TriNet PeopleForceX San Francisco Bay Area—Pitch Competition

Kate Kozak: We are thrilled to get this show on the road. So with that, I would love to welcome our amazing panelists of judges.

So Asya Bradley, she is multi exited founder and LP and a super angel. Asya, please take the stage. David Gerster, investor partner at Fusion Fund. David, please take a seat. We also have Danielle Jing, investor at Pear VC. And last but certainly not least, we have Tiq Chapa with L’Atitude Ventures. Tiq.

All right guys. Danielle, let's start with you. Do you want to share a little bit about Pear VC and kind of your focus for this year? And what has you excited for the second half?

Danielle Jing: Yeah, totally. Hi everyone. My name is Danielle. I've been with Pear for about three years now. At Pear we do pre-seed and seed investments. So we're typically the first check in or maybe the second check in. I consider ourselves a generalist fund with specialist partners, so we invest across the board. But a number of our partners are focused on specific sectors like AI dev tools, health care, biotech, as well as deep tech and, enterprise SaaS. Me personally, I cover consumer at Pear, so I spend a lot of time thinking about what are the trends, social trends and technological shifts that will bring new tools to people's everyday lives.

So, yeah, really excited to be here. And, listen to all the pitches.

Asya Bradley: Hi, I'm Asya Bradley. I'm a founder that turned into a super angel investor. So I have a portfolio of about 30, 40 companies that I've direct invested in and currently advise as a board member or advisory board member. I'm also an LP in multiple funds. Some of the funds that you may have heard of are Cowboy Ventures or Ganas Ventures.

So my background is mostly in fintech, but I'm personally very interested in, medical advances, especially when it comes to imaging and cancer. And so, we do have a, conference coming up in November that's, partnering together with UCSF and, the wisdom study. You can check it out at Wisdom study.org as well.

David Gerster: Hello, I'm David Gerstner. I'm a partner at Fusion Fund. We are a seed stage VC, based in Palo Alto. We are currently investing our $120 million at fund three. Our typical check size would be something like $1 to $4 million in a price seed round. We do invest across a pretty broad range of industries in three sectors. One is enterprise AI, which is my main focus. I have 15+ years of experience in various machine learning roles. I'm sort of Fusion's resident data nerd. We also invest in healthcare and life sciences and also hard tech, including semiconductors. And so, it's a pretty broad range of stuff. So excited to be here.

Tiq Chapa: Hopefully you can hear me. Thank you, team. Tiq Chapa, L’Aatitude Ventures a seed stage fund. $1 to $3 million checks and seed is our sweet spot. One lens we have is we support Latino and Latinx founders. And we do a lot of fintech, enterprise SaaS and proptech and excited to hear from the founders today.

Kate: Amazing. We are so thrilled to have you guys on board. And I would suggest that each and every one of you guys follows these amazing people up here. They're each making an amazing impact in their community. Danielle and Pear, they do an amazing thing with women founders. A lot of support, especially in early-stage. Asya, is everywhere. She's so involved and engaged. She has an amazing event coming up at the end of the month as well, so she's doing a lot to give back to her community. David, you heard him. Huge focus in AI. A lot with medical device. Definitely the data nerd, I see that, but Fusion Fund is really making an impact in the world. And Tiq we heard on underrepresented founders, so they're each doing amazing things there for community. And we're so proud to have them as partners. So thank you so much.

All right guys. All right, well, with that, let's bring to the stage our very first pitcher, Dilip. Please come here and share a little bit about Shaachi.

Dilip Adityan: I'm Dilip, co-founder of, Shaachi. We provide an AI-based knowledge platform for our sales teams to be able to have personal connections and conversations that make sense to build relationships with prospects. Over in the Bay area, about 12 years ago, I started with, as an engineer at Broadcom, automating that chip design and moved into product management, where I was enabling the sales teams.

I did the same role at couple of AI startups. And what I realized was it was hard to coach the SDR, the sales development representatives who moved in and out of different companies and quite often our new grads. One of the things I found, in this challenge was having them to get more people through to the account execs at the startups and being able to have conversations that are, not generic but actually, well, personalized and targeted for every customer.

This led me around, a year and a half to what I'm working on with my co-founders, Shaachi. I have a well-rounded team of co-founders with background in product marketing and tech with machine learning. And my advisors have good background in leading AI teams at Google and product teams at IBM.

Bit more into why it makes sense and why now is the right time for AI in sales operations. What Gartner and IDC have found is, one of the first moving applications for AI and coming up in the next year would be augmenting the sales operations. And half of the companies are expected to spend into tech for sales and marketing.

We have partnered with the major CRMs such as Salesforce and HubSpot, and also with the dynamic pilot that's been very successful for Concentrix. Concentrix has, used our platform to generate more pipeline for their clients. What they provide is sales as a service, for all types of businesses. And using our, AI generated messaging, have been able to get up to 22% leads through to the account executives and their clients, which is about 2X what they would normally get. We are having other clients that directly use our platforms for their sales teams in-house. We are inviting salespeople and business developers to not just use one application, but multiple applications that leverage AI for sales operations.

Our strategy is to be able to automate as well as generate personalized conversations and meeting prep by browsing the web and doing the research on behalf of the salesperson, going to the company's blogs, press releases and outside news, and figuring out what makes sense for your target customer persona. If it's marketing, then what would be most relevant for that customer would be the one that the AI would pick to have a conversation in an email.

So outbound email is not going to look like a templated message, which is hot, which has often been a problem for getting more conversions. We have also automated the process of responding to replies with the AI actually being trained with what Salesforce and HubSpot research has shown to work well. And this is something that is really hard to coach and do it on a daily basis for sales teams.

An example of what the emails look like. It would have a personalized conversation as part of the email and flows with the template. So out of your Salesforce or HubSpot, if you have thousands of prospects to communicate with, everyone gets a personalized email that resonates with what their team is talking about on the on their blogs and internet.

We have a few competitors who are, Reggie Lavender. Reggie has a platform that is still very much hands-on and the customers currently are not really satisfied with how much effort it takes. Similarly, lavender is pretty much a hands-on work where your sales teams are on LinkedIn and browsing each and every prospect. We have skipped the requirement of having hands-on work.

We are inviting, investments for our seed round. As we are looking to do co-marketing efforts with HubSpot, Salesforce and build out our vision for the product, which would have much more, like an agent type of solution for sales teams. Thanks.

Kate: Wonderful. Judges, let's turn it over to you. We'll have three minutes for Q&A.

David: I can go first. so, I find it pretty believable that you're able to tailor the message better using AI based on the information you gather about the customer. I did want to ask, are you able to close the loop and look at, you know, actual impact on conversion at whatever stage of the pipeline? And do that kind of, yeah, not just AI customization, but also, you know, like supervised learning or predictive modeling based on actual outcomes?

