Founder Showcase: Pre-Seed Startup Pitch & Networking Event

All right, good morning and good evening, everyone. Welcome to the Founder Showcase. My name is Ryan McLeady. I am head of global operations for the Founder Institute and a venture capitalist at the Veteran Fund. The Founder Institute is the world's largest pre-seed startup accelerator. Over the last 9 years, I've helped scale the team to build companies in over 200 cities around the world across 35,000 mentors, the largest mentor network in the world. And today we've had over 6,500 startups and 7,000 alumni across those regions. We have an incredible event for you today, and I'm excited to be your host. We've had over 1,000 people register for the event today. So if you're in the audience, please let us know where you're dialing in from. Just put a name and region. You'll also see that there's a set of emoji icons at the bottom of your screen. You can use that to spread the love with our presenters today. Feel free to use those whenever you're ready. The Founder Showcase is Silicon Valley's leading international startup pitch event. We help pre-seed and seed stage founders learn, launch, and connect with investors. We run this event quarterly and have a great agenda for you today. First, we'll have Kelsey Gurnert-Aina, Head of Startup Partnerships for HubSpot, introduce HubSpot for Startups. Then we've got a keynote speaker, Gary Amorell, the co-founder and CMO of breadcrumbs.io. Afterwards, we're gonna have 5 company pitches to show you. These are all pre-seed companies from a variety of industries ranging from consumer services, technology, AI, video editing, e-commerce, and the automotive industry, and geographies including London, Sofia, San Diego, and Sacramento. Each of these companies have impressive early growth metrics, which is why they're here. Um, they are pre-seed, but they're growing very quickly, and they'll most likely be out of that stage in the very near future. So these pitches will be quick, 3-minute format, and then we'll do Q&A, not just from our guest panelists, but also, if we have time, from the audience as as well. Um, the founders will also be there in the chat to answer your questions. So after the pitches are complete, we'll start our international networking session where you can meet with other founders, investors, and mentors here in the audience today. We've set up group chat tables that you can use. Some of you who joined early may have seen that, in addition to general networking tables that you can use as well. So let's go ahead and get started. First, I would like to thank HubSpot for Startups for sponsoring the event. It's my pleasure to introduce Kelsey Gurnert-Aina. Kelsey is the head of partnerships for HubSpot for Startups. There she leads her team across the Americas. She originally got her start in the nonprofit world with organizations such as Teach for America and City Year, in addition to working in the travel industry across sales, marketing, and project management, helping brands scale internationally, which is one of her specialties. So she's also an entrepreneur. She launched two brick-and-mortar plant-based juice bars in Boston with a holistic approach, and she's passionate about helping startups grow through her work at HubSpot for Startups. So Kelsey, welcome to the Founder Showcase. Thank you for joining us today.

Thank you so much for having us, Ryan. Welcome everybody. We are really excited to collaborate with Founders Institute and hear these amazing pitches and entrepreneurs. I fondly remember all of the work that it takes to be able to launch your business. And all the hours that you have to put in to make sure that you're a success. So we are excited to be a part of that journey with you. To give you a little bit more information about HubSpot for Startups and HubSpot in general, if you're not familiar or not familiar with our partnership with Boundless Institute, is that HubSpot is a free CRM. So we also have sales tools, marketing tools, service tools, Ops tools. So basically, as if you're a founder, as soon as you start to acquire customers, or even when you're doing your investor outreach, you can set up a free CRM to help you manage these customers, market to them, and then eventually be able to sell to them and support them through service of your product. Um, through our partnership with Founders Institute, you're eligible for up to 90% off our, um, our services. Across all of our different hubs. So we are very committed to helping founders scale, and you'll see a QR code up in that upper right-hand part of your screen that will help you to be able to apply and see if you are eligible. I'm also going to drop it into the chat for anybody that wants a clickable link. If you have any questions, feel free to chat me, and you can also find me, um, on LinkedIn at Kelsey Aina, A-I-N-A.

Awesome, thank you, Kelsey, and thank you for the generous offer for startups. I've used HubSpot and it's certainly an impressive and very powerful tool, so founders, be sure to take advantage of that. 90% off is about as good as you can get, so use the QR code at the top. Uh, without further ado, I'm also excited to introduce our keynote speaker for today, Gary Amoreaux. Gary brings over 15 years of experience working with clients and employers in SaaS, financial services, retail, pharma, and more. He's passionate about integrating marketing strategy and execution. And over the past 3 years, Gary's been busy building breadcrumbs.io, which is a venture-backed Y Combinator company that provides enterprise-grade lead scoring for everyone. So Gary, welcome to the Founder Showcase. Thanks for joining us today.

Ryan, thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here. Looking forward to sharing a little bit about my journey and most excited about answering any questions that might come up. That's kind of my favorite way to exchange information. But do have a little presentation prepared to talk about the 3 kind of biggest mistakes I've made along my journey. Should I bring that up now?

Yeah, why don't you bring it up? And for the— while you're doing that, for the founders here, we will do some questions after the presentation. So go ahead and put it in the chat. And then we'll upvote them and we'll do a couple questions right after this. Gary, I'll let you take it from here.

