TriNet PeopleForceX Denver—Pitch Competition

Kate Kozak: How is everybody's Denver Startup Week going? Wooo!

Well, I can tell that this is going to be the best event of the week. So far. We have pulled in some of the most amazing companies from across the nation, guys. We had people travel across the states to come in for this. They were very carefully selected by our internal team.

So I think you guys have a show in store for you and I'm excited to introduce you in just a moment to some of our amazing venture capital partners, as well. They are doing a lot for this startup ecosystem in the Colorado area, a lot with the innovation that's happening here. So I'm thrilled for you guys to be a part of it.

Before we get started though, this event wouldn't be possible without our amazing sponsors, so I love to bring the guys to the stage. Could we have Lou from G-P, please? Amazing, Lou. Please share a little bit about your time.

Lou Vassalotti: Thank you. Thank you, Kate. My name is Lou Vassalotti. I am the senior director of Strategic Partnerships for G-P, formerly known as Globalization Partners. I manage our partnership with TriNet, so I thank them for the opportunity to be here along with the rest of the sponsors that support this pitch competition. G-P is a global employer of record. And for those of you who don't know what that is, is we basically operate in 180 plus countries around the world and make it very easy for startups and entrepreneurs to hire anybody, anywhere in a matter of days.

So basically what we do is, you find the talent and tell us where you want to hire them, and we will help you from an end-to-end employment administration with employment contracts, payroll, benefits, HR, legal compliance and basic HR things like PTO and expense reimbursement. It's a really economical way to grow your business, whether it's for expanding a sales organization, servicing global clients, finding tech talent in other parts of the world that will help you grow your business.

And we do it on our platform, which is SaaS space and now AI-driven with technology that helps make it really easy to, to bring those folks onboard in days. Very cost-effective and very compliant. We also do global contractors. So sometimes you're not quite ready to jump in and hire a full-time employee. But if you think you might want to hire a contractor around the world, we can help you do that too.

So have a great night. This is an awesome crowd. Thank you, Kate. Appreciate it.

Kate: Thank you. All right. Next up, I would love to have Eric from Vistra.

Eric Lodge: Thank you. Kate. Hello, everyone. And, terrific job trying to, it always ceases to amaze me, this is the second time I've had the chance to come to the PeopleForce event and TriNet is fantastically connected with the community and does a great job of putting a platform together for these great companies to share their ideas. So great, great job. Thank you for that.

So I'm Eric Lodge, I'm with Vistra. We help companies as they expand internationally. We kind of pick up where we're G-P and Lou leaves off. Where they focus on, employer of record, we're more on the tail end of that journey. So as you're hiring additional folks, you need to set up foreign entities, deal with corporate governance, tax consulting, HR consulting, all things that relate to operating and hiring folks internationally as you expand your business, that's where Vistra becomes involved. So we love coming to these events. We meet fantastic companies that their business has evolved to take them overseas. And I'm sure these, these exciting new companies will have, global aspirations at some point as well. So look forward to, to hearing the stories tonight. Thank you.

Kate: Thank you, Eric. All right. Next, I love to call Jamie from WeWork to the stage. Jamie.

All right, well, maybe we'll put Jamie towards the end, then. So let's shift over to Buchalter. We have Steve here representing. Steve, please come up.

Steve Segal: Thank you all. Great to see you all here tonight. My name is Steve Segal. I am the, head the Denver office corporate practice, and I'm co-chair of the technology group for Buchalter. We are a full-service business law firm. We are passionate about working with startups from the ground floor up through the full business life cycle and hopefully a successful exit. We hope you have a great evening. I think we're going to have a great opportunity to see some bold vision, new ideas, and hopefully some valuable connections made. And don't forget to grab some swag on your way out or during the event. Thank you.

Kate: Thank you so much and thank you for bringing the swag to the house too. All right, last up. I'll call Garrison from Cake. Garrison, please step up.

Garrison Gowens: I'll keep it short and sweet because I'm sure you want to actually get to the pitch competition. But thank you, Kate and Clay. Somewhere in here, I haven't even seen Clay today. There you go. Hey, thank you guys for putting this on for the TriNet team. I lead our U.S. partnerships initiatives here at Cake Equity.

Cake is a platform that helps startups who are fundraising or scaling their teams, streamline their cap table and stock option management, and help them use their equity to motivate their teams. So you may be thinking like, why Cake and not Carta? Well, Cake is a platform for, you know, geared for, companies that have global scale in mind.

So, we facilitate stock options across over 50 countries to date. Companies like Linktree use us to issue equity across the nine different countries. So we're pretty great. And then also we're much easier to use, and much cheaper, so you can kind of think of you kinda think of, like Adobe Photoshop to Canva, where we're very easy to use, very simple user experience. And over 17,000 startups globally use our platform. So, yeah. Check us out at CakeEquity.com. Feel free to reach out to me at Garrison@CakeEquity.com if you're interested.

Kate: Thank you, Garrison. All right. So let me give you guys the lay of the land. We have five pitchers that are going to be presenting this evening. They're going to have seven minutes to present their company and then three minutes for the judges to get to ask some Q&A and dig in a little bit deeper into their venture. From there, we're going to take some time to review and see who we thought stood out, and we're going to announce the winner at the end of the event.

The winner is going to take home $5,000 in TriNet credit. But more than that, they get bragging rights. And that's what this is all about, right? So prior to our amazing pitchers taking the stage, let's go ahead and bring up our panel of VC judges, Rio Hodges from Antler. Please step up. We have Shannon from Ensemble Innovations. We have John Francis from Stout Street Capital, and we have Alex Houghtalin from Access Venture Partners. Please come up and take a seat.

All right, so I'll let each of you guys just share a little bit about your firms, your thesis. What has you excited in the Colorado market space? John, maybe we'll start with you.

John A. Francis: Hi, I'm John. I'm one of the partners at Stout Capital. We’re seed stage fund based here in Denver. We've been fairly active, currently on our third fund. We have about 80 portfolio company actually applying for a third fund. We we're planning to write about 40 checks. Mostly generalists, post-revenue, post-traction companies, looking to raise $1 to 3 million. It's is a sweet spot for us. Our check size around 250 K that's out there. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out.

Shannon Flahive: Hi, Shannon. Sorry, I'm kind of loud, even without a microphone. I work with Ensemble. We are a relatively new player to the stage. We started investing in 2021. We are a healthcare technology-only investment fund, so we're quite a bit different from most of the other funds in the area. We have a niche and we are very passionate about it. We come in at the series A stage. We will dip a little bit earlier into seed when it makes sense. And we really focus on B2B technology sold into large enterprise players in the health care ecosystem. And our mission is to decrease costs, increase access to care and improve patient outcomes.

Yeah. Thank you. I think everyone agrees that we could use a little bit more of that around here. I am a Denver native and, yeah, yeah, and, and super, super passionate about this ecosystem here. I was talking to a new friend. I was out in Boston for 10 years, somehow survived all 10 of those years, made it back here and loved spending all of my time helping cultivate a really active, supportive ecosystem around here.

