. We start where big DLP can't get us, and that's DLP focused on outsourced IT to serve SMBs. We then move upmarket to become a full replacement to current DLPs in the midmarket, something we're already seeing success in. Finally, we plan on scaling up to be a full replacement DLP to large-scale enterprise. We currently have a number of direct paying customers and a number of managed service providers as channel partners that are both selling Phalanx to their customers and using Phalanx to protect themselves internally. Of note, we recently closed a managed security service provider that sells to 118 other managed service providers that represent over 2 million users under management that they will be able to sell Phalanx to. We also have a roadmap on how do we get to our first million dollars in ARR. We focus on the channels that we've already closed, which represent a significant number of companies that they manage. We focus on our target verticals of financial services and government contractors, and our initial goal is to obtain at least 2% of their users under management of the companies that they manage, for which represents for us over a million dollars in ARR. The key differentiating factor between Phalanx and other companies in our competitive landscape is that we provide the most granular ability for both visibility via monitoring as well as actual protection via encryption. Data loss prevention— traditional data loss prevention solutions only monitor to try and restrict the movement of data as it's already on its way out. There's no protection on the actual data itself. And on the other side, traditional encryption solutions focus purely on just encrypting the pieces of data that it's focused on. But they're not really designed for use across workspaces or organizations. Our founding team is comprised of industry experts that have complementary backgrounds, such as myself as the CEO with operational cyber experience in the Army and PhD-level cyber research experience, our CMO, which is also my West Point classmate, with cyber risk consulting experience at Deloitte, and our CTO with lead and principal engineering experience building large-scale secure systems for Northrop Grumman and other defense firms. Our main ask to you is that if you or someone you know is a financial institution or a managed service provider, let Phalanx secure your data today at phalanx.io. And I really appreciate your time, and please reach out if you'd like to speak about Phalanx.

Awesome, Ian. Thank you so much. So let's go ahead and move to judge questions. So Craig, would you mind kicking us off? Do you have a question you'd like to ask Ian or a comment?

Sure.

That was a great brief, Ian. Great. Super excited to see a couple West Point grads out there getting after it. I was just thinking about revenue, like, and, you know, where are you revenue-wise? Is there a customer, a great story you'd want to tell about a customer that you would share with us? And then I'm curious how much money you've raised to date.

Yeah. So right now, if that's allowable. Yeah. The story on our revenue is, so we have 17 direct paying customers and 7 managed service providers that are signed on for channels. And the key point there is that about 6 months ago, we started shifting our main go-to-market strategy towards the channel because we saw this defensive moat, because we saw that there's been a massive slowdown in chief information security officer budgets across the industry. Because of that, we've actually slowed our specific revenue growth, but have brought on those channel partners. So actually in this quarter and next quarter, We anticipate bringing on another about $200,000 in recurring revenue, which, you know, again, over doubles what we are operating with right now. As for how much we've raised to date, we've raised $500K in a pre-seed. Of note, we're Techstars New York City portfolio company. AIN Ventures, C2 Ventures are also some of our investors, and then a number of angels to include a couple of cyber CEOs as well.

Awesome.

Great job. Thanks.

Thanks, Ian.

Joe or, or Tim, do you have a question you'd like to ask?

Yeah, I think a follow-on to that question is for every entity, every company that uses it, what's the revenue that you expect from them?

Yes.

So I'll answer in two kind of facets. So on our direct sales, our initial direct sales is focused on the mid-market. And in that, in that way, we look to deploy about $30K in annual revenue per organization. So that can represent either the entire organization or teams within the organization if they're larger. So we have a number of mid-markets where they started with the finance team deployed out to a program group. We've also partnered, design partnered for paid pilots with a large-scale enterprise. So we have a large bank. Large energy company. Um, because this way we want to make sure that we are designing the product in a way that, you know, phase 3 is when we start going after the large-scale enterprise, but we want to make sure that we have that in mind as we're developing the product. Um, in that case, it is mostly additive, uh, right now. So they'll have certain teams here and there that they're like, these are the core people that need extra protection on their data, um, versus a widespread deployment. On the channel side, um, that, that's actually where there's a lot of great opportunities. So on the SMB side, We're looking maybe, you know, $2,000 of ARR here and there. But the key thing there is that they're able to distribute out to numerous SMBs at once. A lot of them often have about 20,000 users under management or, you know, upwards of 2 million for the larger ones.

A number of hopefully rapid-fire questions. Pricing. Is it priced per seat? Priced on usage? How are you pricing it?

Yes. So we price it per user, and that's specifically because people didn't want— they were scared of the thought of encryptions and decryptions being priced per usage. And it goes to the key issue of they don't even know how many files they have. The last thing they want to do is be charged for that. So we not only let them know how many files they do have, but we don't charge them. We charge them per user across the board.

And is this on a monthly basis or annual basis?

So for our direct customers, they pay annually. So they sign up for annual. We actually have our first customer sign up for a multi-annual 3-year contract. For our channel partners, they sign annual or multiannual contracts with us, but they pay us monthly, and that's because they get paid by their customers monthly. So we wanted to fit in with their business model.

And 2 more tactical questions around that. How long is the sales cycle? How long does it take for you to close a customer?

Yeah, so for the direct, and this is actually why we've shifted over to channel, is so the ideal is about 3 to 6 months. Our fastest to date was 3 business days, which I was like, if they could all be like that, that'd be great. Uh, and then, but we're seeing a slide. So right now there's a number, we have, we have about, about $600K locked up in, uh, sales cycles that have shifted into the 12, 12-month mark. So on the channel side though, that's where things, it's a two-phase thing there. So the first piece can be for the larger ones, you know, could, it could be like a large-scale enterprise deal where it's up to, you know, 18 months. Um, we're seeing actually a massive increase in inbound interest from MSPs and those ones are closing in less than a month. And then from there, it takes another month to 3 months to then identify within their customer base which ones to distribute Phalanx out to.

And then last question, sorry, what's your renewal rate? Like, what's your retention? Is it sticky or is it too early to tell or how's that looking?

Yeah, so far of all the customers we've had that are over a year, which represents about 4 or 5 of them, there's been 100% renewal rate. And then the best thing that we've learned from them is they just say it does what it says on the can. We're really happy with it. So for us, we're very happy to see that because again, it's all about being seamless to the end user and it's all about giving value on day one to the security team. So, so far we're delivering on that mission.

Awesome. That's all the time we have for questions. Thank you, judges, for those. Ian, thanks again. Great pitch. Up next, we're going to bring up Janaye Gamache, CEO of Foresight. Janaye, you're going to get a notification to jump up here on stage. All right, we see you here.

All right.

Hey, Janette, how are you?

Um, doing well. How about yourself?

Doing well. Whenever you're ready, you can go ahead and share your screen and kick off the pitch.

All right. Okay. Um, yeah, so I'm Janette Gammage, CEO of Foresight. I'm an exited entrepreneur, angel investor, Army veteran. I completed 10 years as a military intelligence analyst until I retired in 2016 after being injured downrange. Since then, I've started a few businesses. Oh, jumping right into the Foresight story begins fleet 21 years ago. I had no idea, if I'm being honest. I didn't have problems with the lending industry. Like I said, I was just exiting. I was traveling the world. I got tapped by the SBA as a consultant of small businesses that need accessing capital through lenders. It got real for me when I had a friend try to get a business loan. For them to return to him with an answer. By that time, he had become insolvent. So we had around 9 months of customer discovery, trying to figure out something that we've heard.

Oh, it looks like, uh, Janae might have lost connection. I'll shoot her a quick text, and then maybe, um, just in the interest of saving time, we'll move— oh, here we go, she's coming back. There we go. The connection's a bit choppy. Maybe if you turn off your camera, it might save some bandwidth. You're also on mute here. There we go.