Dilip: Yeah, we are definitely having our thoughts and a roadmap for building that out. So I believe what you're talking about is having the AI figure out if an email campaign is actually working really well and automatically adjust. Yeah, that's something that, it's definitely...

David: Version two? Okay. Thanks.

Dilip: Yep.

Danielle: Are you generating prospects or is that something that the…

Dilip: We are not generating prospects. It's a different solution or technology to implement. There are really big companies that do it and, a lot of data out there.

Asya: Have you, have you heard of Autobound? Any chance? Okay. How do you differ from what Autobound is doing in terms of their messages and their research? And then had a second question, because the research right now you're crawling the web. What do you do with companies that maybe don't have a lot of web presence?

Dilip: Yeah. Autobound is also integrated with CRM. They're probably having similarities when they find, you know, the kind of messaging and blogs, but what they also have people do is go on LinkedIn and click a button. They also have a Chrome plugin. I feel that by skipping, any manual task, they are, able to keep the conversation more professional at the same time. Also, they're more efficient.

Asya: Are you are you grabbing the data from LinkedIn then?

Dilip: No. I think outbound is vulnerable to being banned on LinkedIn if they continue to approach the problem that way.

Asya: Have you thought of pricing already?

Dilip: Yes. So our pricing is based on the type of application we have one for generating personalized emails. That's a monthly of $100 for thousand emails. And we also have an automated sequence that takes care of the whole messaging and replying. And that's $600 for some 1,000 emails.

David: It seems like you could always also use this technology for, like, scripting calls or guiding, salespeople during customer calls.

Dilip: Yeah, that's a great idea. Yeah. It's definitely, definitely a lot of possibility.

Asya: It would be limited up to the deal, though, right? So this would really just be filling the top of the funnel, right? Because at that, at a certain point you still would have to do some manual entry to explain what an actual contract or deal looks like. So this is more the pleasant…

Dilip: Yeah. This is this is the top of the funnel and meeting prep for a release.

Danielle Jing: Gotcha.

Kate: Amazing. Judges, thank you for your questions, Dilip. Thank you so much. Thank you. It's not easy going first so thank you. All right, so we are just warming up. You may have noticed that all of our pitcher are going to be timed. So they have seven minutes to present their companies, followed by three minutes of Q&A from our lovely judges. So with that, let's call up our second pitcher Amy Kelly with Miri. Amy.

Amy Kelly: Hi, everyone. Nice to meet you. So I have a question for you all, which is how many times have you needed help with coaching in your life? You could have hired a therapist or maybe a physical trainer or a fitness instructor. Show of hands if you've ever hired anybody professional for any sort of that kind of help. Most of you.

So I envision a world where everybody who needs that kind of personalized, ongoing coaching support has access to it. And the way Miri is going to do that is through empowering the wellness and health organizations that already are distributing that content, but need it to be personalized and interactive. I'm Amy Kelly and I'm the CEO and founder at Miri. And we are building and have built an AI platform that customizes very quickly a coaching nutrition agent for organizations and coaches to distribute to scale their methodology and help more people and monetize.

So we know that it's personal. We know coaching is important and it's only really impactful if it's customized to you when you get the right help at the right time. That's why you're paying money for someone to do it. I know this because in another world, I was also a therapist myself. I've helped thousands of people. I'm a behavioral health entrepreneur.

This is the second time founding a company in this vein and I know that people need help at the right time by someone who they know and trust or an organization that they know and trust. And I also know it's very cost prohibitive to have that kind of support. Not just is it cost prohibitive, it's really hard for people to scale that kind of help. And burnout is rampant. And I knew that also, as a provider, we have a massive burnout issue in health in this country. So how are we going to do it? We are leveraging our AI platform to create customized agents that are cheaper, faster and more effective than what's out there today. By ingesting data from these organizations and commingling with our own content to create a really dynamic program that they can use to scale their coaching.

We know this is a massive industry, $39 billion that actually was, kind of impacted higher with a recent conversation I had with the GLP-1, pharmaceutical company, who's also very interested in a nutrition AI companion in the space. So this extends, we offer a B2B turnkey solution. So if you come to us and you're an organization, you've got data.

You may need data to make a product that you can then use to coach other people. And you're willing to pay for that product. The product that we have today, because you know that you have to go really in-depth with one particular coaching methodology. It can't be all over the place. You have to go deep to understand the issue.

And we're starting with nutrition. We offer real-time relational feedback, accountability, macro tracking. We offer different types of figure-it-out in the moment when you need help. I'll go back to that to show a little more about that. But there's, when you're at a restaurant, you need to order something and you're on Whole30. You don't know what to do. You can talk to your product. It can tell you what to order. It can give you a recipe on the fly based on what you need in the moment and what your coach or organization is telling you to order. We know that this is something that is really valuable for people and they also don't want to just search, search, search.

They want to talk to somebody and have that be traceable, trackable with progress, and have accountability. We offer this type of digital product with coaching as a service. Where we see a foundational layer is just the talking. So you guys know GPT. It's conversational. It has memory of you beyond that. We want to offer something that's a whole integrated whole body coaching service with engagement, with the follow up, with the progress tracking for a system and program.

That's an experience in nutrition and we offer the turnkey solution for that. We also have our own menu of content. So say you're a gym. We've got two gym partners today. We just actually signed both CrossFit gyms in San Francisco. So if you're a CrossFit member, you might see us soon. If you are in CrossFit and you want some nutrition support and maybe, you know, want to try different types of nutrition programs, we're going to have content that they can use so that they can deliver that to you.

And you can try different types of… you can do paleo, you could try vegan and they could bring their own. They have their own trainers that they might want to also add in in making their product. We have an experienced team. My co-founder is the former chief technology officer at Lyft. He found out that I was pretty good in the behavioral health space, knew the customer well, and, and, our kids went to preschool together, and he coached me to come work on this with him about a year and a half ago.

He brought some buddies at Lyft and we've got some advisors who are very deep in the health and wellness space and have built competitor digital products that are helping us move the needle a bit faster. We see our product is leading the way, both in terms of advancement with customization and a turnkey solution for B2B options, but also as a way for people to have a private and customized coaching program that goes beyond what you would get with just accountability or just education.

To date, we have 15 experts signed. We have partnerships with Ulta Beauty that we're currently building a product for. They also came in as a strategic investor in this round. We have Kintsugi which is an employee benefit solution. We have a contract out right now with Heffernan, which is a massive employer benefit solution as well. Monarch Gym, we signed, like I said last Friday an MoU with CrossFit. My intent. And we are talking to a GLP-1 organization as well.