A little bit of a side plug for something I do for one of my unpaid jobs called Seed Angel Forum. We host regular events about once a quarter where we bring together Colorado startups and accredited investors, and it's a night of pitches, cocktails and dinner. So if that's something that's interesting to you, if you're a founder who wants to apply to pitch or an investor who wants to attend, again, that Seed Angel Forum, another amazing opportunity for local startups.

Kate: Awesome. Thank you Shannon. Rio, let's move over to you.

Rio Hodges: Just a plus one for Seed Angel Forum. It's it's fantastic. It's a really well-attended event and something I look forward to.

Hi everyone. My name is Rio. I'm a senior principal at Antler. Antler is, one of the largest pre-seed investors in the world now, and we deploy capital in a in kind of a creative way. Our thesis is that there are not enough founders in the world today, and we try to provide those onramps to the highway of becoming a venture backed founder and a venture backed company. And so, the way in which we do that is we deploy capital by working with founders, usually in a sort of what we call a founder residency, for two months, and we do it about twice a year.

And so we deploy capital out of the U.S. fund. There's a Southeast Asia fund, there's a Nordics fund above and beyond. Right. So there's all these funds that we have globally. And our underlying thesis is that we can kind of make the world a better place by investing in founders at the super, super early stage. In the U.S., we invest in founders up to $500 K in capital and pride ourselves on, you know, working with them in sort of the shorts and t shirts phase, if you will. So, excited to be here. And thank you for having me.

Alex Houghtalin: Alex Houghtalin and I work with Access Venture Partners. We've been around for, 25 years this year. Investing in early-stage companies, mostly in Colorado, although we will invest outside of Colorado. But we're also really passionate about this ecosystem. And we're, B2B software focused.

There's a few areas we, we really like, like cyber, also HR tech, which is why we love TriNet because our friends, our friends there are very helpful. And, we write checks anywhere from about $250 K to $4 million into usually post product companies, but we do sometimes invest pre-revenue. So, up to series A.

Kate: Amazing. Thank you Alex. Let's give it up for our amazing panel of judges. Awesome. All right. Who is ready to get this pitch competition started? Woo! All right, first up in the hot seat is Melissa from indipop. Coming all the way from Arizona to be here this evening. Melissa.

Melissa Blatt: All right, everyone, hear me. Okay. Hi from Arizona. Okay. I am Melissa Blatt, the founder and CEO of indipop, where we believe membership is a next generation of healthcare.

I want to introduce you to Alex. He's in his 40s, lives in New York, self-employed, married, two kids. He pays $3,000 a month for his health care. And he has a $10,000 deductible. What Alex is really upset and frustrated about is that in addition to his $36,000 he pays yearly for his health care. He has still out-of-pocket expenses for his medical needs, and he had to change all of his doctors. He heard about indipop, and in three simple steps, he was able to review plans and enroll, saving close to $2,000 a month. But more importantly, he gets to keep his providers. Meet Brianna. She's a New Yorker turning 30. Before she came to indipop, she didn't have health care for three years. She's now on a health savings account, compatible plan. Saving for retirement. And on the opposite side of the spectrum is Mary, 62. She was on COBRA, and now she's saving close to $600 a month.

Mary, Brianna, Alex, they're all self-employed and they're part of a self-employed population of one third, which insurance just doesn't work for them any longer. And they are forced to enroll in high deductible plans with limited benefits and hidden fees. And I too am part of this population. I left corporate several years ago, and I had high hopes going into healthcare.gov that I would find an amazing, affordable, quality plan only to be presented with a bronze HMO, which meant that I had to change all my doctors at a $9,000 deductible. And it was not free. I now had to spend $600 for my crappy plan. So I said, there has got to be a better way. And there is.

indipop is the first membership subscription-based health care company. You might have heard the term cost share or health share before. This is where you become a member of a large group or community that shares the cost of medical needs. There are dozens of these types of plans in the market, but most of you probably have never heard of them. You don't know which ones to trust. You wouldn’t know how to search for it or which one is going to be the best fit for your needs. And that is where indipop comes in. We are the gold standard of these cost shares, where we have vetted plans and we have curated them with very specific options.

Now indipop is able to have exclusive plans and pricing that you can only find through our platform and we have established ourselves as a trusted resource for the self-employed population, touting a 95% retention rate. And we're able to offer our own membership right now for the GLP one, for diabetics, and for weight loss.

I'm going to dive into insurance. I hope I don't lose you guys, a little bit here, but this model is very different than insurance. And if you've only known the insurance model where you have a premium and deductible, you're going to be, taken a little off guard. Like there's another way? Yes, there is another way.

So first of all, the first question we get asked every time, every day is can I keep my provider? That is very important for a provider patient relationship, for continuity of care with our plans. It's not an HMO or a PPO. So you have an open network. You have the freedom to choose who cares for you. We have been seeing insurance go up every single year, 6%, 10%. We just quoted a company with 150 people. Their insurance went up 25%.

I want you to think about this as a business owner for a second, or a CFO of a company. You want to do right by your employees. You want to give them the benefits that they need. What does that 25% factor into your business? Whereas with indipop, all of our plans, you have a 20 to 70% savings, not only on the front end, meaning the monthly, but the most expensive plan, the most expensive for a family that you would pay out of pocket is $6,000 in a calendar year.

More importantly, these types of plans are not-for-profit, and so the most increase they've done every single year is 6%. Well, one of our health care partners, is committed to not raising rates this year at all. So when you're going to the gas pumps and that's raising and you're going to the grocery store, this particular health care company is not raising rates.

We don't abide by open enrollment. So you can enroll on your timeline. I don't know if any of you have had a surgery before. Do you still get medical bills like a year later after you've had your surgery and then you're on the phone trying to fight, and wasting those precious minutes? You're on your own trying to navigate a massive health care industry.

Whereas with indipop, you have medical advocates and concierge care, so you're never alone trying to navigate the system. Our plans serve all 50 states. We've actually heard situations where somebody went a county over. They were considered out of network. We serve all 50 states. So whether you're building a team in Omaha, Miami or New York, you don't have to worry that the plan will work across all 50 states. I'm going to say it. I think insurance is disease-focused. And the reason why I say it is because if you have an ACA compliant plan, you will be able to get your annual wellness, which is should be included at $0. But if you start talking about your aches and pains, it could be coded as diagnostic. And therefore it's you're going to be owing that bill. And most people, when they come to me, they're like, I just need it just in case I break my leg or I get cancer. But you're paying. Some people are paying close to $3,000 a month. You want your wellness care and you're not getting it. All of our plans are focused on your well-being and getting it as close to zero as possible.

10% reoccurring revenue is our structure where, the average monthly commission is between $10 to $120 a month. We have opened it up to larger group plans now. So we have three group plans. The difference is a group size can be three and you can be a group with our plans. And obviously it's a very large market of contractors and freelancers that make up this workforce.

But I want to focus on this stat of 32% earn more than $150,000 a year. Why is that important? Because they're not getting a tax subsidy. And that's why Alex was paying $3,000 a month. We checked the boxes for self-employed, but we are working with larger companies now and associations that, as the landscape of the workforce changes, more and more companies are hiring 1099 contractors, and so they don't technically fit or they might not be eligible for insurance. And we play very nicely with insurance. So you can keep your UnitedHealthcare. And we can fill the gaps where insurance might leave off.