Well, let's turn it back. All right. Yes. There we go.

Don't worry about the time. Go ahead.

Okay. A big problem that everyone knows, whether you're in the industry or not, obtaining a loan is slow, it's biased, you won't get approved. And when we dug deeper into the problem, we realized it's not all on the lender, as much as I love our entrepreneur friends, um, 74% of the applications they receive are incomplete, um, or incorrect, which creates this manual back and forth, um, collecting documents, verifying financials, speaking with business owners, and most important to a lender, just lots of wasted resources because 90% of applicants will actually drop off during this time. And then that one that makes it through, may not have the legal infrastructure or documents they need in place to even receive the capital. So our approach couldn't really come at a better time. So not only is the industry ready for disruption, lenders are being forced to kind of stop kicking the can down the road.

Credible.

Um, there's alternative lenders. Our solution is an intelligent application that generates a complete verified and de-risked application with only 4 entries from the borrower, um, before they even click apply. So this means by the time a credit and risk team sees an application, They've already been underwritten and their financial statements are actually correct. And what, or rather who, makes our application intelligent is Linda, a lending assistant that helps borrowers through the application, answers questions, creates correct financial forecasts, and instantly creates those missing documents that credit and risk teams are faced with chasing down. We've seen unprecedented growth for a B2B fintech that has enterprise customers signal solid validation of the pain point. We've acquired some landmark partnerships and future customers, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Northwestern Mutual, and as of this week, Visa, who has also expressed interest in buying our data once we reach a certain threshold. So thanks to this, we've acquired a record 300 banks closed and an additional 97 approved customers on our waitlist. That brings in around $15K to $25K in annual revenue per institution. We've also just closed our largest customer currently with $7.4 billion assets under management, 14 locations, which is a milestone we set for Q4 of next year. One, we reached 10% market share, which CDFI, community development finance, you're now familiar, and for reasons we own our pipeline, for reasons this problem is sticky, we're full and we earn revenue through implementation fees, per-seat monthly fee, and transactional fees. We're currently exploring how to add in origination fees, and once we can make it make sense, we will also do that. Every single, and it's because the incumbents are focused on having managed what have been the supply, it's on long customs forms for debt collection, coming with software, and then our focus on the first touch of the lending cycle, application, eliminates dozens, dozens of issues our competitors face. Integration, modeling, data, onboarding.

There we go.

And our core strength is adaptability and product execution speed. The core team has decades of experience in fintech startup credit and risk. My CTO actually built or helped build a platform for Bloomberg that they still use today. Our CRO, former VP of forecasting from Citibank, she did the exact thing that we're doing but on the credit side. Our first— uh, we're currently closing a million— uh, 250 million in GTV. Northwestern Mutual, Visa, and as a veteran, I'm hoping to be able to join forces with the Veteran Fund to change the way business is done for small businesses all over the country, especially the 2 million that are looking forward to— thank you for having us. Our mission is accelerate financial inclusion. For those that serve them. That's the end of it. Staff questions?

All right, Janée, thank you so much. And I think, you know, it's still coming in a little choppy, so you can go ahead and unshare your screen. I think that'll give you some more bandwidth as well. And then we'll go ahead and start with questions. Mike, do you want to kick it off?

Yeah, I'm happy to kick it off. And Janée, yeah, unfortunately, you know, about 50% of that we weren't able to hear. Due to some technical difficulties and the slides were cutting in and out. So, you know, overall, I'll just share, you know, from what I saw, really great product, incredible team. Congrats on the traction that you have already. I think 300 financial institutions is what you mentioned. Can you tell me a little bit? You said your competitors are solving the symptoms, not the root cause. Can you tell me more about your moat here? And I know you kind of said speed to market. Really what separates you not only from existing competitors, but if this is such kind of what I see as like a no-brainer solution, why aren't or what prevents others from creating something and just implementing it and getting it to market faster than you?

Yeah, of course, like you said, us being a first mover, you know, there's a lot going on behind the automation. You don't create a product like this when you need it. You start 2 years before, which is when we started. And we can build a competitive advantage around that. We can continue to build up our data. We're working with University of Carsey out of DC. They are in charge of public policy for access to capital and financial and banking and lending. So they're actually feeding into our data to help us, which is a huge competitive advantage. Our market share, as well as our team and execution and our big vision for the product. Which is moving into the insurance space, becoming embedded credit, and serving a larger market than our competitors are focused on.

Any follow-up to that, Mike?

I would just jump in. Yeah, because I think I was thinking along the lines of Mike, like, it looks like you've built something like super slick here. But I was thinking like, what is the secret sauce? Is it just The banks are just so clunky with their applications that this is like, oh my gosh, this is so elegant. We'd rather just have you be the front door than build our own.

Yeah. Um, that manual back and forth extends a lending cycle for them roughly up to 2 months on average. Um, and because we're creating this, this continuous virtual cycle of retention that they don't usually have. So Right now, if you apply for a loan and you get denied, most likely the bank will never see you again, right? You're either going to go apply somewhere else or you just won't apply at all. So since we're cycling these businesses back through, we've seen an opportunity in the B2B fintech market for small businesses. A lot of the fintechs are focused, like Brex, are focused on, you know, high-growth startups or venture-backed startups. There's really an opportunity, a missed opportunity to focus on these small businesses, especially the ones that are non-digitized and needing to get to a state where they can manage all their expenses, manage all of their finances, get capital whenever they need it. So we have an opportunity to explore that. We're already in the process of building it. We've already, we already have a list of around 300 small business, or excuse me, 3,000 small businesses that are ready to use the platform once it's completed.

Janet, I have a quick question. You've got to be using things to do your KYC, other products. So what, what's the— in terms of the unit cost as a percentage of the unit or of the unit revenue that you get, what's your cost of goods sold? How much are you paying?

So roughly $8 because we're going directly to the agencies. We're one of the only softwares, softwares, I haven't seen any other ones, but I'm not willing to say we are the only, um, that can pull from all 50 states right now. Everything for KYC, KYB, anything on the business owner or the business. Um, we charge $25 for that. Um, it costs us $8.

Okay.

Let's do one more question. Does anyone have a follow-up? J—

anything you guys didn't get to hear? Yeah, I'd love to.

Oh yeah, I, I'll go ahead and jump in and ask a question here. So I mean, you know, being able— your company is a year old. It seems like you've got some pretty incredible momentum of things that you've done over the last year since Yeah, I knew you were building it before, but officially incorporated for, for about a year.

Yeah.

What can you tell us about like the buying cycle with the banks? Because traditionally it would be a really slow cycle, but you've been able to go in and get 300 banks as customers here. So, so what have you learned through that process?

Yeah, well, my background is in marketing and sales. So, I knew early on that it was a long sales cycle, like you mentioned, and it was going to be really important for us to be innovative when we got to market and explore real beachhead, do a lot of customer discovery, and find channel partners that win if we win. Um, so the Bank of America partnership, uh, was the first one to come on board and help us build our pipeline. Our sales cycle is really low right now because, of course, um, everyone that we see right now has already bought in. Um, some of the banks that we've gone out and gotten ourselves, whether through referrals, network, or just cold calling, emailing, roughly probably took about 30 to 45 days, which is super quick in comparison to the market. But CDFIs, we've onboarded them in less than a day. Our largest customer interest will take about 45 to 60 days, and that's because of the legal back and forth that we'll have to do in diligence.

Awesome. Thank you. I know that's all the time we have for questions today. Apologies for the technical difficulties, but I think we got the core of it. So thank you and appreciate the pitch. Let's go ahead and move to our next pitch. We've got Dr. Ryan Weed, CEO of Aerofuse. Ryan, you're going to get a link here in the Zoom platform that's going to give you the ability to come up to the stage. There we go. All right, we can see your screen. You want to do a quick mic check?