We have a 43% product market fit scores. We're very interested in how people use us and what's valuable. You know, I can take my methodology with coaching and make it, you know, ingested. So where you're at in terms of motivation, where are you today to lose that weight or to try this diet and really make it customized to you. But we want to make sure that that methodology, plus the nutrition methodology is valuable for enough people. So we're doing rapid iterative growth tests right now and have achieved a 43% product market fit score.

Kate: And we just hit time. So any final words?

Amy: I'm raising $4 million. And if you are part of an organization that is interested in talking to me, I'm going to show you this slide which has a QR code to my Calendly. So feel free to take out your phones and scan the QR code, and I'm happy to have a conversation with you. Thank you so much.

Kate: Amazing job. Thank you, Amy. Judges, go ahead and ask your questions.

Danielle: I have a question to start off with. It's amazing that you have so much traction in so many partnerships. I'm curious to get a little bit more clarity on like, what do you define as your ICP or your like, yeah, your customer, your ideal customer.

Amy: So anyone that typically refers out their fitness or their nutrition program, so it could be fitness organizations. It could be longevity clinics. Gut health clinics were partnered with as well. GLP-1s are interesting because they want a solution that's beyond the pill. So anyone that typically when you're talking to them and they're like, “I'm sorry, I can't give you nutrition support, I'm going to have to refer you out,” that's our target. And we're partnered with those organizations.

Danielle: And, one more follow-up, which is what data do you collect from them to train your model?

Amy: Some have none. And that's why we have our own data as well. So we have a menu, a selection item of different, you know, diets, different experts that have contributed their content. That's now Miri-branded and we own. And then some have a methodology. If it's too off-center, they're not the right partner. So back to that original question. We're not going to do like a hyper customized very specific one. They have to be somewhat mainstream and within the lines of macro tracking, follow up, accountability, that sort of thing. And sorry, I lost my train of thought. I just flew in from LA, you guys, so I'm like, on stage, doing the best I can, but that's those are our best partners.

David: Are you able to take advantage of data from Apple Health or are you able?

Amy: We're integrating with Apple Health right now. Thanks for asking that. Yeah. And also Lumen. We're talking to them or we're thinking about as well. Absolutely.

David: And I also seem to recall that, intermittent fasting tracking apps made a bit of a splash a while ago. I don't know if that's also potentially relevant. A lot of different directions you could go in terms of helping people track their progress.

Amy: Absolutely. I mean, with Ulta Beauty, it's interesting because they're demographic they're looking at right now is menopause. And we've got a lot of nutrition support around menopause. They know beauty is on the inside and out. They've got 90 million consumers, you know, worldwide. And they want to find a way to give those people nutrition support, but they don't want to build it in-house.

So I think the there's lots of different ways that organizations can partner with us to really serve the needs of the people who are looking for support.

Asya: Have you considered hospitals as well? Medical systems?

Amy: I have, and we've been starting to talk to people now, a lot of the clinics and I'd love more if you have, if you're interested and you have some contacts there. We're talking to clinics that are privately owned right now. So California Integrative Medicine Clinic, a lot of longevity clinics are very interested. They always do referrals, out of the clinic for nutrition support. So, they're the first people who are converting.

Asya: What are the guardrails around it? Because I'm, what I'm understanding is that it is purely, you know, a ChatGPT type of product. So there's no actual human involved once you've kind of handed it over to your client.

Amy: So we have, we're building a dashboard right now. I'm glad that you mentioned that. A lot of what these folks want is an ability to reduce churn and help with adherence. So they want to see how many people are adhering to that, and also ways that they can pull people back in with direct message as needed. Some people want that, some people don't. We're building that out. So they're in the loop and they also…

Asya: Currently, currently this is not a profit center. This is not something that any of these organizations are making money out of. So you're basically correct. If you use them, you can make X amount.

Amy: Exactly. And they build directly invoice their people directly additionally or it helps them reduce churn. Generally speaking, so they can market people after they leave the gym for instance.

Asya: Okay.

Tiq: And whether like from old to CrossFit, how are they talking about staging a rollout? Is it initial, smaller segments, see how it goes and then grow that?

Amy: They're currently doing internal usage right now and then staging with smaller rollouts. Exactly. Heffernan is going to do an internal rollout first as well.

Kate: All right. Amy, congratulations.

Amy: Thanks, guys.

Kate: Let's give it up for Amy, everybody.

Amy: Thank you so much. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. Thank you.

Kate: All right. With that let's bring up our third pitcher. We have Premal Patel with Cell Infinity Bio. Please come up.

Premal Patel: Fantastic. Thank you. So well thank you for this opportunity to introduce Cellinfinity to you. We are a biotechnology company a cell therapy company. We design, identify immune cells that are supercharged, genetically enhanced so that they can fight cancer. And that's essentially the picture that you see, a blue immune cell fighting the cancer cell.

And in terms of our overall vision, you see traditional discovery is slow. It's modifying one gene at a time in the hopes that the cell that you identify is that much more potent. We mutate 20,000 genes at the same time, you could think of this as a marathon where you have 20,000 racers, and then we allow a race to occur and then allow the race to identify the one modification that is truly the winner.

So this approach is much faster to find winners. It's precise, more reproducible with increased translatability. And in terms of the overall, Car-T therapy, it is FDA-approved in liquid tumors and it does work really well, resulting in cures after a single dose. However, in solid tumors, this form of therapy really hasn't been successful. And that's what we're trying to do; identify genes that will empower immune cells to kill solid tumors.

And so in terms of our investment thesis and where we are right now, we can, generate a broader set of modifications more than any other company. And by that we, I mean, we make isagenix cells identical in every way except a single gene is modified times 20,000. These could be gain of function changes or loss of function changes.

We could enhance or delete any gene. Not only can we, we have done this, we've done these evolution experiments, and we've already identified a series of genes that makes immune cells better. And now these genes become part of our clinical product. And that's what we aim to next. Our clinical portfolio includes a lead which is slated to be in the clinic in 2025 timeframe.

We have a really good management team. We've raised $13 million, including with from a pharma partner in venture funding. And then, in non-dilutive NIH grants, we have another $3 million. So total of $16 million. And essentially, what we're looking for our partners to get us into the clinic for the next phase. It's a for-biotech company. So $35 million to get us all the way into the proof of concept phase two clinical studies.

And this is our management team. I'm Premal Patel, I'm a physician scientist, was an oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering. But my dad passed away when I was there, which brought me to a life of drug development, finding better therapies for cancer. I worked for a better part of a decade at Genentech within their research and early development program. Then I was a vice president at Pfizer and then chief medical officer and CEOs, a variety of different companies. Our technology was found out of Yale University. Actually, we have a lab at Yale and a lab that, right near UCSF here.

And our rest of the executive team has substantial experience at the C level in leading, cell therapy companies, including Margo, who is a CSL, at Kite, and at Lyle and Thomas, had research for us, and he led research for, for allergy. So really an experienced team. And what we're here to do is identify new ways of treating cancer, using cell therapy, particularly solid tumors.