It's a win win-win TriNet. So we started working with them over the summer and we fill the gap obviously for insurance and the, suite of products. And then we refer back for the HR and the benefits. And as you know, franchises can range from small, husband and wives all the way to corporate, competition. So I wanted to focus on one thing that is a differentiator and that's the word “deductible.” So a deductible is tied to your calendar year, which means that if you have a broken leg at the end of this year, what happens in January that starts over again. So you're paying for it twice. Whereas with our plans you continue on with your treatment plan.

We have a lot of other, benefits that are included, and I have to wrap it up. So we're part of Capital Factory. Capital invested us last year. And we have a small bridge that we're raising, attractive terms. And you can find me.

Kate: Let's hand it over to you for questioning.

Alex: I'm going to defer to Shannon first.

Shannon: I was going to meet you guys. I think it's important that you care about your product, right? And the basics. It is going to be very familiar to me. [Unintelligible.]

Alex: Yeah, I would like to just know a little bit about your, plan partners and, just, you know, why it, like, kind of what's the catch? Like, why are you able to offer such amazing sounding plans at lower, I mean, it sounds amazing and I'm just…

Melissa: It is amazing.

Alex: Yeah. A little bit more about how you make that.

Melissa: So insurance is for profit. They have to make a profit. They have shareholders. Whereas this, you're becoming a member of a community. So it's community based. It's not you're not going to sacrifice benefits because you're part of a community. In fact, there's more transparency because they're showing you what the real costs are in our health care system. And it blows people's minds to know that $50,000 surgery, that ACL surgery was $6,000. So our health care partners are vetted by my team. And not everybody makes the cut. So that's why I say we're the gold standard of curated membership. Because there are tons out there. Just like there's good insurance and not such good insurance. There's going to be good memberships and bad memberships, but all of ours have done exactly what they say they're going to do. And they're all different. And they're all over the United States.

Kate: We did have a question from the audience. So I'll go ahead and interject. They wanted to know who your core audience was.

Melissa: Meaning who do we serve the most? So it can range from solopreneurs that usually earn $60,000 because you're not getting a tax subsidy. But we do really well in Colorado and New York and Arizona. But small business owners, you know, because you're not… Sometimes to form a group, you're going to get better rates because you have a group. But that's not the case with our plan. So you can have a small group of three and you're going to get those really amazing rates. You don't have to have that that company of 500 to get better rates.

John: I have two questions. One, a yes or no and the other one's a little more elaborate. One is it tax deductible. Which is a yes or no.

Melissa: Yes.

John: The other ones tell us a little bit about your team. Why you? Why your team? To bring this product.

Melissa: We are all affected, but my whole team is on our own plans. We use the product and this has grown slowly. So it wasn't in the first year that I came out, and I'm, like, raising $1 million. I've seen other health care companies like cash.CEO fold. I've seen other companies that haven't put the time and the foundation into it. And so, my whole team has been from they were affected as a as a business owner or a family that were not able to afford a certain insurance any longer. And they believe that things have to change.

John: Just a yeah, sorry. Just a quick follow up. From a mood perspective, how, it's an idea that I guess all VCs have seen similar ideas before. Why will this one work?

Melissa: Well, this work is four years in the making. I’ve already beat the odds. So it's because we're doing it… we built… First of all, we have a culture, and we abide by that culture. I hire and fire by that to that, to our core values. But second is not only is it about how we're able to add like the technology and all the fun stuff, but you have to prove out that these relationships work, that the health care plans work. So I think it's the vetting process and the relationships that we built and the trust, like we really do have that trust.

People are coming to us now like what else do you have? And the industry standard to stay on a plan is usually 12 months, a little over 12 months. We have people going on three years. That's incredible. And we don't have this where you have to get a renewal every year. It's a membership. So they're just staying on their health care plan. And really when they leave, they're leaving because they get married or they go back into the workforce.

So, but we have I didn't want to do it because this is a public forum, but there's a lot that's going on behind the scenes that I'm not, I can't say sorry, guys, but eventually you will hear all about it. But there's more to it than what you see before. Just but the core is the membership. And then what we're doing with those membership.

Kate: Melissa, we have one final question from the audience, very specific to the Colorado health care system.

Audience member: In Colorado, a small business that has at least two employees qualifies for small business purchasing through the Colorado brokers and major carriers. So what's the value of going through indipop versus…?

Melissa: You're going through insurance. So you're you're getting an insurance product like Blue Cross Blue Shield, UnitedHealthcare, Cigna, Anthem. Right? That's the marketplace. That's insurance. This is not insurance. This is another health care product. It's completely different. So if you want to explore that, you have a choice. This open enrollment, you have insurance or you have indipop.

Audience member: So you contract with your own providers?

Melissa: So these are health care companies that are there's many people that join this group, this community. And you have basically this a concierge team that is walking you through the process. So yes, you can keep your provider. Yes, you know the transparent cost of how much is a surgery. It's going to be upfront. Yes, it has dreadful disease in it.

Kate: That's all right. You did amazing didn't she do great guys? Awesome.All right. That was your first taste. Our very first pitcher is done.

Let's move on to number two. So we have Skyler and Stefan from 3MERA. Please come take the stage.

Skyler Van Sickle: Hi everybody. Too loud? Oh. Thank you. Hi, everybody. I'm Skyler Van Sickle and we have Stefan here. Both Colorado natives. Go, Colorado. Yeah, I got slides coming. Awesome. Okay. That's me. So here we go. Next one. Want to bring this up. Just take 30 seconds for the different entrepreneurs. All the entrepreneurs in the room call yourselves founders, please. And, this is where we got started as a t-shirt company. And I just hope that this, the reason I want to show this, I just hope it can be inspiring to show you where we've come from this.

So we'll get started with that. We are 3MERA and we're making industrial commerce extremely easy. I want you to think of us as the Shopify for industry 4.0. What is industry 4.0? Well, it's actually a governmental term that talks about the digital transformation of manufacturing and industry. It is, you know, it is additive manufacturing. It is 3D printing. It is CAD, computer aided design. Does everybody know what CAD is? CAD, computer aided design. Cool. It is computer vision. It is AR/VR. It is essentially this trend of going from bytes to atoms, being able to construct things completely digital before ever seeing it come to life in the real world. This is a $2.3 trillion industry, 12% of the U.S. gross domestic product.

Yet what do we see? A bunch of WordPress sites, 2D images. In fact, 95% of products are already manufactured in or designed in 3D. Yet we find 70% of manufacturers still on WordPress, still using 2D images and not selling their parts online. No e-commerce. In fact, it has been deemed one of the highest priorities yet the highest challenges in manufacturing today. So how are they doing it?

Well, you can imagine what it was like in the early 2000s and how you would buy stuff. Basically, this is paper manuals, invoices, phone calls, bunch of ACH transfers, paper catalogs. But we get it. It's hard. Imagine having a part, product that is made up of hundreds of parts, and you need to take one of those sample products off of the line production line, or in fact, stop the production line to get photos and videos of it.

