Canada FI Online Demo Day (July 25, 2017)

Hi there, everyone. Sorry, we're a few minutes late on getting started on this exciting Canadian Demo Day. We, uh, right as we hit the go-live button, uh, computer crashed and gave us a small delay. But I'm excited we can have a few hundred people waiting to see these amazing companies from Canada. My name is Adeo Ressi. I'm the CEO of the Founder Institute, and I'm here to really guide you through the different company presentations today. Now, before we get started, let me just talk about Canada for a moment. Right now, we operate in almost 200 cities around the world, and we have multiple cities in countries like Brazil, Canada, etc. One of the strongest companies or countries in the world in terms of the quality of companies that are being graduated is Canada. We see over 100 grads have been created in the Canadian ecosystem by the Founder Institute. They've raised well over $10 million. The graduates are getting into top-tier programs like Y Combinator after going through the Founder Institute. They're raising money from angels all around the world, including in Canada. So I know a number of top angels and VCs that have invested in Canadian companies right from here in Silicon Valley. So we're very proud of our Canadian chapters and we're very proud of our Canadian graduates at the Founder Institute. And we're going to give you all an opportunity to meet some of the most promising ones firsthand. So very quickly, each company today will have about 3 minutes to present. Okay. And then you're going to have about 5 minutes of Q&A. I am going to take questions that you ask in the chat. So you'll see on the usually right-hand side of your screen, there's a little bar and there's a chat area and you can type a question in the chat and I'll try and work it in and make sure that every question we can will get answered. Now, what will also happen is— so there'll be about 5 minutes of Q&A following the 3-minute pitch, but if you don't get your answer on screen, so to speak, by me, what will happen is that the presenter, when they're done presenting, will also go into the chat and try to respond to your questions as well. So don't fret if we don't get your question on screen. It's very likely that will get to your question, just what we've done in text by the CEO after they're done presenting. So since we got started a little late, I don't want to take too much more time on any introductions. Just if you don't know, the Founder Institute is a startup launch program. We create about 2,000 companies a year all around the world. And we're happy to have you here today to see some of the output of our hard work in Canada. Now, one thing of note, it will usually take a minute for the presenter to switch from their pretty face to the pretty presentation. So please be patient. Let's call our first pitch on screen, Space Eye Share. She's a Toronto FI graduate. Sara, are you there?

I am. How you doing, Adayo? Hi, everybody.

Great to see you. So you're a transactional marketplace that allows people to store things in other people's vacant areas. So it's somewhat of an Airbnb for storage. So without further ado, just say hello to everybody and let's switch you into presentation mode and get started.

Sounds good, Adeo. Thanks, everybody. I just wanted to thank First Off Founder Institute for giving me the ability to pitch here today. I will switch on over to my presentation.

And now while that's happening, everyone in the audience, remember, okay, you can ask questions in the chat and I will try and get them on screen when she is done Presenting.

Great. So you guys can see my screen. Okay.

You can see the deck that I warned you about. All right. Presentation's up. Sarah, can you, uh, when you're ready, uh, please get started.

Sounds good. Okay. Um, so as Adel mentioned, uh, my name is Sarah. I'm the CEO of SpaceiShare. SpaceiShare is a peer-to-peer marketplace for self-storage, including boats, cars and RVs. So did you know that the average household has 300,000 items in it? Where the heck do we put it all? Well, millions of people put their things into self-storage. But self-storage, it's expensive, it's often too far away, and for storage builders, city bylaws are making it more and more difficult to build in urban centers. But with SpaceiShare, people can now rent space from neighbors. Think garages, driveways, and sheds. Costs can be up to 50% less than traditional self-storage or a closer location to store your vehicle. We are creating an unlimited supply of already existing space. So if we assumed that only 2% of homeowners share space, that equates to a $1.5 billion total addressable market. And one core target are the millennials. They are sharing economy enthusiasts, and 53% of them own homes. And if we look at this from the $35 billion self-storage industry, 75% of self-storage renters put price as their number one consideration. We're going after the 10% of incoming renters who search online for self-storage options. SpaceiShare takes a 15% service fee off every transaction, and will be covering most of the legal liability and the insurance. We soft launched last fall and already have 1,000 listings and paying customers, and we're currently in talks with the number one self-storage company in Canada and the world's largest insurance adjuster. Our go-to-market strategy on the P2P side continues with focusing on finding hosts through classified sites, plus we've reached out to Airbnb and VRBO hosts of which 20% have space to spare. And in addition, our goal is to unlock unused commercial spaces. We'll start with local Toronto-based spaces and scale across Canada and into the US as our site becomes more robust. So as we know, traditional self-storage facilities, they're expensive and too far away. And storage is a hot topic right now with startups like MakeSpace and Clutter raising big rounds. But as a renter, if you needed to access your things on a regular basis— think about like things like golf clubs— costs can become too high. With SpaceiShare, you have access to your belongings based on the space you book with the host. And people are already sharing space. If you look at Craigslist alone, there are 10,000 listings for parking and storage in 5 major cities, yet there are no reviews. There's no insurance, and there's no easy way to pay. Our long-term vision is to be a space hub. We've started with a focus on vehicle storage, but our plan is to grow the storage category and expand into subletting, events, and more. And our team is a team to do it. We have a proven track record of success together. 3 of us were sales leaders at a startup digital media company that drove more revenues than Yahoo and AOL. I also managed our 2 developers at a startup where I was previously the GM. We're currently seeking $300,000 to give us 8 months of runway, and in that time our focus will be to increase our monthly matches to 400, build out our new mobile app, and get to $7,500 monthly recurring revenue. Let's share space around the world. So we can see less of this, an environmental eyesore, and more of this. If you see space like we do, I'm happy to talk to you guys after. Thanks very much. Oh, for some reason I can't hear you guys. Can you guys hear me?

