The Journey from Launch to Acquisition with Emilia Chagas

I'd like to share some key findings, things that really helped me along the way. And I realized maybe learning as I did, as we entrepreneurs, we do that a lot. And I understood something that customer development, this concept that to me was somehow very related to something that I used to do as a journalist, interviewing people. I loved to develop this technique of doing good interviews, and that helped me in customer development. But what I found out was that this technique did not only help me validate a problem back in the day when I understood that, well, maybe I have an opportunity, a business opportunity here, let's see if someone else has this problem that I can solve, how big it is. It also helped me validate, um, other problems along the way. Uh, it's, it's developed to a true mindset of being customer-centric, of trying always to understand the mindset of the customer. So it's a pretty cool technique to use, not only in the early days, but as you grow as well.

Good morning and good evening, everyone. Welcome to the Founder Showcase. My name is Ryan Micheletti. I am head of global operations for the Founder Institute. And a venture capitalist at the Veteran Fund. The Founder Institute is the largest pre-seed startup accelerator in the world. We've helped launch over 7,500 startups across 200 cities with a mentor network of 35,000 mentors. We've got an incredible event for you today. I am your host. Um, we had about 1,000 people register for the Founder Showcase. So if you're in the audience, please let us know where you're dialing in from. Founders from over 100 countries will be here. You'll also see that there are emoji icons at the bottom of your screen. Go ahead and click those. Let's give some love to our keynote speaker today who I'll introduce in a moment. And you can do that throughout all of the presentations today. As you may or may not know, the Founder Showcase is Silicon Valley's leading international startup pitch event, helping pre-seed to seed-stage startups learn, launch, and connect to investors. We run this event quarterly and we've got a great agenda for you today. First, we'll have Amelia Chagas, Head of Business Strategy at Growth Software, do a keynote presentation. She's great. She's led pioneering efforts in content marketing platforms as co-founder of Growth Boulevard and CEO of Content Tools. She's helped empower over 500,000 professionals and 3,000 teams ranging from industry giants like IBM and Spotify to many others. After that keynote, we'll have 6 company pitches to show you. These are pre-seed companies across a variety of industries such as fintech, IP, e-commerce, AI, mental health, shipping, sustainability. And these companies are also dispersed across several different geographies from Toronto, London, Cordoba, UK, US. Each of these companies have strong early growth metrics. So while they're still technically pre-seed, they're growing very quickly and will most likely be out of that stage in the very near future. The pitches themselves will be a quick 3 minutes, and then we'll also do some audience Q&A with the founders. After we do the pitches, we'll host an international networking session where you can meet with other founders, investors, and mentors from the audience today. So if you join the event before we, we started this broadcast, there's a lobby in the event room, and you're able to set up and join these group video chat tables organized by topic and geography to help you figure out where you want to go for networking after this. So without further ado, let's go ahead and get started. It is now my pleasure to introduce Amelia Chagas. Amelia, uh, let's bring you up here on stage. Welcome to the Founder Showcase and thank you for joining us today.

Well, thank you for having me here, Ryan. Thanks everyone. I'm really pumped to share my journey with you.

Yeah, well, welcome, and, and, uh, you know, appreciate you taking the time to spend with us today. So we're going to go ahead and kick off the keynote. For the founders here in the audience, if at any point you have questions during her presentation, please put it in the chat. We'll get to them during the Q&A session afterwards. And Emilia, why don't you go ahead and share your screen, and I will let you take it from here.

