CMU Swartz Center - VentureBridge 2021 Demo Day

[Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hi good afternoon to folks joining from all over the us and a very good morning and good evening to the attendees from around the world we are extremely excited for today's showcase and we welcome you to cmu's short centers venture bridge fourth demo day i am namrita banerjee the director of the venture bridge program along with me here today is dave mohini the executive director of the schwartz center for entrepreneurship who you'll hear from in a bit and alex petkov program manager for venture bridge and multiple other initiatives at the schwartz center now carnegie mellon university is synonymous with path-breaking innovation cmu students faculty researchers and staff are famous for cutting-edge research and have created some of the very notable brands that we know today duolingo nest aurora argo for moms chula wiggle whiskey fifth season pure storage locomation nimble to name just a few at cmu we don't imagine the future we create it over the past years cmu founders have created over 400 startups and raised over 7 billion in funding at the schwartz center founded in 2015 by a generous grant from jim schwartz cmu alum and pittsburgh native we run multiple programs to support entrepreneurs we provide logistics and financial support including access to over 100 plus events incubation space strategic introductions mentorship and funding now the venture rich program was founded in 2018 and it focuses on supporting carnegie mellon alumni founders who are working on their startups full time over the past four years we have funded over 38 startups that are using advanced tech ai and robotics to solve problems in various industries we have funded startups such as co-pilot that's using motion technology and robotics to help everyone get a personal wellness coach anywhere anytime at an affordable cost we funded yc that's using ai to create retail intelligence platform for cpt brands we funded organoid therapeutics that's creating artificial organ technologies for clinical and research applications we funded shift robotics that's creating everyday shoe that can help you walk faster we funded talk me up which helps your employees communicate better we funded ecto vr the world's first robotic vr movement solution that empowers you to work naturally through digital content we funded agot ai which is bringing efficiency and accuracy to the quick service restaurant industry using their advanced computer vision technology we funded refibre that's using ai and robotics to create 100 recycled thread for a better sustainable future we funded bloomfield robotics that uses robotics to provide plant breeders growers and scientists with high resolution crop data we funded aperture data that's solving storage challenges for large-scale visual data and many more this year we funded 16 founders on their big vision these founders who you'll hear from in a moment have inspired us with their hard work focus and enthusiasm we are rooting for their success and we hope many of you become their customers their suppliers their chair leaders but before we move on to the showcase a very important thank you entrepreneurship is hard and no one understands this better than mr bob dobkins who co-founded linear technology which is today part of analog devices bob lived the life of an entrepreneur with all its ups and downs and we are grateful for his and gave fenton's generous support of our founders through the robert and kathleen dobkins intuitive foundation thank you bob and gabe for all your time and mentorship to all the founders and supporting our program we would also like to thank the many many expert advisors investors who stopped by to talk to our founders special thank you to karen klein from bloomberg peter sydney thomas from precursor elizabethan from hustle fund ben madison from tenacity shan chan from lightspeed thank you also to fusion fund heartland ventures crumb ventures the first republic banks spectacle branding for their time and support thank you to all the alums who stopped by to help sophie novati from formation evan and alex from acot vishaka from aperture data min from yc talk jj from talk me up matt from copilot mark from bluefield brad and anna thank you so much we also want to thank cma board of trustees lane bess we also want to thank peter stern ben gurley matt rogers phil compton and denise maynard for their teachings we are incredibly grateful thank you also to our sponsors aws for startups hubspot talk me up and retool and our partners the 99 tartan cmu angel investing syndicate and the cmu tech and entrepreneurship community thank you and finally thanks to sheryl root from cmu silicon valley she's the director of the masters in technology ventures program and has been supporting us throughout our venture bridge journey thank you cheryl and finally thank you to our generous sponsor perkins cui and matt kermeyer matt is a partner at perkins queen based in san francisco and has over 30 years of experience in seed and venture financing he has been guiding clients in security offerings and mergers and acquisition and is also an adjunct professor with us matt's teaching and timely advice continues to benefit our founders tremendously we are incredibly grateful to you matt and with that everyone please welcome matt kermeyer hi everyone i'm matt kermeyer a partner in the emerging companies in venture capital practice at perkins cui our law firm supports startups at every stage of growth from entity formation to financings and in some lucky instances for example with our long-term client amazon the inevitable ipo we also actively represent investors and venture capital firms who help make founder dreams a reality in fact perkins cooy even has a separate startup and investor team who work directly with our clients at no charge to prepare them for the process of raising capital and targeting the right investors their goal is simple to create a win-win relationship for our clients and investors another program that i'm extremely proud of is our lead better initiative it's inspired by the lilly ledbetter fair pay act of 2009. leadbetter is an educational networking and alternative fee arrangement program designed to offer support to companies in the startup ecosystem that demonstrate inclusion and business leadership diversity in their executive suite suite for our startup clients who have at least one woman in a senior executive role we provide a 15 discount off our standard hourly rates for a period of time okay i had to get in that short plug for perkins coin but now let's talk about cmu i had the pleasure of paying for my son's two cmu degrees and so i'm quite familiar with all that the wonderful cmu community has to offer and we at perkins cooi have been really lucky to be a long time partner of the carnegie mellon community and truly believe that programs like venture bridge and events like demo day foster all the creativity and passion that cmu alumni and students have to offer you are all so lucky to be in such a wonderful program and to have the support of dave namreta alex and the rest of the community good luck to all the presenters today and thank you for allowing perkins cooy to contribute to your startup journey thank you nimrodda and matt hi my name is dave mawini i'm the executive director of the swartz center for entrepreneurship and a very very proud cmu alumni and parent of cmu alumni every year 3 000 of the smartest people in the world make their way to a carnegie mellon campus that is what makes carnegie mellon such a special place and that is what has catapulted us over the last 10 years into a top five entrepreneurial university we're so excited about today's program where you're going to see 16 of our newly minted startups who are graduating from the venture bridge program the venture bridge program has become our flagship program over the last few years and has launched amazing companies like co-pilot like mach 9 that you're going to see today and and many other very very cool and growing companies like to thank today bob dobkin and his wife casey and gabe fenton from the intuitive foundation without their generous support we would not be able to to put this program together the way that we have i'd also like to thank our benefactor jim schwartz jim is the founder of axel partners if you don't know accel partners you know the companies they've invested in facebook slack where they were the first vc investors and with jim's generous support and with his mentorship of me we've been able to put together a wide variety of programs that will allow us to continue our climb up the ladder of entrepreneurial universities to number one that's right mit and stanford we're coming for you with that said i'd like to thank you all for coming today and may the schwartz be with you [Music] hello everyone my name is matt's patel i am the co-founder and ceo of copilot and i'm super excited to be talking to you guys today as part of the venture bridge demo day a little bit about myself i am a carnegie mellon alumni i graduated in the fall of 2019 with an undergrad degree in ece i founded copilot which is a one-on-one remote personal training experience we pair every one of our customers with their own coach that through a series of video calls daily messages and personalized workouts gets them to their fitness goals whatever that may be anything as general as feeling better and having more energy to anything specific is setting a pr in a race or a sport this is made possible by the technology we built for devices like the apple watch which allow us to see exactly what exercise how many reps what's your pacing what's your form what's your range of motion while you're working out and send all that information back to your trainer so they can work with you as if they were right there next to you in person we were part of the venture bridge 2019 cohort after venture bridge we launched a closed beta and then in 2020 we launched our product to