All right, testing, testing, 1, 2.

Can you hear me?

Yeah, loud and clear.

Cool.

All right, let me know when you want me to jump off and I'll dive in.

Cool, whenever you're ready, take it away.

All right, hello everyone. My name is Ryan Weed. I'm a physicist and a former Air Force test pilot. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Aerofuse, and we're building what we believe is the most impactful propulsion technology since the dawn of the jet age. Our mission is zero emissions, an aviation industry that's truly sustainable, efficient, cost-effective, better for you, and better for the planet. The problem in aviation emissions is that they're continuing to rise, and by 2050, they're expected to account for about one quarter of all carbon emissions worldwide. This sector is especially difficult to decarbonize because jet fuel is such high energy density. There's a huge opportunity for fusion in aviation. Because nuclear fusion fuels are about a million times more energy dense than jet fuel. So incorporating a fusion reactor with existing aircraft and jet turbine engines could reduce and eventually eliminate jet fuel from— and carbon emissions from the industry. We believe that this is the right time for the technology. We're at an inflection point with fusion. The first ignition has been achieved in a fusion system at Lawrence Livermore last year. And combine this with the incredibly high thermodynamic efficiency of modern jet turbines, it's clear that propulsion could be the first application of fusion energy. As you can see in the chart in the bottom right, there's a giant hole where other zero-emission options like batteries and hydrogen just fail to address the largest portion of aviation carbon emissions in the medium and long-haul markets. Other options like SAF fuels are expected to be 2 to 3 times more expensive than current jet fuel, so not a great solution. So how does our system work? We're developing an efficient way to extract heat energy from a fusion plasma and deposit that energy into a compressed airflow. We've patented this fusion heat exchanger, which bridges the gap between compact fusion cores and existing jet turbine engines. This could allow for a retrofit of existing aircraft instead of a complete redesign or clean sheet design of an aircraft. The goal is to be cleaner, safer, and smarter. Cleaner in that we're actually truly zero emissions, no carbon offsets required. Safer in that we're not creating radioactive waste in the fusion process and we're not increasing passenger radiation exposure. And smarter in that we're utilizing existing infrastructure, including airport infrastructure, to accelerate and expand adoption. The market demand here is clear. Airlines currently spend more than 30% of their operating budget on fuel. It's a $250 billion market and expected to grow over the next decade to $500 billion a year. So Aerofuse's technology is aimed directly at these commercial and military jet fuel markets. This is the team that will bring the technology to life. I've spent the last 15 years working in advanced propulsion and flying experimental aircraft for the DOD, NASA, and in commercial aviation. Tom McGuire is one of the world's leading experts in fusion plasmas, having led Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works compact fusion team for over a decade. And Rama Myers has set up billion-dollar propulsion retrofit deals in commercial aviation for companies like ZeroAvia and will lead our business development and partnership efforts. We have a team of advisors that are experts in nuclear materials diagnostics, safety and regulatory planning, as well as defense and high-speed applications of this technology. So far, we've filed a provisional patent covering the fusion heat exchanger. We have partnerships with the leading fusion core providers, University of California, Berkeley, and a letter of support from the Air Force for an AFWORKS Phase 1 proposal. We've simulated the fusion augmented external combustion engine cycle and built a lab facility within the Department of Nuclear Engineering at UC Berkeley to test our heat exchanger materials. The development roadmap starts with that demonstration of the heat exchanger at UC Berkeley using an ion beam source to simulate a fusion reactor. And then over the next several years, as fusion cores come online, we'll leverage subscale flying prototypes to de-risk the complete fuel cycle, leading to large-scale demonstrations and retrofit pilot program towards the end of the decade. I want to thank the Veterans Fund for the opportunity today, and thanks for everyone for your time. Happy to answer any questions you might have.

Thanks.

Thank you, Ryan. You came in with 2 seconds left, so perfect timing. Let's go ahead and kick this off. Does one of the judges want to unmute and ask a question?

How much of the capital you need in order to get a prototype can be from non-dilutive capital?

From non-dilutive, we're looking at getting an initial MVP out the door through probably DARPA or SCO, which with a, with a clear defense application in either loyal wingman or long-duration ISR applications. This is, this is a small-scale drone that we can design, build, and put into operation for probably $20 to $30 million. Does that answer your question?

But what percent of that $20 to $30 million do you think can be, you can generate from non-dilutive, or that's, that $20, $30 million is from government?

I would say the majority of that could be non-dilutive through either STRATFI, TACFI, or other OTA agreements through DARPA and SCO.

Joe, looks like you have a question.

Yes, you talked about the fusion source. You've got the heat exchanger. Are you going to partner for that? Are you, you know, doing co-development?

Yeah, we're not designing and building fusion reactors. There's already 30 to 40 companies doing that in the U.S. We're designing the piece that allows fusion reactors to integrate with jet turbines, and we will partner with several fusion companies. We're somewhat agnostic on, you know, which fusion company gets there first, but our technology is somewhat agnostic there.

I mean, they've taken quite some time to get to where they are now. I'm not familiar with the smaller ones, but the larger ones like Commonwealth, you know, I mean, they've spent Commonwealth magnetic confinement plasmas and fusion is not the approach that would be applicable for aviation.

And the scaling there really goes to really large systems because they need to be able to sell electricity, whereas we just need the thermodynamic properties of the fusion plasma to create value. So we think that our system allows several fusion companies to reach a market long before they're selling power on the grid.

Okay, thank you, Ryan.

This is big, right? So I'm thinking the whole time, like, of course, like, yes, right? So I guess my question is, what sort of pushback? I mean, it seems like everybody would want to do it, but there's got to be some pushback.

Yeah, I mean, most of the—

what does that look like? What's the concern?

Most of the attention these days is on either inertial confinement technologies or magnetic confinement, and that's where most of the government dollars and expertise lies. That being said, some of the advanced computing capabilities that's come out in the last decade have led to an explosion of what we term hybrid approaches to fusion. So things like field reverse configuration and Z-pinches and these devices that can be magnet-free and actually be small enough to fit onto an airplane. So there is some institutional inertia on whether or not we can put a fusion reactor onto an airplane, but we think that the amount of private capital going into this area, there's definitely an acceleration of technology progress.

Yeah, Ryan, I'll jump in. Really great presentation. Oh, sorry, Craig, go ahead.

I was just gonna joke. I was good. I was gonna joke that I was going to ask about Z-pinches, but that was, that was just a joke. Wasn't gonna ask.

And I'll quickly mention that there was a time when people wouldn't have believed that there would be nuclear reactors, uh, on naval vessels.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, Brian.

Um, you know, I guess more on the practical level, so, you know, you've got the simulation done. What it feels to me is a lot of things have to happen right. And, you know, in the startup world and venture capital, we know things generally take twice as much money, twice as much time. I think in this case it could be maybe 10 times as much money and 10 times as much time because we're relying on so many other parties, namely, you know, a lot of the fusion companies to get this technology out. You've got the simulation done. I'm curious, on a high level, you're a very smart guy. How confident are you that this will actually succeed? Be technology that is widely used across, you know, government, commercial?

I mean, we're very confident. Otherwise, I wouldn't be doing this. I think all roads lead to a nuclear source of energy for aviation. You know, we tried fission reactors back in the '40s and '50s. That's a terrible idea. Ended up irradiating the crew. So fusion is the logical approach here long term. We do think we're going to need partners to get there. We need Boeing and Airbus on board, and we've already had initial conversations with them, and we haven't scared them away. It's the same thing with airlines. We need the pull from the market. We think the pull will be there because no one wants to pay 3 times more for jet fuel and 3 times more for a ticket on an airline. So yeah, the market demand is there. The technology will take a lot of de-risking And there'll be plenty of steps along the way. But there's also a lot of non-dilutive capital out here from the Defense Department because it brings such a crazy operational performance advantage once you go to a nuclear fuel.