And the challenges are multifold. The cells that we have, the immune cells find it difficult to enter the solid tumor environment. If they do enter the cell tumor environment, it is an incredibly unfriendly, hostile environment for immune cells. And the immune cells often die within tumors. So can we make them persist? Can we enhance our potency? Can we make them live longer? Each of these elements may require different sets of genes or mutations. And so, we identify these genes first ex vivo. And then we design therapies, create immune cells that are endowed with these gene enhancements. Okay? So, our overall technology allows us to do gain of function as well as loss of function, as well as engineering the warhead of the T cell itself—the warhead that detects the cancer cells.

So in aggregate, we can, interrogate enormous sequence space larger than any other company that I know of. And not only can we, but we have done this. And this is a data slide in which we show that we start off with many thousands of starters, each with a unique mutation. And after many cycles of treating cancer cells, we are left with a few cells that can continue to kill cancer cells across many days to weeks to months.

And we then identify these genes and they become part of our clinical product. And in terms of our clinical pipeline, they include two types of therapies a T cell therapy and K cell therapy to immune cells that we engineer outside the body and then put them back into patient's body.

The third form of therapy is something quite novel. We can actually engineer cells directly within the body itself by taking a virus and infecting T cells, and then they harbor these, in DAO genes. Okay, so very novel technologies with three leading products. And essentially, let's skip this line. We can show that our overall therapies are better than the standard conventional therapies that you see, the best gene that we know of in T cells is to knock out PD-1.

But the genes that we've identified empirically are better than that. So how we can benchmark against our competitors to show that there is a more durable, longer, quicker response relative to other genes. And this is my last slide. Essentially what we aim to do is to continue development going into Phase 1 and Phase 2 clinical studies. We're doing GMP manufacturing now and IND enabling studies leading to clinical trials for our lead product and our second product, in case someone is about a year behind. And then we're also developing this ex vivo technology. So all together, $35 million that fund the company for three-plus years going into the clinic. So thank you for your attention. And I look forward to questions.

Kate: Thank you from all judges. I'll turn it over to you.

David: Apologies if this is a bit of a basic question, but is the focus more on, targeting specific types of cancer and programing the T cells to do that? Or is it making general changes to the T cells so they survive better in the solid tumor environment?

Premal: Yeah, it's a little bit of both because solid tumors we do need broadly the T cells need to be more potent to get in there. But we also, the warhead has to be specific to a specific type of cancer. Right? So we've optimized the warhead itself to go after the two types of cancer. I didn't go through the details, but it's kidney cancer and colon cancer are the warheads that we've designed.

David: And have you did any animal studies yet?

Premal: Yeah, we've done animal studies and the drug works on animals in mice.

David: Thanks. Okay. I guess I'll also ask, are you going down the 510k path for approval or are you doing de novo?

Premal: So it's a therapeutic. So we'll have to go through, you know, efficacy studies overall. It's a done over therapy.

David: Thanks.

Danielle: What do you see as the biggest challenge for you building this business?

Premal: I think so as, founder, initial CEO, I actually think in today's world it is with novel technology. Paradoxically, it's just getting enough funding. And so we have a lab of 20 individuals to make sure that they're funded, over the long term to execute on not only the preclinical program, but also the clinical programs. So I think in this world, it's relative to, you know, the companies that have been in the part of in the past in this era, it's funding.

Audience member #1: [Unintelligible.]

Premal: Yeah, no, that's a really good question. So the tip of the warhead that would actually attack the cancer is an antibody fragment, right? That would bind to the cancer cell and then the explosive is actually the T cell itself. The immune cell is in amazing reservoir. It has an amazing capacity of killing pathogens. Mother Nature designed an amazing system. And that's what we're using as our bomb, if you want to call it that.

Audience member #1: [Unintelligible.]

Premal: That's right. You can think of it as a flagellum. And also, the ability to infiltrate a solid tumor is very difficult for our current T cells. Cancers resist immune cells. So we design immune cells that could go deep into cancer cells.

Kate: I love the engagement. And thank you for the questions from all. All amazing job. Okay. Awesome job. All right guys. With that it's time to bring up on stage our very next pitcher. Irosha de Silva with Marketrix.

Irosha de Silva: Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks a lot everybody. It's great to be here. So yeah. So my name is Irosha. I'm the CEO, founder and CEO of Marketrix. So essentially with Marketrix we are building AI avatars as a website concierge. So if I'm to tell you a little bit about myself, I've been in all things tech things of my childhood build multiple, successfully failed startups, I would say.

Right. My previous startup I started from my garage, which is like all creative abilities, software product services company, right? So I build it from my garage and give to a team of 40. So this product actually as a concept, it came in from one of our customers. Right? Who's in the manufacturing space? And then they wanted to build up a sales pitching platform.

Right. So then we built it for them and we thought, like, and actually there is a product concept, because some other manufacturers, they like, you know, adopted the same concept as well. But we, you know, like little did we know we were actually going in the path of competing with Zoom or Meta, like, you know what?

Not so we pivoted, towards, using the same, tech that we build there to, like, you know, making it a simple website plug in, that would trigger an AI avatar as a website concierge. Right. Sconco, to tell about the main problem. Right. So now in the U.S., if you look at it, small to, like, medium size companies, they are, spending an average of at least $2 to $10 million on sales and support.

Right. Me being in the enterprise, sales space as well, I, you know, I know for a fact that about at least like, you know, 70 to 80% of the interactions in sales and support is quite, very much repetitive. Right? So we are tackling this, tackling to solve this. But at the same time, if you look at it, the sales and support, it is a front.

We are like, you know, we are, the teams are actually front-facing. Right. And at the same time, that personal connection is very much important. Right? So this is where, like, you know, we are, bringing in AI avatars to also like, going to have that, like, you know, that interpersonal aspect as well. But at the same time, like, you know, how we can take off all the repetitive aspect in the sales and support landscape.

So to tell you about the product, of course, like, you know, it's a simple website widget that would, trigger an AI avatar on the website. Right? And then, we bring digital twins. So this is actually quite a, like an a love feature by sales teams because then they can instead of, like, you know, doing the, like, you know, like, you know, instead of doing the same pitch over and over, how they can, like, you know, deploy their digital twin and then essentially, like, you know, allow the digital twin to take up, like, you know, some of them. Right? And then, we have the core browsing mode and the focus more. So these were then your digital twin or from our avatar library when it's deployed on the website, the avatar is able to take up a conversation, either, from the core browsing mode or, like, you know, having a face-to-face conversation. Right? So think of this like more of an interactive experience, what you get from a standard chat base solution. Right? And then of course we have marketing slide because like, essentially like sales is at a stage where AI can completely take over through sales and support through AI.