Awesome. So we've had a little bit of introduction about me. I don't like talking about me too much, but quite an interesting career over the last little while. Many of you might be familiar with BlackBerry. That's where I started my career, really cut my teeth. And rode a crazy roller coaster from, you know, category creator, market leader to not that. And then, you know, went along and joined many other big Canadian brands. Canadian Tire, for those who are familiar, Hootsuite. Then went to the States and started my journey in the US with a company called Chargify in the software billing space. And ultimately, started Breadcrumbs. Now I think for context, it's important to understand the genesis of Breadcrumbs. Um, by no means did I set out to be a founder or to start my own company. It was largely serendipitous. So, um, I was at SaaStock Dublin, which will come back up again in my talk today, In 2017, 2018, I was there and ran into a previous colleague of mine from Hootsuite. And I was working at a company called Chargify at the time. I was working on what I thought was a pretty novel and creative video series. I believe it was called Billing and Brews at the time, where we took leaders from around the SaaS space and brought them to San Antonio, Texas. And we were either on a barge floating along the river, or we would visit local breweries. And we would sample a beer, feature a beer that usually regionally focused and make some connection to that beer style or beer brewing process or whatever it might be, and billing for SaaS. Tenuous connection, I know, but it turned out to be a pretty entertaining format. And while I was at SaaSLOC in Dublin, like I said, I ran into a former colleague of mine, his name was Armando Biondi, and invited him to be part of that series. That conversation, that invitation rekindled a relationship and we continued to talk. And fast forward a little while later, Armando, who is a many times founder, had a successful exit to Hootsuite. He sold his company at Espresso with his co-founder Massimo Chiaruzzi, and that's how I met them originally. He asked me, would you, would I ever consider starting a company? And I said, sure, like I've thought about it. The thought has crossed my mind. And he asked me to describe what it would be. And I gave him a very bare bones description of what is now Breadcrumbs. Fast forward a little while later, March, March, as the pandemic is kicking off, we incorporate Breadcrumbs. And then we spend a year developing products and validating the concept with some design partners. And then we, we launch. So we've been 2 years kind of in market selling. And along that 3-year journey, lots and lots and lots of learnings. And they really kind of fall into 3 categories: learnings about ego, learning about friends, and some interesting revelations about work. So let's start with ego. Relying on previous experience is a big mistake if that's all you're relying on, I think is my key takeaway here. So as I mentioned, it's actually closer to 20 years now that I think about it that I've been doing marketing in tech. In one way or another, or tech-adjacent industries. And I was pretty confident that I knew what I was doing. And my two co-founders having had a successful exit, I actually had a ton of confidence that that would fill the gap in terms of that, you know, day one experience that I did not have. And turns out my previous experience is very, very beneficial. There's no doubt about it. And their previous experience is very beneficial. But this journey is all about new learning. And it's all about quick experimentation, quick iteration, quick failures. And quick moving on. And there's, I'll give you a couple of anecdotes about how I came to this discovery. I think a key thing was when we initially brought the product to market, we came out with a pretty sophisticated pricing and packaging strategy. We had the, you know, we had the 3 packages, we had it mapped to, you know, certain segments. There was, you know, feature differentiation between them. And I think if you read a textbook on pricing and packaging, the offering that we came out with would've been textbook. The challenge is we are brand new, right? Unproven products. you know, somewhat of a new category, or at least a category redefinition. We hadn't clearly defined product market fit. Our ICP was, you know, loosely defined at best, and it was too much. We were— we stretched ourselves thin in terms of market segments that we were attacking. It made it difficult to refine messaging. It made it difficult to, you know, prioritize spend in terms of our marketing efforts because we bid off a big chunk of the market. And although that strategy is, I believe, correct, it wasn't correct at that point in time. It's more correct now. Fast forward, you know, we have We have clearly defined our ICP. We are confident on our product market fit. The product is far more mature. The feature set is far more robust. And now, you know, that, you know, lower tier for the SMB, middle of the road tier for the mid-market, and then this bespoke custom plan for larger, more enterprisey customers. Totally makes sense. We understand who we're talking to at each of those market segments. We understand the pain points so we can market appropriately, we can target appropriately, we can prioritize investment appropriately. So that's all great. But we put the cart before the horse. And I say we because my co-founders are awesome and we share all our victories and we share all of our defeats. but that was a, that was a function of, hey, I've been here, I've done this, I know what works, I know what the pricing page should look like, I know what the pricing should be, I know what features should go in each plan. Um, and, uh, although much of that may have been true, like I said, not right there and then. And, um, that's been a humbling experience. Uh, there has been several other anecdotes like that across the, uh, the journey, where confidence in previous experience led us down a path, and then we realized, hey, like, this is a different— this is a different beast. We're at a different stage. We need to take a different approach. We either need to be, you know, a little bit more humble, or we need to be a little bit more nimble, or we need to be a little bit more aggressive. Whatever it may be, taking stock of the inflection points along your along your startup journey is really important. So that's the ego bit, which, you know, if there's anybody out there that knows me personally, that was pretty hard to come to terms with. The friends part. So, you know, on a personal note, I pride myself on having a big group of friends and a large family and enjoying spending time with them. And making memories. And, you know, those friendships and those family relationships make your life richer. They're just as important when it comes to your, your business life and making relationships with people that are, have gone, are going through, or considering going through what you are going through is really, really important. It ties into the original concept, that ego concept. It's a good place to get your ego put into check. But it's also a great place to, you know, bounce ideas off of, validate your thinking, and quite honestly, just get a little bit of catharsis, a little bit of like therapy. This is one of the most challenging things that I've ever done in my professional life. You know, it's 3 years that feels like 15. Every minute of it rewarding, but every minute of it challenging. And without a support network, it would be much, much harder. So again, going kind of to the genesis of Breadcrumbs, super, super lucky to have two repeat founders as my co-founders in Breadcrumbs, Armando and Massimo, as I mentioned earlier. They bring a ton of experience to the table. They've seen that, they've seen a lot, they've gone through a lot. They can bring that perspective to the table. The challenge, the challenge is, you know, they're still my co-founders. And so they're going through the same experience I'm going through at the moment. They're feeling the same pressures, they are feeling the same challenges, perhaps in slightly different ways, but, you know, we're in it together. So there isn't this outside perspective. And it took me a while to realize I really needed that, longer than it should have. I was lucky enough to already have some pretty successful, you know, founders in my network. Shout out to Patrick Campbell of of ProfitWell, Price Intelligently, now Paddle, who, you know, in the early days really helped me feel comfortable making the decision to take this risk and, and, you know, leave a, a very promising, uh, career, um, to take on this founder challenge. Alex