the world and from 2020 to 2021 we saw a pretty insane growth we went from our first you know a few dozen customers that were just part of our you know network to thousands and thousands of clients training with us on the co-pilot system and so we capitalized on that momentum we went out in the very beginning of 2021 and raised a 3.3 million dollar seed round bringing our total funding to 4.2 million dollars to date and since that round we've been growing 20 to 40 month over month it's been pretty insane just to experience we're up to 50 full-time employees a lot of which are here in pittsburgh which is a lot of fun and it looks like we're going to be going out to raise our series a around the end of the year so it's been a wild ride i'm more than happy to connect with any of you to discuss anything about startups working out whatever and my call to action to all of you today is to just try out copilot we currently have a two-week completely risk-free free trial so if you go to mycopilot.com you'll be able to sign up there and get mass with a coach today so thanks again for your time guys and i look forward to meeting all of you in person very very soon [Music] [Music] at yc we're solving a 1.9 trillion dollar problem in the consumer package food industry due to out-of-stocks and product waste our platform is built on ai technology that provides real-time intelligence from shelf images to achieve control and skill reduce loss and sell more effectively in any retail location ryc we transform legacy retail into intelligent retail cpg brands and retailers gain performance accuracy and increase revenue since the venture bridge program we have raised over three million dollars in funding won several brands and have been accelerated by sap google nasdaq and most recently by stanford we're also post revenue with lease in over 20 countries and with a current sales pipeline of 6 million our solution is being promoted by our global sales partners including sap and also by our direct sales effort as part of our expansion strategy yc is already a trademark in several countries i am min chen ceo of yz and you are welcome to join me next week in las vegas at the grocery shop conference feel free to contact me if you would like to know more about yc or if you like to introduce us to any cpg brand and grocery chain thank you very much [Music] hi everyone my name is sarika bajaj i'm the ceo and co-founder of refibered refibre is solving the world's textile waste problem by developing the only hundred percent eco-friendly textile recycling system that converts unsorted used textiles into new 100 recycled thread we do this using an ai and robotics based system that autonomously sorts discarded textiles by material and color which then enter our 100 green chemical process to produce our final product of refibred thread which can re-enter the new textile supply chain ever since completing venture bridge last year refibre had the chance to become south by southwest's best bootstrap company of 2021. we also were able to complete our pre-seed round of five hundred thousand dollars with our lead investor of better ventures since then we've been working on de-risking our technology through the development of our first micro factory and we are looking for pilot partners for re-fibroids 100 recycled thread and paper line that were made making from discarded textiles any connections to textile and fashion manufacturers and suppliers would be highly appreciated and we really hope you keep following our progress at our company's instagram at garbuji we really appreciate it it's great to be back here and thank you so much to venturebridge for all of our help it's really helped take our company off thank you [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] until two years ago when anyone went online cookies and other extremely private information provided a staggering amount of intelligence on that person this information was very effective in targeting consumers with ads online however over the past two years two things have changed for one privacy regulations across the globe have gotten stricter secondly consumer technology companies like apple have built-in privacy measures to protect the privacy of users as a result of which cookies have gone away and with that has gone the ability to target people online now this is a huge problem for an industry that brings in upwards of 400 billion dollars a year globally and this has resulted in ads being served to irrelevant people and a massive wastage of ad dollars before starting ads game i was involved in conducting a wide variety of digital marketing campaigns for a fortune 500 automotive company as a digital marketer i've seen heavy emphasis on cookie level and other audience data points with changing privacy laws such as gdpr and ccpa coming into place collecting audience level cookie data is going to be impossible these privacy laws brought in so that customers can be protected online at all times having an ecosystem where customers feel protected and safe and where businesses can potentially reach out to new customers in a succinct and in and proper fashion is going to be a defining point for the digital advertising ecosystem and this is where ad scale comes in ad skate solution analyzes online content like online articles videos and images and provides insights into key audience and brand attributes such as user intent topics and products reviewed additionally with adskate marketers can be assured that their ads appear next to content that is not only relevant to their audience but also carries the right sentiment and is brand safe we have built a technology keeping marketers in mind marketers know very well that every business is different each business caters to a unique audience set an audience set that is consuming a wide variety of content online that could be news articles on websites content on mobile apps product review videos on youtube etc so how does a business know where best to reach out for your audience and hence where best to run effective ad campaigns that's where ask it comes in using state-of-the-art techniques in ai we are able to discover and analyze content across websites mobile apps podcasts and on video streaming platforms such as youtube we annotate the content for more than 700 unique topics for brands being discussed for sentiments being expressed etc using this our customers will be able to ensure that their ads appear next to the most relevant content by using adsgate our clients have seen significantly improved targeting increase in revenue up to 44 better brand recall and optimized ad spend since it's paid our release earlier in the year ads case technology has seen a rapid adoption and has been used in more than 45 campaigns across a variety of industries ranging from consumer electronics to e-commerce and healthcare with an easy-to-use sas based subscription model businesses can start using adscape immediately the creation of content and consumption of content is only going to increase people will read listen and watch on multiple devices ranging from smart watches to connected tvs to giant billboards and everything that falls in between at the same time it is very important to protect everybody's privacy online what we are building is a world where businesses can effectively reach their consumers online at the same time everybody feels secure when they're browsing the internet digital advertising is only going to grow and will be driven by content analytics across multiple media platforms languages as well as devices if you're a business or a marketer and would like to learn more about how you can get the most out of your ad dollars come talk to us we would be more than happy to arrange a demo for you if you're an investor we would love to have you on board as we transform the 400 billion dollar ad space to help businesses drive revenue growth in the next generation of internet we are raising appreciate round to take our product to the next level and drive customer acquisition come join us [Music] [Music] imagine you own this office building in brooklyn it's not too old built in the 90s and just large enough to hold a few offices in a store to comply with the new regulation the city wants you to upgrade this building and reduce your carbon footprint and to incentivize you they've enabled rebates and funding that could bring down the cost to go green what if you don't do it well starting 2023 you will be fined over a quarter million dollars for non-compliance each year and as the owner of this building you would not be alone like new york city 600 local governments in the u.s have now enforced building performance standards to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and nearly everyone struggles to actually get access to these funds that are supposed to help here's what most property owners don't know there are billions of dollars out there to pay for these upgrades but it's always been hard to find this money and even harder to understand how to qualify for them that's why we created any yales to connect you with the money that can help you go cream hi i'm hetal paris the founder of energies and i identified this gap through the course of my phd at carnegie mellon what i found during this time was that green incentives weren't being used because one they were hard to find and two even harder to understand there just wasn't any site which had all of this program information so combining my background in architecture with experience in building performance and optimization over the last seven years i have developed the first ever comprehensive database of green incentives and financing that you can qualify for our database has over 600 million in rebates grants green loans and specialized financing from private and public sectors you can access them through the nae's platform with a powerful search engine and optimized matching we make it fast and easy for you to find more green for any type of green project and with our concierge services we even do the