This way. like, we have a hybrid mode where you are internal sales and support teams can kick in at any time. Then of course, like, you know, session recordings are maintained to keep on like, you know, improving the capabilities. Right?

So, to talk about the capabilities of the avatar. So currently it acts as a website concierge of goods channel, being the website. Then we are headed towards product demos and sales pitches. Right? Going into web apps and mobile apps. And then how can the avatar, like, you know, gather requirements during negotiations. Right? And like integrating into channels like AR and VR and like, you know, spaces like that, then of course closing deals and final like, you know, holographic space. Why? Because, like, you know, I mean, the experience we are replicating is if you really think about it, you walk into a showroom, right? And a really good non-intrusive salesperson would come to you, greet you like, you know, sort of take you through the showroom, like, you know, different aisles and then basically close the deal. Right? So how can that experience be replicated with your website being your storefront.

Right? So essentially avatars are on the rise, like, you know, currently the tech space agents are they are then of course, the space agents are there. The next thing is essentially visual based agents. So that's like, you know, we are we are really aiming at.

To talk about our business model. We have a freemium model. So we have the free plan and then the startup plan at $29 a month, pro plan at $99 a month. And then the enterprise plan is there. So to talk about the market size, so globally, about $4 trillion is spent on like, you know, sales and support teams. Right? And then in the U.S., it's about $938 billion. And like, you know, U.S., so if you look at SaaS companies, about $10 billion right spent on sales and support teams. So we aim to like, you know, capture 10% of that spend essentially speaking.

So to talk about our team, of course, like, you know, myself is the CEO and then we have Odysseus, who's from a, ex-engineering director, like, you know, we have the very good AI and ML backgrodiund. He's our CTO. And then we have Suren, angel investor and then, advisor. And like, you know, he's from a fintech background. And then we have Akshatha, who's ex, like in a position at U.S. Bank and then MUFG. Kristen, very good, like, you know, marketing background, ex-Visa and ex-Leo Burnett. Right? And then Wathmi, a customer support manager who's right over there, and then we have our engineering team and, engineering team, Ajithsanth, Sardinian channel connectivity. He's a UX designer.

So in terms of our traction, we have, a grand total of 10 customers right now. And in the pipeline, we are, early stage. Right? So then we have 10 customers right now in the, B2B, SaaS, legal and education sectors. Right. And then in the pipeline now we are essentially like, you know, onboarding, we have about like 15 more in the pipeline. Now we are seeing, like, you know, people discovering our product, coming to the site, like, you know, implementing and then basically that whole loop. Right?

So and our ask is for our pre-seed round of $500,000 at $5 million post-money valuation. So thank you very much. So essentially, like, you know, would love to see the world where the sales and customer support and customer experiences are being transformed with AI avatars coming into the picture. Thank you very much.

Kate: Great job, Irosha. All right, judges, let's have it.

Danielle: I can start. What metrics are you tracking to show attribution or effectiveness?

Irosha: So essentially speaking, I mean, right now, you are able to see who are the live traffic that is there on the site right now. Right? And like, with the interferences, like, you know, from AI avatars coming in and from your like, you know, whoever the internal agents that they are, how they can effectively drive this traffic towards a conversion. Right? So you run an ad campaign, right? And then you sort of flagged and then you drive that traffic to like a particular land instead of just hoping, like, you know, the traffic, sort of, like, you know, submits a particular CTA. How can our avatar sort of facilitate that in a non-intrusive manner and then drive that towards an effective conversion?

So, yeah, just like, you know, I mean, right now it's like, no move on the data we are providing to the customers. Right? But we are building analytics module where you can actually see it on your own.

Danielle: How are you differentiating from intercom?

Irosha: So I would say Intercom Zendesk. Like, you know these are and even if you look at like, you know, Hubspot's chat widget that's there to you. Right? So these are sort of chat-based. I mean, all these are mostly text-driven, like, you know, interactions that you would do. Right? So you would go there and then you would like, you know, sort of ask a question, or maybe it would pop up with like a particular you need help or you need to connect with an agent.

So here, what we bring in is more for different experience, I would say. Right? Whereas the avatar would greet you, like, you know, guide you to different sections with call browsing. Have a meeting with you. Right? And if like, you know, just like even chat. Also if the, like, you know, if AI chat cannot cater that, then it would drive to a real agent.

So in the same aspect like you know in our case also it would write to a real agent, but the real agent would come in a real meeting with you and guide you once again with core browsing and then make more of an authentic experience, I would say.

David: And so it sounds like part of your differentiation is that the human is more tightly in the loop. Is that the idea?

Irosha: I would say that. And at the same time, like, you know, how can because now, if you look at, more of complex products, right, of course, e-commerce, you can take just a decision. Okay. Pair of sneakers. Right? But if it's more of a complex product, like a legal product or even education product, you would actually need to speak to someone, right?

So I mean, that's the usual I mean, even B2B sales as well, if when it's, enterprise deal. Right? So how can we reduce the time duration, right. Rather than you sort of getting into a meeting and like, you know, with all of that, how can we make that more instantaneous? Yes? Right? And then like, you know, make more of an effective conversion.

David: Thanks.

Irosha: Thank you.

Tiq: I think over email you might have mentioned participating in an Nvidia program. So how you're hoping to advance the platform, through that and then next 12 months, what are some milestones you want to get to?

Irosha: Yes. So we got into Nvidia's inception program and Microsoft for startups. And by C, we were at the top 10, but we couldn't get through unfortunately. So, there are, I mean, with Nvidia, of course, specifically, we are now integrating Nvidia's Maxine life portrait model, right? So that, like, you know, how, avatars can become I mean, it's an early stage, like a new product that they've just launched, right? So to basically make the avatars much more hyper realistic and then, even the digital twins, how they can become much more realistic, understand sentiment analysis, like, you know, and things like that.

Kate: Wonderful. Let's give a round of applause to Irosha

**Irosha:**Thank you very much. Thanks a lot. Great to be here.

Kate: With that, it is time for our fifth competitor. Please bring to the stage Lizzy Kolar with Scope Zero. Lizzy.

Lizzy Kolar: Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to be here. Let's see how this works. Perfect. Okay. So at Scope Zero, we created what's called the carbon savings account, or CSA. And the CSA is both a financial wellness benefit for employees and a corporate sustainability strategy for employers, because ultimately, we provide strong financial incentives to employees to help them upgrade their home technology and personal transportation, which then reduces a company's work from home and commute emissions.

Before we dive in, just a brief introduction of myself and my co-founder. So my background is in mechanical engineering and my expertise is within residential utility consumption. I used to work for a company called Ameresco, where I was designing energy and water efficiency upgrades for military-based housing all over the U.S. I left that position for grad school at Stanford in a program that's called Sustainable Design and Construction.