Amazing. Here it is. So yeah, thanks everyone. As I said, I'm really excited to be here, not only to share the highlights of my journey, but also the bumps along the way that really shaped where I am today, and as well as some questions that I like to ask myself, specifically when we have to make decisions. And there are so many decisions that we make every day as entrepreneurs, right? So let's see if anything from my journey can save you some time and hopefully some trouble as well. That would be really truly rewarding to me. So let me go ahead and start by saying that I'm passionate about helping businesses grow and leaders meet their potential. There is a bunch of information here. Ryan already said a few of them and there is more on my LinkedIn, so I'll save your time. And go ahead to ask you a question, everyone here. I would really like to bring you in the center of this conversation and let's reflect together. Uh, I'd love to know, how did you start your entrepreneurial journey? Feel free to share here on the chat. I'll go there afterwards. I want to read all of your, uh, your answers. And, uh, what is your first experience as an entrepreneur, the problem that you love to solve, or you found out that you love to solve, the first step that you've taken, that big step that really pushed things forward to you so far, and ultimately, of course, your main goal right now. Please share this with us, and I'll share some of mine too. So for me, growing up, I was dead set on becoming a journalist. So I worked in newsrooms, broadcasting, and with content marketing in parallel. And things started to change for me really after I wrote this female entrepreneurs piece for a magazine feature. Their stories, the stories of these women, they were, were not just inspiring to me. They actually were a wake-up call. I saw their challenges, I saw their breakthroughs, and I thought, well, you know what, maybe I can do this too. And one of these women recommended to me that I should read a book called O Segredo de Luiza, which translates from Portuguese to something like Luiza's Secret. And it's actually a very nice story of a young dentist who decides to become an entrepreneur. She builds a factory, she goes through a lot to create a business plan, to get investment. You all here know the drill. So yeah, the book really turned my what-ifs into why-nots, right? And my shift from journalism to entrepreneurship wasn't just about changing jobs. It was about changing my entire outlook and mindset, to be honest. I'm from a city in South Brazil called Floripa, Florianópolis, which has this effervescent startup scene. And I began connecting, absorbing everything from lean startup methods to business model canvases, as you can see here. And it was a whole new world to me where every challenge was a chance to learn more and more. And I ended up starting a business. With the purpose of making the lives of content managers like myself easier, making the lives of marketers easier. And my team and I developed a software that ended up helping over 5,000 marketing teams and help them streamline their operations and scale their efforts. And we were funded by Silicon Valley investors, participated in accelerators like 500 Startups, startups and launch incubator. And as CEO of Content Tools and later as head of strategy at Growth Hackers, I led teams that pushed the boundaries of content marketing, of growth. And, uh, taking the business global meant jumping to Silicon Valley's intense pace. As you all here know, uh, we tuned our strategies in accelerators, as I mentioned, pitched world-class investors, expanded our reach to markets that once I only dreamed of impacting. And, and here I'd like to share some key findings, things that really helped me along the way. And I realized, maybe learning as I did, as we entrepreneurs, we do that a lot. And I understood something, that customer development this concept that to me was somehow very related to something that I used to do as a journalist, interviewing people. I loved to develop this technique of doing good interviews and that helped me in customer development. But what I found out was that this technique did not only help me validate a problem back in the day when I understood that, well, maybe I have an opportunity, a business opportunity here. Let's see if someone else has this problem that I can solve, how big it is. It also helped me validate, um, other problems along the way. Uh, it's, it's developed to a true mindset of being customer-centric, of trying always to understand the mindset of the customer. So it's a pretty cool technique to use, not only in the early days, but as you grow as well. Another thing that I ended up doing and revisiting over time is that the minimum viable product that we all end up having to develop somehow early on to validate the solution can actually help with more than that. We can use this minimum viable product approach to learn about the market. Where is the market? How big is the market? And not only does the solution work, that's of course the first question that we have, but we can definitely go beyond. Another finding for me was that early on it was super important to search for good, great partners, specifically for distribution. Distribution is a true pain that we don't look at early on because we're concerned with other things, with things like making ends meet, right? Like financial. Things and investment and getting like the right people on board, all of that. But, uh, but distribution will definitely make you or break you over time. So searching for the best partners, uh, to me was paramount to what we did afterwards. And another thing that I, at first, I, to be honest, I approached product-market fit as a checkbox that I would, that I would eventually, you know, check and then move forward. And I found out over time that product-market fit is not tied to a specific time and space within the startup journey. It is an ongoing process, to be honest. And I'm sorry if you find this a pain. I did, to be honest. It was not easy to have this, you know, we want to have at least 40% of our customers saying that they would not live without our solution anymore, right? We do want that. What I found out about this being an ongoing process is that this 40% is elastic. The same people that said yes once, the market evolves, right? Other competitors enter the market, the problems that this company, in my case it was a B2B solution, so these companies have, it also evolves over time. So keep revisiting product-market fit, not only for new features, new opportunities that you want to tackle, but also for the current ones, maybe to kill the feature that also consumes a lot of your servers and people are not using that much anymore. And you can move forward. You can use that budget for something else. Another finding that proved really key to us at Content Tools and then Growth Hackers is that strategic M&A— and I thought M&A back in the day, being my first entrepreneur, my first experience as an entrepreneur, as I mentioned to y'all, is that M&A was a goal, something that would be saved for the end of the road. And then I found out that actually it is a strategy. You can use M&As, uh, and acquisitions to make a shortcut, specifically if you're working from a crowded market. If you have an opportunity within a red ocean, M&A may be very strategic to you. So these are some of the findings and, well, consider asking as well, when will I really need investment? We usually think that the moment is right now. And sometimes we approach this a bit too early. You know, we want to get investment right now, but how long really can we grow bootstrap? Uh, you don't want to push things to a point where there is no turning back, of course, but if you can grow the business, prove the business a little bit longer, it will give you leverage when you finally, uh, want to, uh, to, to, uh, raise that round. And it will be a different approach and you'll be perceived differently from investors as well. If you push things a little bit for a little bit more bootstrap. Another question that I consider asking is, is the problem that I'm solving a local problem or maybe it's a global problem, right? And if you can, you should definitely consider expanding your opportunities. That's something that is very natural to many US-based and born founders, not so much for founders who are from Latin America like me, or sometimes Asia, or even, uh, in Europe is a different set because you have sometimes very small markets. And if you don't launch your product globally, you don't have a market to sustain your, your product anyway. But, um, But consider, definitely consider a broader approach. You will have a lot of pain points to solve by creating this startup, this product, launching and expanding and all of that. So why to keep a cap, right? Like why to put yourself in that position if you can broaden the size of your market? And another question that became really important to me was, What is my ideal outcome? That is something that we definitely co-create many times with our co-founders, with our investors, with our team. But if you can answer this by yourself, like deep down, not only for the business, but what are your personal goals with this journey, that can definitely be a shortcut for you to make tough decisions over time. And finally, one thing that I think every single day, and I thought about it this morning, am I guided by purpose? If your decisions are aligned to your values, you're less likely to regret. And whatever you do, maybe it's hiring someone or maybe even letting someone go from your team. If you're being guided by purpose, if you know that this is the right thing to do and how how to do that, you're less likely to regret and you go through this journey in a lighter way, you know, because it can be heavy too, but we don't want that for you. We want you to, you know, leave this experience the lighter and have fun with it, which is definitely, it's not easy. It's not easy, but it's something that we can definitely, we can make our lives easier by doing that, by guiding ourselves. By purpose, that's what I mean. Something else that I learned along the journey, and of course my experience with Growth Hackers had a lot to do with this, is that to scale a product, a service, um, one approach that has proven to be very efficient time over time is being laser-focused on what customers want. What are they coming here to get? And if, if you can, um, if you can understand the metric that you can check every single day to understand how much your customers are getting that, what they came for, and how much more you can deliver to the market every single day, we call that your North Star metric. Maybe you, you know this concept already, it's not a new concept, but definitely many startups still don't use it because it's a little bit tricky. It's not copy and paste. You cannot get your benchmark North Star metric and simply apply to your business. Every business is different. So you can, you need to definitely, you need to understand your customer deeply and how your product delivers to the customer to have this answer for this metric. But once you do, let's say, let's say you're Uber. So your North Star metric is amount of rides taken per week. You know how many rides you're getting this week, and you know that by the end of the year, maybe you want to double that or triple that. So you already have an objective. An objective in terms of growth is the first step. So once you have this objective in mind, this North Star metric, and a number tied to this North Star metric, and a goal around it, You start analyzing how you got there, ways that you can improve this number, etc., etc., and you start having ideas. Awesome! These ideas that come from the observation of your metrics, they are more data-oriented and they can be prioritized. So here we will have many ideas every single day as entrepreneurs, and we will talk to customers. Customers have ideas about our solutions, how to improve our product as well, and our team also does. So I've never seen a startup team with a lack of ideas to improve the, the business. What I did see was a lot of ideas being thrown, uh, everywhere and not being prioritized. So you should definitely prioritize based on any score that you can come up with ICE score is the most used one. You can use ICE or use RICE if you already use RICE for product or other projects. Use PIE if you like PIE, doesn't matter, but have one score that you go to to prioritize these ideas so you can start testing. So run small tests, short tests to learn. In the startup world, we optimize to learn first. If you optimize to learn, you will grow. If you optimize to grow, you not always grow. But if you optimize to learn, you definitely grow. You know the path to grow your product, your app, your startup. So start executing these tests and understand how they impact this objective that you created. And analyzing to either expand what is going well or take that test out of the way if it didn't work, but just register that learning because the learning is the goal after all. And you repeat and you do that over and over again. It's a numbers game. The more you test, the more you learn, the more you grow. So big companies will do that, will test and experiment to the thousands every year, tens of thousands, some of them hundreds of thousands experiments per year. If you can start with a couple dozen tests with your startup, you'll be better than simply shooting for what you think or your, what are your customers' are saying, right? Without leveraging your data, the actual usage, and testing around things that you want to change. Okay. Uh, not only that, but with these experiences, I saw over time a gap, uh, in how teams were led through innovation. And that's why I started this project called the Leadership for Innovators program, and it's It's not only about becoming a leader as an entrepreneur, as a founder, it's also being a beacon for your team. We cover everything from setting OKRs to fostering culture of continuous learning, as I just mentioned, and adaptation. And if you're, if you want to transform your team's dynamics, or maybe you just want to chat about this crazy world of startups, uh, check the Leadership for Innovators program. I have the link here. You can dive on bit.ly/LFI caps program, and if you use the code, the coupon code founders, you have access for a very ridiculously low price. And know that all the money is also being, um, reverted to a project that helps mothers who experience food insecurity in Brazil. So, well, let's get this dialogue going, this conversation going. I'm here to share, to learn, uh, maybe to kickstart some few new journeys alongside with you all. So thanks for joining me, and I hope all of you here keep keep pushing the limits, keep building something great. So thank you.