Right? And then you have to manage the markups, the reshoots, the metadata. I got this guy. Thank you. Yeah, he gets it. And then you got to put all that into your ERP. A lot of fun, right? In fact, such a headache that Ikea has been investing in 3D rendering for the past 20 years and you haven't seen like they haven't taken a single product photo or product video in the past 10 years.

Everything you've seen in their print media or online, 100% rendered. So what's the solution? You go from CAD to commerce. We have a tool that sits in the middle of engineering teams and marketing teams, allowing them to unlock 3D for the entire company. Is this being done? Yes, but it's being done in segments. You have 3D visualization tools that really don't go the full nine yards. It's an app download. A lot of times very clunky. They don't have integrations.

And on the other side of this, we have legacy e-commerce systems that, frankly, were built for consumer retail. And so, 3MERA bridges those two gaps with a subscription service and payment processing. Our customers, now that they're able to use their 3D files, are able to construct content just like you would in the movies. They're able to better show their parts, their products, the processes, how things are made, how things work, how to maintain the thing, and even drill into the part to find the product, to find the part they actually need. And while doing this, they're utilizing this whole next wave of digital technology with AR/VR. I mean, it's coming, it's coming.

In fact, it's been shown to sell better. Shopify. It's been shown to train better. And at the end of the day, our customers are now designing to sell, using our CAD, using our CAD to market solutions. We have four customers and a growing pipeline. We have some pretty strict NDAs. I can't share much of that, but to the extent it's from contract manufacturers to construction and equipment manufacturers, all the way to medical device companies and industrial machinery. We have also, we are also a part of working group setting 3D standards forums and have access to all the top companies already doing this through the metaverse standards. Forms, like I said, 3D’s coming. Apple is starting to work together with Microsoft to make this happen. And we've also recently been nominated for two awards here in Colorado, one being the Manufacturers Network Award. So love your vote there.

We are made up of a team of experienced advisors and I mean, look at Stephan here. He's our lead platform architect. He's actually designed this chair for himself and has worked on the DoD and cybersecurity. I mean, it's crazy. We got Tom our CTO, which has a background in 3D animation illustration. He is our 3D guy. You got Tate, our veteran in marketing over 20 years of marketing leadership. And you got myself, just, single founder, a single exit.

You know, these guys put me to shame. Great team of advisors. You know, I want to note Pfizer’s on here. That was first data not too long ago. PTC, Dassault, I mean, we got we got good names on here. So my question for you is, who's ready to render with us? And please scan my QR code and follow us on LinkedIn. Please take out your phones. Yes, now. That's all I got for you.

Kate: Awesome. Great job. Skyler. All right. Judges. Rio, do you want to go first this time?

Rio: Yeah, sure. Thanks for the presentation. Appreciate it. So can you walk me through, basically, like, maybe masking the names? Walk me through, what one of your paying customers is paying for? What, you know, what the value of that customer is? And what are they actually kind of using it for on a day-to-day basis?

Skyler: So, you know, I'll point out this is our go to market segment right now. There are OEMs of equipment manufacturing companies that have to sell through distribution. Right? So it's mom and pop shops. If you think of flooring industry, it's all physical equipment, very like small showroom. And we see these distributors starting to put out distributor programs basically. Okay? So that that's in regards to unit sales. So now they're, it's highly competitive in a small store. They need a better way to digitize that referral program or that distributor program. And so, we add essentially a digital layer over those programs. That's for unit sales. Post-purchasing, what happens is the distributors are undercutting the OEMs on tooling purchases.

So like every, for example, we have one customer here. Their equipment cost $8,000. Every time a contractor does a job, it's four grand on buying what are called like pleats diamonds for flooring. And the distributors are undercutting them with cheaper knockoff Chinese products. The OEMs want to start capturing more of that market, and so they're able to come back to their digital programs, and then post-purchase, you know, it's like you have one of these pieces of equipment, you go into your distributor. They're saying it takes them two days to figure out they don't have the part you need. Takes them another two days to get back to the OEM, and then it takes them seven days to get the product shipped. That's two weeks of a contractor not being able to work. So it's not only unit sales and accelerating sales, but it's also the post-purchase doing a lot of phone calls right now. Dial back option number one is parts every single time. As in they're having to manually provide this as a loss leader.

Rio: And then just quick follow up. The CAD space is relatively consolidated, right? There's only a handful of players that have a massive kind of market share. Do you see them as a threat? Do you see them as a partner? Do you see what how do you kind of figure out the Autodesk world?

Skyler: I feel like I skipped the slides in here. So we're talking with all three of them already. They don't see us as a competitor. We have we have products that like they're not they're not rendering in real time and on the web. It's pretty much a CAD viewer every single time. I thought I had a slide in here. It talks about headless commerce, basically. So it's it's the it's the, the cads, the CRMs, the ERP and storage.

Rio: Got it. Thank you.

Shannon: All right. I've got a question for you. When I think about your beachhead, how do you go to market? A lot of those products are low margin. Right? So you're talking with an industry that is antiquated in terms of its use of technology, as you very well know, but also like really has to worry about their bottom line. So do you have hypotheses or in terms of your sales process, like how are you convincing them there's an ROI? Do you have made a cost savings estimate of top line growth? Like what's your business case to them?

Skyler: It's we're we take products to market faster. We eliminate the costs. Like I don't know where my slides are in here, but we eliminate like 50% of the cost to bring a product to market online. Basically, cutting down, I mean, imagine managing photos of thousands of parts to be able to provide that e-commerce. So it's accelerating sales demos at, like on the job site, in the field with sales reps, it's a lot of distributors. So they need a better way to demonstrate the product to accelerate sales and then also be able to provide those that reordering of materials or tooling that isn't going to undercut them. So, did I answer your question?

Shannon: Yeah. Well, one suggestion for you is, as you get these initial customers, if there's any way that you can get one or a couple of them to sign on to be willing to share their financial data before and after 12 months with your product? I feel like this industry will respond very, very well to you being able to say, “Hey, they paid X. They got Y.” And that's going to be like a much easier shoe in. So if you can partner with those customers, I feel like that could be a...

Skyler: We have we have that happening. We also have our own merchant services agreement through Pfizer. And with lowest buy rates you can imagine at zero volume. So, it's we're going to be going really the go-to-market is they need a tool now. But it's going to be here's payment services at, you know 100 basis points plus size. IC Plus basically. So we have the financial transaction which has been holding a lot of them back too.

Alex: Great. First off definitely congrats on going from the t-shirt.

Skyler: Yeah. You remember those t-shirts?

Alex: Yes. Awesome to see. So I'm familiar with some of these competitors specifically, Vntana. And you mentioned that they are primarily taking a very kind of vertical, more niche kind of go to market or just talk a little bit more about the competition and what your technology differentiators are.

Skyler: Sure. So we actually use their APIs for compressions, but we found better ones. They consider themselves a dam and that's as far as they're going to go. They're just starting to release their WebEx stuff. Yeah. JigSpace they actually [unintelligible] us today. We saw it. They… it's an app download. It's only working with CAD. Has to be an app download. There’s no plug ins for either of these. Also there’s no plugins. BILT another app. More in the consumer space. Showing you how to put a grill together. Threedium. They're all over the place. Threekit, mostly a product configurator in the in the consumer, the consumer space.