So again, focused on that energy efficient building design. That's where I met Kaitlin, whose background and expertise is within employee benefits. She used to work at Guideline, which is a 401(k) company. So when we came up with the idea for the carbon savings account, it was truly grounded in our expertise in employee benefits, corporate sustainability and residential utilities, and how these areas can intersect to create significant financial and environmental impact.

So the first question I like to ask when I give talks is how many gallons of water do you think that the average person in the U.S. uses just at home, just inside per day? I usually, the most common answer I get is like 10 to 12 gallons per person per day. So let's break it down. These are the five devices that typically consume water at home. The average shower is eight minutes. Average shower head two gallons per minute. That's already 16 gallons for one shower. Sinks, another ten gallons a day. Toilets another 13 gallons. Washing machines and dishwashers add on another 11 gallons. That's a total of 50 gallons per person per day just for indoor water use. Just at home. That's over 18,000 gallons per year.

The crazy thing is that this can easily be cut in half with just simple efficiency upgrades. This potential is true not just for your water devices at home, but also for your energy consuming devices. So I just want to set the stage with the potential here. So not only are you wasting all this water with outdated home tech, you're also wasting all the money that you're paying for to have that water.

So this, then leads into some of the trends we're seeing both in the corporate world and with individuals. So on the employees side of things, there's been a huge shift to hybrid and remote work, which increases your utility bills until rates have gone up. There's tighter household budgets with inflation on the sustainability side, individuals are starting to care.

What can I do to contribute to a healthy climate? And I want my companies to demonstrate that commitment as well. So on the employer side, you're seeing a bunch of aggressive climate goals, but they need an effective budget to meet those goals. They also want to engage employees in the corporate sustainability efforts and then attract and retain top talent, all while staying, within affordable benefits packages.

So the carbon savings accounts, HIEs all of these pieces together in a simple and familiar employee benefit framework where you have the employee and the employer both contributing funds to the account. Then the employee uses that money for eligible home technology and personal transportation upgrades that reduce their utility bills, fuel expenses and carbon footprints. The average home in the U.S. could save over $5,000 a year with these upgrades, which greatly broadens our employee engagement as opposed to if we only targeted folks concerned with their carbon footprint, simultaneously serving as a corporate sustainability strategy because we reduce work from home and commute emissions.

Our product is a platform that facilitates the benefit. You can ultimately think about it in these three main pillars: fintech, analytics, marketplace. So on the fintech side, we create and administer the bank account, facilitate the cash flow. We have a marketplace of vendors that sell and install the eligible upgrades.

We surface relevant utility and government incentives. And then on the data analytics side, we create an energy and water profile of each employee's home and a fuel profile of their vehicles to do all of the performance tracking and to provide customized upgrade recommendations. So here's what our employee dashboard looks like. You can see the account balance at the top, a handful of recommended upgrades based on your profile, your lifetime financial and environmental savings. You can also... And then we have a dashboard built out for the employer admin so they can see companywide financial and environmental savings and then a breakdown of those enrollment and engagement statistics.

Now is the perfect time for the carbon savings accounts for all of the trends that I listed earlier on. And just for the magnitude of impact that exists here, if every employee in the U.S. that is offered a 401(k) also had a carbon savings account, we could save over $300 billion a year in residential utilities and fuel expenses, which would be the environmental equivalent of removing 125 million cars from the road.

The average car in the U.S. is about 13,000 miles per year. So think about that at scale. And just to summarize a couple of the pieces we've touched on so far, the CSA ultimately serves as this low cost, high impact benefit. It's much more affordable than like a typical 401(k) or HSA, for example. And it provides not just the financial wellness, but also the environmental wellness.

It's effective, equitable and timely. You know, 99.9% of employees are housed and or use transportation modes other than their feet to get around. So I'll touch on this in a minute. How diverse our user base is and all of this can provide triple bottom line savings financial, environmental, social, and actually, we're seeing companies use the CSA to reduce overall spending on both their ESG goals and their benefits package.

So where are we today? We've raised about $3 million in funding. We've used this money to build out our engineering design and go to market teams. The two biggest types of customers that we see traction with are Fortune 500, with formal climate commitments and then small mission aligned companies. It could be utilities, nonprofits, climate tech, people tech, etc.

We've launched with New York Life and HearstLab, just to name a couple of, of those companies. And right now we are focused on, growing our reach in those two target audiences. And just to wrap this up, make it a little bit more tangible with the types of metrics we're seeing within our user base.

I'll touch on some of the metrics we've seen with New York Life. So with New York Life, we hit their enrollment cap within the first 10 days of launch. Just three months into launch, 85% of that cap had used their CSA is to make significant home tech upgrades. We have a net promoter score of 95. And then my favorite piece about the CSA is, again, how equitable it is.

You know, most of New York Life employees live in New York and New Jersey. With New York Life alone, users in 25 different states, red states, blue states, urban and rural settings. The age range is young 20s to mid-60s. So basically the entire working age spectrum, and it's a healthy mix of renters and homeowners as well. So with that, I thank you for your time and I'm happy to answer any questions.

Kate: Thank you, Lizzy. And right at time, very succinct. All right, judges, I'm going to turn it over to you. What questions do you have for Lizzy.

Asya: I love this, I love this. You've hit everything. And honestly, I just want another conversation with you later on.

Lizzy: Oh, well, thank you. I appreciate it.

David: So I think, it does seem sort of tailor made for large enterprises that are saying, you know, we're going to be net zero by 2030 or 2040. And it's just this somewhat nebulous goal that, like, the CEO kind of tosses out there. Are you able to kind of give them some sort of numerical estimate about how you perhaps are in some sense offsetting, you know, whatever they estimate their carbon footprint to be?

Lizzy: Yeah, absolutely. trying to figure out how to condense this answer. So, if a company reports on their carbon emissions, there's a standard accounting framework that they need to use. It's similar to financial accounting, but in the carbon world we call it scope one, scope two, scope three. That's actually the inspiration for the name of our company, scope zero.

Anyway, scope three emissions include work from home and commute, and scope three is usually always the biggest type of category of emissions at a company and the hardest to measure and control. So there is a huge value add for companies in the fact that we can measure their baseline work from home and commute emissions, because it's so hard and inaccurate for them to do that on their own.

And then not only do we measure the baseline, we can report any progress as people engage with the CSA, because we know exactly what you're purchasing, because you're purchasing it through our platform. So we know how much money and carbon and energy and water you save from that new showerhead or from that new refrigerator, for example, to give you a ballpark number.

Again, back in the napkin calculation. But think about a company like Nike. I think I just looked it up. They sell like 800 million pairs of shoes a year or something. Something crazy like that. They only have 50,000 employees. So, you know, if you think about them as a whole, their workforce is quite small. Their product is quite big.

