Veteran 2020 Online Demo Day: TruGenomix, POMMe-Health, Refactr

Hello everyone and welcome to the Founder Institute Veteran Online Demo Day 2020 edition. My name is Ryan Micheletti and I'm Head of Global Operations for the Founder Institute. I've been working here for the last 6 years helping launch startups all across the world, and my role is to work with all of our leadership teams that run our Pre-Seed startup accelerator program in over 200 cities. And so for those of you who don't know Founder Institute, FI is the world's largest pre-seed startup accelerator. We run a program that helps founders get to traction and funding in over 200 cities globally. We've been around for 11 years, and as a result, we've created over 4,500 companies that have raised almost $1 billion in funding, and we have the largest mentor network in the world of over 15,000 mentors. And so we're currently enrolling across 6 continents, and if you're an experienced entrepreneur or investor, or if you're interested in helping launch promising companies, then feel free to reach out to us. We'll be sending an email to everyone here who is interested in reviewing the video that we're recording today. So this is live. I want this to be interactive, and so veterans, if you're in the audience, go ahead and say hello and introduce yourself. Maybe tell us where you're from and By the way, happy birthday, Marines who are out there. And before we get going, I'll just give you a quick agenda. The founders on the call today are all Founder Institute alumni. They're gonna pitch their company, they'll have about 3 minutes to pitch with their deck. And then we wanna have a lot of follow-up and Q&A from the audience. So I have a couple questions I wanna ask the founders, but we also wanna hear your questions. So at any point, if you have questions for Charles or Michael or Cheryl, go ahead and put it into the chat and we'll get to it when we do the Q&A portion after each pitch. And so just to give a little bit more background on, on the Veteran Founder Initiative. So in 2017, we launched something that we call our Global Veteran Founder Initiative at the Founder Institute. And the goal was to help veterans and military spouses launch global technology companies. And a part of that was to try and unite the veteran startup ecosystem. And so I've been helping launched veteran companies since 2012, several hundred veteran companies. And what I found is that the ecosystem at the time was very fragmented. And so I just want to give a big shout out to our partners Bunker Labs, Patriot Bootcamp, AMC, and several others who have been really great in supporting the founders who have gone through our program, as well as by promoting our branded fellowships through the Founder Institute. So if you're a veteran and you're interested in joining Founder Institute to work on your technology company, we have a series of free scholarships that will allow you to join the program for free. And so if you're interested, you can go to veteranfounderinitiative.com, just send us a quick line, and we'll be able to match you with a program that's local to you as well as award you a scholarship for, for joining the program. So without further ado, let's, let's jump right in. So the, the very first pitch of the day is Charles from TruGenomics. So Charles Kaplan is the CEO. It's a behavioral health company that uses the power of genomics to advance the diagnosis and treatment of PTSD. So Charles, you're an Air Force veteran and you're based in DC. Do you want to start off with your pitch whenever you're ready?

Absolutely. Let me share my screen and we can go ahead and get started. Excuse me. All right.

All right, we can see it, so take it away when you're ready.