Awesome. Ryan, thank you so much. That's all the time we have for questions. Really interesting stuff. And stick around in the chat because I think some people might be asking questions for you there.

Okay.

Up next, let's go ahead and bring Christopher Rohrbach to the stage, COO of DataSquared. Hey, Chris, welcome. Go ahead and unmute your mic, and then when you're ready, you can go ahead and share your screen.

Okay, can you guys hear me?

Loud and clear.

Hopefully I got the right one here. Okay, so you should be seeing the DataSquared.

Yeah, we, we can see it. And whenever you're ready, go ahead and take it away. I'll start the timer.

Okay, great. Well, hi, thanks for having me out here. I'm Captain Chris Robach, retired Navy SEAL, co-founder and chief operating officer at DataSquared. So it wasn't long ago that organizations struggled due to data scarcity when making crucial decisions. Whether military operations or the commercial world, incomplete information left us with an unclear picture. But times have changed. Today, our challenge is no longer data scarcity, it's data overload. At Data Squared, we're focused on harnessing artificial intelligence to tackle this critical challenge. Our solution provides a more holistic picture of the environment, helping leaders make more informed decisions. In today's data-driven landscape, 93% of companies are adopting generative AI, with over two-thirds planning to increase their investment in the next 3 years. However, challenges still exist. As a recent BCG survey indicates, the primary barrier to generative AI adoption is traceability, followed closely by concerns of both inaccurate and AI-manufactured misinformation. Our solution pioneers AI traceability and employs question science to provide not just faster responses, but also deeper insights and better decision support. We do this by utilizing patent-pending technology that can ingest any data type, We structure the underlying data model in a knowledge graph, empowering us to interrogate, enrich, and visualize the data. We then deploy hallucination-resistant reasoning agents to dive deeper into the why rather than just the what. This innovative approach offers an unparalleled chain of cognition transparency and complete AI explainability. I'm gonna run a short video here. It's a quick demo of our product using a fictional dataset used to train intelligence professionals. Basically, we're looking to build a target package on who killed our source, Janak. So a typical workflow would require 4 to 6 analysts anywhere from 2 to 4 weeks to sift through the data to get high confidence and actionable intel. We get this down in minutes. Our product sifted and reviewed over 600 files in seconds. Here we see the different types of intel products, human, sig, and fin. And importantly, the system already identified an additional 49 entities to look at. Asking questions is a lot like a Google search, and as expected, we're going to get great answers. But what's really behind the answers provided? How do we trust this information? Well, our team engineered a transparent framework allowing users to dive into the details, being able to validate the answers provided. They do this by either drilling into the node cited or inspecting the code that was used to produce your answer. Regardless, we provide full traceability of your data, visually display it, and decrease cognitive overload by automating the process. Essentially, we built a platform you can trust. This data fusion enables a more holistic view of the operating environment. Ultimately, this reduces operating risk, optimizes the efficiency of the organization, and enables leaders to make better, more informed decisions. Our commitment to trust and traceability extends beyond vision to reality. And it's applicable across multiple industries. For example, in the oil and gas sector, our product provides a comprehensive platform for well abandonment planning and engineering support. For the US government and law enforcement, our product offers analytics-derived insights and recommendations, ensuring full-cycle traceability for investigators and decision-makers. Our vision has garnered notable partners like AWS, Ingram Micro, XQ, Microsoft, and the Colorado Springs Catalyst Accelerator. We're supported by $1 million in seed capital with an 11 to 12-month runway, and our FY24 revenue projections range from $5 to $7 million. The GenAI market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 31.4%, and the market potential here is significant. With every $1 invested in GenAI, companies are seeing an average return of $3.5. Despite competition from established brands, we believe Data Squared excels, offering 5 competencies versus their 2. And we're backed by a seasoned team with 100+ years of expertise in defense, energy, and AI. We have firsthand experience of the issues and possess a better solution. In conclusion, Data Squared is more than a service-disabled veteran-owned small business. It's a catalyst in data analysis and decision making. Discover a better way with DataSquared. Thank you for your time, for the opportunity to be here. I've got my CEO, John Bruton, and CTO, Jeff Dowgliesh, ready to join me and answer any questions you may have. Thanks again for having me.

Great. Thank you, Chris. Yeah, we'll go ahead and bring them up here for Q&A. Looks like we got John here. So does anyone want to unmute and ask the first question?

Yeah, I'll kick it off real quick. Great presentation, Chris. Thank you. You know, you, on the traction side, you mentioned 3 customers. Just a couple, like, quick points. What are those customers paying? How did you acquire them? And then what is the retention of those customers generally? I know it's very early in the business.

I'm happy to jump in.

Yeah, happy to jump in.

Thanks, Chris.

So right now we're in advanced conversations with all three of these folks, close to closing the first deal. What does it look like in terms of revenue potential? Both of them are greater than $5 million total revenue, at least in terms of contractual commitments over the first year. And then ultimately, we believe that our solution is going to be very, very sticky. The reason we believe that is ultimately we've been doing POCs with people to prove our competencies before we get into deeper contractual conversations. And once we have those conversations, they progress quite quickly, even to the point where probably our furthest conversation right now, we're actually negotiating on exclusivity in some regards to that industry and that basin of operations so that they can maintain what will likely be a fairly substantial competitive advantage, at least in the oil and gas industry. So we're pre-revenue right now, very, very young company. We have lots of conversations going on. We have raised some capital, but in general, we believe that it's sticky. We believe that we've mapped 190 use cases across 18 different industries, and ultimately we think we're going to be able to generate close to, if not more than $1 million a year per customer. You—

Great presentation. And I don't wanna hear it now, but I'd love to hear the story from being a Navy SEAL to this team. But I was thinking about what, with all that data you expose, are you also exposing like red flags? Like, okay, there could be a trademark or copyright, or this is, you know, you know, a fake site. Are you putting those alerts out there for customers?

Yeah, I'm gonna give that to you.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah.

So yeah, we're doing what we're doing is we essentially take evidence. So evidence comes into our system, and everything in the system is stored as evidence. So what we do is we basically bring that into a knowledge graph, and then we reason over the knowledge graph with the large large language models. So that's kind of the basis of what we're doing. So once it's in the graph, then really that's where the AI and the ML components can be added. So if we were to say build something that's looking for fraudulent evidence, essentially that would be an enrichment in our world. So we'd load all this evidence into the graph and then we'd enrich it. And some of these machine learning algorithms could detect, you know, do we have evidence that has gotten into the evidence stream that is faulty? As generative AI keeps growing and moving us into places, we're learning that there's so many abilities to be able to enrich what's in the graph based on other AIs monitoring the data that we actually have in. So we're not trying to build, we're really trying to basically get everything to work together so that we can create the best answers. So if there's AIs out there that are detecting evidence, we can integrate that into our framework. So our framework is essentially a microservice framework that allows us to bolt on AIs to enrich the graph. And the reason we're doing that is when we reason over it, we want to be able to, be able to trace back exactly what generated what piece of information. And then every piece of evidence in our system also has the ability to be scored in terms of how likely and how valid it is. So the probability of a piece of evidence being correct. Now, how that gets filled out, that's where the AI and the ML have to come in, but we've really built this whole thing around an evidence model. We believe that generative AI is, in order for people to use this and buy it and trust it in industries like oil and gas and defense, it has to be back to source data. So we need to be able to trace all the way down to record level, field level. So we track all that in our evidence. Plus when the reasoner is reasoning and it comes up with an answer, we keep a chain of evidence or a chain of reasoning. In place so that that can be validated when it's time to check it out.

Thanks, Mandy.

I saw your note there.

Thanks, Jeff.

Let's do one more question.