Kate: All right. That puts us that time. Skyler, Stephan, thank you so much.

All right. Next on the stage is Rene, CEO and co-founder of Delta Gen. Rene.

Rene Bystron: Let me take you on a quick journey, a journey of how technology transformed my life and the life of countless others over the past two decades. I was a square peg in a round hole, growing up as a scrawny gay kid in post-communist Eastern Europe small town, my world was pretty gray and frankly, not very big. Then the internet arrived and remembering typing those first words in your search box, the whole world waited on the other side of the screen.

Technology became my gateway to freedom and I found others like me. Next, enter social media and with it the promise of idea-sharing unity and connection. Oops, we know how that turned out. The next remote working. And weirdly enough, this time around, I became a round peg in a zoom square. And I'm sure you'll hear a ton during Denver Tech week about AI, and frankly, rightfully so.

It is the largest tech shift of our generation and we all face choices. Right now, I think we're kind of here. AI's doing… AI is writing bad poetry while human’s doing the grunt work. Let me show you what that looks like all over the world at an employee level, workers are asked to master, prompting a complex skill that's obscure and no one ever signed up for.

They're asked to rely on chat bots that hallucinate and spew falsehoods, making information unreliable, and fear so much fear in the workplace. Managers worry about data security and workers fear getting fired for using AI. These challenges, they're not just hurdles to workforce development. They're real roadblocks and bad for companies too. This year, only companies will spend over $235 billion on enterprise AI projects, yet 85% of those will fail.

There's gotta be a better way to truly advance the future of work. We need a different solution, a solution that's right now just kind of right where you know where your data is going that supports you, doesn't undermine you with humans at the center. Now meet Delta Gen where enterprise AI contextual tool that puts humans at the center and does work for you.

Let me show you how. Imagine your boss sends you a 100-page market research report with heavy financials and asks you to create a deck for the next board meeting. Well, this would have meant countless sleepless nights, but not with Delta Gen. You log in seamlessly into our platform and a beautiful, personalized dashboard welcomes you. Instead of wasting time on prompting, you choose one of the 20 plus workflows made specifically for you.

And in a matter of minutes, our proprietary AI ML model delivers output that you used to. We trained on the work that you do in order to deliver exactly what you need to deliver. And now say your boss calls you in the middle of the night asking for some obscure calculation, like a market segment growth over the past five years.

Well, you can ask Delta Gen for those as well. And I know the one question on your mind is this is another ChatGPT wrapper. We're not. We're contextual AI. We integrate with all of your data, combine AI and ML algorithm to deliver 80% task automation, saving your employees 30% of time to do strategic work for latest client example, a large global producer, we cut their project proposal timeline from 12 weeks to two weeks and something else interesting happens. Job quality increases and work enjoyment skyrockets. Our business model is simple. We sell seats on an annual basis and our three-tier approach allows organization of all sizes to invest into the workforce development and prepare for the future of work. I spent my whole career and I last year actually built an AI upskilling app that was top 10 apps in the App Store and had 220,000 users and my co-founder, Avi is a two times Techstars founder.

He recently sold his AI tech and I could not have done it without it on my side. So grateful to have him as my CTO. We started building Delta Gen in May from scratch. In June we joined Techstars here in Denver. In July, we released our MVP and by the end of July, we hit 290,000 in sales.

We're currently opening our round in a couple of weeks. The round is 50% committed and we’d still love to talk to you. If you're passionate about our mission of empowering workers with the right kind of AI. The AI power we're on right now will take us through a bleak and dark future where we replace workers instead of empowering them. This isn't the future of work we want. The other path is Delta Gen, where we give workers enough time and resources to learn, grow and innovate, and where technology solves greatest challenges. Instead of creating them. Which paths do you choose? Thank you.

Kate: Great job, Rene. All right, let's hand it over to our judges for some questions.

Alex: I'll go first. Great presentation. Can you tell me more about your ideal customer?

Rene: Yeah. So currently, we're a very function-specific solution. We sell to corporate development and finance teams. So that would be a head of corporate development right now.

Alex: Any kind of size company or other company characteristics?

Rene: Yeah. The company size is usually large to medium size enterprise with at least a couple hundred million in sales. We're hoping to expand to smaller companies, but as of now, those are the companies that we work with.

Alex: Just more, like, why you think those are the best fit for you guys right now?

Rene: Because they are the hardest to serve. They've got the hardest integration, including SAP, Oracle and sometimes TriNet. So that's really terrific for us at our early stage to learn around. And they also have very heavy quantitative workflows, which is helping us to train our model.

John: Tell me a little bit about your workflow. So you you said you have about ten workflows. Is it siloed in any way, from an industry perspective?

Rene: Yep. So our solution is function-specific. The workflows are based on that specific function because we find that functions across multiple lenders to actually quite similar. And we train we integrate with all of your data to understand what your output is and build the workflows around the output that you have delivered in the past.

John: And could you talk a little bit about the data that you need to train prior to, implementing these workflows? And how much data do you need? Or, you talked a little bit about privacy. How do you ensure privacy? And you're not repurposing that data for someone else in the same vertical?

Rene: Yeah. That's a… so you had two questions. So your first question was, how much do we need to build those workflows? We need at least three examples of your output to build each workflow. And in terms of privacy, one of the reasons why companies really like us is because we deliver to work on a private tenant, which allows them to keep all of their data.

We vectorize everything because before we use any of the AI or ML models and we have a SOC2, a type two certificate. We have SOC2 type one certification because we're not old enough, but we were working towards a SOC2 type two certification.

John: And talk a little bit about go-to-market if you can, please.

Rene: Yeah. So right now we're a very small team. There's four of us, Miyavi and two engineers. And so it's all founder-led sales. But our future go-to-market is sales-based. We're not really investing anything to marketing because I think usually we talk to large enterprises and heads of corporate development or finance. And so it's mostly all based on giving them, they call showing the product and trying to wow them.

John: Thank you. Great presentation.

Rene: Appreciate it.

Kate: Okay. We are at time. A round of applause.

How is everybody feeling? Fun night tonight, right? All right. Well, we still have two more pitchers to go. Next up is Dr. Matthew Allen from DifferentKind, CEO and co-founder.

Dr. Matthew Allen: What's up everyone. It's good to be with you tonight. Thank you so much to TriNet for hosting. And it's great to be a part of this. I live in a super small town in Colorado, so this is like almost as many people that live in my town. So I'm really excited to be with you all tonight. I am Dr. Matthew Allen, the CEO and co-founder of DifferentKind. DifferentKind is the dental patient experience leader. We help deliver improved oral health outcomes for patients and improved business outcomes for dental groups and payers, ultimately delivering a different kind of dental experience that we all truly want. I'd like you to meet Isabella. Isabella is a four-year-old friend of my son and last year she had to go to the hospital.

She had something that doctors weren't sure what was going on and so she had to go in to get some testing. Unfortunately, her mom had a bad experience when she was having Isabella and didn't want to go back to that same hospital. So she was able to go onto the Medicare Care Compare website, where she was able to find very specific things about the hospital that she was looking for, like cultural sensitivity and her willingness to be involved in the decision-making that she wanted to have for her daughter.