Perfect. Well, good evening, everyone. As Ryan mentioned, my name is Charles Cathlen. I'm the CEO of TruGenomics, the precision behavioral health company. My interest in behavioral health actually started here. Ryan mentioned I was an Air Force officer. I spent about 6 years in the Air Force. I'm an Air Force Academy grad. But in 2001, I transitioned to the U.S. Public Health Service, and I worked at the Office of Secretary of Health, and I was responsible for medical emergency response. And about 3 weeks after starting that job, 9/11 occurred. And here you see a picture of me deployed, working at Ground Zero. We converted a store into a pharmacy, slash, clinical station. But that event and that deployment had a profound impact on me, particularly seeing the first responders in the community and even the impact on my team from a mental health perspective. And from that moment, that really got me sort of interested in technologies around mental and behavioral health. Now, in our country specifically for veterans, this actually is an old statistic, 21 veterans commit suicide every day. It's actually up to 22. There's a lot of resources from the VA and the military that are invested in PTSD and suicide, but the rates are going up. And we believe at True Genomics, a lot of it is because the tools that we're using to a certain extent, are antiquated. We rely on survey instruments, which introduces a lot of bias into the process, into the healthcare process. And people have to essentially admit that they're struggling with an issue to sort of trigger the intervention. And there's a lot of stigma. I mean, let's be honest about it. And many of you who are out there, if you feel like it could, potentially impact your career, even though I think the military has made a lot of progress in reducing the stigma, you will be less apt to really say something. And everyone has different symptoms. In a condition like post-traumatic stress, that is a, that term is a man-made construct. It doesn't necessarily equate to the biological underpinnings of the disease. And if you, if you go from one diagnostic criteria to the next, which have changed over the last few years, it's actually a little bit different. So what we're trying to do is get down to the biological underpinnings of diseases such as post-traumatic stress. So our company, we've developed a laboratory test. It's actually a genomic biomarker that we patent that we call TruGEN-1. And early, early in the days of our company, we're about 3 years old, but we were fortunate enough to get accepted into the Illumina Accelerator Program, which is a— Illumina is a $50 billion company based out of the West Coast, and they pick probably 4 or 5 companies a year to participate in their accelerator program. And we were able to work with them to take our intellectual property and actually build and build the product, which is a 755-gene custom panel that we call, again, TruGen One. Now, 3 of those genes are focused on PTSD, but what we did is we took the IP and we expanded upon that so that we could look at other potential mental health conditions. But right now we're laser-focused on post-traumatic stress. And essentially how it works, the platform, is you draw a blood sample and you sequence it, and that the results of that sample gets fed into our bioinformatics system, which we call TrueBase. So that's another product that we're developing. So we take the genomics and we apply other types of data, metadata, and apply also AI machine learning to assist with refining the biomarkers. And what that does is generates a report for the clinician so that they can have objective information, not just the subjectivity of a survey instrument, to allow for better decision support and also much earlier intervention way upstream. And we think that's the power of this technology, being able to identify a problem much earlier than waiting for someone to essentially self-report. Now, one of the things that we like to emphasize is that PTSD is not just a veteran or military issue. If you look at COVID right now, there's going to be a lot of mental health ramifications just from that. If you call COVID— what we like to say is if COVID is the earthquake, the mental health ramifications of it, it will be the tsunami that's coming in. And we're already starting to see the rates of post-traumatic stress and suicide increase as it relates to COVID. Well, where we have our intellectual property, our patents, it's a pretty large market size. We have a US patent. We also have an EU patent, and we have a Canadian patent. Canadian patent that's underway. And so it's a $64 billion total addressable market just for our TruGen One test. The other thing we like to emphasize is that the cost burden of a condition like PTSD just alone, just one mental health condition, is significant. There's a lot of resources that's put into diseases such as cancer and different types of cancer, but it's projected A study projected that by 2030, it'll be a $6 trillion cost burden globally just due to post-traumatic stress disorder. This is before COVID actually, which is 13 times greater than cancer. Now our company, we're primed to really, I think, help a lot of people. And right now we're currently working with the VA. We just signed a collaborative research and development agreement with the VA, and we're preparing to do a pilot study within the VA healthcare system, hoping to do a multi-site study. So we're very excited about that. We're currently working with the Army. They recently gave us about 520 PTSD-confirmed samples to include in our validation. And the Canadian Ministry of Defense, they actually were early adopters. While we were still at the Illumine Accelerator, they gave us about 100 blood samples. And we're preparing for a contract with them right now. And we're also working with private healthcare systems. Most notable is Sanford Health, which was an investor in our company. So here are some of the milestones to date. We're also a service-disabled veteran-owned small business. In 2019, we raised $200K in pre-seed, and this year during COVID we were fortunate enough to raise about $1.8 million, and we're on track to raise another $750K to $1 million over the next few weeks here. We also were awarded a grant with the University of Maryland, and we're continuing our product development. And next year, we're very excited. We're getting ready for an NIH grant, and we're hoping to begin that study with the VA, and we're also preparing for our FDA submission as well. So just real quick, I already talked a little bit about myself. I did 23 years in the service. My last position, I worked as the chief of staff of the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center. I also spent about 10 years working at the FDA. I was the chief of neurology devices, and my chief medical officer, Dr. Anna Clario, she's a former command surgeon of the Army National Guard, retired last year after about 30 years. And Dr. Cunningham, he is my co-founder. He spent about a decade at the VA working at these type— on these types of issues, a Princeton grad, and also spent some time at National Institutes of Health. And is a professor at George Mason University. And also he got his PhD at Rockefeller University. He's a virologist. So finally, our mission is— what we want to do is bring behavioral health into the 21st century, leveraging the power of genomics and machine learning. And again, really to advance the knowledge base and also the technology around behavioral health. Thank you very much.