work to get you the money so you can focus on growing your business in fact during our pilots in pennsylvania 92 percent of the people found money through a platform that they had initially missed out on which made going green profitable for them and this number will only get better as we grow our database and product offerings our business model is simple on one hand users access our database on an ongoing basis through a traditional sas model and on the other hand they avail our project specific value-add services for cash flow optimization application assistance compliance all at only a fraction of the overall cost i started anneals with a lean team of two developers and a data analyst and our three very hands-on advisors guide us on tech policy and business plans their expertise combined with my background has helped us leapfrog the competition owners relying on contractors and escos alone get limited financing options and fear leaving money on the table and other startups in this space like unity incentive fine and station a cover only a select few projects or a select few financing options there is no one else in the space today that provides holistic data driven support for going green this summer we did a beta with 42 properties in western pennsylvania that helped us lay the groundwork for our sas platform and our green report going into the fall we will continue with customer discovery grow our database and expand geographically one city each month to accelerate our user adoption and demonstrate a product market fit we are establishing strategic partnerships growing our team and hoping to raise a precedent round by the end of 2021. for us this is just the beginning with over 6 million commercial buildings retrofit financing is now 123 billion dollar market and growing at over 10 percent each year annie's is the first to offer one-stop holistic support everyone with the biden administration focused on retrofitting 4 million commercial buildings we are excited for the growth opportunity in this market for your next green project in new york and pennsylvania visit our website complete a search and find avenues to reduce your first cost and for anywhere else in the country email us at hpar ekh niels.com to learn how you can benefit from our value-add services you'll see how we're democratizing and accelerating the process of going green and making a difference not just in this market but for the future of our planet itself [Music] my name is matthew pollowitz i am ceo and co-founder of equihealth aqua is a personal mindfulness training technology that builds resilience and peak performance in the workplace our technology was born in the health and human performance lab at carnegie mellon which is run by david cresswell who is our lead co-founder and ceo about six years ago david's lab built its first in-house mindfulness meditation smartphone app this was focused as a tool initially for researchers to accelerate the science of mindfulness meditation as an intervention for a range of clinical patient populations as well as overburden and high stress employees we saw such strong outcomes around stress biology around loneliness mental health compared to our leading competitors that they were hard for us to ignore our other co-founder is julianna rae who's building out the curriculum she's got two decades of coaching experience and founded unified mindfulness which is training cohorts of coaches in the same evidence-based curriculum we're threading into our app apollo ono is a close advisor and one of david's first students when he was training the us winter olympic speed skating team and performance mindset i'm a recent tepper mba graduate with experience supporting a high growth high growth tech startup to acquisition and alongside myself we have a rich ecosystem of carnegie mellon talent helping us build out the technology so we're all familiar with the growing mental health epidemic facing our workforce today one in four u.s millennials experience regular anxiety one in three workers report often are always experiencing stress as a result of worse work and to make matters worse we're seeing a five to seven year doubling of mental health issues like depression and anxiety among our younger generations increasingly we're turning to our phones for help this has been shown in the huge rise in digital mental health therapeutics of late in the mindfulness app market alone there's a 41.3 percent category in global revenue projected through 2025 so i'm betting that you've heard of headspace and com right both have achieved billion dollar valuations and perhaps you've even tried one of them well my guess is if you have tried one that you're probably not using it anymore today right and you wouldn't be the anomaly while both of these companies have been really good at attracting users they aren't really keeping them around headspace has a 92 churn rate within the first 30 days and they're a leader in the space column is closer to 94 why is that well the reason they're not keeping people around is that their approach is one size fits all right it's essentially youtube or spotify for meditation and what we've learned is that what might be great for mellowing out to relaxing music or content does not lead to the long-term outcomes our science has told us comes from skills-based training right so while those who come to mindfulness apps may have similar goals like performing better being more available to their loved ones becoming more focused on their goals or maybe just feeling better the reality is we all have different learning styles and roadblocks that can keep us from successfully getting there right just like intelligent learning platforms that are creating better outcomes by working to understand users challenges and then give them targeted training to help them through those roadblocks there's opportunity in the meditation training space to follow suit so we're solving the personalization problem with aqua echo is better because we have an evidence-based outcomes that are demonstrably better than our competitors and we've got an interactive training model and technology that is supported by the behavioral sciences to keep people inc accountable and engaged so just a brief glance at our traction to date we're just finishing venture bridge we'll be moving through alpha lab this fall we've raised about 125k to date and we've got three customers getting ready to start in our pi pilot program in the next few weeks we're focused on two core b2b markets tech startups and healthcare providers uh tech startups because it's a shorter runway to pilot and to get a feedback loop going for product development and healthcare orgs because not only do they have a ton of overburdened employees right now but they really care about science and we've got some concrete plans for the next six months focused mainly on improving our distribution model getting some targeted customer feedback to enhance our product and filling some key roles in our team to do this we're asking for an investment of six hundred thousand dollars in our precede round again which will go towards building our team developing our product client acquisition and building momentum for our seed raise we'd be excited to meet with you feel free to reach out using the contact information listed and thank you for your time [Music] hi i'm chelsea the founder and ceo of viral moment we're shining a light on the stories and the conversations being shared in images and videos across the internet with our tool analysts are able to quickly and easily identify movements as they emerge on social media so that they can plan for a timely response leading up to the events at the u.s capitol on january 6 organizers had a rigorous presence on tick tock thousands of social media users shared an intent to use violence and force to fix our government but many of the incitements for violence conspiracy theories and the hate speech went unnoticed why images in video based hate speech and calls for violence are not being detected and measured today video and image-based social media platforms like tik tok youtube shorts and snapchat leave a gaping hole in our ability to notice growing movements and to measure the traction and the audiences who share these stories online unless a user includes a hashtag traditional text-based tools used by brands pr teams and governments miss important visual symbols and queues and online movements have real-world implications that can cost brands hundreds and tens hundreds millions even billions of dollars in 2017 united airlines lost a billion dollars in market value in 24 hours after viral memes of a gentleman being dragged from an airplane surfaced in 2018 procter and gamble spent over a hundred million dollars to clean up the aftermath of the tide pod challenge and these are just a few examples of the ways that social media can wreak havoc financially on a brand i've spent years working as a subject matter expert i've spent years working as a subject matter expert to support the department of defense fighting disinformation and propaganda studying how harmful false and toxic stories can worm their way at a breakneck speed through visual platforms and into our communities and our homes i have a master's degree in innovation from carnegie mellon and a decade of experience in product management my cto shaida has two master's degrees from carnegie mellon and is a computer vision and machine learning expert who also has family in the us and abroad who are struggling to understand what's real we're backed by mentors from carnegie mellon university venture bridge techstars la and industry images and video carry a language in and of themselves riddled with actions symbols and patterns we're an all female team pioneering the deep tech that is revolutionizing the future of natural language processing for images and videos so that we can detect measure and understand the stories that are told in the individual memes and videos we share and building up into the trends and the