I can hear you. Sorry about that, my microphone was muted. Okay, that might be having— well done, I applauded that.

Thank you.

If you're having technical issues with the system, just restart your browser, come back in. Lots of good feedback in the chat. One thing, we're also going to be creating a poll where you can rate the presentation 1 to 5, no 3s. So keep an eye out on that. I thought it was excellent. Mel had a question. What about insurance? Can you go into that a little bit more? And what about the possibility of theft and damage relating to insurance?

Totally. And that's actually one of our number one questions that we receive. So on the insurance side, currently we have our own insurance in place, but we are speaking with a number of different insurance companies that will, that will insure both the belongings and the host property. So once we have that existing in place, then every person that shares space will have up to $1 million that they can claim should there be any issues. We have legal documents that people sign so that they are sharing that information. And then when it comes to what is in the box, what we ask hosts to do is to check inside the contents of the property that the person who's renting from them, but we also have that legal document that states you can't have any of these items, which, you know, are the usual drugs and plants and live things and dead things. But we also, like I said, have the host make sure that there's nothing in there that would, that would be a problem. For the most part, it's people's decorations, baby gear, and, you know, winter tires and things like that.

So I'm going to merge a question from Ken and David. Ken asked, do I sign a lease? So I have certainty of duration. And David was asking about what about 24-hour access? So You know, I don't know why you would need to, but like, I need my stuffed teddy bear that I'm into.

So yeah, exactly. So just give you an example, the host defines the terms. So they dictate the price, the access. And so with access, if it's a garage that you never use, and in my case, I'm renting out a space to somebody right now in my garage, and I gave her keys to my garage, I told her she has access whenever she wants to give me a heads up via text whenever she's, she's going in there. For other people, they may not want to have that person in their home for more than like once every 6 months. And depending on who's renting from you, that might be perfectly fine. So it's finding that person in the right area and then making sure that their access is in conjunction with what you want. And then if you have more access, you can charge more money too. And then you'd asked about timelines. So typically on the platform, one would go on and say, I want to book 6 months. There's no first and last in the old traditional way of doing it, but there's money that's coming out on a regular basis. And in our terms and conditions, we dictate that you must let the person know, either the host or the renter, if within 60 days if you need them to vacate or if you need to leave.

Okay, there's a lot of great questions here. I'm going to continue with another sort of space one, then jump into some of the financial. Can you rent that garage to multiple people? Because you said you gave this tenant a key.

Yeah.

But like if there's someone else is storing maybe gold bullion next to someone else's teddy bear. Yeah.

Yeah. So absolutely. I think it's up to the host. It's up to the renters. So in my case, and I'll just speak first person, I know that if I was to tell my renter that someone else is also going to be sharing space, I'm pretty sure that's fine with her. I don't think there's anything in there that's worth all that much money. And so I would make sure that everyone knows who the other person is. And so there's that transparency. I would say moving forward, it really is up to the space owner. Like some people in commercial spaces are going to have, you know, 8,000 square feet of space. They will want to divide that up. So they'll want to make sure that each and every person has their own privacy or a key or there's some agreements made.

We're going to do one last question from Mike. And then if you don't mind going into the chat, there's a lot of great questions that still need to be answered. Mike was, what's the rationale behind a $7,500 monthly run rate as a target? Yeah, seem low given the size of the market.

Yeah, so I'll say that we do take 15% right now, and certainly it does seem quite low, but it is a bit of a snowball effect. So the more people that get on board and rent space, the higher the amount will get. But if you look at an average transaction of being about $100 for 100 square feet of space, which is what self-storage facilities usually have as their average, then we're looking at $15. So really $7,500 is indicative of a lot of $15 putting together and having those 400 transactions a month. Of course, we're expecting to have 100,000 MRR as time goes on, but it does take a lot of money to make this project work because it's building a brand and it's creating creating more information for people so they have access to who we are and what we do.

All right, so thank you very much. Well done.

Thank you.

We're going to move on to The Food Room. I'm going to try and, you know, we did that in about 9 and a half minutes. You did run a little long, but you did amazing. The Food Room helps small businesses grow by providing culinary coworking spaces. The company's already raised significant funding and you were featured on Dragon's Den. Why don't you quickly say hello, Amelia?

Hi, everybody.

Um, can't hear anything.

We can hear you. We can hear you.

Yeah, okay, cool, because my thing was lagging earlier. So yeah, we basically were in the 2015 cohort of the Montreal Brown Institute, and we opened our first location August last year. And at this point, we've been open for like a year, growing and looking to open more kitchens soon.

Great. Do you want to switch to the presentation? Remember, this is the awkward switching point, everyone, where, uh, and Sarah, you did a fantastic job. If you can go in the chat and just start answering everyone's questions, I'm sure— I mean, you got a lot of questions. I was like, uh, All right, so we're gonna have a presentation up on screen in a moment. And Sarah got a 4 out of 5 average rating, by the way. Okay, we're ready with Foodroom. Let's get going.