Awesome. Thank you, Charles, for that. So we have a couple questions from the audience, and I just want to start off with one. Obviously, you know, people are looking at the blood samples and the tests, and one of the questions here is, how accurate are these tests for PTSD? Maybe you could talk a little bit about like the validation studies and things. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that's a really good question. So first of all, what we're doing is very cutting edge. So we believe we're at sort of the first mile marker of a marathon in terms of the technology here. Now, our test, to get more specific, what it does is identify higher risk for PTSD, and it does that by looking at these genes that are associated with the fight or flight response mechanism. And so what we find is that certain individuals who have these markers that express a certain way they're at a higher risk for what you call HPA axis dysregulation, which controls the fight or flight response mechanism, which controls your cortisol levels. And so that's sort of how it works right now. And the data that we have is for risk for PTSD. However, the clinical studies that we're preparing for are going to be really important because what we want to do is transition from risk to diagnostic. And the criteria for diagnostic is a higher bar. Especially when you're going to the FDA. So we're very excited about that, but there is clinical utility right now in identifying those who are more susceptible, but the endgame is a full diagnostic.

Could you maybe talk a little bit about how the government or whoever your customer is, how they would use a diagnostic test versus one that simply measures risk?

Yeah, well, I think there's a couple of, Things I think to clarify. For one thing, risk I think provides an opportunity to look way upstream so you can intervene earlier. Diagnostic, the strength in the diagnostic, particularly when you're using a biomarker, is again not relying on the subjectivity of a survey instrument. And so one of the challenges that we have in this space is that the gold standard for how we diagnose these isn't a strong gold standard because it's a survey-based instrument. So if you look at cancer, for example, genomics is really advancing how we diagnose cancer, but you're comparing it to a biopsy. So a biopsy, you're actually pulling tissue and it's a very, you know, it's already a biomarker that you can compare it to. And what you're doing is you're improving upon your ability to diagnose through genomics and particularly risk. But if you have a survey instrument, it presents a number of different challenges. So we continue to work very closely with the inventors that we license the technology from so we can keep it advancing. But it— but just— I think just having a biomarker that's not survey-based, that's focused, that's associated with the biological underpinnings of the individual is a huge advancement.

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, a question here is like specifically which VA are you working with? And I think it's the US. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the work that you're doing with both governments and like, is Canada looking at the use case differently than the US and how would they potentially implement it?

Yeah, so for Canada, so right now we're working with them on potentially on some projects, research projects. We've already been working with them in terms of our own research and now we're gonna be working with them on some PTSD research projects. Them and some other potential partners that we're talking with, they're interested in using our markers just for the purposes of them doing post-traumatic stress research because they understand that the survey introduces a lot of bias. And so it's really hard sometimes if you're doing a study to really know who really has PTSD and who doesn't. So this provides another data point for the researcher. And so that's what the Canadian military is interested in doing with us right now. In terms of the VA, we've spoken with a number of different sites within the U.S. Veterans Administration who are interested. And let me take a quick step back. We've spoken with a number of principal investigators who are at different VA sites. And so we're very excited about the opportunity. We're not quite ready to share until there's a full commitment. But happy to talk with someone offline if they're from a VA and they're interested in working with us.

Awesome. And then John had a question here, which was, does PTSD risk also mean suicide risk? And are they the same individuals?

Yeah, so that, that is something that, you know, this— we're starting to get a lot more data on that. If you, if you look at some of the studies coming from the VA, Not necessarily PTSD risk correlates with suicide risk, but PTSD does correlate with suicide in terms of it being 14 times higher incidence of suicide with individuals that have PTSD based off of VA study. So that is something, you know, we believe that as we advance not only our technology but different types of technology so you can intervene earlier, we're hoping to start bending that that curb, even if we reduce that rate by 1 a day, in my mind, it'll, you know, the effort is worth it. I just think it's such a horrible statistic, almost 1 every hour of our veterans being lost because of suicide.

Absolutely. I 100% agree. And I think that also goes to speak to like why the importance of a diagnostic versus just assessing the risk, it can really help in that regard. So— Absolutely. Thank you, Charles. I'll ask one more question here and then we'll move on to Cheryl. So it looks like someone asked about your business model. Maybe you could go and just talk a little bit about how you make money selling tests or data. How does TruGenomics make money?

Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. So there are 3 different sort of things that we're looking at here. So when we originally started, we sort of approached things as more of a product company. And so we were developing this product and, you know, we could sell our tests, but what became very clear is that we're truly a lab services company that has specific IP that only that we can provide at this time. So although we're developing products, we're also standing up a lab services capability, which, we've been able to do only within the past several months because we were able to get some investment in. So that's one aspect of it. So just selling our tests through our lab services. And then also the data is a huge component of it as well. We're not in a position at this particular time to necessarily monetize any data, but that is something that we're looking at in the future. Right now we're focused squarely on our PTSD biomarker test and getting that out there and continuing to get feedback so we can continue to refine the technology.

Amazing. Well, uh, obviously you're working on something very, very impactful, and anyone in the audience, if you'd like to connect with Charles, reach out on LinkedIn, and we'll also post his website here in the chat. And also, if you just want to connect with him directly, just reply back to the follow-up email we'll send, and we'll make sure you get connected. Charles, thank you so much. It's really great to see you, brother. And let's move on to Cheryl. So Cheryl, welcome to the Demo Day. So just to give a quick overview, Cheryl is the CEO of Palm Health. She actually graduated from our Toronto program. So you were in the Canadian military, and you were also a medic. And so we really are excited to have you here. I think this is the first time we're doing sort of an international Demo Day with veterans. So welcome, and we're ready for you whenever you're ready to take it away.

Thanks very much, Ryan. And I take it you can hear me okay and see my screen all right?

Loud and clear.

Awesome. Okay, great. Thanks so much. Okay, welcome. I'm glad to be here tonight, and thank you so much, Ryan, for inviting me. My name is Michelle Nutterfield. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Palm Health. And for 20 years, I was a let's see here, I gotta get that, a physician in the military, Canadian military, and managed teams taking care of complex patients. Effective communication was always a significant issue. Our goal with every patient is to provide better quality of life. Now let's think of complex patients who have an illness or an injury, and the goal with them is to provide a better quality of life, work, play, recreation, and it's all about functioning. The circle of care providers deliver this care, but there's usually too much information for them to digest, and this information overload causes gaps, blind spots, and inefficiencies, raising costs. And what happens is this means that for some patients, we're right back to where we started again. The solution is a secure cloud-based communication platform where the healthcare team and the patient enters information that quickly allows them to co-create a single care plan. And think of this as an executive summary. It allows us to track functional outcomes, and with this, they will all make better informed care decisions. The templates are unique for each patient, whether they have mental health, physical health issues, and both the healthcare team and the patient and family enter data that is actually simple and requires little to no training. The healthcare team uses this collated information to create the care plan, and then dashboards from this create graphics that will allow tracking functional outcomes over time. There are significant immediate benefits for healthcare teams related to efficiencies. There are more strategic benefits related to healthcare organizations and costs, and both of these benefits will have positive outcomes for these complex patients. Discussions for a pilot project and validation studies are underway for when the doors open in the new year. A health project is currently focusing on community patient needs right now. Our revenue model is a SaaS one that's flexible for the size of the organization purchasing the platform. Our initial target market is private long-term care facilities, followed by government community healthcare centers where there are already collaborative healthcare teams working on these complex patients. It costs over $3 billion for seniors living in my community alone and in the long-term care facilities in the immediate area where I am. A 10% decrease in time spent collaborating on these patients can save up to 40% on the their healthcare costs. As Charles already mentioned, post-COVID needs will target those whose care has been delayed or avoided, as in the third wave that you can see. But the fourth wave is the next global concern, which is the rise in hidden mental healthcare illnesses. Our competitors have collaborative platforms and electronic medical records, but Palm Health is unique with a cloud-based consensus care plan that tells providers how a patient is functioning. And the most significant differentiator is the ability to measure the value of healthcare delivery. That means outcomes, functional outcomes divided by costs. We have a prototype ready for use in clinical settings, and the next step will be to add admin and security privacy functions. And our go-to-market strategy focuses on both public and private early adopters, then partnerships leading to scaling and expansion. Along with my 25+ years in healthcare, my CTO and advisors each have over 20 years experience in healthcare technology, product development, data analytics, and marketing. And we're looking for places to continue partnerships and trials and the funding for deliverables in product partnerships and revenue. And we're Palm Health, happy to meet you, would love to take questions, and we want to be able to deliver better healthcare to these complex patients. Thanks very much, Ryan.

Awesome. Thank you, Cheryl. What a great pitch, and, uh, and thanks for joining us today. So, you know, maybe you could talk a little bit about what was the inspiration of this. Was there like an aha moment that said, okay, I'm gonna go from being a physician in the military to then retiring and then jumping into the startup world?