movements that we're seeing in 2021 viral moment is a sas suite of computer vision and ai tools that works today on platforms like tiktok and reddit we offer a self-service discover analytics platform that can alert users when their brand is going viral we have a service that helps to monitor and analyze the comments section on tiktok and we offer an app that helps users to go viral themselves we have paying clients and we're doing trials today to measure what audiences are engaging with a story what content patterns they're using what influencers are driving a conversation and what trends are going viral some of our recent projects include working with an institute to see who is still passionate about stolen election narratives on tick tock we've worked to understand what symbols and languages are being used by audiences who are opposed to vaccinations and we even did a project to see what audiences are engaging with the latest hit movie trailers and why our tool saves analysts thousands of hours of manual research time and it empowers cultural leaders to maintain a strong voice in strategic messaging the social analytics market is over 15 billion dollars and that is just one industry that we can revolutionize with the future of nlp our competition is a market full of text-based social listening technologies who have very minimal image recognition capabilities we are first to market with image contextualization processing technology we're looking for people who want to join us in our next round we're building out a strategic tech team and a marketing and sales function and we'd love to talk to strategic partners who want to help us build a better internet we're also looking for more customers who are willing on to pilot our tool as well as to use our app thank you very much [Music] hi i'm nikki couture professor carnegie mellon and founder of schema meet emma she's planning a trip and is spending hours going through articles and reviews and blogs and pics to find the best restaurants see how they compare on the criteria she cares about and share them with her partner meet bob he's doing a competitive analysis for an app he's building and is spending hours going through articles and reviews and blogs and pics to find competitors see how they compare on the criteria he cares about and share them with his team they're not alone google gives us a thousand results but all the hard work of making sense of them is left up to us and whether it's travel competitive analyses shopping health market research programming you name it they all share a similar pattern we collect pages extract what we need and organize them based on the criteria we care about we spend about a trillion hours a year or 10 percent of all labor hours on this kind of sense making and everything out there only does a piece of the process leaving us to manage dozens of tabs or laboriously copy and paste into an unwieldy dock or spreadsheet schema transforms your browser into an intelligent workspace that helps you through the whole process and because we're with you each step of the way we can capture the work you do so others can benefit let's see it in action here's emma's browser while she's planning a trip you can see she has dozens of tabs for hotels and restaurants she uses schema to collect her tabs into workspaces clearing her browser and her mind she can go back to them anytime she wants and organize nest and prioritize them next she extracts the useful parts that are scattered across her tabs with the sidebar that lives with her pulling out hours and menus and reviews and ratings and pictures of dishes she likes because schema keeps track of not only where that clip came from but all the context and web of pages surrounding it it intelligently puts them together so she can see everything she needs it also gives her lightweight ways to collect by just wiggling her finger instead of onerous copying and pasting and accessing everything on her mobile devices after she's collected all the pieces schema allows her to see how everything stacks up based on her criteria as she jots them down like thin crust pizza schema goes through what she's saved and even connected pages she hasn't yet to find evidence that matches which she can drill down on to find out more bob can do the same process for his market research and puts in what criteria he cares about like mobile experience but uses a table view to quickly see how his competitors stack up users have reported spending 20 minutes on tasks like these that would normally take them four hours because we've captured their thinking everyone else can benefit from emma and bob's too so how do we monetize right now teams and power users are paying over a hundred dollars per month for multiple tools that still don't help with the whole process like schema does their data will kick-start our entry into the digital advertising market where we can help you find exactly what meets your criteria some of our key advantages are that we have a head start with 12 years of validated research four patents and a functional prototype we have built-in stickiness once people put their tabs into our system they've put their lives into our system and it's hard for them to leave you can see that with our 30-day retention rate being 10 times higher than the market average and as people use it they generate a network effect where the system becomes even more useful and sticky coming from cmu's school of computer science the team has collected 16 best paper awards in sense making has over 30 years of combined experience in this space outside of the lab the team has a successful history ranging from commercializing research to delivering for fortune 500 companies what's our timeline we've generated a 3 000 user wait list based on early press and are working on product market fit with a functional prototype we're raising a seed round now and working towards a public release and viral growth which will help us get teams and power users and use their data to power recommendations in advertising along the way we're laying a foundation in which we can all benefit from emma bob's and each other's work thank you and join us in making sense of the web [Music] [Music] hi and welcome to surfbest let me ask you a question are you an organization trying to build competency or struggling with on-time project deliveries in this post-pandemic era well let's look at one of the reasons for your struggle if we look at a typical task execution cycle it can be divided into four sequential steps figuring out what to do when to do it following through and outcome evaluation while a bunch of solutions exist for the other steps there lies a huge gap when it comes to follow through our research shows that employees lose focus due to distractions lose motivation due to unclear objectives and feel frustrated when they are stuck we understand that as humans it is natural for us to lose context of what we want to accomplish in the real time with the right mix of technology and human health we are solving this problem finally at southwest we're creating a superhuman to help employees finish tasks we're doing this by creating a platform that on the backend integrates with the existing project management and upscaling tools and provide a front-end that motivates and reminds employees to finish tasks we have developed a central web application that works in conjunction with other context analyzing modules with this we intend to provide a customer with an increase of 20 in return on talent which can not only save companies billions of dollars but also provide value to employees with increased job satisfaction in the existing industry landscape there are a bunch of point solutions for distraction management goal setting focus creation but self-pass positions itself to bring in that best-in-class integration when it comes to an organization's task execution pipeline and personalize it to the way a person functions we are having an enterprise sas model priced at 10 dollars per employee per month which gives our customers an roi of 160x we are looking at a potential market of 88 billion globally of which 18 billion is in us alone our first set of target users would be new engineers who are wanting to scale up quickly in their organization and advance careers and the first set of target customers would be technology organizations who are hiring a lot and this becomes an even more pressing problem in the global talent shortage that's happening right now we have completed one private beta with a 20k plus person company who we are in talks with to extend it to other departments and there are current two ongoing betas these companies are helping us prioritize features on our product for example we recognize the importance of human health through one of our beta we also have interest from 18 other companies and our immediate go to market would be to pitch paid pilots to these companies specifically for competency building and then get referrals to other organization we envision this to be a new spend with the company and with that we have a target of 70k of user base by end of 2023 and 6.2 million in revenues in terms of the team i am the ceo and cpo of surfbest i've worked more than six plus years on a number of products including ones working on the matchmaking problem like taxi one to one and authorizedhealer.com our cto is a technology veteran with more than 20 plus years of experience in creating world-class products like in-page through him we have access to more than 300 engineers with varying degree of competencies and he brings in the challenges of follow-through having managed multiple teams small and large size over the years currently we have four full-time engineers working on this product and we also have our internal r d with psychology and ux researcher we have a great set of mentors matt rogers the founders of google nest is helping us on the product as well as dan raleigh with more than 20 years of experience in psychology helping us with the internal r d our journey so