Ready?

I'll start the timer. Yep, perfect.

Oh, awesome. So hi everybody, my name is Emily. I'm the founder and CEO of the Foodroom. And today I'm here to tell you how the Foodroom is going to change the game for food startups. So Alex is a chef. He started to do meal delivery on the side and his business is growing. So he wants to take that business to the next level. But since Alex is working from home, he has a problem because he can't keep up and he has no room and not enough money to afford professional equipment. Just like Alex, there are over 250,000 food makers in Canada and US alone facing that very same challenge. They are dreaming of a beautiful production kitchen like this one, but they can't afford it. Existing solutions like rental kitchens are not good enough because they are poorly equipped, unaffordable, and most time overbooked anyway. With that in mind, we created The Foodroom, coworking for food. Just like WeWork did with office space across the nation, we wanna empower food makers to get their business off the ground by giving them access in a place that is quick, easy to use, and seamless. By having dozens of entrepreneurs working out of a single space on a hot desk model, we're able to lower their costs and give them access to the space, services, and community they need to successfully run their business. We've gone above and beyond by adding a tenant dashboard and a booking platform. For members to allow them to flawlessly manage their users' space and the payment processing. Our members are paying between $700 and $2,000 a month for a space, and at 75% capacity, we can generate over $1.5 million per kitchen. Since August last year, over 50 businesses have used the space, and we have more than 35 members who are using the space on a regular basis. We're currently looking at our options to decide where we're going to expand next, but the plan is to franchise part of the future kitchens so we're able to scale the business faster. To reach our customers, we're building strategic partnerships with organizations who can help us acquire new customers, like cooking schools, full retailer, or insurance company, who even have, who already have access to our customers at this point. I've had a catering business for 3 years before launching this business myself, and I did it because I faced this challenge. I was looking for kitchens for my business, and it was a really hard problem. My team has a strong background in HR, marketing, sales, and operations. We've been breaking even at $35,000 since last March, and we're aiming to double down by the end of the year on our sales so we can get to $70,000 every month, so we can start thinking about our future kitchens. To do so, we're raising $500,000 at this point. 10% of it has already been committed, and we're looking for introductions to investors who who can help us complete this round. Thank you.

Well done, well done. All right, so let's switch back and start taking some questions from the audience. Remember everybody that you will also have the opportunity to rate the presentation in a poll on a 1 to 5, no 3, but that— I think that was really excellent, so I'll refrain from my rating. I'll just say what everyone else rates, but it would be high. Let's put it that way. Right. So Amit was asking, who is the, you know, major customers today? Because you brought the representative example up of a chef who has a food delivery business, but you brought up that you were in the catering. So if you look at who's representing your average customer?

So we have, in terms of like company size, we have anything between one-man show to big organizations. We currently have the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, which is part of the Fairmont chains. They're the biggest catering company in Montreal right now. And they are using our kitchen because the hotel was shut down for a year. So they did a bunch of major events like this, the Rogers Cup tennis tournament and Formula One, also from our kitchen. So in terms of volume, it's pretty impressive what you can get out of this space.

Well, I would imagine to that end that if you have a catering company that has its own commercial kitchen, and to your point, they get a big deal, they might want to have you as a backup, right?

Yeah.

For spillover.

Yeah. Our target customer is this point.

Okay, you cut out there. Your target customer is what?

Sorry.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. I was saying our target customer is, um, we're looking to sign more small people who have, we're looking to do R&D and production for these restaurants. These are like our end goal. That's like our best fit customer.

All right, you're coming in a little choppy, so we'll try another question or two, or then maybe you just work questions in the chat. Garrett was asking, great idea, love the concept. How do you plan to educate the general public about this alternative that's out there?

You're freezing. I'm not sure, I can't hear anything.

Okay, so we've got a connection problem, everyone. This does happen. Let's do this. Why don't you answer the questions in the chat and we'll just speed along next to Lean Systems. So Food Room will be answering the questions in the chat just due to some connection lagginess. You know, Canada is not that far away. Why don't we move on then to Lean Systems? So can we pull Lean Systems on the screen?

I can see that.

All right, there you are, Sebastian. God, why don't we pull them forward? Lean Systems is creating a schedule optimizer for fleet planners. The company just got accepted to Techstars New York. It's not uncommon for a company to go through the Founder Institute and then go into a second seed accelerator or something like that. Sometimes they even go into a third. Afterwards. Sebastian, say a couple words introducing yourself. Can someone pull Sebastian to the center screen, please?

Yep. So I'm in New York currently, so I have 120 megabytes of bandwidth, so it shouldn't be too choppy.

Yeah, we're excited about that. Just say a bit about yourself and then we'll get started.

Yep. So as you said, we just got into Well, we got in Techstars for the winter cohort, the Techstars New York program that ended last April. And since then, we've been on a sales frenzy. So I'll just do the awkward part of switching my screen.

All right, great. I don't see you in the center yet. All right, there we go. Perfect. Awesome. Excellent. So, Sebastian, welcome. When you're ready now, for everyone, because Emilia was having some lag issues. She will be answering your questions about Foodroom in the chat, and then we're going to move on to Lean Systems. All right, when you're ready, we're ready. I'll start the timer. Let's go.