Um, I'm a family physician by training, and I have a lot of background in occupational musculoskeletal and disability medicine. And my main job in the military was to get people back to work. And that's no difference out in the civilian world either. We want to get people back to the best functioning that they can have, the best quality of life. Now, we expect, expect some people to get better with treatment. We expect some people to stay the same. When you think about the elderly population, we know that they're going to decline, but we don't want them to decline quickly. We want them to have the best quality of life possible. And there's an overload. There's a barrage of healthcare information. And it is— it's almost impossible to go through it efficiently. So my main mandate was to find a simple way to collect data and give it to healthcare providers. Along the journey, I found out that the data that we can collect can be used by healthcare organizations for comparative analysis between different groups of providers, different communities, different hospitals, and this becomes quite powerful. So I'm happy to have been able to expand that journey.

Awesome. And so we've got a couple questions here. You know, before we went live, we're kind of joking about like the various EMRs. And so maybe you could talk about how, you know, this could be a standalone system or you could integrate into an EMR and when that might be more applicable.

I consider electronic medical records a repository for information. Information is just collated in there, but there's really no collaborative function with that. So what I'm referring to is a lot of different care providers just dump information into there. The platform that we're developing actually creates a synthesis of this and displays it in such a way that it's very easy to look at, and the dashboards allow for very efficient decisions made for the benefit of the patient and efficiencies all around. The platform can be used and integrated with an electronic medical record system as necessary, but it also can act on its own because it is cloud-based. So it's transportable, it's flexible, it's adaptable to different environments, and that means it's not bound by, by borders for where a patient is heading.

Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Shannon from the audience asks, how do you handle consensus in instances where maybe there's a difference of opinion?

Oh, it's a wonderful question. That's actually where the true collaboration comes. We want to know where there's those differences in opinion come from. So if you have a team of 10 healthcare providers and 8 of them have the same perspective on a patient's functioning, but 2 of them are different, this gives rise to collaboration. It's the nidus for that. The really fun part is, is when you see the differences between the care providers, the patient, and the family, and then what do you do? And this information is usually hidden. It's very valuable. We need this information to make the best decisions for the patient. But it gives us clues as to how to deliver that care better. You could have a person with cognitive issues who thinks that they're absolutely fine and they're actually quite unsafe. And we need to, we need to, we need to know that for this patient. So the differences are what makes this collaborative platform work even better.

That's great. We also have a question here around data security. So how do you protect people's medical data? Are there any standards that you've employed?

It would be the same as any kind of electronic medical record that would be sitting on a platform with data at rest encryption that has PIPA, FIPA, FIPEDA, all of the different requirements for secure data for privacy requirements. That would be all built into the platform. We're not at that stage yet because we're doing studies that is not using any healthcare information or private information at all.

Great. And then another question here from Mary. Can this be set up or adapted for home healthcare providers?

It can be adapted for any kind of clinical environment where you have— you want to follow the functioning of a patient. So you could actually use this for one patient with one care provider or one patient with 20 care providers. If you want to track functional outcomes on a patient and determine where their progress is being made It allows you to ensure that you meet due diligence and you're checking off all of the different aspects of a patient care. The platform is very good at identifying functional issues, prioritizing them, and then triaging them, and all on one sheet, this executive summary that I was referring to.

So it looks like we actually have some people from the audience who are in the medical field. And so obviously, you know, it's pretty hard to sell into hospital systems. There's a long sales lead time. And so Maybe you could talk a little bit about, you know, how does this have like high growth potential? Have you learned any best practices or tips when dealing with hospital systems?

Yeah, the hospital systems definitely do have a long sales cycle. When I think of public versus private markets, the private long-term care facilities here have a need to decrease costs and decrease liability, and they're an easier target from a cost analysis perspective. That model does naturally flow into a US hospital market much better than the Canadian government market does. When you think about the community health centers in the Canadian landscape, each one of those does have a budget to purchase software, and some of the funding that they get requires the data that our platform can get to them. So they can actually use our platform to get data in order to get more funding.

That's really interesting. Is there, I guess when you're kind of looking at this as a whole, what's one thing that people in the audience can do to help you? Is there anything you're looking for?