Stuma of SaaStock as well, a huge supporter in the early days, um, and, you know, tying back to how Breadcrumb started, I actually ran into my co-founder at SaaS Talk, which seems to be a theme at that conference. For those of you who haven't checked it out, you definitely should. But, you know, it just wasn't enough, to be quite honest. And so I kind of went on a mission to find different ways to connect with other founders. So YC, we're a YC company, that was a huge help in that journey of connecting with other founders and being able to have a network of people to reach out to and have conversations with. SaaS Stock actually came back into this realm to help as well. They have something called the SaaS Stock Founders Membership, which I joined, I think pretty much day one, I was one of the earliest members. But, uh, that's, uh, that's an opportunity where you meet with the same, you know, group of founders on a monthly basis. And, uh, you know, you start to build a relationship, build rapport, and you're talking about, you know, your biggest wins, your biggest challenges, um, you know, your biggest concerns, your biggest, um, hopes. And, um, you know, you start to build a history with these folks and it becomes a very kind of safe space to have these conversations. And so, you know, it was probably close to a year into the journey before I started to prioritize building this network and making it a more kind of focused, formal part of how I spend my time. And it's been absolutely transformational. The opportunity again, just to share and get things off your chest, get some catharsis has been awesome. But having like an on-demand network of people to bounce ideas off, to share current situations with and get real-time feedback from, you know, meet from a meaningful place. You know, they've, they're either going through it or been through it. and, and you get— they have that perspective. Super, super powerful. Uh, so I would encourage anybody who's, who's going through a founder journey or considering one, start building this network early. Um, and then I think something that applies, you know, to work life in general, professional life in general, uh, but has been really magnified is is the relationship, you know, my relationship with work. I think most founders find joy in work. You know, I think you have to in order to take on something like this because it takes up a huge part of your life. I've never been a big believer in work-life balance. I think that that's a misnomer. I think, you know, life includes work, work is part of life. They go hand in hand. And finding meaning in work beyond, you know, beyond a paycheck is one of the secrets to success that most people have forgotten. Success in terms of like, a fulfilled and happy life, not necessarily monetary success, although hopefully that comes as well. The challenge is when you actually, when you enjoy work and when jumping into work is something that's not daunting, it's not something that you, you know, you dread, but rather you, you know, you enjoy, you like taking on those challenges. In a startup where, you know, day one we were 3 people, we're now 18. 18 is still not a lot, especially as you're growing quickly, your customer base is increasing, the demands on the business and your time increase. I found myself attracting work. Lots and lots of stuff would come at me, you know, from parts, you know, different team members, uh, externally from, you know, the— your, your investors, your partners, um, and stuff that you just take on yourself. Um, and the list of things that I had to do, um, continue to grow and grow and grow. The challenge is, uh, often some of that work is really not all that valuable. Or you confuse it for things that will move you forward or that create progress. And they really don't. For example, early on, a lot of the content created for Breadcrumbs, and we're a content machine. If you haven't checked out our blog, please do. We're really good at creating content. A lot of it was founder-created content out of necessity. And as the business continued to grow, it took us longer than it should have to shift some of that work off of our plate. Now, a lot of the content that's kind of thought leadership or where certain types of expertise are required, obviously, were still involved, but we didn't need to be writing every piece of content at a certain point. Um, but it's very kind of tangible work, right? You take on a, you take on a blog post, you, you work on that for a bit, something comes out the other end. It's something that you can look at, you can see the end result, uh, and there's something very satisfying about that, especially when you compare it to like more strategic type work, future thinking stuff, building partnership relationships, stuff that the results are not near term, but they may be midterm or long term. It's a very different kind of feeling. And it took much too long to make that realization as well. I think it's really important for founders to understand that there's only so much time in the day. They can only do so much. And the best thing they can do is really focus on the highest value work that needs to be done to move the business forward, only the things that only they can do. And really, the other part of the time should be spent building the team that can take on all of those other items in order to move you forward. You know, don't, don't drown yourself in the work thinking that by doing it, that's how your business is growing. Really identify what it is that you do that will move the business forward. And that's kind of the, the, the end of the 3 biggest mistakes. Again, happy to take some questions. I would be remiss not to mention a little bit about breadcrumbs, given the opportunity. Why did we, why did I go on this crazy journey to build a lead scoring platform, an enterprise-grade lead scoring platform at that? I did it because I really believe in the methodology and it's just been poorly implemented in many cases and the technology to support it hasn't really existed in the past. But yet many marketers understand the value of it, right? So here's a quick stat. 68% of marketers consider lead scoring to be one of the most significant contributors to the revenue and a 70% with a 77% higher lead generation ROI than other methods. The funny thing is it's widely ignored. Uh, 6— over 60 to 80% of businesses still don't utilize lead scoring. For B2B businesses specifically, only about 20% of them use some type of lead scoring. Um, so we built Breadcrumbs to solve a bunch of this. It's a product, not a process. We score on fit and activity, and we make the most of the data that you currently have. There's 4 kind of legacy key problems with old approaches to lead scoring that we've solved for. Happy to talk through those if we ever have a chance to connect. And one of the ways to connect is to get started with a recently released feature. It's called Copilot. It's our AI-driven approach to creating lead scoring model literally in seconds. You're completely in control, all of the visibility, all of the analytics and reporting that you would expect from breadcrumbs historically, but now you're up and running in seconds. And on that note, happy to take any questions. Brian, you there? Hello? So I'm not— I'm sure people can still hear me. I'm not sure what's going on, but, um, let me answer some of these questions. Somebody asked me about the founders group. Um, it— that's the SaaStock founder or, um, SaaStock members founders group. If you go to saastock.com, you'll find it there, or feel free to ping me directly. I'm happy to connect you to that organization. Uh, is it possible connect with me one-on-one? Absolutely. I'm on LinkedIn, super easy to find. Feel free to hit me up there, just reference that this is where you saw me, um, and happy to connect, uh, through, through LinkedIn. So a question about fundraising: what method and how long did it take to raise funds for your project? So funny enough, um, the plan was to bootstrap. Um, myself and our two co-founders had a high level of conviction, um, and felt that bootstrapping was the right thing for us. Um, the, the secondary benefit of having previous, um, successful founders with a successful exit is that people know who they are, follow them and what they're doing. And so we had a ton of inbound interest, um, in what we were doing and, uh, raised from some pretty significant, um, early-stage funds— Active Capital, Hustle Fund, uh, um, you know, we got into YC obviously, so there was some funding associated with that. Yeah, so we actually didn't go out looking for money. We were fortunate enough that people came to us and happy to talk about that offline as well.