So I'm the CEO of Lean Systems. I used to build fleet optimization systems for top airline companies like Emirates, UPS, and FedEx, and now I'm the CEO of Lean Systems, the first cloud-based platform for optimizing fleet and crew scheduling. Hundreds of billions of dollars are wasted by logistics and transportation businesses each year. This is ridiculous and a huge problem, and here's why. Everyone knows that routing and scheduling is a super hard problem. Today's fleet management systems offer primitive automation tools that don't fully capture the unique rules needed from each operation. This means they end up scheduling by hand. And since it's so difficult, this process generates schedules that are extremely inefficient and companies lose billions as a result. So our solution is to solve this problem by building a flexible API-based routing and scheduling platform that automates and optimizes the entire scheduling process using top-tier algorithms. Using Lean Systems is extremely easy. And here's how it works. A customer sends the required data through our API. This includes a list of drivers, the tasks, the pickups and drop-offs, etc. Automatically applying the right rules, our engine returns fully optimized schedules and routes within minutes. Our system requires no training, integrates easily with the tools that companies already use for scheduling. With Lean Systems, customers save time, reduce costs, and make more money. While this all sounds simple, under the hood, Lean Systems combines column generation with novel shortest path problem implementation and auto-tuned branch-and-bound. We combine this with a rules abstraction layer that can automatically capture the exact operational rules of any transportation company. The advantage of our approach is that we are able to solve large-scale problems within minutes, and no one in the market has anything close. We charge a fixed amount per route depending on the industry, and here's a few examples of the size of the pricing that would come up based on the size of our customers. And if you have a very large operation, we can offer bulk discount. So during the Techstars program, we doubled our MRR from around $4K to $7.5K. And since then, we've signed contracts that will bring this up to $20K MRR by the end of September. And the other cool part is our customers are growing about 10% per year, which increases our revenues as they grow. So I previously worked for one of the top optimization consulting firms in the world. The algorithms that I developed helped save millions of dollars a month for top airline companies like Emirates, UPS, and FedEx. My co-founder Graham has experience in marketing and sales for startups, making for a well-rounded founding team. We also just hired another great engineer, as well as the head of core engineering team from ADAPT, that used to work for, which guarantee our ability to manage growth throughout the next year. We're going after the $30 billion fleet optimization industry, starting with paratransit and business aviation, which represents about half a billion dollar opportunity here in the US. However, those spendings comes from top tier of the market. With our approach, we can tap into the non-existing market the desert lies at least 3 to 5 times as large. We're raising $1 million, for which $700K is already committed. This will allow us to reach $1.75 million of annual recurring revenue within the next 18 months. As the population continues to increase, smart resource allocation is inevitable throughout transportation. And although drivers will soon be replaced by software, the challenges of fleet management will remain. Our vision is to be the backend technology that enables everyone to leverage accurate optimization in real time. Lean Systems is going to be the future of transportation optimization. If you're interested in being part of our journey, please reach out.

Okay, Emilia, if you could turn your camera and microphone off just to make it easier here. Okay, Sebastian. Hi there. Well done. Well done. Now, you went a little bit over on time, so I'm going to give you a little extra time on questions. We already have a question from Murray. What happened at Techstars to increase your monthly revenue run rate, or was it simply just the move to New York?

Yes, it was a negative turn.

What?

It was a negative turn.

Explain, explain what you mean by that.

Uh, the customers that we have grew on their own, so like no sales, it's just the current accounts that we have that grew on their own.

So there was no net effect of moving to New York or joining Techstars and increasing your revenue run rate? It just happened organically?

Yeah, not during the program itself, it just happened. However, during that time we worked on the sales funnel and now the The further increase that we'll see in the next couple of months are the results of how we came out with a very clear recipe for our sales team to execute against.

If we can put Sebastian on the main screen just so he's the focus. What about— Andrew was asking, who are your customers? Trucking companies, Uber? What about simple customers like GPS users?

Right. So our first customers were taxi companies. Taxi companies to public transit authorities that operate the adapted transport operations. But since then, we put a focus on business aviation. So today, our current customers are business aviation operations.

Business aviation. I know what that is. Is it like ExxonMobil sending people to drilling platforms or—

Yeah, things like that. Like one of our customers does that for like mining industry in the up north Canada.

Yeah. Well, of course, Canada has some pretty remote locations that all the transport and, you know, Ice Road Truckers being a great example of a show about that very subject. So maybe just to continue with Andrew's question, if anyone else has questions, please pop them into the chat. Well, actually, Mel just wanted, does, does your system assist in help rerouting after delays due to accidents?

That's a very good question. So it depends on the data maturity of our customers. So we support it, but it really depends on if our customer already have GPS trackers installed in their vehicle so they can measure and monitor everything.

Right. So you can pre-plan, but if they don't have the tools to reroute, then obviously you can't do that. So You could if they have the tools, but if they don't, that's tough. Kim was asking, have you considered a revenue model where you share in the savings?

Uh, yes. Okay, so it's a very good question. So the thing is, there's so many— like, we increase raw revenues, and it's really hard to see what's the actual net benefit from that. So figuring out contractually how to make that work is incredibly hard. So what we're doing instead is we're doing back of the envelope calculations on the average cost of operation for our customers, like cost per mile, cost per hour. And then we come up with a number that we think makes sense based on what they're going to save and what we would like to capture in terms of value.