far has been rewarding uh we are looking to raise 750k which would encompass uh resource spend uh specifically strategic hires in hci and psychology along with spend in marketing and infrastructure our exit strategy is to go all the way to ipo but just in terms of how we place ourselves in the task execution pipeline we do see ourselves getting lucrative offers along the way we're also getting a word out you can see some of our happy customers here in silicon valley and we're also speaking at the grace hopper this year so if you are interested in investing or piloting with us please connect we're always up for a demo and do not forget to register on our website self.best to be part of a closed beta see you later thank you [Music] hello everyone i'm vijay co-founder and ceo of maya aids before getting into the details why maya is and what's the story behind it just before the pandemic along with my co-founder vignesh we found out that many restaurants were struggling with the problem of too many tablets for their online orders each tablet for each delivered applications like dodash ubereats grubber postnate chow now caviar and the list goes on so we build homes an online order management system which will consolidate all delivery apps into a single tablet and a printer during that time we got an opportunity to visit thousands of thousands of restaurants and able to understand the integrity of the operations during that time we got an interesting learning that major of the restaurants are struggling with the interesting problem of underutilized kitchen capacity which means they can potentially make 200 orders but they're currently making only 50 to 60 orders so they pay 100 of the rent they pay 100 of their salary but they don't use 100 of the time so after this new key insights we decided like why can't we launch a delivery only a virtual concept on top of the existing physical kitchen which will help them to reduce the sunk cost that's the whole idea so with that theoretical idea we launched our concepts in two different kitchens and we are able to demonstrate that we can bring in this additional revenue these concepts are only available via door dash ubereats scrubber postmate and no dining in or no storefront so when we got this initial success like we are able to bring in 2025 orders then we are imagining like is this a simple like lifestyle business or there's a huge opportunity then we realize it's not just about restaurant kitchen it's any kitchen it could be cloud or ghost kitchens it could be hotel kitchens it could be any commercial kitchens who have license to cook so that's why we got this vision of let's build the world's largest virtual restaurant chain without owning a physical real estate or owning the complicated restaurant operations we do this by partnering with existing commercial kitchens who are under a place kitchen in essence we are uber for kitchens in the last few months of launching maya eats we are able to launch 65 digital restaurants just in bay area and able to make like like fifty seven thousand orders we processed and two million dollars in gme and four hundred thousand dollars in revenue so once we got this initial success we are like trying to scale out of bay area and that's where like we got into y combinator and cme venture bridge for our seed round we are also currently working towards like our core technology which will propel my eyes to add like thousands of thousands of restaurants in the coming few months this will allow us to get a key inside about current operations basically like hobbies or reputation like all the ratings and reviews from door dash ubridge grab up and also help and google pages everything will be consolidated and be like invoice generation and customers can create accounts or certain partners and get the single version of truth so before doing my age a couple of years i worked at nvidia software engineer and six years at google software engineer so we have a great understanding of tech and i also have like similar application uh like a delivered application like chef if you know connecting the homemade food to the consumers i had my own startup i founded in 2014 2015 period and vignesh is like a experienced engineering manager who maintained a team of 20 plus mobile developers in ios and android and he also had a great success in his previous venture called track yoga which got like half a million downloads and like 40 to 50 000 monthly active users right now and our team is spread across the world uh one of the key uh like element of our success is like we are keeping the cost very low so we decided to keep our operations and engineering teams in india and main founding team and our culinary teams are operating from us and our vision is like we understand the pandemic has created a permanent habit change like more and more people are adapting to on-demand food how they are already adapted to on-demand videos like netflix so restaurants are more and more becoming an experience and if they want any utility food it's going to be digital orders and we want to capitalize on it and cnbc expect it could be a trillion dollar business just virtual and ghost kitchens by 2030 and maya is wants to be the leading player with a vision of launching over like half a million virtual restaurants around the globe so far in our seed round we our goal is to write to raise 2 million and we have completed over 1.3 million and currently working towards closing or remaining 700 000 so uh pretty quickly and thank you so much for your time again i'm vijay we are building the world's largest virtual restaurant chain thank you [Music] hi my name is sajeeb and i'm dan and we are the co-founders of profetto profedo is focused on helping companies activate machine learning and so between dan and myself we have an over a decade of experience in data science and analytics and from our work experience what we've witnessed is this rapid adoption and commoditization of the ability to create machine learning in fact we built a business to help fuel that growth initially and from that startup experience plus our prior work experience what we've learned is despite all the advancing the ability to create machine learning operationalizing those models there's still a very broken software engineering process so what we're on a mission to do with profeto is to help companies activate not create but activate the power of machine learning make this a little more tangible let's take an example of a data scientist named emily she's on a team at a growth stage tech startup using machine learning in their product building a new model literally takes an afternoon on a laptop these days but to integrate that model then into the company's overall software that takes months of work that our team is not well equipped to handle and so she could go out and try to build together put together a brittle solution herself but that takes months because she's not a software engineer she's a data scientist which are fundamentally different skill sets she could go out and try to hire an ml engineer for a lot of money but even that person's time is better spent on more value-add problems such as getting quality data to those models and lastly she could rely on their software engineering team or devops team but they oftentimes don't have the expertise in deploying and managing machine learning models in production which is quite different than traditional software and so our solution is really focused on addressing each of these three key problem areas we're creating a software platform that enables data science teams to integrate deploy and maintain their machine learning model pipelines at scale and the way that this works is we have a python package plus a front-end web dashboard and our python package enables a data scientist to convert their prototype model into a fully fledged production grade microservice application that they can then automatically deploy into their cloud environments with all the logging monitoring reporting baked into it and then our sort of front-end web dashboard enables data science teams to manage and monitor these models so that they can ensure that when they're actually in their production environments they're maintaining the highest quality standards and take actions if they need to and so with propheto a data scientist like emily's workflow is completely transformed no longer does she have to worry about how to containerize her model or create her microservice or what different resources she needs to use in her cloud environment or how to orchestrate her model pipeline together profeto automates and abstracts away all of this from data scientists like emily so that she can actually focus on really building the highest quality models and we believe that with profeto data scientists are able to actually increase the quality of their models because they can focus more on machine learning and future engineering they're able to save tens of thousands of dollars on the actual model deployments and they can deploy in minutes instead of months and get the models into the hands of their end customers faster and so there's a few different ways that we can uh kind of look at the market sizing for this we took one approach which is around the time savings and automation that we'll get with profeto which equates to approximately a 5.4 billion dollar addressable market we've really validated the sort of problem space and in our solution through hundreds of different customer discovery conversations and interviews and this has helped us to inform sort of an alpha version of our product and actually we're working on a beta version for which we've already got 25 pre-launch users signed up and we hope to actually kick that off in the next few weeks this is a pretty competitive market we've kind of categorized uh four different ways that there are competitors in the space currently our key focus around differentiation within the market is ease of use for our product it's the integration for the specific tools as well