I, you had two use cases there. My sense is that this will need you to develop specific use cases per area of influence. And so talk about you know, what it takes to develop those use cases and then how many analysts need to go with the system. You know, the Palantir model is that analysts go with the system. Talk about that a little bit.

Yeah. Can I do that one, John?

Yeah, Jeff, talk about the development of, you know, just the validity of the system.

Yeah, thanks.

Yeah, for sure.

So one, out of the gate, we know that the areas we're working in this oil and gas and defense. On the defense side, anything we deploy has to be runnable without us. So we need to build a system that we can hand off to other individuals to build enrichment agents. So on the oil and gas side, John and I have about 20 years background each in oil and gas. I ran Chevron's IT drilling organization for quite a few years. So on the oil and gas side, I think the way that we're doing it is we initially, we go in, we work with a lot of the oil, with particular oil companies to actually understand what are they solving for in the first place. So do you want to be able to go after contract leases expiring? So they have internal expertise on lease language. So we have enough oil and gas experience to be able to build those agents with them so that we can add them and enrich the graph in the ways, because they've got all the domain knowledge internally. John and I have a bunch, we have a huge network of people we can draw on. But generally the best algorithms come internally. So we wanna build a system that allows us to decouple the ability to build the AIs with the ability to process the information, process the evidence. So we wanna provide the evidence platform, the reasoning platform, the AIs that come in, we'd partner with people to do it or we'd build it ourselves depending on the customer. Oil and gas will probably hire us. They're trying to get us to sign an exclusive right now to keep us locked into that area. Whereas I think on the military side, because this has to be broken apart and be able to run in environments that we don't really have access to or won't have access to, it needs to be set up in a way that we can just hand it off. So we've partnered with Ingram Micro. We've partnered with some larger players that are more connected to that world than we are right now. So it's— they would probably be our delivery arm inside these larger organizations.

Yeah, just to follow up. Oh, sorry about that.

Yes, sorry, that's all the time we have for questions, but take a look at Craig's comment in the chat and definitely get back to him. Thank you for your time and we'll be back shortly. I'd like to welcome Montana Bilger next, CEO of Deep Space Bio. Montana, good to see you. How are you today?

Thanks.

Thanks for having me on. I was excited to hear about knowledge graphs and interrogating those large language models because we're doing something similar in the biology space. So I'm very excited to hear about that progression. For that industry. Very, very exciting stuff. Let me go ahead and share my screen. Um, I think, Craig, you said you were a West Point grad, huh?

I am, I am.

Sorry for all the Marines out there.

I'm a little bit older than you though, a little bit older than you, Montana, a couple years earlier.

It's all good, it's all good. Okay, let me know when you can, uh, see my screen and we all get together.

Go ahead and take it away.

Awesome. Well, hello, my name is Montana Bilger, and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Deep Space Biology. We are here to accelerate health discoveries with AI. Welcome to the future of healthcare. Our world is grappling with a multitude of diseases. Cancer, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's, hypertension are all skyrocketing. As we speak, 140 million people are in danger in the US alone, putting our national security at risk. and the current health discovery tools to understand these diseases are just too slow, expensive, and complicated to keep up. Navigating the world of scientific research is riddled with inefficiencies. From the laborious task of sifting through countless papers, only a fraction of which are actually relevant, to grappling with unstructured data and elusive database access. The majority of researchers lacking the advanced programming skills find themselves lost in a trial and error maze that's both costly and time-consuming. Despite their immense efforts, the quest for disease targets remains daunting with an alarming 85% failure rate. To address this massive health crisis and the problems that researchers face, we created Yoda, our AI-powered platform that accelerates health discoveries. Yoda is an all-in-one AI platform for biology researchers. It revolutionizes research by swiftly processing and distilling papers, bringing structured research projects, And by providing a singular gateway to numerous databases and intuitive no-code user experience, Yoda demystifies disease complexities and propels researchers towards a more effective disease target discovery process with proprietary explainable AI. We are the first AI company to process billions of dollars worth of space biology data from experiments conducted on the ISS over the last 20 years. This data is valuable due to, due to the accelerated disease progression that happens in space. YODA has already obtained numerous novel drug targets for a multitude of chronic diseases using this dataset and can be used to analyze any biological dataset. In an industry where other tools are either too complex, too expensive, or not tailored to researcher needs, we've recognized the gap and launched YODA to drive scientific research and discovery beyond current horizons. The AI in healthcare market is absolutely booming right now. Projected to reach $180 billion by 2030. With our scalable SaaS model and our unique AI technology, we're poised to capture over $100 million in ARR with over 100,000 platform users across academia, hospitals, space, and pharma. With our SaaS platform launching at the end of this quarter, we'll activate our network of over 5,000 scientists from NASA GeneLab, Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, and MD Anderson with the potential to capture tens of thousands more. Our team is rich in experience and expertise with veterans from various industries including health analytics, data science, biotech, finance, and space. Various members of our team have actually had successful exits as entrepreneurs and founders as well. Together, we have the collective passion, intelligence, and grit to make Yotta a success. Since our start at Georgia Tech in 2020, we've made significant strides. Securing pre-seed investment, completing 2 startup accelerators, initiating a grant-funded collaboration with NASA GeneLab, validating our algorithms through a paid pilot with the Mayo Clinic, obtaining Phase 1 approval for a joint ISS proposal with MD Anderson, and gaining national, international recognition as a top space tech startup to watch in 2023. We're currently raising a $1.9 million seed round to fuel our growth. These funds will be used for Yoda platform development, marketing and sales hires, and patent filings. Our exit strategy is an acquisition by a larger biotech, pharma, or technology company for our platform users and our AI IP. Thank you so much for your time. With the power of AI, we can solve complex diseases. Join us in unlocking the future of healthcare.

Thank you.

Montana, thank you. You can unshare your screen and let's jump into questions. Who'd like to go first?

I vote that the younger West Point grad judge go first.

It's going to be a question that Craig brought up on the first group, and that is, how are you pricing this?

Great. Yeah.

So the SaaS model, we have a free tier that's going to be grant funded by NASA, so it's not going to cost us anything. We also have 3 other tiers. We have a basic and advanced and a premium. The basic is $59 a month. The Advance is $159 a month, and then the Premium is actually $6,000 a month. That's targeted towards the pharma players that need that explainable advanced AI. Basically what it does is gives the most important disease targets and the most important disease pathways in like seconds based on any biological data set, which normally takes months or years to find with general methods. So we're making that literally happen in moments if we have the data that they have.

The pricing tier feels like it's being underpriced at the lowest and middle tier, given how much data that I feel like you all have and have combed over.

Yeah. So that's to be totally candid, like the pricing we're launching at the end of this quarter, the pricing, we're totally going to be monitoring the usage so we can tweak that and upsell and understand where we can improve that. We're going to learn a lot once we launch, which I think every company that does will. And so that's something that we're definitely going to update if need be. And if we can, we will do so.

Well, last question. Sorry. And that is, I don't think you talked about why you got into space or how you got into space because this feels very technical.

And yeah, yeah, yeah. So my background is in physics and astrophysics. So I'm a space nerd. My one of the co-founders is a molecular biologist who did anti-aging. Space has a lot of longevity, anti-aging applications. So he's familiar, also a space nerd. And then our other co-founder, Guillermo, he's been involved with various NASA research communities and published lots of papers for years. So we're deeply ingrained with various NASA research groups already. This actually started as like a class project that we pitched to NASA. We like emailed some scientists to like show it to them and we got this out-of-office email. With a Zoom link to like a quarterly director meeting for like AI in space. So we joined it like totally uninvited and we were like, here's our, here's our baby, a Baby Yoda, you know? And they were like, this is sick, let's start working together. So that's how we started with NASA about 3 years ago.

Do you have any pharma companies lined up?