There are a lot of questions coming in and we might run out of time here. What channels are you— Ken was asking, what channels are you using to reach out to customers?

Okay, so transportation companies in any vertical are closed circles. So the most effective strategy is reach out during conference and then identify targets before getting there. And once you get the first customer, then you go through referrals.

Um, wow, they're just pounding in here really fast. Uh, does your, uh, platform help with trade marketing and brokerage for cross-border transport? So managing any cross-border issues?

No, we don't handle the legal thing. What we do is what I think of as a micro supply chain logistics. So by the time that all these things are figured out, we tell you how to most effectively use resources.

Excellent. Well, there's a lot of questions in the chat and we hopefully got a poll out on the 1 to 5. I'd love to hear the 1 to 5 for food room and the 1 to 5 lead systems if we were able to get that out. What we're gonna do now, thank you so much. Boom!

Thank you.

That was great. Now I'm gonna call CubbySpot to the screen, but they've been running into some connection problems. So, um, actually all have gotten 4 out of 5. So, uh, we had the first pitch was SpaceiShare, 4 out of 5. Foodroom, 4 out of 5. And Lean Systems, 4 out of 5. Now Cubispot, are you able to come on screen? Not able to do it yet. So we're going to call the next one Deep Pixel. While we wait for Deep Pixel to come on, what you're going to notice, which is really lovely about all these companies and a lot of Founder Institute graduates, is the CEOs and founders of the company have a lot of deep experience in the industries so that, you know, you can't build a transportation logistics company without that kind of background. Boom. You can't build a space-sharing company without some marketing and logistics background. You can't build a commercial kitchen incubator without that type of culinary and chef background. So it's really lovely. And Now we're joined by Deep Pixel. Welcome. Do you want to quickly introduce yourself? It builds intelligent digital agents for businesses to reduce costs, increase conversion, and serve customers. Welcome on screen.

Yeah, thanks, Adair. Yeah, so that was a great introduction. What we do is we build the AI systems that power the next generation of chatbots.

Chatbots.

And I'm sure you've heard, and a lot of people have heard of chatbots lately. They're the new hot thing for companies to build and for marketing and for customer engagement. But we're trying to take it one step further and we're trying to automate some support functionality using the chatbots. And with that, we bring in the AI systems.

Excellent. So why don't you do the awkward switch to your presentation and I'll try and entertain everyone while you do that. I have a really great juggling act, but I'll reserve it for later because my office isn't very big. By the way, I don't normally do the webinars in my office, so while you switch, I'll just talk. But this is actually my office, so welcome everybody. All right, here we go. Excellent. So when you're ready, I'll start the timer. Deep Pixel, everyone.

All right, uh, so yeah, I'm Filipino, uh, so I help with the business development and I bring in clients, uh, Some of our clients are very large banks and some other companies are large retail players that are selling products and they get a lot of customer service questions, requests, this isn't working. And we're trying to automate a portion of that and help the customers focus on the more complicated questions so they can spend more time with the users and they don't have to waste as much time waiting on the phone for their customer service people to pick up. Which I'm sure everyone has experienced before. And so here's the problem, right? So companies spend millions annually on customer service. And the issue with that is a lot of times even really wealthy companies with like tens of millions of dollars only have one customer service center in one geography so that they don't have 24-hour service.

And the— Can you speak a little louder please? Just a number of people, thank you. Or closer to the mic.

Yeah, so there's a really high employee turnover rate in a lot of these customer service centers because generally they're answering the same questions over and over again. And that's what our system is aiming to solve. So what's really the solution? So with Deep Pixel, companies can save over 40% of the cost of having someone responding to live chat requests. And that allows the company, because the system is automated, to have a basic level, a tier 1 support level of customer service 24/7. And a lot of times what we've seen with our clients is they get a pretty quick ROI of about 5x in the first year because we can also drive conversions and drive sales of products through live chat. Now here's, you're seeing the product, And these are a few different demos of things that we've built for some of our clients. So on the left you see we built for an airline company a chatbot through Facebook that reduces the amount of time it takes the pilots to schedule their flight times and schedule what planes they'll be flying. In the middle you see something that we've built for one of our banking clients, and this allows them to increase conversion for retail banking. So they had actually a simple chat system before and they wanted to upgrade the level and the amount of functionality because they saw a significant increase in the amount of conversions that their website was driving. And on the right here, you're seeing reduced costs with this e-commerce bot that we built. So this was actually Beer Bot. It allows you to order beer right through Facebook Messenger and have it delivered directly to you. So now companies don't necessarily need an app anymore. They don't need to force people to download an app. They can just message the company on their Facebook page and then have beer delivered straight to their house. Now what's our business model? We deal with pretty large enterprises usually, so we ask for $50,000+ upfront, and then we also charge in terms of like support and maintenance depending on the amount of traffic that the company is getting to the bot. Right now we have a couple of paying clients, and now we're working on expanding and really growing the company and getting more clients on board. So by the end of our first year of actually selling the product, we're expecting to have about 7 clients who have paid us just about $800,000 in terms of revenue. And also at about that time, we're expecting to have $80,000 monthly recurring revenue. So here's our traction so far. So right now we're just about to close our second client, and actually our second client is most likely gonna be a follow-on from our first client. So our first client is a really big company and they have a lot of different uses for our technology. So our second client is most likely gonna be in that same company because they really like what we've done and how we've built a bot for them. So what you're really looking at is a growth of our clients, and our real end goal here is to get more monthly recurring revenue into the company to have a more stable amount of income. And the way that the company's been run so far is, is really worked out quite well for us because our CEO comes from a kind of a hardware background. So he really understands the complexities involved in actually making deep learning work on a hardware level. He used to work at NVIDIA. And our co-founder Denis here, he is a CTO. And he has a PhD from the University of Toronto. So he's really experienced and he's been busy building the product and building all the algorithms from scratch. And that's something that a lot of companies don't do. They actually use other systems or like IBM or Google systems. We have our own in-house AI and NLP systems developed that we find actually more effective than some of the bigger companies' systems. And that's it.