Awesome.

Emilia, can you hear me okay?

Yeah.

All right, great. I know we have limited time, so let's get to like 1 or maybe 2 questions here. So there's a few questions that I'm trying to filter through. I think let's go with this because it's, it's Relevant for like, you know, the topic of customer development and acquisition. Are there any, like with the advent of AI, like things are changing so rapidly from like building the top of your funnel to converting customers. Like, is there anything that you've seen recently that might be a really good tool for founders to look at when it comes to actually like either doing sales outreach, building pipeline, doing prospecting? Like how have you seen AI affect that? Piece of the—

Oh my, yeah, definitely. I've seen tools that help with collecting data. Like, one thing that I would like to say to that is that you definitely should go to your customers first, build your own lists. I know that when, when we first start, we want the hack, we want the workaround, not so much the hard. Way to do it, but it is hard. But if you, if you build your own lists, you will have definitely a better open rate, more interest, more relevant interest from your customers as well. But there are several tools who help with that. And to me, the hardest thing when we first start is truly understanding our ideal customer profile, because without that these tools won't work for you. I mean, AI can make guesses, but if you truly don't know who your ideal customer is, these tools won't do the job for you. So do your job, uh, interview a lot of people and a lot of potential customers. You'll get a few customers just by doing that, which is also fun, and it's something that doesn't scale. In the beginning, to be honest. I truly think that founders should do this job firsthand. I've met a founder a couple of weeks ago and he was like, oh, should I hire, when should I hire someone like head of sales? Like, how have you built your pipeline? Have you gone through this process yourself? What does your sales playbook look like? And he did not have anything like that. So do that first, you know, like truly understand that first, because that will— this information, this knowledge will not only help this new team that you're onboarding deciding on these new tools that you wanna, um, that you wanna have for, for scaling, but also it can feedback to the development of a better solution to, uh, actually help your customers in the end.