Awesome, Gary, thank you. And apologies for the technical glitches here. I couldn't turn on my video or camera, so we had to refresh. When in doubt, reboot. That's what I got to show there. So I think you've, you know, you covered a lot of really interesting pieces there. I actually had a question for you. I see we've got some that have been kind of upvoted here. You know, you mentioned the support network of founders is incredibly important. Do you have any recommendations for the founders here in the audience or best practices for building that network, especially now that we're in this hybrid in-person and virtual world?

Yeah, I think, um, you know, I think if you're a part of an organization like this, this is a great way to connect with other people that are on a similar journey. Um, I think the best connections often come from the network you already have. So reaching out to your current friends and family and colleagues and saying, hey, I'm on this journey, I'm looking to meet people that have been through it or going through it, is there anybody you would recommend I connect with and can you introduce me? And then there's formal things like the, like the SaaS Doc Founders members group that I was talking about. That's a formal thing, you know, there's a, there's a membership fee, which is really just about commitment, right? Because like, you're, you want to make sure that the people in this group are actually committed to the hour or two a month that's required to get value out of this. I think those are kind of the top the top ways.

Yeah, that's a good point. I've found that you sort of build your network brick by brick or person by person over time, whether it's your founders or customers or investors or even just friends. And so I think if you continually work on building that, eventually you'll kind of see where the intersections are. You meet some founder that could connect with some investor and all of a sudden, you fast forward a couple of years later, you've kind of built out this pretty incredible network of people that you can utilize in any way, whether it's just feedback and support or actual investment in your company. I don't know if you answered this question already, Gary, when I was rebooting, but the top question here seems to be how do you win your first customers?

Yeah, good question. Great question. Whoever's asking it, or, you know, I'm sure there's multiple people asking it. It's the exact right question you should be thinking about. And the reality is it's for us, and I think for most startups that are successful, It's founder-led sales. It is knocking on doors of people in your network where your product is relevant. This is not like a favor, but this is, you know, hey, we know each other. I'm working on this thing. I think it's super relevant to your business for X, Y, and Z reasons. Are you willing to give me a shot? Can I share with you? And leverage that network ideally for more than your first 10, for as many as you can, right? And use those conversations, use those interactions to refine your pitch, to really hone in on the pain points that are relevant, the things that drive buying behavior, and get to the point where you feel you have, you know, a repeatable, reliable, um, sales process, right, that you can then leverage beyond your network.

Awesome. Well, just in the interest of time, I see there are other questions here. Gary, feel free to answer some of these in the chat, or if you're going to stick around for the networking piece, we can jump to them. Um, without further ado, I would love to jump into the pitch part of the Founder Showcase today. So, um, founders, just let me kind of go over a quick overview of how this will work. Um, so we're going to kick off this founder pitch session. Each pitch will be 3 minutes long, then we'll do a short Q&A afterwards with the founder and our guest panelists. Keep using that Q&A function so that we can take your questions and put it to the top of the list, and, and we'll be sure to ask them afterwards. We're going to have both Gary and Kelsey join us as the panelists where they're going to ask some questions as well. And also the founders are here in the chat, so they'll be able to answer your questions directly throughout the rest of this event, and then you'll be able to connect with them live in the networking portion, which we'll do after the, the 5 pitches are complete. So let's welcome our first pitch of the day, Gary Palmer, founder and CEO of Electric Sheep. Gary and Electric Sheep is dedicated to accelerating visual effects for the VFX industry with using AI with a focus on speed, security, scale, and streamlining film and TV workflows. Let's go ahead and get started.

Hi, I'm Gary from Electric Sheep. We're accelerating visual effects with AI. More specifically, a process called rotoscoping, removing the background behind the actor. And the average film spends over £200,000 on this process alone. The problem is that it's time-consuming. For 1 second, it takes over 6 hours drawing around frame by frame each actor, and it costs £80. And the industry is growing. Our solution is using AI to remove backgrounds. We're 360 times faster, 160 times cheaper, and we're infinitely scalable because we're cloud native. My background is over 7 years working in TV and film on shows like Spider-Man and Maleficent 2. Jake comes from building highly scalable, highly secure SaaS platforms in fintech. Richie is a B2B tech sales specialist, and Ryan has a PhD in computer vision and over 15 years experience in industry. Spotlight does what humans hate, including multiple people and matting to such a fine level of detail that we can matte every single strand of hair. We've had over 100 client calls, our tech has been used in a OnePlus mobile TV advert, and we have 10 data partners, 6 of which are Hollywood data partners, giving us exclusive access to their data. Our focus for the next 18 months is improving the product, carrying on with our data collection, and launching our full SaaS model. So starting with our data partnerships and moving into a SaaS model, at £12.50 per second, we are 75% cheaper than the incumbent at a 95% gross margin. We did a bottom-up analysis of the industry of rotoscopers globally and we found it to be a £1.2 billion problem. We forecast capturing £7.5 million of that within 3 years. Our go-to-market is speaking to our customers in the visual effects companies, and we're offering 1 second free use of our tool for 1 second exclusive access to their old data. And when they run out of these credits, we convert them to commercial data customers. The pro tier Most of the competition applications run on client hardware, making them slow. They can't process clips concurrently, and the quality is too low. The semi-pro tier run in the cloud, but the quality is not high enough, and the security in the workflow just doesn't work with professional TV and film. Our cloud scalability and focus on professional workflow fixes this, along with our exclusive data partnerships to get the highest quality output. We're raising £275k for 18 months runway at a £3m cap. We're over 70% complete and we're opening a rolling round due to overwhelming interest. So let's chat.

Hello, Gary, on screen. Hey, Gary.

There we go. Um, so yeah, so we'll just, we'll, uh, we'll do it live. So Gary, it's really great to see you again. Thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having us.

Let's go ahead, Gary Amaral. It sounds like you might have had an initial question, so let's start with you, then we'll go with Kelsey.

Yeah, just wondering, current traction, are you guys in market?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Good question. Actually, just a little bit of news I can share. Literally while I've been on this call, we just had another VC come on board. We have closed our offering, but we do have a rolling round. So that's great news for us. In terms of traction.

Yeah.

So as, as we said, we've been used in TV adverts, so we're really good in certain types of image content. And what this raise allows us to do is it allows us to move this across all different types. So what I didn't have a chance to go in with on the pitch is that we're really good at full body front facing, which is say one type of shot. And there might be sort of 15, 20 different types of shot, you know, like over the shoulder, top down, that kind of thing. And we really just need these data partnerships and a little bit of time on product to really make this widely commercializable. So what we are focusing on right now is our data partnerships, but we do have a product that's being used, it's being tested, and we're iterating with the visual effects studios. Directly.