Great, thank you very much. Boom. So, um, Ken asked, uh, there's a lot of questions already, but Ken asked, uh, is there an opening live demo where I can ask questions to test the product in real time? And if you want, you can paste it in the chat or just explain how to access it. How can I order beer, for example?

Oh, how can you order a beer? So that one hasn't gone live yet. What you can do is we usually have our bot on the site, but we're just making some upgrades to it right now. What you can do to test out some of the bots is you can go on Facebook and maybe you can look up Beer Bot. And I think there's a couple different Beer Bots, but eventually I think if I should, one of those should be the right one. So maybe I can post some links into the chat.

Yeah, post some links in the chat when we're done. Another kind of funny one from Andrew: Why is the company called Deep Pixel if you're doing NLP? I don't see pixels in your data. There's quite a few more, so why don't we do that one and I'll try and burn through this.

Yeah, we get that question a lot actually, and it's kind of an inside joke. So deep comes from the deep learning aspect of what we do, and the pixel comes from— it's kind of a reference to GPUs and how they help with the AI and the deep learning space. So that's the kind of joke there, but yeah, it's not that funny.

So an inside, uh, joke. Okay, um, one of a kind of interesting one is, you know, how I want to know what deep spends— like, you know, how much work has gone into or how much money has gone into getting to where you are with this MVP, was asking Josh.

So, um, yeah, we spent about a year of time developing, uh, the the core technology behind what we do. So I think the company really started with Hiri and Denis in their basement building out the real core of the technology. And just about in January of this year, we were ready to start actually going through some trials, and we went with a few different startups that we knew, and we started trialing the software. And now we've really gone to a mode where we're working on closing deals and generating revenue.

And Paul was asking, how are you different than something like other bot solutions with AI, maybe Watson, Bluemix, etc.?

Right, so we're actually in the process of working on a white paper that compares our technology to their technology. But I would say that one, with us you get more control, because if you're a company, and especially if you're a smaller company, if you want help from IBM or some of these other companies in terms of deploying the bot or fixing bugs in the system, They're going to charge you an awful lot more than we will. And we also have a lot more control of the technology because we can change the specific instance of the bot tailored for you rather than with IBM. It costs you hundreds of thousands of dollars to get an instance running for yourself. So cost is a big thing for us. And so servicing a lot of these smaller needs. And we've actually seen our algorithm outperform some of the competitors. Because we actually use multiple different algorithms and we have a phrase-based approach to the AI where a lot of other companies actually just use a keyword-based AI approach. And so that's— those are the key differences, I would say.

Okay. There's a lot of questions. So I do want you to go in the chat when we're done. There's a couple that I like. Chris was asking, do you got— do you have enterprise sales experience on your team? And that relates to what you were just saying, because you were talking about how the cost was low. And David was also asking, so I'll bundle them, you know, $50K seems kind of steep. So are you really going after low-end customers with that price point? So maybe if you can talk about enterprise sales and the price point, and that would be great.

Yeah. So that's a fair point. So yeah, right now we're going after much larger companies because we need the revenue to expand. But I think our really, our end goal is to really sell the solution downmarket in a year or two once we've had the learnings from working with these big enterprise clients. So yeah, the other question I think, sorry, can you repeat part of the question? I think I missed the first part.

So do you mean that, do you have enterprise sales skills on the team to go after these companies? Right, right.

So yeah, we obviously with our CEO, he's been in enterprise sales for a long time. And within NVIDIA, he actually worked on some projects between them and Google. So there's definitely a lot of enterprise sales experience. And yeah, there's— but we're always looking for more because it's tricky to find great salespeople. So if one of the people in the audience is really good at enterprise sales, we'd love for you to reach out.

Ah, well, there you go. That's a great point to leave it on at about 9 and a half minutes. So we're going to go next to Dot. DOT serves the increasing need— thank you very much, well done, by the way— for more precise and effective wearable medical devices that diagnose and treat mental disorders. Sometimes when running these webinars, I feel like I have a mental disorder. Yashel, do you want to just quickly introduce yourself and then we'll get started with the screen switch?

Yeah, absolutely. So hi everyone. Hello, Adil. Thanks for the introduction. And, you know, I was also a part of the Founder Institute cohort with Emily and Sebastian, and it was truly a very great learning experience for me, and I learned quite a bit about my business from it as well. So without further ado, let me just switch over to my presentation.

Great. And we're going to try and get Kubby spot on if we can. My team will continue working. So we're in the awkward switching moment. I'm gonna start juggling and doing other things. Now back quickly to Deep Pixel. Lots of questions in the chat, so please take a moment, read the questions, try and answer them. Michelle, the same thing will happen with you as you go through. Hopefully we switch. There we go. And then if you have questions for Dot and Yashelle, type them in the chat. She'll do her best to answer them. When you're ready, Yashelle, we'll start the timer. Everything's on screen.