So ultimately, she was able to find the right hospital. Isabella was able to get diagnosed correctly and was able to get better. Unfortunately, that same thing doesn't happen in oral health. Dental payers and providers don't have enough precise data to be able to create the kinds of experiences and outcomes that you all want and they all want for you. And that's where DifferentKind comes in. We help deliver the data to ultimately prove what matters most to patients, and actually help dental groups and payers deliver that. We do that in a way that is immediate, so that it's not waiting months or, you know, sometimes six months for data. We do that in a way that's actionable.

It's taking the metrics that we measure and actually helping providers and payers improve on those metrics. And it's automated. It's a turnkey solution for a modern dental group or an innovative dental payer. But you can't do that without good employee experience as well. If you ever show up to a hospital or dental clinic, right? If the employee is not happy, it's not generally a great experience.

And so we built a second product as well. We actually measure employee experience and measure trust within organizations. We do similar things. We give them consistent data. We do it in a way that's actionable and we're automatically connected to their HR to allow them to do this in a way that doesn't require any administrative burden.

So how does it work? Let's take the patient experience side just so that you can see that. So the day after your dental appointment you go in, you get a text from your dentist that says, “Hey, we really value your feedback. We'd love for you to, you know, share some things with us.” Right? It's not a would you recommend. We're asking about very specific parts of their journey so that we can collect the metrics that are most important to patients—things like empathy, active listening, price transparency, things that we all want from our health care providers.

Once you submit that it's anonymous, it's private, it goes back to the dental offices, it goes back to the payers in real time. Now they can actually take this data and say, “Hey, we're struggling.” And after visit management, we need to really improve how we're connecting with patients after their treatment or after their care. And on a payer side, they can say in our whole network we're struggling with after-visit management, we need to support our providers better and ensuring that they do that well for their patients.

Ultimately, we're putting the data in the hands of the right people so that you can have the kind of experience that you want. So what does this look like for our current customers? This is one of our customers in Houston. They were struggling and they brought a different kind in to figure out why. And so within two months, they had identified several pain points.

And they were able to then make some transformations within their practice. They saw a 63% increase in same-day treatment plan acceptance, which was great because they were on the outskirts of Houston. People were driving in from a long way away, and they were able to actually perform the treatment for those patients when they needed it, where they needed it. And that led to great business outcomes for them as well.

Within two months, they saw a 23% increase in monthly production. Who here hates going to the dentist? A pretty decent amount of hands, right? It's generally not people's favorite day in their life. This helps you have a voice in your dental care. We measure the things that are evidence-based that actually, truly drive your ability to want to go back to your health care provider.

We do that. Do so in a way that's convenient to you. No one's calling you during dinner and we do so in a way that's personalized that if you do have an issue, you can get service resolution built right into that process. We are a verdict-true vertical SAS. We are built by dentists for dentists. And so a lot of our competitors are operating in tech spaces. Or you know, in hospitals. We are built with dental integrations in mind. We are built with dental expertise in mind so that our customers can truly see the differences that they want to see. And we are truly the right team to build this. I'm co-founder with Dr. Carolyn Brown who is truly an innovator in the space early days of teledentistry, early days of medical dental integration, lots of innovation from her.

And we are both experts, consultants, speakers. We have the network and the expertise to truly bring this product to market, along with a great technical co-founder and Rich Wertz, as well. People think the dental market is small. It's totally not true. There are more dentists in this country than there are emergency room physicians, pediatricians, psychiatrists, dermatologists and chiropractors combined.

So a lot of dental providers, it's a big market. We sell to those dental practices right now on a per practice basis, which is about 1 to 1. Why is now the right time to do this? Well, certainly there's been a focus on patient experience recently, both on the group side as well as on the payer side, but also from the consumer side.

Right. And especially in a post-Covid world, you expect different things of your health care provider than you probably did five or 10 years ago. And so patients are actually some of the ones who are demanding this. And the dental industry is certainly no stranger to workforce problems, especially post-Covid. About 50% of people are looking to leave the dental industry or switch jobs within the dental industry, especially hitting hardest in places like dental assistants, dental hygienist and associate dentists, within practices, it's really hard to go to an appointment when there's no hygienist to actually take care of you.

So how are we actually going to market with this? Well, certainly we have different marketing strategies for the different sized groups that we're targeting. Whether it's a small group practice who's looking to go from one doctor to five, right? That's a different why for them. And these are some of our customers and people in our sales funnel, then certainly the enterprise groups who are looking for business efficiencies across three or four or 500 practices.

And on the payer side, certainly they're looking for things like, I want to optimize my network so that the right providers are in my network. I want to reimburse those providers correctly. Right? I want to add or pay for performance incentives so that if they're performing well on these metrics, they get more dollars. And I want to do so in a way that helps me sell to large employers better.

We've had a contract with Blue Cross Blue Shield in North Carolina for two years. We're about to renew that for three more years. We're about to launch a pilot with Cigna and care should close by the end of the year as well. So what have we done? We have received money from Colorado to keep us here as a small-town company.

We closed the pre-seed round led by Greater Colorado Venture Fund last year. We built a new product this year and we just crossed six figures in error. This year. We have a lot of big stuff coming up, including the pilots, with Cigna, which is a huge, huge, huge transformer for us, as well as working to close care Oregon.

And by the end of the year, we are raising our seed round early next year and look to have our first enterprise customers on, with our employee experience product as well. So how can you help? We're hiring great folks. We would love to talk with folks who are in DSO or in the payer space as well.

So if you know any of those, we would love to talk with them. And lastly, we'll be raising our round. So if you are the seed VC with SAS and health care enterprise expertise, I've heard some of that today. I already know what you're saying. And, we would love to talk with you as well. Ultimately, we're the right people to do this with the right products to do this and finding the right traction with the big market, payers to unlock, we think we can do this and have an outsized impact both on the dental profession, but also on our town where we create jobs and keep people there.

If you've ever been to Salida or Buena Vista, Colorado, as I'm sure many of you have, if you want to keep coming there and have it not turn into Vail companies like DifferentKind that create that it's true that create meaningful outcomes for the people who can live there year round. We are the kind of company to do that.

Thank you so, so, so very much.

Kate: Amazing job Matthew. All right judges, what questions do you have for him?

Rio: I can shake things off. There's a lot of survey fatigue. When I get a text and they ask me for anything, I'm just immediately it's, like, marked to spam, right? Mostly just me. Maybe it's just me. Right. But how do you incentivize people to take surveys, fill things out, fill things out completely when otherwise we're inundated with messages.

Dr. Allen: Spam marketing? Yeah, two things there. We're talking about health care, not hamburgers. Right? So when it matters more, people are more likely to respond, which we definitely have seen. Our survey response rates are generally in the teens, which is a lot. Our goal is to be above 20%. But certainly we're proud of where we've been thus far.

And on the survey design side of things, we've done a lot. So we collect 14 experience metrics. We randomize those and only collect five at any one time so that it's one screen. It's pretty easy to do. And it's coming from, you know, it's all obviously very personalized to them of like, hey, you know, recent visit with your doctor, blah, blah, blah.