Yeah, I think that's really great advice. A lot of the time, founders do look for those types of hacks, but you have to remember that everything is a relationship. Your relationship with investors and when you're trying to sell your company to them, it's a relationship. Their sales pipeline, that's a relationship. And it's important to have a deep understanding there. You can't have a superficial high-level understanding of your customer. You need to really have that deep perspective. So I think that's, that's really great feedback. Um, in the interest of time, I know we only have 1 minute left for this section, so I don't think we're going to get to any more questions. But Amelia, thank you so much for joining us. Feel free to stick around, and I'm sure there's going to be other questions in the chat. Otherwise, uh, we'll see you at the next one. Appreciate all your support.

Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here. Bye-bye.

All right, we're gonna go ahead and kick off the founder pitch session for today. So here's how it's going to work. Each pitch will be 3 minutes long, then we'll do a short Q&A session afterwards with the founder live here on, on the, uh, the presentation. Then, uh, if you have questions at all during the chat, you can also put it in there, and the founders are going to stick around to answer the questions that you might have for them. So put it in the chat. Founders won't necessarily have access to the Q&A part on the back end here, so Please hang out. They're going to answer some questions and we're going to start off with our first pitch today, Chamionics. Let's go ahead and welcome them, bring them on stage.

Hi, my name is Carlos Ortiz and I'm the founder and CEO of Chamionics. Did you know that cargo shippers and carriers experience high costs and decreasing revenue every year due to the challenges and complexities and their customs and cross-border logistics operations. From overspending by managing a fragmented process of multiple logistics stakeholders and spending hours of productivity compiling manual visibility reports to the increasing errors and omissions caused by the inefficiency of working with multiple software tools at the same time. So that's why we created Comunix. Comunix is an enterprise-size platform to help shippers and carriers control costs and reduce spend by improving end-to-end shipment-level visibility, enabling better stakeholder collaboration, and easing foreign trade processes with digital automation and AI. Now, shippers and carriers can gain access to a complete suite of tools that would allow them to reduce spend and cost up to 50% by rationalizing stakeholder collaboration, save hours of productivity, and reduce errors by gaining full control of their shipments, improving profitability and customer satisfaction at scale. We want to empower companies with the next-gen supply chain automation platform powered by AI. Our product is at post-launch stage and we're constantly working on new versions to improve the efficiency and the user experience for shippers and carriers. Our goal is very simple: enable better collaboration through centralized shipment data, provide superior visibility, enable better operational control with a small control tower, and optimize data interchange with powerful integrations. In essence, we want to be just like the macOS but for international logistics platforms. Elegant, highly efficient, and very easy to use. The cargo logistics industry, it's a $1.5 trillion market just in US and Mexico and Canada together, and it is expected to reach $1.9 trillion in market value by 2029. Our goal is to start in this market, but we aim to expand to other global markets in the midterm. We monetize primarily by charging an annual or monthly subscription plan to customers. We have 3 core revenue streams: our subscription model, our, with 3 plans starting from the light package at $5K, add-ons and customization projects such as APIs and EDI projects, and professional services such as supply chain consulting. We will scale community through 5 primary go-to-market channels: outbound sales, digital marketing campaigns, partnerships, referral programs, as well as participation in industry programs and conferences. What sets us apart is that we are attacking a very unattended problem where users usually rely on multiple solutions to solve it. And most of the players out there address just one big part of the problem in a very holistic way. We're raising $500K at a post-money valuation of $5 million for 18 months of revenue, uh, of runway. Most of our resources will be allocated on making our product more robust and increase our sales and marketing budget. As well. So far we have secured 3 key partnerships and we have a projected revenue of $20,000 per month. I have more than 12 years of experience in the logistics and supply chain industry and I have experienced myself firsthand the pains customers face when shipping their goods internationally. So the time to finally transform cross-border trade is now. That time is coming next. Thank you very much.

All right, awesome. Let's welcome Carlos to the stage. Carlos, thanks for your presentation. Can you hear us and see us okay? You have to click the camera button and the microphone button on the bottom. Looks like Carlos might be having some technical difficulties. In the interest of time— oh, here we go. Carlos, are you there?

Yes, I am here.

Okay, great. There's a couple questions here for you. This one comes from Hugo. How do clients leverage the platform to automate or advance their carrier network's compliance?

Sorry, you cut off a little bit. Can you just repeat the question again?

Sure. Yeah, how do clients leverage your platform to automate or advance their carrier network's compliance?