All right, perfect. So hello everyone, my name is Yashelle Khan and I'm the founder and CEO of Dot, and we have the code to decode ADHD. So we are developing a neurofeedback headset to provide quantitative analysis of brainwave activity as well as therapy for children with attention deficiency hyperactivity out of all mental disorders, ADHD is the most common. It affects 11% of all child population, accounting to 9 million children that are affected. The annual cost per family is about $3,000, accounting to $27 billion being spent. So after surveying hundreds of families, we narrowed it down to 3 main problems. The current system is inefficient. Diagnosing a child with ADHD can take several years, and it's usually based on teacher feedback. Parents often have to visit multiple specialists at a great expense before receiving a confirmed diagnosis. And medication is based on trial and error, so which means it's very error-prone, as well as misdiagnosis and incorrect prescriptions are rising concerns. Our solution is efficient, affordable, and effective. Diagnosis is available to the parent within minutes. Parents can use our product from the comfort of their home. Our results are data-driven, meaning it's based on the child's EEG signals. So how do we do so? We would be selling the headset directly to the parents, who can then download the application from the App Store, which serves two main purposes: monitoring and therapy. For monitoring, we're reading the brainwave activity and applying clinically established algorithms to diagnose ADHD. Therapy is available through interactive games that use clinically established techniques of neurofeedback to help the child develop their skills. We also track the child's learning ability over time and make suggestions based on personalized data for optimal results. So if I am to take a second and summarize all that fancy pep talk into two slides, this is what it would look like. We're taking the technology that exists in a clinical setting and would look so and simply bringing it to the consumer home. We have already conducted our initial studies and tested with the diagnostic platform. Currently, we are preparing for the crowdfunding campaign. So if you have not already done so, I would urge you to go on our website, sign up, and support the campaign, which should be up and running within a month or two. So these are the recent upcoming companies in the brain space, and the neurotech industry is truly taking its value now. And if I'm to summarize this into just ADHD market, you'd see that there are only very few. Now comparing these upcoming companies with the traditional ways and Dot, you will see that we have a wholesome solution to offer. I work with Dr. Rashida, who's a PhD neuroscientist at McGill University, and Nael Jazir, who's a gaming developer We recently just graduated from the Texas Medical Center Accelerator, and we're currently raising around $1 million to be able to order the first batch of hardware, finish product development, as well as be $2 million in revenue by 2019. We're also looking to hire marketing personnel and bring them on board. So if you're interested, please reach out to me. I'd be happy to connect with you. My name is Isha Khan, and we have the code to decode ADHD. Thank you.

Wow. So there's a lot of questions in the chat for you as well. The questions are flowing in. Great. So remember, ask questions in the chat. You can also take a poll. It looks like the Pixel came out 4 out of 5. We're gonna email the presentations and the videos to everybody. CubbySpot will not be able to connect, but we'll email them. That was fantastic. You know, um, I'm gonna ask a question. So a lot of people say that I have ADHD now, or ADD, one or the other. Um, and, uh, I think they're being a bit of an ass, but let's, let's say I do. Um, do you deal with adult populations? Because you only mentioned the children. Audience?

So initially when we start off, the first 3 years would be focused on 7 to 12-year-olds, and after that we wish to expand into the adult population. Having said that, the current platform is capable of diagnosing ADD in the adult population as well, but that's a segment that we will enter later on.

Right. So, you know, maybe later basically is what you're saying for me.

It definitely will happen though. We just, it will be 3 years down the line.

So what about misdiagnosis? Someone was asking and I missed the, Mel was asking and related to that, Murray was asking, are clinical trials related or necessary? Excuse me.

So initially when we launched the market, we're not going to be claiming diagnosis. We're going to go to the market as a monitoring device. That way we're indicating to the parent if your kid has symptoms where they lack attention or focus, and then they can go to the doctor. Having said that, the reason why we're going down that route is not because the system's not capable. Our system, our application is capable of diagnosing, but we want to stay away from the 510(k)(f)(d) approvals initially so that we can go to the market sooner and then increase our consumer database. And that way take that subset of data and enter our clinical trials and go down down that route. So eventually in year 3, like I said, that's when we're going to be pivoting to our B2B model and entering clinics and physicians. That's when we will be requiring the clinical trials.

Right. And, and, you know, the clinical trials are expensive. So, uh, you're going to do the FDA approval and the clinical trials at the same time?

Definitely. So it's going to take place, uh, the clinical trials actually, we have contacts at the Texas Medical now who are willing to hold the trials for us. So it's going to offset the cost quite a bit. And once we have those in place, we would be ready for the 510(k) approval, which is what we're going to aim for.

Adam was asking, is the headset proprietary?

Currently, we're developing our own headset. So yes, it will be. Right now we're playing around with a bunch of sensors and a bunch of other headsets on the market. So there's the Muse, the Emotiv, and several ones out there. Out there. We're hardware agnostic, so you could plug it in with any and every headset and it would work. But we are in talks with our manufacturer in San Diego, and we will be essentially ordering our own headset and customizing the device because we need it to be more robust. We need more sensors and make it more kid-friendly than the ones that exist on the market today.