So one of our investors is actually Boring Pharmaceuticals. So we are working with them to finalize pilot details. We actually have a joint IP agreement with the Mayo Clinic right now validating drug targets we discovered alongside of them. If that— if those get validated with in vivo and in vitro studies, we'll actually be part of a revenue share agreement, which will give us single-digit revenue share on those drug targets throughout the roughly decade of that development of a drug. So longer term, potential that could be like tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars based on the condition we're solving for. That's not in our model currently because it's— we don't know if it's going to be successful. But we do have partnerships with MD Anderson and Mayo Clinic that are going to help us engage those big pharma players with a big brother next to us because, you know, it's a small company. They usually are like, hey, we don't want to talk to you.

Let's do one more question.

Montana, as I looked at that team slide, it looked like a lot of different skill sets. There was a lot of finance skills, there were a lot of science skills, but what I didn't see was like heavy on the AI and the data scientists.

Sure.

Yeah.

So I was curious, like, what's the team look like?

So myself, myself, Mike, the other co-founder, and Guillermo, we all got our master's in data science in Georgia Tech. So we all have expertise there. I worked at Nike as a data scientist as well as a company called BetterUp, a startup. So I understand the startup ecosystem really well. We all have tons of experience in the data science sector. Mike specifically is like a bioinformatician and like he's the biggest nerd. He's awesome. He's great. We're all nerds, but he's like the king nerd, you know? So we have tons of experience actually in the data science realm.

All right. Awesome. Montana, thank you so much. We're going to go ahead and do the deliberation. So judges, well, first of all, let's bring Clark Yuan up for this next piece. Judges, if you could go ahead and mute yourself, turn your camera off. Mike Sherbakov is going to send you a Google Meet link via our text thread, and then you can just jump on your cell phone and you guys can talk about who the winner is. When you're ready, go ahead and come back on screen, and then we'll be able to, uh, we'll be able to announce the winner. Clark, good to see you, man. How are you?

I'm doing great. How are you?

Uh, things are going well. Um, we're running a little behind schedule here, but you know, if the military, uh, veteran community can't run a competition online, I don't know, I don't know who else could. So let's go ahead. Um, I would love to, to have you give an update. Just for the audience here, the context is that Clark won our very first, uh, $100,000 veteran pitch competition. And so he's a portfolio company CEO of The Veteran Fund. I would love for, for you, Clark, to maybe just talk a little bit about what you've been up to recently. I know you probably have a deck ready. We can go ahead and walk through the deck if that, that works for you. And then, uh, and then we'll, we'll kind of do some open Q&A. So if anyone from the audience has questions, you can go ahead and throw it in the chat and we can and we can chat about it here for the next 5 to 10 minutes.

Sure. Maybe just to give some context around, you know, what Stitch3D does, and then I can give some updates after that. So Stitch3D is a cloud solution that lets users store and visualize, analyze, and manage 3D files, which is actually a pretty significant problem because right now, if you go all the way upstream to how people manage 3D data, Just about everyone is uploading it to Google Drive or Dropbox, OneDrive, ShareFile, Box, whatever it is. But the challenge is that commercial cloud data management solutions are not compatible with 3D file formats. So therefore, you cannot view 3D files on those platforms, and users have to download and upload the data to desktop software just to be able to see what they're working with. And when you're working with 3D data, these files are incredibly massive. We're talking you know, 10 gigabytes to, you know, 2 terabytes of data, and sometimes even bigger than that depending on how big of an area you're scanning. And so it was a significant pain point to just be able to view and share, collaborate on the cloud with 3D files. The problem actually came from the US Air Force. The Air Force was collecting LiDAR data from drones, from aircraft, from vehicles for damage assessments. For example, looking at sinkholes or crater damages from missile strikes on runways, or looking at post-disaster, you know, hurricane damages to hangars and facilities. And they had all this great data, but none of it was accessible. So they actually asked us to see if we can build a cloud solution to help them manage data a little bit better. For the last year, we've just been working on a commercial enterprise solution. Initially, we built the analytics and, you know, the the nuts and bolts of being able to share 3D files, view, analyze. But actually, as we were building, what we started to realize is this is an enterprise B2B SaaS solution, and users needed significant security on their— around their data, being able to invite members. And that just kind of like blew up into its own challenge. So the last 6 months really was really building the enterprise tools to let organizations manage their own data. And I'm happy to say we're about 3 to 4 weeks away from launching the commercial product.

That's awesome. And what is the initial feedback been from your commercial customers and the pilots?

Well, the initial feedback is just being able to share 3D data is a huge value add for organizations because the previous workflow, everything was very siloed, right? You were sharing data using Dropbox as just a vehicle for storing that data, and then the receiving end would have to download individual files and then run it through through desktop software, and that just takes a lot of time. Not only does it take a lot of time, but there's no collaboration. So, you know, a lot of value from data is just being able to work with someone else on it, being on the same common operating picture. So the value that we initially bring is letting users have accessibility to collaboration and baseline analytics they need to be able to work with 3D data on the cloud.

I think a picture is worth a thousand words. Do you have a demo that you want to walk through just to kind of show people really the power of what 3D data actually is?

Sure, yeah, let me, uh, let me pull that up. All right, are you able to see this?

Yeah, we can see it.

Okay, so the user interface is very similar to Dropbox. We decided to not spend a lot of time on designing, uh, on the initial user interface for V1, and Dropbox's interface works just fine for us. So you can upload your files in all sorts of varieties of different 3D file formats. I'll just show you an Air Force use case, for example, like that crater problem set I was talking about. This is a crater that we actually blew up at MacDill Air Force Base with the EOD team down there. And so this is actually at their range, and this is using 10 pounds of dynamite. Basically what the Air Force wanted to see was, can you take a crater volumetric measurement of this crater? And the use case is, you know, when you have, for example, a missile strike, you're going to have multiple craters and they need a triage based on, you know, the largest craters to smallest craters to figure out a minimum airstrip where they can get a fighter jet to take off. And right now they're, you know, sending airmen out with civil engineers and EOD teams, and it's just taking a long time. So The alternative is to fly a drone equipped with the LiDAR payload to that airstrip, quickly get a 3D scan, and then all users have to do is just to come in here, select the volume area, and then hit Calculate Volume. And it's pretty quick. So here you have your mesh of the crater volume and your total volume right there. You can slice it a little bit and see what that looks like. And so that's one use case for the Air Force. Another use case is if you have georeferenced datasets, you can save this and share it. So actually, let me just walk through that real quick too. So let's say this is a greater test, create this canvas, go to the canvas. So now if you wanted to share this, you can either invite someone with a, you know, with their email address, you can give them view and download permissions. Or you can copy a public link, give users the ability to download it, and then just copy the link and then paste it into a Facebook post, a LinkedIn message, or just text it to someone on their phone. So that's basically what people are looking for when they're working with, you know, being able to collaborate on the cloud with 3D data. Like I was mentioning earlier, let's go to a georeferenced dataset. So A lot of times when you have drones, they're equipped with inertial measurement units and GPS. So here is Oregon State University looking at some scans that we're doing for the Oregon Department of Transportation mapping coastal erosion along the Pacific Coast Highway. So here you have data collected from a drone, and you can map it to either a satellite view or a street view. So here you can see the data is floating above, and what you can do, because there's, uh, these are sometimes not perfectly aligned, you can actually just, you know, slide it down and place it on top of the terrain. Actually, that's not a great data set to do that with. Let's see if we This one looks a little better. Actually, that's the same one.

Um, well, so I mean, yeah, just a, a question here because I mean you've worked with everything from military to law enforcement to universities. What do you think, after kind of exploring all these different, um, opportunities to leverage 3D data, what gets you most excited? Like what are the industries or use cases that you think will kind of be the breakout for you guys?