I want to talk to people. I want to find out what their needs are at the higher level, at the organizational level, what kind of information means the most to them, what would make this easy for them to want to trial this, use this, buy this. Because I want to get into the market as soon as possible, and I want feedback from people. Healthcare is complex, and I need to talk to as many people as possible to make this happen. So happy to talk to anybody who has a collaborative issue where we're trying to measure value-based healthcare.

So we actually have another question that was posted here by an anonymous attendee. He says that he works at the VA. He works on federating the VA patient records data. From multiple EMR systems. They support the Joint Health Information Exchange and are currently looking at inter-systems for analytics of healthcare data. Many ask, how is your product different than other platforms?

It's different because we are focusing on functional outcomes solely. So I'm not interested in grabbing somebody's EKG or their blood work and looking at that because that's already somewhere. We're actually taking data that is typically unstructured, which are the words and the progress notes that care providers put in, and making it structured and using discrete elements so we can actually code it, compare it, and do data analytics on it. So all that part is done. There's no natural language processing with this whatsoever.

Awesome. Well, like I said, if anyone's interested in connecting with Cheryl, just reply back to one of our emails that we'll send you, and we're happy to connect you. Cheryl, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure having you. And I think we're ready to move on to Michael.

Hey, Ryan. All right.

Hey, Michael. All right. So just to kick it off while you're pulling up your pitch deck here. So Michael is the CEO of Refactor. It's a radically simple DevSecOps tool automation platform that drives outcomes for cybersecurity and DevOps teams. So, Michael, you were in the Air Force and you're based out of Seattle. So whenever you're ready, take it away.

Thanks, Ryan. Yep, so as Ryan said, I'm co-founder and CEO of Refactor, where we've created our radically simple DevSecOps automation platform for cybersecurity. And there we go. So I am ex-Air Force. I started my career out as a cybersecurity engineer. I've been a serial entrepreneur and actually came from the cybersecurity side to the software engineering side, and actually last year finished my master's degree in computer science. And, you know, being a technical person in the field and working with enterprise and DoD, I found that, you know, there was a core mission I was trying to achieve when founding Refactor, and it was really to empower cybersecurity to operate collaboratively at the speed of and with DevOps teams who have been doing agile automation for for over 10 years now, but cybersecurity was being left behind. So the real problem out there is that most cybersecurity practitioners are not developers but are being asked to shift left, which essentially means getting closer to the beginning of a software delivery lifecycle. Also, there's this term that I've come up with called IT as code, which really means as everything is modernizing and moving to the cloud, it requires there to also be a modernization in skill sets. The majority of cybersecurity practitioners out there, over 78% of them, aren't a part of the development process, and tools and platforms like traditional CI/CD, which is essentially an automation platform for developers, was made for developers only and is not a tool to— or a platform to cater towards additional users like cybersecurity teams. And cybersecurity is really still a reactive, and in a lot of engagements a manual process where there's a handoff to the cybersecurity team. And so there's really not anything out there that has been purpose-built for cybersecurity that also incorporates the tools that they'd expect, as well as being able to be friendly to develop— to DevOps engineers. So that's where Refactor comes in. I myself am, as I said, prior Air Force, We also have over 40 years of combined experience in cybersecurity and cloud and software engineering on the core team, and industry experts, cybersecurity practitioners who have been in the trenches themselves and know exactly what the industry needs and where it's going. So this is where Refactor comes in. We're really a platform that helps security be able to have a seat at the table, to be able to create agile automation through a continuous IT as code automation platform that was purpose-built for them so that they can tie into the existing DevOps workflows that are out there and work cohesively with the DevOps teams, as well as be able to integrate into anything that they're modernizing as people are going through digital transformation, moving to the cloud, being able to turn everything they have into code, to be able to have security be a part of that process and cater to all the different use cases so they can continue to take and maintain responsibility for what they need to in a format that caters to them, which is all based upon a visual approach on the front end so that they can actually build automation through a visual low-code builder, but also have all of the power that their other teams like the DevOps team expect as they are already creating and developing and delivering software internally. So this is the, the builder that we have that allows for the cybersecurity engineers to come in and actually drag and drop and utilize our built-in tools that work for what they're looking for, that cater to the different use cases that they're looking for, so that they now have an ability to collaborate with their DevOps and developer counterparts and be able to have a seat at the table so they can be a part of this agile process, which is really something that's being pushed across the entire industry from the DOD to the enterprise, and everybody is pushing towards modernizing and wanting cybersecurity to be a part of this process. So to date, we have 20 customers. We have over 20 pilots in flight, a lot of different organizations. We also have customers like Netscope and Tufin, Center for Internet Security, even engagement with the Air Force through our Air Force CIVR Phase 1 contract. Any day now, we're waiting on our Phase 2. We've ramped up on our employees over the last 5 months and had over 30% month-over-month growth. We also are in 2 startup programs with Microsoft for Startups that we were selected into, as well as AWS, and we're on a trajectory of exponential growth over the past 2 years. We spent last year coming to market with our new version of the platform and really pushing hard on our DoD work through dual use through the CIVR program, and we're also seeing an uptick in interest on what we're doing around cloud adoption because a lot of organizations want to go from legacy. Our overall total addressable market is $15 billion. That includes DevOps tools and SOAR, which is security orchestration automation and response, and we live kind of at the nexus between both of those industries. Competitive landscape, different products out there. Rundeck just got acquired for $100 million last month in IT ops, and again, we bridge the gap between IT or cybersecurity and DevOps. And have the ability to be the first solely cybersecurity-focused platform that has features and capabilities that cater to cybersecurity teams. Our overall accomplishments: we have, we have, we won a $100,000 pitch competition back in November 2018, have a lot of different recognition from being a part in the Veteran Funding Lab all the way to CRN's Emerging Vendors and Tech Innovators, and this year we We were a finalist again for the CRN Tech Innovators for 2020, and we're also looking at additional SBIR contracts that we've submitted for as well in conjunction with all of the commercial traction we have. Thank you. Appreciate it. And now I'm interested to hear your questions.