Cool, thanks Gary. Uh, Kelsey, let's go to you next.

Yeah, um, Gary, really, really cool product. I'm excited to hear more. Um, one thing that, that I wanted to know about with the speed at which AI is evolving and the incredible amount of players that are entering into the marketplace, how do you think about maintaining your competitive advantage in this area?

Yeah, great question, Kelsey. So I guess there's a few different elements to this. So AI moves so quickly that every day our component pipeline changes, right? We've got multi-step algorithms and different components can be updated, improved upon, and upgraded. And really what we're doing is we're building this moat around our data so that this exclusivity with these houses that we're working with It gives us the highest quality data that is available in the world because nobody does this level of quality outside of Hollywood. What we're working on is we're working on building these models that we can train on this highest quality data, and then we deliver directly to the professional TV and film market, which at the moment isn't actually captured for a lot of these products. They typically tend to aim for the content creators like the TikTokers or the YouTubers because the quality is a bit easier to get into. But the way that we view this problem is we tackle the hard bit first and then we can move down into the semi-pro area.

Thank you. That's, that's very helpful context.

Thanks, Kelsey. Gary, how are you getting your customers? What's your go-to-market plan right now?

So we've divided the market into 3 different segments. We have our SMEs, we have our mid-market, and we have our enterprise players. Our go-to-market focuses on the mid-market players. These are the visual effects companies, and these companies are downstream of the streaming services like Netflix, Amazon, Disney, so on and so forth. So this industry is really growing at the moment, and our go-to-market strategy is getting them on as a data partner. They get 1 second free use of our tool for 1 second of data that we can use to train the algorithm. And then in future, when we're integrated in their workflow and they've burned through the credits that they've built up with us, we convert them into commercial customers. Does that make sense?

It does. Thank you, Gary. Any other questions? I don't see questions here from the audience, at least not in the Q&A tool. So, um, if you do have questions, feel free to put it in the chat. Um, also, Gary, why don't you stick around because some founders may put some questions to you here in the, in the actual chat tool, uh, and then we'll, we'll make sure to, uh, connect you with the folks in the networking session. Thanks so much for, for joining us Thanks, everyone.

Appreciate it.

We're, we're gonna go ahead and move to the second pitch of today, Bambinista. Um, so Bambinista is based in London. It's an e-commerce marketplace and physical baby goods retailer that helps new and future parents find the best brands of baby and nursery products. Their CEO is Susan Daker. Susan, I'll let you take it away.

Hi, I'm Susan, founder and CEO of Bambinista, a premium baby and nursery retailer based in London in the UK. The problem with traditional retailers is that they do retail traditionally. The customer, on the other hand, is evolving faster than they ever have before. Customers don't just want products, they want information, they want connection, they want experience. And nowhere is this more so the case than in the baby products market. Would you buy a car without test driving it? Well, I can tell you from experience that I did, but I would never have bought my daughter's baby stroller without experiencing it first. It is true retail is a tough industry in a global cost of living crisis, but the last place a parent will stop spending is on their children. Globally, the market is worth $225 billion a year. In the UK alone, it's a $7.7 billion market. However, huge numbers of well-established national and small independent retailers are closing up shop as they fail to stay relevant to a new generation of customers. We believe the retail company of the future reaches customers where and how they want. E-commerce is the core of our business, and we have a store in Westfield London, arguably the premier shopping destination in all of Europe. We've developed a hybrid retail marketplace model, which allows us to sell a much greater range of products while minimizing our risk and cost. Most importantly, we support our customers in their journey with personalized in-store shopping, live online shopping so they can shop from the comfort of their own sofas, and talks and events to build our community and truly connect with our customers. To date, we've done over $3 million in revenue with our monthly recurring revenue exceeding $125,000. Last year we were up 49% on the previous year. The market is wide open. The demise of huge but outdated retailers—Mothercare, Babies R Us, Debenhams—has created a $2 billion gap in a $7 billion a year market. And the small local independent retailers are not wanting or able to fill this. And this is where the huge immense opportunity for Bambinista lies. I myself am a retail professional with almost 2 decades experience in senior management, for global giants like the Louis Vuitton Group and Walmart. David is our sales and ops guru from a hospitality background. Mike has designed the retail systems for Oracle and ASOS, the UK's largest online fashion retailer. And investment banker Andy advises on financials and business strategy. We have already received over $200,000 investment in our pre-seed round from Loyal VC. And we're now seeking $1 million in our seed round to reach our next milestone of $10 million of annual revenue within the next 3 years. Thank you for your time, and I'm happy to answer any questions.

All right, Susan, thank you and, uh, and welcome. Susan, if you're able to, you can go ahead and turn on your camera and unmute. And if there's no button that allows you to, just hit the refresh button at the top of the page.

Refresh the top.

There we go. We can hear you now.

You can hear me, but you can't see me.

Yeah, I think that's fine for now. We can go ahead and jump right in. So, Kelsey, why don't we start with you this time and then we'll go to Gary?

Yeah, Susan, great pitch. Really interested to learn a little bit more. I would like to know what— how you plan to deploy the funds that you are raising. What are your priorities?

So it's a bit of a mixture of things. So what we're trying to do now is kind of take it from where we are now at a million pounds a year revenue to the next level. So it's, it's a combination. Firstly, it's hiring more people, which we need to scale. We are looking at opening a larger physical retail space because in the baby products market, I think that's particularly important because people like to go and touch and feel and try and it's It's part of the whole sort of nesting process, which is sort of— if you've got kids, you'll know, you know, you kind of take it quite personally and you want to get really involved in that. The other thing is marketing. So it's really— and then the last thing is tech. So we need to kind of develop the tech a bit. We want to put a lot of money into marketing because the market's so wide open that I think there's so much opportunity to, um, to grow just by putting more money into marketing. Um, another store, although we want e-commerce to be the core of the business because obviously that's a lot more profitable, there is a need for that sort of bricks and mortar as well. But we want to limit it to 1 or 2 stores at max. Um, and just bringing the right people on board to help us to grow the business, because we're still quite a small team despite the fact that we've done £1 million revenue in the last year. It would be nice to hire some more people.