What gets me really excited is that 3D data is coming on in a pretty big way across multiple industries. This is some, you know, this is data that was not previously accessible because the sensors were so expensive. The different ways you can deploy it on a payload was, you know, pretty much limited to just, you know, tripods. But now you can put it on robots, you can put it in cars, you can put it on drones, airplanes, It's on your iPhone. So the, the ways that people can collect 3D files is expanding, and the industry use cases are also expanding. So that's what gets us excited is that the market is definitely growing. The challenge for us is that there's still a pretty big education curve in terms of, for example, law enforcement could use 3D data to document traffic accidents or crime scenes, but they've never used it before. So there's an education curve to getting new industries to adopt 3D data. But once they see it, it's kind of pretty intuitive, you know, for how useful the data can be. And so for us, you know, trying to break into new markets, that, that's the biggest challenge.

Um, there's a question here in the, in the chat. It's kind of similar to what I just asked, but who, who do you think is like the ideal customer profile, maybe, maybe at these agencies?

Sure, yeah, the, uh, I mean, the low-hanging fruit are folks in the engineering and land survey industry. These are folks that have been using, you know, photogrammetry, LiDAR, 3D files for quite some time now. So there's not really the education curve that you need to scale when you're talking to folks in that industry. The architecture, engineering, construction industry as well, they're pretty familiar with LiDAR data. So that would be the low-hanging fruit that we've been going after. and also academic institutions as well, uh, you know, researchers mapping, um, coastal erosion, uh, glacial retreat, uh, deforestation. They're using a lot of 3D data as well.

That's awesome. And, you know, just to kind of switch gears away from 3D data, can you tell us a little bit about your journey as a military veteran startup founder? Like, what kind of got you turned on to this, and what's your journey been like?

Yeah, so, uh, I left active duty in 2019 and started a dual degree program in public policy and business in 2019. So, you know, just a semester and a half in, COVID had hit, everything kind of shut down. To be honest, when I went to grad school, I was not thinking about starting a company. I was kind of on the finance track and I'd done most of my internships in finance, but there was an opportunity to work with the DOD through the National Security Security Innovation Network. They had an accelerator where they partner you with a defense lab, and you kind of, you know, explore potential commercialization opportunities using technologies that the lab had developed or was looking at. So in the summer of 2020, I worked with a Navy lab that was using LiDAR to document naval ships, and that's kind of what got me turned on to this market and doing my own customer discovery research and, you know, market research. That, you know, LiDAR is coming on in a big way. That was the summer that Apple came out with LiDAR sensors. And just over time, because I had 2 years in business school, did some pitch competitions, really realized that a lot of the skill sets you learn in the military from, you know, running small teams, managing budgets, managing resources, translated quite well to, you know, running a small startup. And I really found out that, you know, that's where my passion was after having done some finance internships and realizing that wasn't it for me.

Yeah, I've been on that similar finance track and then dove into startups. So I think it was a good move. You know, Sharon here in the audience asked if you're building in the aerospace sector, then she'd love to connect with you. I know that that's been a use case, but maybe you can talk a little bit about that.

Something that we looked at in the aerospace sector, I'm actually talking to Airbus tomorrow, is using change detection to identify vehicle or airplane damages that are imperceptible to the naked eye. So a lot of times you get gravel kicked up in flights, there's, you know, damages to the exterior of the plane. And a lot of times if you do a quick walk around the airplane, you can't see it. Doesn't mean it's not there. So, you know, something that we tested out with the Air Force is using a handheld scanner to scan the exterior of airplanes and then overlaying that, you know, pre-flight post-flight and maybe, you know, month over month to see, you know, what changes structurally are happening to the exterior of that aircraft. This is technology that is still super new, you know, being able to do 3D change detection to de-noise the things you don't want to see. So you're not seeing a bunch of random, you know, changes to that aircraft is something that's pretty significantly challenging for us. But that is a use case that the aerospace industry is looking at.

Mark, maybe, I mean, what are you looking for and how can how can some of the folks here in the audience help you today?

Well, I think what we're initially immediately looking for is commercialization opportunities. You know, we're launching the commercial enterprise product here in 4 weeks, I'll say. We currently have 22 enterprise customers signed on. We're just looking to expand right now. We're trying to really grow sales and, you know, get into the revenue generation part of the business.

Can maybe you could list out some examples of like the types of companies that you're really interested in connecting with so folks can kind of make that direct connection?

Absolutely. So anyone in the engineering, land survey, construction, architecture industry would be great folks for us to be introduced to. Also folks in the law enforcement space and firefighting would also be really great. So I think maybe we should start there. And then surprisingly, we've also had a lot of interest from forestry, measuring the tree heights, deforestization rate, looking at slope of the land. Um, that's also been a pretty, uh, surprising, uh, market for us to look at as well.

Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, what have you seen in kind of like the, the forest, CAL FIRE, like all of those different areas? Um, in California, as you know, we've got kind of pretty bad fire, fire seasons over here. Yeah.

Um, it's— I haven't actually seen a lot of that in terms of, you know, mapping post-fire damages, but actually in the papermaking industry, they manage a lot of forests and they need to know at what point they can cut down the trees if it reaches a certain height, and right now they're sending people out there and doing, you know, manual measurements to, you know, measure the diameter and circumference of the tree at breast height and trying to estimate, you know, what this tree is, you know, how tall it is, It's very inaccurate and it takes a lot of time. So I actually met with several companies that are now using drones to LiDAR scan their forest farm and just very quickly dropping that, slicing down to see, okay, these are all the trees over, say, 50 meters tall that we can start to harvest. And that gives a very quick way to section out the different parts of the farm that they can focus on. Yeah, so that was a pretty interesting use case we studied into.

Brian from the audience had a question here. Do you compete with or work with GetBuilt.com?

I actually haven't heard that company, but I'll take a look at it. Yeah, I'll take a look at that.

So, I mean, you've gone through the phases of launching the company, like building something that's pretty technical, getting non-dilutive funding is like a phase 2, and then also going out and raising capital for from professional investors. What advice do you have for some of the veteran entrepreneurs who are kind of at that stage or even just starting out?

Doing things like this, you know, getting yourself out there, doing pitch competitions, refining your pitch, refining your story, talking to as many people as you can. When you're starting out, I would maybe even caution against raising capital too quickly and see if you can build something, you know, with non-dilutive capital. SBIRs, STTRs, they're a great way to get started. For me, I was fortunate to be in school for 2 years to kind of, you know, test my idea, test the markets, apply for non-dilutive government grants, and also participate in pitch competitions. But for a lot of veterans, at least for me, you know, I didn't have the technical skill sets to build this product. I had to go out there and find engineers who believed in the idea that I could hire and help me build this thing. So I would say, you know, try to stay away from fundraising too quickly and test your ideas through pitch competitions before you, you know, really commit to that.

And, you know, one question here, you know, the— I guess there's some comments here about like SBIRs and STTRs. I mean, did you personally file your work? Did you work with a company to help you kind of get the grants properly formed and filed?

Yeah, for our first one we did, because I had no idea what I was doing. I'd never heard of SBIRs before, so I worked with a grant writing company to write our first Phase I proposal. What I realized through that process is a lot of it is just following directions. The, you know, the SBIRs tell you exactly what you need. So if it's 10 pages, don't do 10.5. It's 12.5, font, you know, stay within the rules. And all the forms are available online. Um, and what we realized at least is, you know, we had all the knowledge from our customer discovery interviews to write the meat and potatoes of the proposal. Uh, so for the Phase 2, you know, we just took a shot, wrote it ourselves, and was able to get that funded.