Yeah, so we help customers with, you know, basically we do all the integration for them. That's one key value that we help them do is that we do the onboarding from them. If they already have a carrier base of service providers that they are currently working with, we help them out, onboard that into the platform, and then we help them with, you know, evaluating once they are fully onboarded, their teams are fully onboarded, have all the users We help providers once they start shipping products with their— with our platform, and we give them a comprehensive overview of what they are, if they are compliant with all the documentation. So we basically help them centralize all that data that is not usually centralized in a database. And we integrated that, we integrate that with the operational part. So we help them, you know, while they improve the operations, while shipping products, while scaling shipping with their carriers. We help them also stay in full compliance and help them audit their performance and make sure they are improving their KPIs and ultimately, you know, reduce cost, spend, and, uh, the transit time to their shipment. So that's how, that's how we help them. That's our approach.

Got it. And then there was, uh, someone here made a comment that, um, around a, a company called Nuvo Cargo. Do you consider them a competitor or are they more complementary?

Yeah, so Cargo, it's a, um, uh, ticket transportation primarily. Uh, ComunicSys is an enterprise SaaS platform. So we help them improve their internal process of managing the cross-border part.

Hey Carlos, there's a little bit of a connection issue. You're cutting out. I would recommend, let's do this just because we have to move to the next pitch. Go ahead and stick around. If other founders have questions for you, they'll put it in the chat. And then if you scroll up in the chat here, you can find the specific question around them and feel free to jump in there. But thank you for your time today. Exciting things that you're doing at Chameonics. We're going to go ahead and move to our second pitch for today. So up next, let's welcome Pacto. Demian is the founder. Pacto is a mobile-first platform for creative professionals that makes ultra-precise, pixel-perfect communication possible easy.

Hi there, my name is Damian Borba. I'm the founder and CEO of Pacto. Are you tired of having to decipher text? All this feedback that you receive on Slack, Teams, Discord, or even if you have to review videos on, let's say, Frame.io, you have to type your feedback, go to a frame and type feedback. I don't know if it— I like it is the same as I like it. Not talking about Figma where you have to jump and just navigate this craziness of comments all over the place, or Google Docs, same thing, unweighted feedback, hard to understand, and you spend so much brainpower there. Enough of that. Send your feedback with Pacto. On Pacto here running on my iPhone, you could also be running on Android, Vision Pro, Meta Quest 3. All these different devices, I can then load a video image and really play that and record my feedback as a human with my voice. All the notes, they can stay or disappear like in this case. I can do the same thing on the iPad or in any Android tablet. I can really be precise on the feedback and really show the frame that needs to change. I can bring comparison assets like references. Videos, images, all these things to really get my point across, be really precise. If I want to sync the videos, I can sync them and they will play at the same time. So it's even easier to share your message, your feedback as a human. And if you're running Pacto on your computer, Mac or Windows, you can record your screen and you have access to a ton of features like the free drawing here, but also the arrow. Circle, and all these different tools, including your camera if you want to use that. Here, if you want to share, you can create a web link, right? And then it generates the title, it generates results based on what was said in your feedback. You can change the instructions so the AI will now respect your instructions. You can even add a template here so the results will be a template. In this case, I got more areas to improve. but everything takes place on the device before you get to the, to the web link here. So it's privacy first. Our numbers, we have more than 100 paying subscribers, more than 4,000 videos reviewed, video reviews created within the platform, more than 1,000 payments completed. We have a very low churn rate and our team is very, very experienced. So we worked in all these different companies and we really know the creative industry. With the $500K that we're raising in this first pre-seed, we're gonna invest in sales, growth, integrations with all these creative tools, AI, AI assistant, AI agents, and go from there. So that's it. Thank you very, very much for your time. If you have any questions or if you want to try Pacto, just scan that QR code there and share your feedback. Thanks for watching.

Awesome, Demian, great presentation and, and You know, love the work you're doing at Pacto. Um, just a quick question, like, who, who are some of your initial go-to-market customers? Like, who are you targeting to use this first?

Yeah, we're really focused on the creative professional, and we separated that in 3 areas: video professionals, designers, and developers. So we're going with everything we have now on the video issues, the video challenges. So animators, editors, directors that send feedback via text. It's crazy when you look at how Hollywood operates in terms of feedback on shots, it's really text, still like text-based, and we're going to change that there.

Yeah, no, amazing stuff. You know, you and I have talked about in the past of like even using it for pitch deck feedback. I mean, it's such like a manual process, so I, I think there's some interesting cases. Since there's, you know, hundreds of founders on this, um, how could founders potentially use Pacto?

Yeah, like you can record your feedback, you can record your thoughts, and then you can share a link, and our AI can help you use your words there to then create a script or create a story or create a template, create anything you want. We have users— like, this was crazy— we have one user that's using Pacto to create scripts to feed HeyGen to create amazing avatars, but he records everything from his couch. Everything messed up there and it creates these amazing videos. Yeah, we want to accelerate the, the creative process, the feedback exchange process in creativity.

Yeah, Jasper here in the chat is mentioning that, you know, even sports coaches could use something like that, reviewing videos, giving feedback to, to some of the players. So I think there's a lot of ways that you can leverage the platform to provide more improved quality feedback that saves the person time.

This is so true. Yeah, just some point very quickly. We have some of the best surfing coaches in the world using Pacto. So Andy King, who coaches Gabriel Medina, he uses Pacto every day. It's interesting.

Yeah, that's really interesting. Well, what's one thing that we could be helpful with?

At this point, we really want to improve the platform. There's a lot more to do. The quality bar for creatives is very high. So we want user feedback. We really want to improve it based on what our customers need. So if you can give it a try, and we're raising at the same time, so connecting with investors, uh, that would be awesome. But mostly feedback.