Awesome. Thank you, Michael. So you guys are breaking out right now, and you've got a lot of really great traction and validation. Maybe you could talk a little bit about some of the customers that are, that are using you right now.

Yeah, absolutely. So we have Center for Internet Security that's using our platform. We actually worked to integrate one of their tools that was primarily something that the cybersecurity team would have to implement themselves. So now they can actually utilize it in a continuous automation process in our platform built in. Which was awesome. And with that, we've had kind of the one-to-many approach to where they now have— we have other opportunities with other customers that want to use their Syscat assessor tool with our platform. We also have other cybersecurity vendors, Netscope, Tufin, and we're working with a lot of service providers, Big Five, large DoD primes. We're all trying to solve this issue, which is I want to build this content, but I also want to do it in a continuous way so I can continue to add value to my end customer, whether that's a branch of the military, whether that's an enterprise customer. And so we're seeing this converging of the industry where this is one of the first times I've ever seen where the DoD and the broader government are lining up with enterprise with the initiatives that they're pushing forward on it too internally. So we're kind of at the nexus of the overall industry and where everything is going and how Everybody is catalyst, or essentially accelerating their strategy, turning it into reality, not just to move to the public cloud, but now with a lot of, you know, everybody working from home and kind of having to really turn strategy into reality and accelerate all of the digital transformation projects that were kind of in flight, but not really at the implementation stage yet.

So as you're dealing with both customers on the government side, but also the commercial side, do they see a difference in value, or is there another sort of implementation that they're looking at this, or are they seeing it in the same light?

Yeah, everybody sees it in the same light. I mean, they may have different outcomes they're trying to achieve, but really there's two core objectives. One is to fill, leverage automation to fill the talent shortage out there. So you probably see numbers out there in cybersecurity from 3 to 4 million. In, in a talent shortage, as well as on the DevOps and developer side. And so because of that, everybody's trying to augment and do more with what they currently have and leverage automation to be able to do that. Cybersecurity is a very difficult area to be able to provide automation, but now that it's kind of spilling over into everything that everybody wants to be able to automate in the cloud and a lot of the cloud-native stuff, It's becoming more and more of a, hey, we need not just to be able to let cybersecurity teams know what's going on, but actually be a part of the process. And the same thing from the cybersecurity engineers that we're working with and bringing on as customers, they're also looking at the same way where they have both enterprise and DoD customers. So if they create automation content that they can provide to their customers, it can work both on the, you know, on the government side as well as on the commercial side.

Got it. And so Mary's asking here, does this platform work for enterprise customers abroad? So do you have any international customers that you're working with?

Yeah, so we have, we have interest from all over the globe. We, we have some things coming. I can't talk about it on the presentation, but we have some functionality coming. We'll really be able to support those use cases, especially for data sovereignty and needing to be able to abide by different, you know, continent and country requirements around, you know, data and so on. And then the other one is, for us, we have some architectural things coming that will allow for us to support that globally. But right now we're North American, mainly focused on the US and Canada, and then we have interest from all over the globe, which we are looking at and strategizing and how we'll be able to solve for that with some of the upcoming things we have coming later this year and early next year.