that a data scientist already needs and has in making that process as easy as possible we're also really focused on enabling a strongly secure data and development standpoint so data scientists are actually deploying directly from their environments we operate client-side and so they don't have to worry about sharing their models or their data with third-party systems we plan on targeting an open core model for go to market we'll offer a free set of features to data scientists to kind of win their trust and provide immediate value for them then we'll be able to sell into them uh into those accounts with some premium features for which we plan on targeting about a 20k asp and then at the enterprise level we'll offer this additional customizations and professional services which will equate to approximately a five hundred thousand dollar uh per account asp so we're out raising a one million dollar pre-seed investment uh to invest in r d we wanna get to five engineers by the following year we want to invest in building out our product some early go to market experiment to really get the product market fit and then invest and go to market after 14 months with a more substantial feed round to summarize why profetto is going to really win in this market one is uh it's minimal behavior change data scientists are not going to have to learn any new tools and professionally it'll make them get started very easily whatever tools they're using we're going to be able to integrate a highly displayed fragmented nlp stack through our integration first approach three we're going to be able to win the practice practitioners trust to a developer first approach it's going to make us be able to set the standard for ml ops going forward and lastly with our flexible configurations for mlms we're going to be able to provide the best practice deployment and monitoring configurations for any envelopes use case thank you so much for taking the time if you want to learn more about profeto feel free to reach out [Music] [Music] hi my name is alex bakovitz i'm the ceo of mach 9 robotics and we build mobile sensors to find infrastructure failures we're helping utility companies perform infrastructure inspection to monitor infrastructure that would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per minute in downtime our team came out of the carnegie mellon robotics institute i originally met howard she and josh spiezak while we were all in the biorobotics laboratory at cmu josh and i previously worked for red whitaker on a variety of department of energy nuclear projects and later led carnegie mellon's team in the darpa subterranean challenge infrastructure is so critical but yet it's aging and tons of issues are emerging a several trillion dollar infrastructure bill is on the table and also the workforce and a lot of these contracting organizations and utility companies is also aging meaning that now is a better time than ever before to develop technology to solve some of these labor shortages and find problems before they actually happen and actually cost people their lives mach 9 developed something called the cube which is a sensor hardware device with integrated software built in to create survey quality models of surface and underground infrastructure the cube is incredibly modular meaning that we can attach tons of different kinds of sensors to it to enable all sorts of new functionality in positioning sensor information some sensors that we currently integrate are ground penetrating radar to find things underground thermal cameras defined overheating electronics potentially on the surface or even underground infrastructure that's degrading to gas detection cameras that can find where methane is leaking we can seamlessly integrate new types of sensing modalities to solve all sorts of new problems we deploy our cubes on delivery trucks and ubers to actually collect infrastructure prop information and find problems we then sell enterprise licenses to civil engineering companies and utility companies to have access to this information and allow them to make actionable decisions based on the information that's provided in minutes instead of months we're allowing people to have the power of the world's geospatial information at their fingertips so that they don't need to commission services surveys and fix this broken design bid build process where people will typically just under bid and over promise and actually go over budget instead we provide the lowest cost guarantee to fix a lot of these broken slow industries just for u.s power and light we're able to capitalize on fractions of expenses that people currently dedicate to inspection for instance pg e spends over 700 million dollars in this space and we're just seeing that this one small customer that uh could eventually grow into something quite large is just one vertical in which we're targeting with mach 9 related data but our insights are just so much more general and can be used for all sorts of things from optimizing the design of actual maintenance systems or maintenance of utility systems to actually preventing damage during construction to marketing to demand forecasting to preventing infrastructure problems and all at the same time collecting the best self-driving data set in the most amount of diverse environments currently we're moving mach 9 fast we're deploying with the nation's largest utility locating company we have a contract being built with clear teledyne systems on large-scale radiation and chemical monitoring to locate narcotics production in cities capitalizing on huge expenses in the space from law enforcement we've initially gotten to where we are with development contracts from dgt associates we have upcoming pilot tests with actual utility companies uh we were in y combinator adventure bridge this summer distinguished ourselves among mit and cardi email and startups and have received support from large oems to help us take mach 9 to market overall mach 9 is creating this four-dimensional model of the world to predict infrastructure failures and preserve limited resources currently we're raising a three million dollar round to take mach 9 and create in a large scale city scale experiment here in pittsburgh to sell our data to the relevant stakeholders and build out our technology even further then we certainly plan to deploy worldwide starting in new york san francisco and boston we're looking to raise our round and in the next year uh hit over 5 million and also be profitable from mach 9 related data and services thank you so much for listening if you have any questions comments ideas or referrals please feel free to reach out and help us prevent tomorrow's infrastructure failure today thanks so much [Music] hi i'm allison ceo of hardly have you hired anyone lately you probably either use an extremely expensive recruiter or posted the job to many different job sites either way you spend a couple of minutes evaluating for skill level and then weeks interviewing for culture fit that's a lot of wasted time and resources on candidates that don't go anywhere early in my career i recruited and vetted candidates for focus groups four times a day i would see a new team dynamic formed and i quickly understood the mix of people that would make the best group my colleagues were shocked by how quickly i could pinpoint a respondent in the waiting room that would negatively impact the group mix many times all they had to say was two words fast forward six years i came to carnegie mellon to turn my gut instincts about team dynamics into quantifiable scalable and reactive candidate matching and that is how hardly was born hardly matches candidates to companies through skillfit experience culture fit and team dynamics our algorithm uses 35 years of organizational psychology research from across the globe and we have two organizational psychologists guiding us one academic and one in consulting professionals go to the harley website to understand themselves their values motivations leadership style they can invite their colleagues and receive info on how to best manage conflict and how to best work together all rooted in their personality values and active traits when they are ready to change jobs hardly shows them a list of job openings that match their ideal culture and where the direct manager matches their own work style it's not about making everyone the same it's about complementary fit for example a candidate that needs autonomy will thrive under a trusting manager and not under one that's more controlling and the opposite is true for a more rule-based candidate once hired the professional continues to use hardly to understand their team at their new job and our algorithm becomes more and more accurate as they progress in their career and yes assessments have been used in hiring for a while but always later in the process and hardly is different we began selection by seeing candidates as full humans not just their resumes that way we can make sure that you are spending your valuable time with the candidates that will most likely thrive at your company ones that will be more engaged work harder be happier and stay longer and because we don't share information on age race or gender prior to connecting the candidate to the hiring manager you can be sure you are removing unconscious bias from the hiring process we are focusing our pilot in pennsylvania professional service firms which spend half a billion dollars on hiring new employees every year with your help we believe we can capture the 15 of the market and get to 73 million dollars of revenue in pennsylvania in a few years we'll expand beyond pennsylvania with our seed round and capture more of the 80 billion dollar industry of professional service talent acquisition across the u.s we have paying customers and we are actively matching candidates our revenue is through monthly or annual subscriptions to employers accounts are free hiring managers deduct a credit each time they connect with a candidate in the future we'll expand