So, we've found lots of ways to get people to a click on it and be open it so that we can actually collect the data. Ultimately, the health care company or know hospitals are incentivized or reimbursed based on this kind of data. And we're certain that the future of dentistry is in that realm as well. And so it will certainly be almost, not a mandate for patients to respond, but for this data to be a part of, of certainly any kind of dental care organization.

Rio: When you guys take a look at the insights that you can get from the data collected, what are the top three insights that a dental practice is clamoring to buy, purchase, improve?

Dr. Allen: Totally. So the three things that we see that are actually most related to patient retention are, active listening, shared decision making, which is involving patients and their decisions, and then what we call patient consideration.

So gentle, sensitive. My comfort level, those things the at least the top two of those, but probably all three of those are not taught in dental school. Right. So you have all of these doctors who are very smart, who know a lot, but actually don't know how to interact with patients. And you may have experienced that, right?

We go into, a doctor and you're like, wow, they just talked at me and didn't listen to me the whole time. I hated that, right. So that's certainly, a differentiator for us as a company. We have a lot of expertise in that and are able to really create insights that, you know, from another consultant. They wouldn't, you know, be able to glean.

Rio: And then out of the customers that, you know, have, how do they so once you get the insight, like how do they solve the problem? Hey, I'm a jerk, I don't know, how do I fix being a jerk? Hey, I don't have good bedside manner. Like how do I how do I fix that?

Dr. Allen: Yeah, totally. So it depends on the company. So a lot of, organizations will have somebody within their organization that's responsible for like, training, development, those kinds of things. And so we'll work with those people to build processes internally to them. We generally try to do is white glove to customer success as we can and only hire people who can actually help, you know, to support those people, to say, hey, if you're looking to do this now, we're helping you make organizational change. We can do that as well.

Unknown: Got it. Thank you.

Dr. Allen: Yeah. For sure.

Shannon: I have a couple things. I know you've been focused on selling to individual practices or small group practices when I'm assuming it's a win, not an if. Are you guys going to solely focus on go to market with CSOs?

Dr. Allen: Yeah.

Shannon: And DSO is dental service organizations, large groups. It's basically the franchise model for dentists. It's the B2B to…

Dr. Allen: Yeah, exactly. So for us right now, we see that especially on the employee experience side, is like a huge need for them. Like we have, you know, our first 300 practice group that wants to come out in the spring. Right? So those are exciting days for us.

I think ultimately though, on the side on the patient experience side, it will likely be very focused on payers in terms of go to market, especially as we roll some of these things out that we can then, you know, go to the next payer, in the next payer, in the next payer to say, hey, look, Cigna's doing this, BlueCross BlueShield in North Carolina is doing this. Kerrigan's doing this. Like, here's how you can do it as well within your organization and produce and have a better network if you're Aetna or if you're, you know, whoever you might be. Yeah, that's a de-risking strategy. Exactly.

Shannon: My second thought, it's really about reuse. Question around incentive incentivizing patients to take these. If I am a patient and I take this, what I want to incentivize me to take this is the access to the data at the end of the day, right? Because my dentist is phenomenal, has a great bedside manner. And I learned about him through my boss in 2015. Right. There's no database outside of really horrendous Google reviews. Right. And so I'm willing to enter the data if I am then able to look at the data given back to me for a bunch of providers so I can prioritize the variables that matter most to me. Is that coming? When is that coming or are you not doing that 100%?

Dr. Allen: So as a part of the pilot signal, that's one of the things that we've talked about, right? Where, hey, this data now comes back into your provider networks as people search for you, right? To be able to give them exactly what they need. Just like I mentioned with Isabella, to be able to say, hey, if you're an insurer looking to truly differentiate yourself, why don't you collect this data and give it back to your patients so that ultimately they can make the best decision for them?

That's huge. And we actually got to talk with some of their clients as well to say this would be incredibly helpful for us if we could tell our employees, hey, go here, you can find the right dentist for you. You don't have to search Google or ask your friend, which is how people find dentists right now.

Shannon: So will they have that product or will you guys push that product out?

Dr. Allen: We will have that product for them.

Shannon: Okay. Okay. Good. I'm glad to hear that.

Dr. Allen: Yes.

Kate: I hate to say it, but we are at time. Everybody, one more round of applause. Thank you so much. All right. The time has come for our final pitcher this evening. Let's bring to the stage. Here he comes. Lockett E. Wood president and CEO of Avivid.

Lockett Wood: Well, thank all of you for putting up with me for ten minutes. And thank TriNet for inviting me. Let's move on. If I can figure out how to run this thing. I can. Here we go, we go. Okay. Our job is to clean up the world's nastiest water sewers to clean. We don't worry about that. What we worry about at the industrial wastewater white landfill leachate, which is really nasty stuff, where rainfall falls on the landfill and the water runs out. And man, it is nasty. But in Colorado, we have another major problem.

Our landfills are okay, we're dry, but our problem in Colorado is mining. And frankly, not only do we have a problem in Colorado where we're polluting 1,600 miles of streams in this state alone, and there are 30,000 abandoned mines in the U.S. alone, 500,000 worldwide. This is why we clean them up. We clean that water so you can drink it, if that's what you want to do.

So, the other one is landfill, which is landfill leachate. There's a whole brand new problem that 10 years ago nobody talked about. And that's our so-called forever. Chemicals are our pitfalls. That stuff is now understood to be hazardous. We didn't know that. We cleaned it up until we tested for it. We actually sequester 100% of the people. And then we can, because the sequester and we’re condensing into a much smaller volume, then it can be destroyed.

So what is our market? Well, the world, the world markets, what are we competing against? The what people use today to clean up their water is chemicals. Well, everybody knows one of the chemicals that's our people have been using our for 4,000 years to clean up water. They put it out in the water. You get a big precipitate and you're done.

What works? I'm not going to tell you how our technology works because I only have seven minutes. So if anybody wants to know, I don't have any secrets. I'll tell you all about it. Talk to me afterwards. But. The mining business in this country, just the water clean up is 1.2 billion landfill, which is 2 billion. We have over 2,000 landfills in the U.S. that are out of compliance today.

And I tell you, these guys are beginning to panic. And fortunately, we cleaned up landfill water in a way that a guy that was working on it for 15 years, that he had never seen anybody do that good a job. So what's your attraction? Oh, and by the way, we're a very mature startup. This is technology that I've been developing for 18 years. So, you know, finally it works. But that that I'm new country. Other people been working on it. So, you know, you.

At any rate, you just basically we've got, we're doing an install this week for the U.S. Navy for washing down airplanes. Oops. Let me let me get back on. How do I do that? I, you know, I have a Ph.D., and I came to. Anyway, we're doing a install this week at a naval base for aircraft wash down. We just completed an EPA, pilot down in Crete, Colorado for the Nelson month. And, these three bottom ones that we're working for are the three largest mining companies in the world. I can't tell you who they are, but I can tell you that there. If I even get one of them, I'm going to retire.

So who cares about who cares? Well, the only people that care are those that are trying to clean up water and trying to do it cheaper than anybody else and trying to do it in a low maintenance kind of way. And we've accomplished that. Our technology is low maintenance. We're self-cleaning. The big deal is that we create very little waste.