Right. I've seen some of them. They are not kid-friendly. They are kid-anti-friendly. Like, well, I mean, they also have to work a smaller head, to your point. Okay, so there's so many questions, I'm going to try and burn through them. So how much is the hardware selling for? And I'll ask a related— this was Andrew— and then related, is there a license or fee for the software side?

So the hardware, we're going to sell it at a direct sales cost, so it's going to be $450, and then you get the application.

$450 US dollars.

US dollars, that's correct. And then based up thereafter, the therapy— so that's a diagnostic component. And the therapeutic component is through gamification, and those games would be a subscription model based on a monthly fee if they want 1 game or 2 games, etc.

Okay, so, um, okay, so 1 game, 2 games, so it's not really based on usage or anything, it's the number of games. How many games— I'm gonna just ask this, I presume someone else will— how many games, uh, do you think you're gonna have in total? To provide the health necessary to the children?

We're going to be focused on games that improve attention, focus, memory, and problem-solving skills. So essentially, there's going to be 4 subsets of suites of games. But having said that, we're going to try to offer the parents customized solutions based on what their child's needs are and recommend a set of games for them.

So there are 4 categories of games. You'll have at least one game per category, right?

That's correct.

And then you might have more games per category. Now, are you going to develop based on the needs of your population?

Definitely, that's how we're going to go down. So initially, right now, if you look at our website even, it's very kid-friendly. So now we have a cartoon image of a squirrel that's running around because we're targeting the younger population. As we go to the older population, we will have to change the game so that we can engage the adult population as well and not just the kids.

Some of these questions are funny. David was asking, can parents or children cheat the system to get a diagnostic? I thought that was interesting, so I just throw it out there.

Well, you cannot. What's funny is that there's the thresholds for— I'll get a little technical over here— you're looking at theta beta theta alpha ratios, which are your EEG G signals. And irrespective of how disoriented or disengaged you are, you can never hit the level of 3 unless you have some sort of mental disorder. So, and then essentially that's when you're categorized as ADD or a combination of ADD and autism and other disorders. So having to answer your question, no, you cannot really cheat the system to say that you have ADD if you don't have it.

Melissa was writing, amazing. I'm also the president for learning disabilities. So many kids in our organization could benefit from this tool. Um, someone was saying, hey, one of your competitor tools, the Muse, only costs $299 CAD. Um, do you want to just address the competitive market and the other hardware? I know you said you will interoperate with other hardware, but they're not rugged for kids and don't have enough sensors. Maybe you could comment further for Andrew.

Yeah, absolutely. So currently the Muse, they changed their focus. They were one of one of our— we were supposed to be collaborating with the Muse initially, but they changed their focus and now they're doing sportswear. Having said that, Muse available that is on the market is a meditation tool. It's used to just essentially, if you look at their app, it's raining and you get to essentially sit down and meditate. So they're not using any proprietary algorithms or anything of the sort to focus, you know, improve attention or to focus. Yes, it does read EEG signals, but then with the Muse, there's also Emotiv, there's NeuroSky, there's like many on the market that already exist at a similar price point, but they're not claiming improvement in focus or attention or anything of the sort, which is where we have that edge.

Okay, and Ian was asking, will health insurance cover some of this or all of it?

So in the United States, no, it is not covered by health insurance as of yet, but we are still looking into ways where we can maybe, if not through through the parents' health insurance, maybe we go through the parents' workspace and try to get some sort of those insurances to kick in, and which would assist parents, help take days off, and they can use that money essentially to reimburse the cost of the headset. Because right now ADD, because of ADD, parents actually have to take quite a bit of time off to cater to the needs of their children. And if we can get the employment insurances to kick in and assist with buying such devices, then that's gonna be a plus point.

And then Serge brought up last question, because these are really good and lots of them, that should doctors' offices actually be a potential target for you so that you channel the market and you sell to the doctor?

And that's where we would be 3 years down the line, definitely. But for that, we need to be 510(k) approved. We need to have the clinical trials, right?

So you need to get the, the other stuff done first. Okay. All right, well, my goodness, this was a great group of Founders, well done, well done. Thank you so much, everybody. Now, just— we kept an amazing group of people almost at peak, almost 300 people, close to 200 still here. And as you saw, these founders are phenomenal. They're all from Canada. They've all graduated from different programs, Montreal, Toronto, and what I will say is, as you saw, they have deep domain expertise, lots of passion, and great knowledge about the businesses. What we're gonna do for everyone that watched and everyone that signed up, we're gonna send you a link to the videos, presentations, and the ability to reach out to the different founders who presented. We'll include CubbySpot, who had trouble connecting. They were in the Philippines on business. So you're not going to miss anything. You're going to be able to follow up with everyone. I'm going to give a moment here. If you have further questions relating to DOT, we're going to get them answered in the chat. But I want to thank everyone for coming out and watching this webinar. I want to thank the amazing companies that presented their businesses and the great progress and interesting things that they're doing in the world. And I hope that whether you support them financially as an investor or help them with their hiring or growth needs. As you heard, each one, they had different asks, both financial and other. So if you know great investors or if you are an enterprise salesperson or have contacts that can help, please do, because it's our belief at the Founder Institute that it takes a city to raise a startup. It takes a community of people that care and want to help to build great companies, and we had some great companies on here today. So thanks everyone, have a great day, and I hope to see you at the next webinar.