Awesome. Thanks, Susan. Gary, let's go to you next.

Yeah, just understanding a little bit about kind of your revenue streams right now. So you, you said a portion of it was monthly recurring. Can you just remind everybody what that percentage was and maybe tell us a little bit about what that revenue is?

Yeah, so the majority of our revenue comes from our website. And then we do have the physical store, but obviously that's limited in terms of how much you can actually move through the store. But most of it is just e-commerce business, so it comes from word of mouth, it comes from Google marketing, it comes from now we've sort of becoming one of the better known baby retailers in the UK.

So the monthly recurring revenue specifically? Yeah.

What, what is driving that? Um, exactly that. It's just we were getting better known. We're doing Google marketing. We have customers that come through the front door. So we basically don't have to do anything to kind of continue that revenue stream. But we want to continue to grow that at the same rate that we have been growing it, which is why we want to invest in bringing on more brands, bringing on more staff, bringing on— we've just partnered with a third-party logistics provider so we can move more product through. But being in retail, you know, once you're an established retailer, you know, you've got a customer base and it's fairly easy to continue the monthly recurring revenue. But what we want to do is continue to grow at the 400% year on year that we have been growing at the last 2 years.

Thank you.

Susan, there's a question here. Well, there's a couple of questions in the audience. So make sure when you're done, Harry, you go in and you could add comments to it. Um, I'll focus on just one of them, which is what are your current challenges to provide the best customer experience through your online channels?

Um, it's a, it's a really good question. I think the one challenge that we do face is that, um, the market is, is competitive, um, where a lot of— we, we do face the issue of some not so legitimate retailers will just cut price. In those cases, we don't deal with brands that allow price cutting. So we, if we find that there's a brand that supports other businesses that are discounting heavily, that's just not a brand that we want to be involved in because we need to maintain our margins. So we're very selective about the brands that we stock. We're now in the very fortunate position where You know, maybe 2 years ago we were going out to brands to ask them if they would want to be stocked with us. We have the opposite problem now. We have brands contacting us on a daily basis asking if we would please stock them. And so we're very prescriptive on maintaining prices and margins in the markets. We won't deal with any brand that allows other retailers to cut prices and eat into margin. If so, we expect a full margin support from the brands. So I think one of the problem— the biggest problem is obviously that competitiveness of the market, but at the same time with the large independent, the large retailers, like I said, a $2 billion gap in the market over the last 2 years from some of the huge players in the UK. Having exited because they're sort of doing business the way they did business 50 years ago. And then you've got the other side of the market, which is a lot of like small local independent retailers, and half of them don't even have computer systems. So it's just almost like taking candy from a baby, if you mind the pun. It's just such a big opportunity in the market, and I think that's where where our opportunity lies.

Awesome. Thank you, Susan. Yeah, so make sure you answer some of the questions here in the chat. And founders, if you'd like to connect with Susan, we'll be doing networking here in the next 20 minutes or so. Let's go ahead and move to our third pitch, Fetch. Fetch is a patented mobile application located in Wilmington, North Carolina, that helps hotels enhance their on-property guest communications. Which then improves the on-premise sales with increased guest satisfaction. All right, José, I'll let you take it away.

I'm José Quiroz, I'm the CEO and co-founder of Fetch, and at Fetch we're helping hotels connect with their guests in a new way, and by creating closer interactions between the hotel and the guests were helping improve guest experience as well as improve new sales. Now, myself and Jamie, our co-founder, have extensive experience in the hospitality industry. We ran and operated the largest guestroom telephone manufacturer in the world. I was a COO for that and she was a CFO. And if you want to think about what we're doing at Fetch, we're essentially replacing the original solution we sold with this new updated technology. Technology that Fetch offers. We have a great advisory board including Bill Oates, who is a CIO for Starwood Hotels and Resorts. One of the best ways to give you the problem is to give you 3 data points. Up to 50% of the staff at hotels has been decimated since COVID Many of these folks are not coming back, which is leaving the hotel with a service issue. For example, only 13 out of 100 calls on average is answered at a hotel, which is not great service. And, and this is driving, uh, the, the problem of 4-star reviews. So when you go online to book a room, uh, I myself look for 4 stars and above. I'm sure you do too. So dropping from a 4-star to a 3-star, for example, has a significant impact on revenue on an individual property. So it's important for them to keep that 4-star review, and that means better service. Um, and part of the problem, the service is suffering is that the hotels have given you, the guests, kind of antiquated and ineffective tools to talk to them. So what we've done at Fetch is created a mobile application that allows you— allows the hotel to offer you, the guest, your own device as the way to transact business with them or requests. We offer voice, SMS, images. We can be sold standalone or as a white label. But the most important thing is, is that when you use Fetch, you actually will will be embedded within the hotel systems so that the hotel can see that, that who's calling, that you're registered guest, your registered room, registered name, and of course they'll have your credit card on file to process your transactions much more smoothly. Now we have been issued process patents for our technology, and again, issued patents instead of patent pending. We have the patents in-house. Our market is significant For us, the biggest number we're looking at here is just under $400 million in addressable market. And that is based on our B2B SaaS, $250 per property per year, $20 per room per year. The average hotel in the US is just over 100 rooms. It's about $2,200 that hotels will spend on Fetch per year. Great steps, great traction for us. This next quarter, we're looking for pilot site installations. First customers involved with that as well, dealer agreements finalized, as well as getting this funding round completed. And our ask is a $250,000 raise, convertible note or SAFE. Referrals are also welcome if you have any. And Fetch is going to change the way hotels talk to their guests worldwide, and we hope you can join us on our journey.

¡Hey, José! ¿Cómo estás, man? Good, ¿how are you? Doing well, thanks for joining us today. Uh, let's go ahead and jump into questions. Um, Gary, this time we'll start with you. Sure, Jose.

Uh, I'm curious, so is the goal, um, like selling into the brands? You want to sell into the Marriotts? You want to sell into the Starwoods? Or do you— is it like management groups or individual owner-operated properties? Like, or is it all—

it's all of those, Gary. This industry is so convoluted, it's, it's funny. Uh, but we're starting with individual properties right now, the non-branded ones. And some of the smaller management groups because they're easier to get okay from than the brands, obviously. And that way we can get the case use studies and data so we can go back to the brands and show them what we're doing.