But what is our business model? Well, we'll sell you. We'll put the whole system in and charge you just for the water. We'll sell you the equipment and support you. We'll lease you the equipment. And actually, we've had a few people ask us for licensing agreements. We haven't agreed to that yet, but we may hear.

So what's your competition? Well, really our big competition is chemicals. That's where everybody is treating water today. And these guys, these are these are the multibillion dollar guys out there in the world. None of them have our technology. We're presently talking to all of these guys about the possibility of a strategic partnership. Who knows? That's who. That's what we like to have because they're big enough to take us over the finish line.

These guys have sort of the technology, but they struggle to make it work. And I'll describe that to you afterward if you're interested. But what do we care about mines? The reason that the mines like this is, for example, this is a mine down near Silverton. They're treating it with lime, which is the standard way of treating acid mine water.

They generate 700 truckloads of trash or sediment per year. If they were using our technology, they would generate 70 truckloads. And more importantly, our sludge is half the... The Argo mine up in Idaho Springs is throwing away a half a million a year with the platinum, because you can't take it out of one, because it's just simply two parts.

In fact, they didn't even know they had platinum, and we didn't know they had platinum because you can't test it in the water. But when you test that sludge, it turns out that there's a significant richness of platinum and it's got all the other metals copper, zinc and all those things. So here's what landfill looks like. You see it and it's better to look at than it is to smell.

You take. Yes. We can take it to the point that they want it. Take them. We could take it to drinking water quality. They don't want it that far. We take it. We take water just to the point that the people are happy with it. Right there. We trying to optimize cost and energy. And this is us. We we've been in business now series for developing the technology. And actually got it under control. Covid hit. And we just basically shut us down until this year. But 2024 is being a great year, and it looks like 2025 is going to be just super.

Kate: Lockett, I hate to say it, but we are at time. Okay, well there you go. There you go.

Lockett, round of applause. All right. Now for the tough part. You got the questions from the judges.

Alex: I'll go first. Could you say a little bit more about the cost difference of the, you know, the 700 truckloads? That was very, helpful, but you know, what kind of, cost improvement are we talking about at scale, using your approach versus line approach?

Lockett: We're not pursuing oilfield work although we do a great job on produced oil water. But a typical cost to to clean up a barrel produced oil water is about anywhere from $0.85 to a buck. Important we can do it for about $0.75. Now, that's not a big enough spread to get them to move.

However, what we are proposing this week is for eight industrial land, wastewater, which is for 24D, which is a herbicide. Those folks are paying $2.80 per gallon to get rid of theirs. We can do that for about $0.80 a gallon so we can save $2 a gallon. We'll save them about $2 million a year and we'll make about a million. So that's our cost advantage.

Alex: That's great. Thank you.

John: Question on the pilots. Can you just share a little bit about the scale of the pilots? How many gallons of water per unit will treat 50 to 200 gallons per minute?

Lockett: And of course, you have more water. You have to have more units. The pilot unit that we just finished increased, we treated at 12.5 gallons per minute and 25 gallons a minute to see what the optimum treatment levels were. And we did that because we can we got one of these units in a trailer that we can pull out to the side, and it's all self-contained except for a generator. And so one trailer to treat the water and one trailer to get the cleaned water into after we've treated it so we can test how we did. So that's the size of the pilots. And we've done pilots, much smaller than that. And that's the largest pilot we've done.

John: Okay. And, in terms of what they're looking for, pulse pilot, is it time or is it just quality of water?

Lockett: They're looking for the response to the removal of the metal. For example, green is very concerned about the amount of manganese and arsenic that they're dumping in creek. And what we've proved with even the largest treatment, the at the 25 gallons a minute. In other words, we it's a constant dosage. So the flow determines the dosage of aluminum into the water at 25 gallons per minute, we remove 99.7% of the aluminum and 81% of the manganese. They only needed us to remove 50%. So we knocked it out of the park.

Kate: Congratulations. All right, audience, the time has come for our panel of judges to deliberate. So I ask that you guys all sit tight for 2 to 3 minutes. We'll be right back with this evening's winner. After the event. We would love for you to stick around. We have drinks, we have appetizers. And before you guys go, there is a table filled with some books. And we would love to for you guys to snag them up on the way. So we will be right back.

Kate: All right. If there is a drum roll, I would ask for that to be played right now. I love it. Denver’s in the house. All right, guys. I am so excited to announce this evening's winner. Matt with DifferentKind. Matt, please come to the stage. This beautiful award.

Dr. Allen: Thank you.

Kate: You're so welcome. Thank you for everything. I'll go ahead and hand the mic. The judges want to give you a little bit of feedback. And thank you to everybody else who participated in the.

Dr. Allen: Thank you all.

Alex: I can go. I just want to first say congratulations. You are fantastic.

Dr. Allen:
Thank you.

Alex: Your shoes are awesome. Very small role. So both we thought both about the quality, like the pitch and the clarity and how compelling the pitch was, as well as kind of business, fundamentals and feasibility. And, definitely want to commend you on kind of, like clarity of the pitch. Really easy to understand what you're doing, why it's important, why it matters to your customer and just the kind of depth of understanding you have on both sides, the passion and the, the practice side and really why? There was there, you know, why this was going to be something they would actually fill out and purchase. And I really liked how you thought about kind of the segmentation of the market and how the you sell a little bit differently to each. And also the Slido thing was also compelling to me. I love Slido, so, there was there was just a really a lot to like. All the pitches were, I mean, it was really hard to pick, but, you had a lot of good things going.

Dr. Allen: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Shannon: I will add that we got back. Your go-to-market was really, really compelling. I think that if you're a startup looking to you know, speak to investors, we want to know exactly who you're selling to, why you want to sell them, why they're going to buy you, and how you're going to expand into different segments. So your ability to swap through, you know, spot size, beauty, Asos repair, was really strong. So I think that just shows I mean, not that you're going to necessarily be able to plan every month, right, but that you understand your strategy if I'm going to scale.

Dr. Allen: Great. Thank you.

Rio: Just one last point. Generally in like a pitch setting or maybe this isn't the right format, right? It's very public. It's kind of flipped of the Q&A and the pitch typically, investors have seen a version of an idea before, right? And hopefully if they're doing the job right. They've seen it 50 times. Right. And so what they want to cut to is the Q&A, the clarity of the answers to the Q&A, and then how you kind of combat maybe the 10th time you've been asked that question, or maybe the first time you've been asked that question. And so there are pieces to that where that polished, like if you're done with the slides, it doesn't mean the pitch is over, if that makes sense. And generally investors are our default answer is no in our head. And then we're hoping to get more clarity, more warmth, more of a relationship in that pitch. And so I think you did a good job on that.

I think everyone did a good job on that, on it. So we were pretty impressed with everyone. Right? And there are problems that are far more complex to describe in seven minutes and far easier to describe in seven minutes. I think some of the best founders of the best communicators, and you did a really good job there.

Dr. Allen: Thank you so much.

Kate: All right. Thank you. Thank you to our panel of judges. You guys did an amazing job, John. I see you hiding in the audience back there, and I ask that you guys all stay around, make some amazing connections while you're here tonight. I hope you enjoy the rest of Denver Startup Week. And thank you again for coming out. Bye, everybody.