So you think that a lot of their emissions and they are from a lot of the emissions are from that supply chain. About 5% of all Nike emissions are just from work, from home and commute. That's crazy. It's so, it's such low-hanging fruit. And by using the CSA, not only are you drastically reducing company emissions, you're also providing this immediate, long-lasting financial wellness for their employees.

David: And are you specifically focused on water or was that just an example?

Lizzy: That was just an example. So the main categories I know you didn't have a good view here. It's appliances, water, lighting and plug loads and then heating and cooling. Those are the efficiency categories. We also have clean energy like home solar and storage and then clean transportation like electric vehicles, public transit, commuter bikes, and then like an outdoor section as well. So, smart irrigation systems or electric lawn equipment.

David: Thanks.

Danielle: How are you opening the accounts?

Lizzy: The bank account themselves? Yeah. So we have two offerings. It's the savings account framework and then it's a reimbursement-only framework. So with the reimbursement-only, we don't need the accounts with the savings account framework. We partner with the banking as a service provider to do, do that integration with bank partners, at least for the first couple of years. I think ultimately, once we hit a certain scale, it'll make sense for us to bring that in-house. And actually, we've already gotten quite a bit of interest from some of the major players in the financial space to serve as that fintech partner.

Kate: Yeah, sure. Go ahead. We'll take a question from the audience.

Audience member #2: [Unintelligible.]

Lizzy: Yeah, so let's just focus on the home tech upgrades right now. There are about 30 or so upgrades that would be CSA eligible and on average those devices will each will last about 10 years. So the average person is going to upgrade like one to three devices a year. But the crazy thing is, is that once you get through those 30 devices in 10 years and you just have to start doing it again.

So the, the CSA actually has this inherent quality where we have this lifetime relationship with our users and not everybody stays in the same house. You know, people when you move, okay, now you upgrade this new home or if you're using your CSA for ongoing payments like public transit or financing your EV, your financing, your solar, there's just a lot of ways to be creative. And then, you know, some people might use it as a rainy-day fund when your water heater breaks. You know, it's just fantastic to have that, that safety net where now you can afford and justify that more expensive, more efficient device that's going to be better for your finances from day one.

Kate: Lizzy, amazing job and thank you so much. Sorry, we got to keep it at time. Thank you. Amazing job.

All right. It's time for our sixth and final pitch competitor. So with that, let's bring to the stage Ryan Swoboda, CEO of NAVAN Bio. Ryan.

Ryan Swoboda: Thank you. I just want to say thank you, TriNet, for putting this on. This is a great event just to bring everybody together and, great presentations. Awesome to be a part of such a great group working on some exciting companies and having an esteemed panel here to speak with and share this opportunity with.

Also great to be here. I just got in from Texas and the weather in San Francisco is a lot better. Yeah. Much better. So we should, you know, take note of that. So just to kick us off here, NAVAN was born at the intersection of engineering and biology. And at NAVAN, we are deeply embedded in the new nanotechnology age. And for human health, we're applying our revolutionary nano straw technology to enable the next generation of cell-based medicines.

And we heard quite a bit about this from Premal. We should definitely talk more after this about the impact and the power of cell therapies, which is a new modality, relatively speaking, for medicine to train or reprogram, for example, a patient's own immune cells to identify, attack, cure, correct a disease. And we've already seen approved therapies with remarkable, you know, seemingly impossible results with, for example, stage four cancer patients where they saw with no other options, over 80%, in some instances, complete remission, which is truly powerful, of a modality to treat patients.

And we're, you know, solving a key problem related to making these types of new medicines, which, which is fundamentally linked to the delivery. And I'll cover that in just a moment. But when we look at this new modality, as, as a treatment space, really that power, as Premal has mentioned, hasn't really quite translated, unfortunately, to more complex disease settings such as solid tumors, earlier lines of treatment or other therapeutic areas such as autoimmune disease, inflammatory diseases.

And we're solving that problem with partners. And we just hit a, achieved a big milestone, proving that we can do things no other technology can do with cancer patient cells in the field at a major research hospital in Texas. So we're very excited about that. We've got tremendous momentum and I'll cover some of that data in just a moment and what that means for the field.

But big picture, you know, we're excited to advance through this technology, new solutions for patients to enable the impossible. So let me set up the problem for you. So to make these therapies, you need to put materials into the cells. So training these cells to fight disease requires intracellular delivery. But all these methods shown up here, all fall short of getting the job done to translate to the patient. So for example, toxic chemicals, or viral infections, inside the cell or electrically blasting open holes into the cells with high voltages or squeezing and tearing cells open, and hoping that the molecule of interest gets into the cell.

All these methods, can get publications and papers, which is fantastic. It can help to identify new targets. but actually making those new medicines, is a major challenge, because forcing cargo into sensitive cells simply kills or perturbs those cells in certain AV. And literally much like, giving a patient a shot, we've gone down to the ultimate nanoscale to gently and precisely deliver molecules directly in a metered fashion into cells in a physical way without perturbing or causing stimulation to those cells.

So by reducing the cell stress, we're able to unlock new types of reprograming or put materials into cells or take material out of cells. And this was developed out of Stanford University. And, based off of part of my graduate thesis with professor Nick Melosh, and we have fantastic IP state protection, the exclusive license from Stanford, the technology is differentiated, validated and protected.

And so here's some, big milestone data that I'm happy to share with you in a powerful quote from a world-leading collaborator enabling, improving same-day delivery and injection of cells into these cells. And then we put them directly into mice within 30 minutes without needing the cells to recover or heal. The impact of this taking a step back means we can use this technology to take a process that takes days to weeks down to within a day to enable decentralization and personalization of these medicines, which in our view, is ultimately, are a big mission to increase accessibility, but here's the powerful, quote, “Bioactive cargos into patient cells show target modulation in vivo with biological evidence of delivery in function never seen before.” So we're very excited about this and aiming to publish with this collaborator later this year. And fundamentally, just going a little bit deeper. We don't stimulate these cells and we don't create these pores that last very long or kill the cells.

And that's completely different from these other methods we're leveraging, that unique ability of our technology to, in a two-pronged approach to unlock these new types of cell products for unstimulated cells. So in certain areas and certain indications, in autoimmune disease and inflammatory diseases, we have some, pre-clinical again, biotech company like Premal mentioned, some preclinical assets where we're targeting and pushing those forward with partners.

And then, what we call decentralization 2.0. So there's been incremental improvements in making these therapies. But we have something that's truly different, unique and powerful in terms of cell yield, health and the point-of-care possibility, as well as some exciting things we can do with analytics for these therapies. And we're taking a co-development and licensing approach in that space around our core technology.

We have some key partners in place ready to take the innovation, towards, towards the clinic. So some big pharmas here, as well as, some key translational centers that we've been making some, some key progress with. And we are generating revenue now. Amgen, our long-term partner, is committed to backing around, I'll cover those details in a moment.