Okay, awesome. Well, Demian, thanks for joining us today. We're going to go ahead and move to our third pitch. Um, I'll see you on the other side. Okay. Next up is our third pitch of the day.

That companies lose money when they exchange currencies in Latin America and emerging markets, this is common. And we found that a validated model that integrates buyers and sellers in a digital environment is the best value for them. Then they can propose and fix the exchange rate without intermediaries. Our market is open for every stakeholder in the traditional foreign exchange market. Banks, corporations, SMEs, and exporters, importers are more than welcome in Betriax. Our model of revenue is a transactional fee pretty close to 0.1%. And of course, banks have a double role. They increase the capacity of liquidity, and of course, we are going to integrate through technology with their infrastructure to close the operations through interbanking transfers. The market is huge. More than $452 trillion are traded according to the Bank for International Settlements, and the market showed us that there are two trends. First, the crypto scene where stablecoins are governing hoy, today, and in the other side, traditional players such as Western Union. Neither the crypto scene, neither the traditional players show the levels of efficiency and transparency such as Patriot. And this is our team. I want to remark here, Andres, he's an expert in deutericious and design. Of course, we have people related to computer science and of course the regulation, financial regulation in Latin America. And our staff is composed by 10 guys. We are a small team right now, but I want to remark that we have 2 mechatronic engineers in the dev side of the IT team. Of course, our evolution shows us that people, interesting people, such as the current treasurer of Bank of China in Chile, right now is our advisor. And I want to remark that we ranked as semifinalist at the MIT FinTech 2021. Of course, the roadmap is more ambitious, is the more important, the most important, sorry, thing in Betriax. We want to implement the model starting in Latin America, the Caribbean, And after, we are going to go to Middle East, Asia, and Europe. And this is better. Thank you very much for your time. I'm more than ready to answer your questions.

All right, Roberto, thank you for the presentation. Well, I'm curious, tell me a little bit about the, the genesis of the company. Like, how did you come up with the idea originally?

Oh, thanks for the opportunity, Ryan. Good question. Uh, the genesis is kind tricky because in the past we didn't have an open mindset in the boards of banks to interact with fintech in the last 3 years, for example. In emerging markets, this is very hard to achieve. And right now we have different models of banking as a, as a service models and white labels that operate through banks in different regions of Latin America and the Caribbean. So the company evolved in terms in terms of creating different types of models according to this openness of banks. And of course, it's better for us to understand the real implications to operate with banks because we can overcome every change in the regulation in the future.

Yeah, thank you. I might have missed it, but I didn't see the US on the roadmap. Is there a reason for it? Like, what's the strategy strategy behind targeting LATAM first?

Obviously it's, it's home for you, but yes, yeah, it's obvious that USA is a very important market, but we are trying to generate a double relation, uh, with the two different type of banks. One are the main banks, top-tier banks, and we are starting the process of due diligence with JP Morgan to get liquidity from them, for example, to inject that liquidity to local operators, other banks at the national level. So we have a great partner that I'm creating a great relationship with, JP Morgan.

Yeah, that's great. I mean, it's the, the bank to do it with, so congrats on that. Um, uh, it looks like Anupam asked if you're restricted to Latin America. It doesn't sound like it, um, but is there, is there advantages to starting in Latin America?

Yes, of course. First, uh, founders that live in the financial markets must understand the rules that govern each market by, by themselves. I'm trying to explain that there are several frictions and rigidities in the markets in Latin America and emerging markets. The same is Maybe the same figure of informality, frictions in the market, low levels of competition and transparency are identical in other sides of the world, like the East Asian countries, for example. So we can easily replicate the model because our work and experience with bags will permit us to create good relationships with other cultures and other markets.

One last question here from Bob is, you know, could you talk a little bit more about your revenue model? Are you getting revenue from arbitrage or is there a fee?

Yes, of course. In the past, the traditional model is the buying and selling, the buying cheap dollars to resell them at a higher rate. Okay, the change rate, the spread model. This is a traditional model. Betriax is abandoned the classical model of the of the, of the market. We are going to charge a success fee for each side of the transaction, the supply and the demand for companies. And of course, this will permit us to increase the ambitions of companies to get more efficiency and transparency in each transaction. So this is a perfect model to encourage competition between the stakeholders and the actors. And in terms of what we are trying to do in the future, I'm trying to answer the question, is that we need to integrate more and more players. You know, corporations also have several, several problems to send the profit from different countries to USA, for example. Is there the case of Walmart in Chile, they want to repatriate around $14 billion by 2020 and going up, and they have serious problems with the banks and traditional players. So we are trying to integrate this monetization model in terms of the transparency we are going to inject in market. So our commission, our transactional fee, will decrease according to our productivity and efficiency with money.

All right, thank you, Roberto. So that's all the time we have for questions today. Stick around the chat if founders have other questions. You can connect with Roberto on LinkedIn as well. Let's go ahead and welcome our fourth pitcher today. Uh, Wambo is a platform to bet on skills and one-on-one, uh, challenges for tournaments with real money.