our offering to premium features like mapping networks and personalities throughout the organization and even expand our revenue to users with ai interview coaching my co-founder roger is a web developer with seven years of experience we both have carnegie mellon mbas and i have a master's degree in brand strategy i've worked with some of the largest brands in the world doing research strategy and design we are raising our one million dollar pre-seed round to drive further product development and implement the machine learning that will strengthen our accuracy we also will run social media campaigns within pittsburgh and philadelphia and build relationships with recruiters in both cities we are looking for users on our alpha which is live today so please go to hardlyhyphenwork.com to sign up and start your assessments you may be wanting to find a job or maybe you just want to find yourself a bit more if you're looking to hire soon email me you can create your employer portal for free and you won't pay until you decide you want to meet your candidate matches we know when you love what you do and where you work it feels like you're hardly working we hope that you'll join us thank you [Music] hi everyone i'm stuart diller ceo of estat actuation and we're making robots safer and less expensive mobile robots are an 18 billion dollar market but it should be 10 times bigger if it weren't for two fundamental problems big hardware costs and safety concerns due to high weight and low responsiveness these problems come down to the actuators or the components responsible for movement right now they're simply too heavy slow and expensive to illustrate this let's imagine we're a team of robotics engineers designing a robot to get deliveries from an autonomous driving truck to the customer's doorstep it should be light enough that it won't hurt grandma if it runs into her on the sidewalk and be pretty affordable to work for a fast roi for this kind of application we start designing and quickly realize that even just to walk around or pick up a bag you need surprisingly powerful motors and gearboxes and you need lots of them but even when you get the really high end ones they're so big that you need a heavy-duty structure to support all the extra added weight and before you know it this price is completely impractical and you have a robot that weighs as much as a football player at estat we've created a game-changing new component called an electro adhesive clutch it works by using static electricity and thin composite films that live inside the housing in the device shown in the video meaning that our clutch is three times lighter and uses 600 times less power than the conventional hardware and at a competitive cost it's also much quieter and more responsive and doesn't heat up during operation we use this clutch alongside light inexpensive motors and springs to dramatically improve the overall performance of a robot the 50 billion dollar actuator market is dominated by conventional slow moving industries like transportation and manufacturing which we're targeting more in the five to ten year range initially we're going for the rapidly growing robotics verticals including medical robots and military robots because these customers have the biggest hair on fire problem and are most open to quickly adopting new kinds of hardware technology it's also big and growing very quickly we're selling hardware and creating designs for companies like these who are looking for game changing solutions for the next generation of high performance robots and wearables we've made sales to seven companies and we're on track to achieve two hundred thousand dollars in revenue this year our goal is to sell hardware to ten more companies then scale up production with three of them and have that correspond to one and a half million dollars in customer revenue and orders by the end of 2022 our most established competition is the conventional actuator companies although there are other companies in the space who are developing substantially new solutions for these emerging robotics verticals but our technology substantially outperforms theirs and we have four granted patents with more on the way to maintain our advantage our team and technology spun out from carnegie mellon and we have more than 25 years of combined phd level robotics hardware experience as well as experience leading six previous startups i spent five years developing our technology before co-founding the company with carmel and randy then hiring cmu phd kirby witty we're closely tied into the cmu entrepreneurship community and we're members of the arm institute and the pittsburgh robotics network we developed this technology i mentioned during the five years using over 500k in research funding at cmu and our company subsequently received 350k in non-diluted research funding from the nsf and air force alongside 200 000 in early investments from the swartz center venture bridge innovation works and off lab gear by the time you're watching this we will have closed on our oversubscribed precede round of convertible notes led by 412 ventures to fund our next stage of business development and scaling so how can you in the audience get involved well we're hiring from our current full-time team of two people up to five people full-time by the end of the year in both technical and business positions so we'd love any connections you have to great potential employees who are passionate about robotics hardware we're also always looking for creative customers we're used to that actuation and we're making robots safer and less expensive [Music] hi i'm rob meyer ceo and co-founder of finnish robotics construction in this country is in crisis if you've tried to hire someone recently and found it hard you know this first hand this is simply not the baby boomers retiring and the younger generations not taking their place it actually goes deeper than that in this mckinsey report they found that it takes twice as many hours worked to produce the same amount of value in construction as it did 50 years ago production or productivity is actually declining in the construction industry we at finnish robotics are on a mission to solve the labor crisis and transform human productivity for the construction job site through job-specific mobile robots our first product is aimed at commercial painters meet andy andy is a mobile robot contractors hire on a per job basis to augment their crews and fill in the gaps when they can't find the people that they need andy paints four times faster than a human and is 25 percent cheaper than a human and reduces injuries and risks to the other humans that are on the crew our customers are paint contractors that hire andy to paint they pay for andy on a per square foot basis that he paints when andy's not painting our customers contractors are not paying one thing that makes us very unique uh is our robotic platform design using modular off-the-shelf industrial hardware and adding our own proprietary software stack we look at our platform as kind of four different layers the base layer which manages mobility both horizontally and vertically our intelligence layer which is proprietary that we add sensors and compute the manipulation layer which is a six axis off the shelf collaborative uh arm and then the task layer which is very specific to the task that's being done in this case in the first case architectural coatings in sealants on a variety of different walls the modular nature of our platform allows us to swap out the task layer and expand the product offering that we have and swap out the base layer to increase mobility and height for a variety of different applications the u.s painting market is 29 billion dollars annually we're are targeting as our beach head market the commercial spray painting segment for the larger uh buildings warehouses big box retail flux commercial these are the applications that spray painting is already the norm no painter is changing their process in any way by using andy this market has an annual production of over 22 billion square feet painted and employs around 61 000 humans it's projected to grow 15 percent over the next a couple of years and the market is demanding an additional 9 000 humans to um to paint the extra demand of 3 000 or 3 billion square feet now one of our unique insights into this market that is different than other robotics markets which require a very low cost or very high performance to garner adoption the extreme labor shortage has given us a very strong pricing power to price um andy um using the human prevailing wage 75 to 100 of the human prevailing wage which is about 17 cents uh per square foot painting now and he can paint a thousand square feet per hour so that's 170 dollars per hour a thousand dollars a day or 265 000 a year per robot um in revenue all this revenue adds up rather quickly we project um 115 million dollars in revenue uh by year five by only deploying 328 robots in the top 30 u.s cities now we've had a tremendous response to what we're doing at all levels of the ecosystem from property owners commercial property managers developers general contractors and paint contractors we are scheduling pilots this year and into q1 with all of the logos that you see on the screen and by q2 we will be launching three robots in pittsburgh to paint jobs on a regular basis we have an outstanding team of engineers computer scientists roboticists six people full and part-time this is my fourth startup my co-founder and inventor of the technology ricky has spent decades in the robotics industry uh here in pittsburgh and in boston with a number of years at nrec and carnegie mellon on staff and is one of the former co-founders of im robotics we are raising a three million dollar seed this year to increase our full-time staff to 14 humans for robots and fund operations in pittsburgh for the next 12 to 18 months our series a milestone is one million square feet painted we are finished robotics solving the construction labor crisis with