Okay, so, but is the end goal kind of OEM-type relationship with the big brands? Is that like the—

it would be— we're open to that. We have that possibility, and we're hoping that whether it's that or, you know, standalone, either one. But white label would be a great, great way to embed that into the branded apps.

Cool, thanks.

Kelsey, let's go to you next.

Yeah, um, hi José. Hey Kelsey. I am interested, it makes a lot of sense to me from the hotel's perspective why they'd want to implement the technology and also be able to track these customer engagements. I'm curious about what research you've done with the end user. With the hotel guests and what is their willingness to download an app for this? And particularly when that app might only be for like one hotel stay versus, you know, something that they're using for all of Starwood at this point.

Right.

No, and that's a great, that's a really good question. We've, guests tend to like this. We've seen this actually one hotel kind of infringes, but they have it, Great Wolf Lodge, Lodge. People have used something very similar in those lodges only. Love it. I mean, it's everything from ordering food to, you know, scheduling appointments for whatever it may be. And that has been a really resounding success for that brand. And I've heard from the actual guests going, this is kind of like this, this is really great, I loved it when I had it. So it's a little bit anecdotal because you know, we have to gather that information, we have to do more research. But I can tell you from my own personal experience, just even recent days, you know, they have QR codes for online ordering, but you have to be in the room to take a picture of the QR code, things of that nature. We could just push the room service key on our, on our Facebook, which by the way comes up as the hotels, so as a hotel logo on it and all the services that that property offers. So when you hit room service, we could API right into that online menu, and you could be going back to the hotel after a long day and order your dinner. It's those conveniences, especially for the early adopters, which are the road warriors for us, folks that really, you travel, you enjoy it, but man, it's work and it's tiring. So getting that extra 20 minutes of not having to wait for dinner to come up to you because it's kind of ready when you get back, those sorts of conveniences I think are going to be pretty big.

You're speaking to my weaknesses. I'd love to have a dinner ready when I get back.

Exactly. Or order a drink when you're by the pool, whatever it may be.

There's a basic question here from Jennifer. Do customers ask about privacy issues since Fetch holds on to credit card information?

We actually don't hold on to credit card information, and that's a great question because what we do is we lay lightly on top of the structure of the hotel. So when you call using Fetch and order room service, we don't see that transaction. That's actually going through the point of sale at the hotel level behind their firewalls. So Fetch doesn't actually hold your credit card information, uh, it would just make it an easy connection for the guest and the hotel to make that transaction happen.

Great, thanks José. Let's go ahead and move to our fourth pitch. José, make sure you stick around, and founders, you can connect in the chat or the networking. Our fourth pitch today is Humaxa. Carolyn Peer is the CEO and co-founder of Humaxa. It's based in Cameron Park, California, just outside of Sacramento, and it's a generative AI platform that helps the automotive industry get vehicles to market 2 months faster by eliminating the need to search and write reports. So Carolyn, I'll let you take it from here.

Are you feeling pressured to do more with less? To do a lot with just a little? What if you could do away with HR busywork once and for all and concentrate just on high-value activities like mentoring others, helping someone who's really struggling, or showing senior executives how people ops is contributing to company goals? With HUMAX With Alexa, you can achieve all this. Let's see what it looks like. Hi Max, I have a problem with workplace stress. I'm providing feedback about stress. I just can't find a way to unplug. Hit submit. Max says, oh, I understand how you feel. How about trying mindfulness exercise. I can choose an exercise. I'll choose 3x3. Hit submit. Let's get started. Sit up straight. Let your shoulders sit back, not hunched. That's all there is to it. Thanks, I'd also like to refer someone for an open position here. Let me take you to our referral portal. And I'd like to find a mentor. I select a topic. I'll choose effective feedback. Hit submit. Max says thanks for applying as a mentee. He's found someone to match me with. Would I like to be mentored by Jen? Now I need help writing my performance review. Performance reviews. Max gives me some pointers on how to write a comprehensive and effective review. These are just a few examples of how we can help.

Hello. Hey, Carolyn, good to see you. How are you doing today? Okay, uh, let's go ahead and get started with some questions here. So Kelsey, do you want to kick it off?

Sure. Hi Carolyn. Hi. Um, so I, I wanted to understand the, the scope, uh, a little bit better. Um, you gave a couple of different examples of things that the system could do, and is it more geared towards HR professionals trying to be able to, um, to be able to perform HR tasks, or there's things in there that seem more like it was like personal, you know, mental health support. And so I'm trying to kind of understand what lane you fit into.

Yeah, I apologize. I don't know why, but the wrong video played for the presentation today. So the, the platform is currently being used by HR professionals. We have about 12,000 people on the platform today. But the direction that we're headed is specifically for automotive industry employees to help bring vehicles to market faster. So I'm sure that contributed to some of the confusion, Kelsey.

Apologies for that. All good. Thank you, Carolyn.

Yeah, apologies, Carolyn. Not sure how the videos got mixed up. If you want, I think you might have a link to your actual pitch video and pitch deck. You can go ahead and share that with the audience.

Can I do that? Okay.

Yeah, please do. But I think we can just kind of jump right in and, you know, talk a little bit about what you're doing. I mean, Gary, I don't know if you have an initial question you wanted to ask.

Yeah, I guess in terms of primary use case, I think is what I would like to understand. Like, who is the primary use case for this, or what is the primary use case?

Right. So we're currently working with 6 automotive manufacturers and 3 Tier 1 and Tier 2 providers. So they are the technical design engineers, the market, market researchers, warranty analysis engineers. And what they're doing is they are going to Max and asking Max to proactively search for and bring information to them, generate reports, and then also have proactive alerts. So if I'm a design engineer making decisions about what's going into the manufacturing process, I might say, Max, what are people saying about auto-stop features of new vehicles in the market today? Max will proactively go out and search subreddits on Reddit We'll search enthusiast forums and we'll run sentiment analysis on what are people saying about this and generate those reports each month. Hey Carolyn, here's what people are saying about the auto-stop feature based on the data from last month. Then I can say, oh, that's great. Now I want you to go research something else, Max. Does it have—

Are those sources definable by the user?

They can be, yes.

That's good.