You know, one thing that, um, I think is really important to emphasize for some of the founders here who might be thinking about raising capital is what you said, it's not raising capital too early. You know, I always tell our founders that before you go out and talk to investors, you want to be pretty damn sure that you're like in the top 10% of companies that they're talking to based on your stage and traction. So for example, and I'll actually put this link here in the chat, we use this fi.co/benchmarks page as just a way for folks to kind of compare themselves and where they're at. To other companies that are also meeting with those investors and trying to secure investment capital. And so, you know, really, like, if you're in the top 10% or if you feel like you're kind of at that stage, then it's a great use of time to go out and fundraise. Otherwise, you might waste 6 to 9 months on talking to investors sporadically, never really get anywhere, but waste a lot of time that you could have been used for building. Clark, I don't know, I don't think you have as much of a technical background as your team. How did you build your technical team? And then like, would you say that's an important part of your fundraising process?

I don't know if it's an important part of the fundraising process. Certainly, you know, you have like, if you're building a tech product, you have to have a good technical technical team, but initially it was through recommendations of professors. Being at MIT, there's a lot of resources you can access right across the campus, so just talking to engineers, talking to professors. Our first engineer came through a recommendation of a professor at NYU that we were actually speaking to for market research, and she was teaching a class on smart city infrastructure management using wide R in photogrammetry, introduced me to one of her students who was, you know, excellent. He's still with the company today. Um, it's taking very incremental steps, right? Because initially we had two Phase 1s. There was $100,000 plus some, you know, money from MIT. So it was just like, okay, here's our first engineer, let's build the— let's just have like wireframes and like initial prototype to get to like the second phase, right? And then like, okay, now we have, uh, wireframes and a prototype down, uh, let's apply for the Phase 2. And then once Phase 2 hit, we were able to, you know, hire, uh, you know, 3 or 4 more engineers. And so I think it was like taking it very incrementally and not hiring for people that you need all at once because the product just needs time to, to, you know, mature. And the engineers, the hiring decisions kind of follow that.

One of the things that I've seen in, in the veteran community is that there's a lot of business professionals, but that, you know, it's sort of unbalanced when it comes to technical talent. Um, are Are there other recommendations you have? I know there's some great organizations out there like Operation Code that can teach people how to code, and there's plenty of non-veteran-affiliated ones. Have you seen anyone that is— have you come across anyone that you would recommend to folks? And like, how would you kind of go about getting started with finding those technical founders?

For me, I don't think— you know, Definitely took some AWS courses just to understand, you know, like the ecosystem that we were building on, the platforms that we're building on. So I can speak the language, did a ton of research into like, you know, LiDAR-specific vernacular and, you know, how to talk to people and sound smart about it. But I would say an advice too is not to like overestimate your own capabilities and don't try to, you know, bite off more than you can chew. You have to trust your engineers and set up processes for accountability, but not to tell them exactly how to build. You know, I think your job— my job as a CEO is to take customer feedback and relay it, you know, and set up requirements for them. And then the specific tasks, uh, you know, they, they need to plan that out and take accountability for it. So, um, yeah, I guess that's what I say. Like, my main job is just to take user feedback, translate it into requirements, and then set it up in our sprints.

Awesome. Well, I see the judges have jump back in here. Clark, thank you so much for joining us today. I did put your contact info in the chat here, so I know some people wanted to connect with you and maybe talk about aerospace. So appreciate it. I'm looking forward to seeing you again soon.

All right.

Thanks, everyone.

Well, thanks, Clark. All right. So I see the judges. So I think that means that we have a winner. Should I go ahead and do a drum roll on the drum set back there?

Well, first, Ryan, I think it's worth just a big shout out once again. I know we said it at the beginning, but appreciate everyone joining. I told you, mentioned this to Craig. Craig has really paved the way in and allowed for us to do what we're doing here. Joe, thank you so much for your support. A reminder once again for Tim's great event in February, Military Veteran Startup Conference. You know, it takes an ecosystem. It takes all of us working together. And so just really grateful for you all taking time out of your day to come and support.

Yeah, and I'll just echo one other thing there, Mike. We do, we sent this to the applicants, but it might be interesting for other folks. We created the Veteran Fund Fellowship for Founder Institute for our veteran program that we run. And so if you're interested in joining a pre-seed accelerator that can help you get from zero to one, go ahead and go to the link I put in the chat, fi.co/veteran. And then I'll give another link to our scholarship. You can enroll in the program for free if you're a veteran or a military spouse. So take a look at that and we'll send some more information in a follow-up email here. But I think, I think we're ready to announce the winner. You want to go ahead, Mike?

All right. So again, from 130 applicants down to 5 finalists. And Ryan, did you— it is important in just a minute to explain. Did you talk a little bit about the process between the 5 finalists being selected and the pitch competition today?

No, we didn't talk about that. So feel free to fill it in.

So yeah, what's important to understand is $100,000 is not a small sum of money. And this is an investment from the Veteran Fund. And so, you know, PER being fiduciaries to our LPs, our investors, there is diligence that's required. So the 5 finalists were notified a week ago. They all received a diligence intake form. They met with our team to kind of drill down and ask them the important questions. You know, not only did we watch their pitch videos several times, we looked at demos, we looked under the hood, and we did enough diligence to feel confident with bringing all 5 up and all 5 of them being investable companies so that when we announce them today, we feel comfortable as long as everything— there's no fraud on the diligence and all those important pieces, as long as everything that was stated is true. Leading to the $100,000 investment. So taking that investment consideration into mind, it was very tough. Votes, votes, votes for every— all 5. And, you know, words like this is the best veteran pitch competition they've seen yet thrown around. And with that, I'd like to announce the winner of the 3rd Annual $100,000 Veteran Pitch Competition to Janay at Foresight. Congratulations to Janay. Very, very well done. Again, it went from 5 tied votes down to 3 tied votes down to 2, and then finally selecting one. I know there were some audio and visual issues, and it did help that we've been able to see all of the videos pitch competition before we started. So, Janay, congratulations. Would love to bring you up if you'd like to share some words.

Yeah, I don't really— I'm a little speechless, which is not regular for me at all. Super, super big thanks to you, Mike, and the team, Ryan, at the Veteran Fund. Always been a dream for us to have, you know, a veteran-focused fund on our cap table. So this is just amazing for us. And this actually gets us over the finish line to close out our round. So this is a great day for us. Thanks for the belief in our mission. I don't, I don't really know what else to say. This is crazy right now. And to the other contestants, I, I'm just blown away with your, with your brilliance and your big visions. I know you're going to change the world as well. So thankful to be a part and be pitching with such great people.

Yeah, Janay, thank you so much. We, we're very interested in meeting with the other finalists as well. And I think one thing we mentioned in the beginning is like the Veteran Fund is going to be making 15 other investments in 2024. And so we're going to continue conversations with everyone who pitched today. So thank you for joining and thank you for what you're doing to help small businesses secure capital. I think we're ready to wrap up here. So just so everyone knows, we do have an optional networking session on Airmeet. So we're going to put a link in the chat here that you can use to switch platforms. But before we do that, I'd just like to again extend my sincerest gratitude to all the founders that pitched today, the judges who joined us, the partners who helped promote it and really get the word out about what we're doing at the Veteran Fund. And more importantly, I deeply respect every single founder on this who's watching, who's choosing to step into the arena of entrepreneurship because it is not easy. So we're here to help build the ecosystem, and if there's anything we can do to be helpful, please let us know. Everyone who registered for the event today will receive a video recording of this in the next 48 hours, and we'll also be announcing the winner on social media tomorrow. So be sure to follow the Veteran Fund and Founder Institute on LinkedIn. So without further ado, let's go ahead and get the networking session started. Our producer is going to put the link in the chat that which will bring you to Airmeet. It's a separate platform. And there you just fill out your name and then you'll be able to enter a room and do speed networking and set up tables with everyone here at the event. So once again, thank you for joining us and God bless America and our allies. Take care, everyone.