Great. A question from Steve. He's asking about the raise amount. So how much are you asking for? And he's also asked about like, what do investors receive in the liquidity event? You don't need to get into valuation now, but how much are you raising? And it sounds like Steven might be an angel investor. So what would you tell an angel investor right now?

Yeah, I would defer that to a conversation. We have some other talks with some very large VCs right now, so I— we can chat about that offline. I won't get into specifics here, and there's a reason around it, but if you're interested, you can feel free to ping me, and I'll drop my email in the chat. Cool.

And yeah, we're happy to— yeah, why don't you drop it in the chat? That way you can get some continuity there. And so, you know, you already talked about your— a little bit of your work with the Air Force. I mean, there's probably a lot of veterans on the call today that are interested in Phase I or Phase II SBIRs. I mean, what would you give in terms of a recommendation or any advice to entrepreneurs that are looking to raise government grants?

Yeah, so the first thing is it takes a lot of time to do it yourself, so I would definitely look at using a third party to help you out that has relationships and expertise in it, primarily from those who've come from the contracting space on the, the gov, you know, the DOD side that have that, you know, knowing of the inner workings of how the process works. Also, there's, there's a, there's a method to it that you could do yourself, and I know people that have done and have been successful, but there is a large amount of time And the one thing you don't want to do is apply for it and then not get selected and then have to come back at it again. The other thing I would say is be very cognizant about the end customers that you're going after and how you're solving for what you're doing with them so that your— what you're doing can not only get the CIVR funds for the Phase I and then work towards your Phase II, which is essentially R&D dollars to adapt your technology for dual use. But then also thinking longer term with Phase 3, which are sole source contracts that you can engage with anybody, any organization across the entire government. And so it's a nice vehicle for you to use, but it also requires an understanding expertise. And I would say I have a pretty, you know, a pretty high level of understanding, and I wouldn't say I'm an expert yet at it, but know a lot about the process. And always, always ask questions and try to, try to engage with a third party that is, that has the expertise to help you there, because it's going to be, it's really good to get a lot of that offloaded and have, understand the process so you're prepared going into it, and then making sure that everything is dialed in to have the maximum amount of factors in place to have the highest level of possibility of being, selected. The— there is the open topic now, which is great, so it doesn't have to be mapped to a needs ID. So you can come in with anything, but it's going to be— the big thing is making sure that it's tied to a customer that either has money or has the visibility to be able to, to, to be what the Air Force is looking. Because at the end of the day, it's about what is the benefit to the Air Force specifically for the AFRC SBIRs. And there's other SBIRs that the other branches have. So, but everything is tied to, you know, what is it, how does it tie to national defense and how is it going to actually help the branch of service that you're getting the CIBER funds from?

Awesome. And a last question here for you is how can we help? How can someone in the audience help refactor?

Yeah, that's a great question. So we're in the process of raising a funding round. So we have that open for sure. So that's one place. The other one is we have a lot of deals in process and pipeline, and we're looking to hire additional folks as well. So, you know, we have some job reqs going out in conjunction with our capital raise, but that's a big deal for us. And then, you know, anybody that has, you know, connections or are part of the DOD and so on, I've had a lot of conversations recently from different software factories and other organizations in the DOD, and there's a huge need on that side, but they are working hand in hand with the commercial side. And so that's also something for us that we keep pushing on is what and how we can make this successful on the DOD side that can relate to the commercial side. So any input or, you know, feedback there would be great, or even just want to have a conversation around that see if you have some way to help us in that process. And check out our new website. We launched that a week ago. A lot of cool stuff on there, and we have a new mascot, the Roboraptor. So pretty cool stuff, I think, on our end.

Awesome. Well, thank you for joining us today, Michael. Really appreciate your time. And that about wraps it up. I'd love to thank all of the panelists who joined us today. So Charles, Cheryl, Michael, Scout, who's producing this in the background. Thank you everyone for, for joining us today. This is really great. And for people in the audience, we'll be emailing out a video recording of this with links to the companies as well as direct contact information in the next few days. So if you ever have questions, feel free to reply back to those emails. If you know a veteran who is launching a startup, we want to work with them and we have various scholarships available. So please check out veteranfounderinitiative.com, and, uh, we look forward to seeing you there. Uh, thank you everyone and have a great night.