Hi, I'm Leandro Ciaria, co-founder of Wombo. Wombo is a platform where gamers can play video games for real money. We found this problem that gamers like to compete for real money, but they don't have a safe place to do it. That's why we came up with this tool that enables players to compete for real money in a safe environment and they can bet on their own skills. The tool is really easy to use. You just create an account, load your Wombo Wallet, then you create the challenge for the amount you want, paste the challenge link in the chat, and the other person joins, and then Wombo retains both money. After the match, the winners receive automatically prize pool in his wallet. Our business model consists of retaining 10% of each challenge, and in the middle term, we are targeting, targeting US market because it's the second highest revenue generation country in the world for the video game industry. And also, there is a strong and growing interest in Growers among the US population, although We are a non-gamble site. That means players bet on their own skills and it doesn't depend on other players' outcomes or in luck. We launched this product in July 2023 with Latinos living in the US. At that moment, we could validate that there was a real problem and we learned a lot about product and acquisition and In January of 2024, we introduced Wombo in the US Madden community and we hit $30K in bets with 200 monthly active users. So our goal now is to raise $600,000 to achieve 4,000 daily active users to make $30K per day in waggers. That means 90,000 of monthly recurring revenue. I like to say we're a small, focused, and agile team of founders. I'm in charge of product and community. Jenny Oliva is in charge of marketing and data. And our full-stack developer is Nicolás Mastroviti. Thank you very much.

Leandro, thanks for joining us today. One of the questions here is around the regulatory complexity of betting and gambling. Where are you allowed to operate and how do you think about that?

Okay, we are not a gambling platform because players bet on their own skills. Okay, it doesn't depend on other players' results or luck, only on their ability. So we are legit in all the United States, States.

So is that, is that just a workaround around the legislation and that's something unique that you discovered, or how would a regulator view that?

No, no, because there are players— by players I mean competitors— that are making some, something similar on the United States and they're doing legally. So it's possible to do it.

Got it. And then, um, Neman is asking about like, what are the types of games that you see or someone can play in Wambo? Um, and then is it like a plugin for all games or is it just within the Wambo app?

Okay, uh, the games we're targeting now are FIFA. We start with FIFA with Latinos living in America, as I told in the, in the pitch. And in the last days of January, we launched Madden in the US community, and there was when we grow a lot more. And we hope to launch NBA and also Call of Duty in the following months. And with Madden and FIFA, we're not yet integrated to the games because they don't have the APIs open, but the other games, yes, we can do that.

Okay, awesome. Someone's asking about anti-money laundering program. Um, how do you ultimately— like, how are you protecting the players on your platform?

Okay, uh, they have to upload like their own documents. Yes, so we can send the money to, to them, because then the US government, when we pass some amount— when each person pass some amount of, of money, uh, well, you have to present those, those documents. So yes, we, we, we, we think about that.

Great. Well, stick around in the chat. Um, we're gonna go ahead and move to our fifth pitch for today, um, and then, uh, you can, you can join one of the virtual rooms, um, to learn more about Wombo. Let's go ahead and welcome our fifth pitch of the— of today. Flappy, which is a virtual assistant for logistics management.

Hi everyone, my name is Oscar Alejo. I am founder of Flappy, and Flappy is a virtual assistant for logistics teams focused on simplifying communication between the industry and freight transportation in 3 clicks. The reason for building Flappy is that in Mexico, freight transportation every day completes 150,000 trips with physical documentation. In an ecosystem with 185,000 freight transport companies and with a forecasted annual growth rate of 50% due to the relocation of companies to Mexico, In Mexico, 70% of carriers operate offline, relying on manual and disconnected processes such as spreadsheets, printed documentation, emails, even WhatsApp messages. This lack of synchronization generates a waste of time and resources. Flappy is a platform that connects the industry and its carriers, providing real-time visibility and status updates for shared documentation in 3 stages: from the industry to the freight operator. Currently, Flappy has more than 30,000 records on its platform, which translates into a 60% improvement in response times and eliminating the need to print and scan documentation just by having everything in one place. Our business model is based on monthly, biannual, and annual subscription packages depending on the size of the company. Behind Flappy, there is a team of experts with more than 50 years of experience in the logistics sector. This has allowed us to develop a platform that directly addresses the challenges that the industry faces due to lagging information. At this crucial moment, driven by the nearshoring trend in Mexico, We are seeking funding to enhance our product development and accelerate the acquisition of our user base. Our focus is to capture 3% of freight transportation. I would like to invite you to know more about Flappy. Thanks for your time.

All right, Oscar, thank you for joining us. There's one question here in the chat from Hugo around the prices that were showed, the $450. Is that billed yearly or is that billed monthly?

Uh, in, in this case, it's billed monthly, uh, but we have many packages depending on the type of the contract. Could be monthly, could be biannual, or could be annual. If you choose annual, it's lower the price.

Yeah, makes sense. Um, share a little bit more about like what you've learned in terms of like your go-to-market strategy with trying to acquire some of these companies as customers? Is there anything that you've learned when interacting with them or value propositions that maybe resonate more for the Flappy tech?

Yeah, the principal problem that we have in this case is the communication that have the industry with their freight transporter because many companies use different templates to to exchange their information. So in this case, our value proposal is to get one template to do many things with all their freight transporters.

And just curious, like, because you're, you're an expert in this industry, like, what are some of the things that you're seeing and what does the future hold for, you know, shipping and logistics? Are there any trends that are kind of standing out for you?