But we also have some significant potential licensees and acquirers with real active conversations and discussions tracking towards inflection points. So this isn't just a NASCAR slide with a bunch of logos. These are real companies that we've been tracking and advancing with. And, actually, just to go back here and I do just want to highlight, there is a high value acquisition comparable in the space for a new drug delivery, technology.

And we're tracking towards those inflection points. We know the playbook. And so it's very exciting for us to be able to move these, these groups along in that area, high level. There's tremendous value around this true platform. Our initial focus is in the research use only space. We're targeting this critical, markets of around 2 billion, forecasted out to 2030.

But ultimately, the unique capabilities of our platform, expand beyond into other markets, for example, our ability to reverse, the flow through the straw to sip out molecules is something generating significant interest from potential strategic. And we've been gaining some great, traction with irons in the fire there for analytical development. There's a clinical tool.

And that's a key part of our next phase is to, to advance in terms of that, into that key point. and then also the upside for unlocking new types of cell therapies where we can partner in license in terms of capturing some of that value. We've got a great interdisciplinary team together to take the technology and products to the next level, backed by a world class scientific advisory board, key folks in the field from M.D. Anderson and other centers like Fred Hutch at UCSF.

Here's the scope of the round, key milestones for the system and device, as well as with, the preclinical assets, as I mentioned. And we've got some key milestones over the next year that we can achieve with that setting us up for our bigger next round. And if you're interested in enabling the impossible for patients and helping to join the journey on that, please, please talk to me. And happy to connect.

Kate: Thank you. Thank you. Ryan.

All right, guys, let's turn it over to our judges for their final round of questions.

David: Thanks for that. Have you done any studies where you've been trying to test specific therapies using this approach?

Ryan: So, we have, some in-vivo studies ongoing right now in mice. Yep.

David: Thanks.

Ryan: And the results are promising so far.

David: So, have you guys benefited from any non-dilutive funding along the way.

Ryan: Yeah. So we've had an NSF grant, Phase 2B, so we've closed $1.15 million over the life of the company. We do have some tremendous opportunities shaping up for both national funding, for example, ARPA-H and we've got some great connections in Texas, as well as, both here in California and Texas as well.

David: And it sounds like your initial focus is the therapeutic approach or delivering into cells.

Ryan: Correct. Delivering into cells, absolutely. But mostly through the device.

David: Yeah. Thanks.

Asya: Can you describe the device a little bit more?

Ryan: Yeah, absolutely. So, I should have brought it actually. But it's, it's relatively small. So at the end of the day, the core technology, think of it like, you know, there's transparency films or like a thin plastic. So that's basically what we have. But it's a nano filter. And on one side of it you'll have these tiny little nano straws.

So we can put that into any form factor that our users need for the target research market. We have little, tiny wells that have these about a million little straws that point up, and so it's no bigger than, like, a desktop printer, and there's a little cartridge that goes into it. And the clinical device will be a similar size.

But we are, for the clinical side, looking to integrate into an end-to-end system. And we've been building some great momentum. We have three public companies, advancing and due diligence, all excited about scaling and potentially integrating towards an end-to-end system. You can imagine sort of like a bedside delivery device.

David: Are there potential vaccine delivery applications?

Ryan: There is some potential there, for cellular vaccines. I would say, you know, this is mostly outside the body, so ex-vivo approaches, so you're reprograming cells and then bringing it back into the patient. So there is a market there, but I think that there are other methods that can sort of get that done.

Asya: I'm trying to still imagine like what the technician is doing with your with your tool.

Ryan: From the workflow.

Asya: You know, typically you would see you would imagine a pipette, you would imagine the little, you know, dots that they're typing into. So I'm trying to understand a little bit more what your product looks like.

Ryan: Right. So the current system that we've used in the field and have partners wanting to buy and place those units, that's more of a manual system. So the workflow generally is there is pipetting. You're you're putting cells directly into these, well, plates. And then you're putting the cargo underneath, the plate. And then there's those are the consumables. And then you put that in the device, push a button. It's about a minute time as it loads and moves the material into the cells.

But we've built it in the standard format so that can be automated for high throughput screening. And we've got some target applications there for big pharma.

Asya: There’s tray kind of a thing and pressing a button.

Ryan: Correct. That's the main goal. Yep.

Kate: All right, Ryan. Thank you very much.

And that does it. You guys have now heard from all six of our contestants. So this is the exciting part. I'm going to pull our judges off stage for just a couple of minutes. I ask that you guys all please remain in your seats. We're going to discuss, you know, who was the standout of this evening's pitch competition. There can only be one winner. And they're going to walk away with $5,000 in TriNet services credit.

So exciting times, guys. So stay tuned. We will be right back.

Kate: We have a winner to announce. All right> Well, all of our judges found value in the founders and CEOs that presented today. And ultimately there is one trophy to take home, along with the $5,000. But, we definitely appreciate all of your participation. And after much deliberation, I'm excited to say that Lizzy with Scope Zero is this evening's winner.

Here is your amazing award. And each of the judges wanted to give you a little bit of feedback as well about this evening's pitch.

Asya: Congratulations, Lizzy. I don't think there's that much feedback from my side, but I would just say on the bass side, as one of the founders of bass ever, happy to talk to you about that to make sure that you don't deal with any kind of possible pitfalls if you're covering what's going on in the bass world, right now. But, yeah, happy to talk about that. But congratulations. I think you've got an incredible product and an incredible team behind what you're doing and the traction that you have. That was all very impressive. And you obviously know your stuff and you know what it is that you're trying to deliver to the market.

Lizzy: Thank you.

David: Yeah, I would echo that. I was really struck by the conviction and the passion in your pitch. It was clear that you had really thought this through to a very high level of detail. You know, in general, I think institutional VCs anyway, may have a little bit of skepticism about that general channel strategy.

Right? But I thought you articulated the traction you have pretty well. And I thought it was a plus that when I asked you that question about carbon accounting, you were like, “Okay, well, how much time do we have in the cave like this?” Actually very detailed answer and I mean, I think that's highly relevant to the kind of, you know, big enterprise customer they're going after.

Congratulations.

Lizzy: Thank you.

Tiq: I think the second it was said your granularity there around with, points like 18,000 gallons per year per person or the 30 kind of home upgrades that really kind of capture a lot of I guess potential benefit was super powerful and resonant. And then to also echo, employee benefit as a not easy route forward, but rooting for you to do it. So good luck.

Asya: I did want to say an honorable mention though, so I thought Dr. Primal from all your presentation was incredible. I love what you've built so far, and I would also love to hear more about what you're doing.

Kate: Amazing. Let's give everybody one final round of applause. Thank you everybody.