I don't see any other questions here from the audience, but I would encourage you put the link to your deck or video here in the chat, Carolyn, and then you'll be able to connect with some of the founders, investors on the call here momentarily. We do have one more pitch before we move to the networking piece here, and we'll describe what the networking part is after this, but Let's go ahead and get started with the final pitch so we can kick off the networking. Up next is Circul. Enrico Marinoff is the co-founder and CEO. Circul is committed to creating sustainable and readily available micro mobility options in cities where they're most urgently needed. Let's go ahead and get started. Thanks, Enrico.

Hello and thank you for joining this event. My name is Enrico and I'm co-founder of Circul. We exist to redefine urban mobility and make our cities more livable, one bike ride at a time. Moving around the city is a pain in the ass. We lose more than 120 hours and €2,000 annually just sitting in traffic jams or looking for a parking spot. Not to mention the ever-increasing cost of ownership, which is 75% up in just the last 5 years. Public transport has low connectivity and is not reliable. Shared micromobility, on the other hand, is a door-to-door and always available service. You can reach your destination quickly and conveniently without any parking hassles. It can save you 90% of your money and make the environment greener. Circul is the first and only bike-sharing service in Bulgaria. We operate 140 mechanical bikes and provide a healthy and safe alternative to transport. The service is used for both transport and fun and has up to 70x more potential users than other shared mobility services. We're taking a shot at the market now because there is a clear consumer shift towards sustainability and a healthy lifestyle. Early last year, we closed a €100K angel round. Since, we launched and generated more than 11K rides and acquired over 8.5K Fusers. With just double the fleet, we can easily cover triple the demand in Sofia where we operate. And all this through our current user base in current operating area. The potential of the entire city is 50x. Meanwhile, the Eastern European TAM that we will target is €2.2 billion. We charge users on a pay-as-you-go model, but we're just introducing monthly subscriptions and advertising and have a deal in our pipeline that will alone triple our revenue from the past year. We have a first mover advantage, up to 12x faster deployment process, and 6x lower cost of the bikes. Thus, we provide cheaper service with a higher quality. We're a young team of 3 with experience from top European universities and leading companies in tech and banking. Our plan is to operate in 15 cities across 8 countries in the region by 2027. Next year alone, we project €850K in revenues, and in 5 years, we estimate it at €55 million. We are looking for €400K now. 50k of them are already in the bank and we have a hard commitment for another 200k. The entire investment will allow us to buy 300 more vehicles, add e-bikes to our fleet, and reach breakeven in less than a year. Thank you and I hope you join us on this ride. Happy to chat further with you. Hello everyone.

Hey Enrico, how are you doing?

Maybe I have some issue with the headset. Okay.

Oh, I think I hear you. There we go. Yeah, loud and clear. Thanks for joining us today. Let's go ahead and start with Gary and then we'll go to Kelsey.

Right, yeah, Enrico, interested in, um, like the plan around the logistics, right? Like one of the challenges with this stuff is like the charging and the maintenance? And, um, how are you guys planning to tackle all that?

Yeah, all right. So basically, currently we're operating a mechanical fleet, so only standard bikes, uh, but even though we, we have to charge them because they have IoT devices. So what we are planning, uh, to improve operationally, uh, basically the first thing that we want to do after we close the round is, uh to get solar panels, and basically this is the way we're gonna charge the IoTs. So there will be no logistics except for relocation, maybe. In terms of the e-bikes, basically they have swappable batteries, so this problem is to some extent already, um, solved. Okay, cool. And so what's the—

what's like the, um, the lifespan of the capital, like the capital goods involved in the business? Like these are either the traditional bikes or the, or the e-bikes. How long do you expect them to be generating revenue? 5+ years. Okay.

Yep. Kelsey, let's go to you.

Yeah, um, so I, I agree with you, this is a growing market and there's a lot of opportunity out there. I also see that there are, I think, some big competitors that are already getting, um, established in this market. So what kind of competitively differentiates you from the Lime bikes and, and all the other options out there?

Yeah, all right. So this business is basically about saturation on the market, so how many units you have, uh, in the city. So this is really what is the, the most important. And we're like the first mover, uh, in our region, um, and we have a very, uh, very fast, uh, deployment process. So it's really 6x 12x faster than other companies because we're working with a local producer. We're in a very good relationship with them, and basically we're shortening the— this process a lot. So this is how we want to compete with the big guys like Lime, Bolt, and those that you mentioned.

Enrico, there, there are some questions here in the audience. The first thing is, you know, someone from Lagos said that you may have a big market here, um, you know, what's your plan to expand? But Jennifer is asking, how does, how does the local government come into play here? Do you have a positive relationship with policymakers? Have they been supportive of this What's your interaction with like the local governments on your go-to-market expansion?

So far, basically in Bulgaria, there are no, no laws regulating this market. It's basically everything is on municipality level. So it really depends in which city you operate. Currently, Sofia, this is, let's say, semi-regulated, but we're already talking to other municipalities where the government, not the government, but the municipality guys, they want to somehow participate in this. But they're like very positively, they are very positive about the business. So, they want to see this developed in Bulgaria because still we don't have that many alternative transport options.

Yeah, thanks for sharing that. There's a couple other questions that popped up here, but I would say let's save it for the networking piece, which we're about to start here. Um, and so founders, thank you for the, the thoughtful questions. You'll be able to connect with Enrico directly in the networking portion, uh, here momentarily. So we're about to start that right now. Uh, before we do, I'd really like to thank our speakers Kelsey, Gary, thank you for spending time with us today and sharing your insights. I'd also like to give a big shout out to HubSpot for Startups. We'll go ahead and post the link here. Make sure if you're in the early stages or if you're building your company now, you can get 90% off HubSpot, which is just an incredible deal for all founders. So thank you for your support, Kelsey, and the HubSpot team. I'd also like to thank the audience members. Your questions were great. And, you know, stick around. We're going to have open networking here. So here's how this is it's gonna work. The networking room is gonna stay open for as long as people wanna connect. So there is no time limit. Audience members can click the tables to join either a group video chat. These chats are broken up by topics and by presenting companies, or you can do what we call speed networking, which is an option at the top of your screen where you can be matched one-to-one, random matches across audience members. People are participating today. So thank you once again, and we'll see everyone at the tables.

Thank you, take care.