Yeah, in this moment we are focused on eliminating the printed documentation in the sector. So it's surprising that in Mexico 80% of freight transport operates with printed documentation. I mean, the last year in Mexico, what we have, uh, 54 million trips with physical documentation. And then 60% of these were incomplete or contained errors. So our proposal is to eliminate this situation.

Yeah, awesome. Well, Oscar, you're doing great work. Thanks so much for joining us and stick around for the chat as well as the networking afterwards. Let's go ahead and move to our 6th and final pitch for today, Autoparty. Which is helping SMBs in the automotive industry go digital.

Hi, my name is Leonardo Gaitán, CEO and co-founder of Autopartme. Over the past 30 years, spare part businesses haven't evolved. They are very traditional mom-and-pop businesses. They are not digitized. For this reason, their customers cannot find them online. We want to change this. We created Autoparty. We are helping SMBs at automotive industry to go digital and grow with technology. At Autoparty, we connect end customers with suppliers from the automotive industry, including sellers, mechanical workshops, automotive services. We call them Autopartners. Using Autoparty, our Autopartners can find a comprehensive solution with tools for marketing, e-commerce, advertising, e-payments, and logistics. With this, they can take the first steps in the digital world. We made this with an amazing team. We combine our experience building technology, funding and scaling companies, and more than 20 years in the automotive industry. Also, our advisors and investors are helping us to take and make the better decisions. We are in a big market, around $118 billion. Our focus is to impact 20,000 businesses and 9 million customers in a $5 billion market in the next 2 years. Our business model has 2 verticals: B2B subscriptions from $5 to $20 per month, and e-commerce with a take rate around 30%. We have a lean, scalable, and profitable business model. Our main focus is subscriptions-based, growing exponentially next year. We launched in 2020. We have been growing 27% month over month. Today we have 20,000 active users, 600 businesses in our platform, And our monthly revenue is around $14,000. Our expansion strategy is focusing growth in auto partners number in Colombia, Mexico, and landing in Brazil in 2026 with a GMB around $7.5 million. Our competitors, they are other platforms. They are focused in selling spare parts. We don't. We are focused in give to the SMBs the tools to sell more and better. We will be the first super app in the automotive industry helping SMBs to go digital. We are looking for $300,000 to reach out our first 20,000 B2B customers and our first million dollars in revenue. Come to join us. Thank you.

All right, Leonardo, thank you so much. Tell us a little bit about like your background and how you got started in this industry.

Hi, Ryan, thanks for the opportunity. I was working in the automotive industry over the last 10 years. Then I could have the opportunity to know the industry, and for that we decided to create Autoparty with my co-founder, who was working in the automotive industry too.

There's a question here from Neman about, you know, he says the growth is very impressive. How do you handle the timely delivery and customer satisfaction aspect of the business?

We are, we are working in that. And today we, we have a process that includes service to our customers, and every day we are working side by side with our auto partners to, to do the, the best journey for their customers.

Yeah, and you mentioned that the, the SaaS is meant to help um, drive more, like, basically help optimize their business. So it's not, it's not just a marketplace, it's actually like SaaS that can help, um, with like increasing their individual revenue. Can you speak a little bit more to like the, the product from the customer perspective and how it works, and then like what that revenue model is?

Yes, our customers are, are the, the SMBs of the automotive industry. Spare part sellers, mechanical workshops, but the, the product is made with them. We began to build this with them, listening and taking a lot of conversations with them, and we are giving them tools for marketing. They can launch outbound campaigns, generate payments links, use last-mile delivery providers, and the e-commerce is assisted for us. They don't have to take the time for admin the store online.

Yeah, got it. And Bob kind of like piggybacked on that, which is, you know, are you, are you not competing with other marketplace apps? And like, what are, what are the key differences? So it sounds like you're more of like a, almost like an automotive workshop like solution versus just being a place that's selling, buying and selling auto parts.

We are not competing with the other marketplaces because We are using the technology to launch our services. We are working on that, but we see that, that we will be a super app for the automotive industry businesses to help them in the daily tasks, including other services like HR, accounting, all of the, the things that they use in the daily work.

Got it. All right, awesome. Well, we're gonna go ahead and, um, continue with the networking part of the session. So Leonardo, thank you so much for joining. We'll see you at the networking table in a moment. Um, so let me just kind of, you know, wrap up this part of the session by thanking our speaker Amelia and all the founders who pitched at the event today. Also, big thanks to our audience members for participating, asking questions. Everyone will receive a video recording of this event in the next 48 hours. So it is recorded and these networking rooms will stay open. So what will happen is in a moment, this broadcast will end. You'll get back, you'll be put back into the main lobby of the event and you can stay on the network for as long as you want to connect. So there is no time limit here. Please feel free to meet individually with folks or join a table to talk about the, the companies that pitch today. Um, audience members can just click on one of the tables that you see. You'll join kind of like a group video chat, um, and the tables are broken up by topics and presenting companies. So you can also create your own tables as well. So if you have a topic you want to discuss, you know, AI, um, whatever it is, you can go ahead and put it into the, uh, one of the tables. Um, and so I just want to mention that, um, you know, this has been a really fun event. I appreciate everyone joining us today and look for the recording that you'll get here shortly. Thank you once again, and we'll see everyone at the networking session. Take care.