mobile robots launching in q1 with eight partners love to talk more with you at the end thanks [Music] [Music] at each day we are defining the future of adhd treatment using data and neuroscience adhd is a complex neurological disorder that is characterized by challenges with inattention organization and a lack of impulse control the cdc estimates that 17 million people in the united states have an official adhd diagnosis and it's growing adhd diagnoses are on the rise and people are looking for help where credible and potentially life-changing information exists it is exclusive unaffordable and improperly formatted for this digital age while there are hundreds of factors that could explain why people are seeking out this information we know what information they're looking for and that's why we started each day each day is the first adhd self-management app that actually educates people on how to identify adhd moments the executive function failures that cause adhd symptoms to occur we then provide people with the tips techniques and learning strategies they need to triage those moments in real time interactions in the app craft a personalized adhd profile that patients can share with their clinicians which serves as a digital memory of how their adhd manifests itself since 1955 with the introduction of ritalin a stimulant medication has been the most common treatment for adhd with non-medication treatments often unavailable or unaffordable unfortunately medication does not address the underlying cognitive failures that cause adhd symptoms to occur and people are looking for a solution that does according to a consumer report survey 44 of parents strongly agreed that they wish there was another way to help their child besides medication similarly 35 percent of consumers taking adhd medication stop because of the side effects with the increase in diagnosis of adhd it's no surprise that the market for treatment is also growing in 2018 the market was valued at 15 billion dollars and is expected to grow to 25 billion dollars by 2025. people are looking to their phones for help with their disorder if you look at social media platforms like reddit instagram or even tick tock you see trending topics about adhd and treatment of adhd as a whole each day differentiates itself with our ability to visualize time triage adhd moments in flexible and unique environments and grow with our user through our data driven adhd profile the rudimentary adhd app marketplace is built on the steps prior to executive functions and is not rooted in a comprehensive teaching of all seven of the executive functions like each day is each day is always available on your phone and this is really important because we know that cognitive failures that cause adhd symptoms happen at all times of the day whenever they occur you can go into your phone find out the adhd moment and then triage it on the fly beyond that our ability to visualize time provides people with a clear overview of what they need to accomplish each day we very clearly articulate your top priorities throughout the day to ensure that you finish all of them in order to clear the dial our growth strategy is twofold first direct to consumer via self-service model where we charge a monthly subscription fee second is through our partner program currently we have two partner capabilities one focused on facilitating a diverse community of content creators to cover the breadth of topics adhd spans and the second is focused on distributing each day services we've identified a few key partners within the education and healthcare space we are working with them to define efficacy within our initial user cohort so far there has been a lot of excitement from all parties involved a behavioral health clinic was really excited to add each day as a digital therapeutic to complement their current adhd treatment effectively increasing the quality of care while reducing the organizational liability when only prescribing adults controlled medications our closest competitors are inflow and endeavor rx inflow is a cognitive behavioral therapy app which emphasizes feelings thoughts and behaviors endeavor rx is a prescription video game for children ages 8 to 12 played on mobile devices their approval by the fda as a digital therapeutic makes them relevant to us our vision is that everyone with adhd will have access to the top techniques they need to self-manage their disorder they'll learn more about their minds understand how adhd manifests itself in their lives and then can have more thoughtful conversations with clinicians and caretakers that care for them each day is looking to raise six hundred thousand dollars for the next six months in that time we'll prove product market fit and validate clinical efficacy we then hope to move to a three million dollar seed round at which point we will spend 2022 building a robust adhd focused product in 2023 building out more relationships with behavioral care clinics and educational entities [Music] pandemic has completely changed the way we work and 95 percent of business leaders believe company culture can't survive remote work and hybrid work poor culture leads to voluntary turnover which costs the u.s 600 billion in 2018 that's going to get worse as employees can now switch jobs with remote work opportunities this mass migration of talent results in companies losing their key competitive advantage their employees hi i'm jody ceo and co-founder of cultureora cultureorr is an early stage enterprise sas solution for employees and hr leaders we take an employee's personal and professional goals and preferences and connect them to another employee around a shared activity like a coffee chat a walk or even a phone call in turn more and better employee connections help them fight isolation during remote and hybrid work for all of 2020 almost all companies struggled to engage employees who were working from home now customers can use the connections employees seamlessly make with culture aura to promote culture and reduce loss of talent hi i'm adam a ux designer and co-founder at culture aura our employee user experience is designed to drive adoption and is a key product differentiator with culture aura employees immediately have a connection recommendation waiting for them in their email as soon as the employee opens the link the connection activity gets scheduled calendar invites can be updated by either person and employees can adjust the connection activity based on their comfort level employees can learn more about their connection via their profile page and once a connection is completed employees log their connection which we use to measure value hi i'm carly and i handle customer operations for culture aura our customers our hr leaders focus on talent retention but have been relying on zoom happy hours to encourage employee engagement but this ultimately leaves employees feeling more disconnected than before they've also tried other community building efforts which require a ton of manual oversight our customer insights are also driving our product differentiation and competitive advantage with culture aura our large enterprise customers are saying this is awesome and it's going to take a lot of pressure off of us can we also use this for our mentoring circles what about for newly onboarded employees with cultureora hr leaders can see the new connections employees are rapidly making to help promote culture and reduce loss of talent our reports are aggregated and anonymized to preserve employee confidentiality and promote data quality these benefits are fueling our competitive advantage we are finding our sweet spot at the intersection of culture and workplace relationships this is where companies are struggling the most and where other available solutions aren't adequate this market has massive potential while our initial target market of hybrid office workers is worth around 22 billion dollars the total addressable market includes any type of worker and is worth 700 billion dollars to tap into that market we're targeting large companies with more than 500 employees that have a workforce that is primarily hybrid or remote and who prioritize a healthy workplace culture we are a sas company and we will offer a trial version to promote initial usage our pricing will be based on the number of users and we are targeting an average price between two thousand and five thousand per month per company culture aura generates value for employees a recent proof of concept experiment with 14 employees at a small wealth management firm facilitated four new connections between employees with the objective of strengthening weak ties employees shared overwhelmingly positive feedback by week three 100 of participants found the experience valuable we know that more connections reduce turnover so by retaining just one additional person this firm will save 65 000 a year a 3x roi we are the right team to get this job done adam carly and i have worked together for several years at upmc a large healthcare system in pittsburgh where we designed built and scaled software we are super passionate about the future of work and bring deep strength in tech finance organizational behavior and hr management we also have a strong connection to carnegie mellon university as i got my master's from the tepper school of business and adam got his masters from cmu school of computer science we do plan to raise a 500 000 pre-seed round in october and seek investors who are also passionate about the future of work we also ask for and would welcome introductions to large enterprise companies culture aura is an hr tech solution that is about to change the way companies strengthen their culture in a remote and hybrid world we are moving fast to market and we invite you to join us on this journey [Music] [Music] you

Channel: CMU Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship

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Length: 94min 49sec (5689 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 15 2021