VCs offer live feedback on audience members' startup pitch decks | TechCrunch Disrupt 2024

Gail AI Pitch and Feedback

• A session is being held where founders will receive feedback on their pitch decks from real Venture Capital Partners, a rare opportunity for founders to get actual feedback. (22s)
• The format of the session involves each founder pitching for 3 minutes, followed by 5 minutes of feedback from the Venture Capital Partners. (38s)
• The first founder to pitch is Grant Mueller from Gail AI, a medical AI coding company. (44s)
• Grant Mueller is an orthopedic surgeon and co-founder and CEO of Gail AI, which aims to solve the problem of incorrect medical coding that results in doctors leaving almost $400 billion on the table every year. (1m7s)
• The current solution requires revenue cycle managers, which can be expensive, with the average hospital spending $56 million a year to ensure correct payment. (2m17s)
• Gail AI offers a lightweight AI coding platform designed to display legacy solutions, which is fast, low-cost, and speeds up physicians' workflow. (2m23s)
• The company was founded by surgeons who were fed up with the current system and created an AI-driven coding company for doctors, taking a deliberate approach focusing on the clinic path. (2m52s)
• Gail AI's solution involves plugging the hole in the system by targeting physicians at the point of entry, where they have access to data and knowledge of the encounter. (3m8s)
• The company has gained traction in academic medical centers, private practices, professional organizations, and even revenue cycle managers, with 92,000 users, superior accuracy over humans, and the ability to bring in over $250,000 of extra revenue per physician. (3m41s)
• Gail AI is focusing on private practices, rather than hospitals, which can be difficult to deal with. (4m4s)
• A startup presented its pitch, focusing on a healthtech product that helps clinicians with coding and billing, and the value proposition for the clinician was well outlined, but the customer and who pays for the product were unclear (4m18s).
• The startup clarified that it is a B2B provider solution, selling to physicians, private practices, and hospitals, with adoptions from revenue cycle managers, and has built a platform that anyone can use (4m51s).
• The product can code a note in three seconds at a cost of $1, with superior accuracy, compared to the 74 minutes and $243 it takes currently (5m17s).
• Feedback suggested that the pitch should focus on what is uniquely special about the product and customer, as it is hard to be everything for everyone (5m28s).
• Additional feedback recommended including more information about the actual product, its place in the workflow, and necessary integrations, as well as the tech stack and software expertise (5m42s).
• The startup is integrated into every major EMR, hosted on the cloud, and uses multiple machine learning tools to be fast and cheap (6m15s).
• The startup is looking to form a sales team with the fundraising, hiring two to three sales people to reach the target goal of 800 users a year (7m19s).
• The fundraising of $4 million would be used to achieve near-term milestones, including product development, team expansion, and key hires (7m6s).
• The startup aims for an estimated annual revenue (AR) of $5.7 to $9 million in the first year and plans to process over a million notes in the second year. (7m36s)
• The company uses a flat fee pricing model of one dollar per note, avoiding percentage-based fees to accommodate the thin margins of private practices and hospitals. (7m55s)
• The startup differentiates itself from competitors by leveraging the founders' experience as physicians, which helps them understand and influence doctor behavior effectively. (8m44s)
• The company faces competition from large electronic medical record (EMR) companies, some of which offer similar functionalities for free, but the startup believes its user-centric design offers an advantage. (9m16s)

Satia Pitch and Feedback

• Amria Bassin, co-founder and CEO of Satia, presents a pitch for compliance automation software aimed at addressing the surplus inventory problem, a significant issue in the supply chain. (10m3s)
• Satia was founded by Amria Bassin and Gary Quang, who met at UC Berkeley and have experience in e-commerce and logistics, where they encountered surplus inventory challenges firsthand. (10m11s)
• The surplus inventory problem is widespread, with companies holding $800 billion worth of surplus inventory across various supply chain levels, leading to high carrying costs and overhead. (10m35s)
• Surplus inventory is a significant and costly issue for businesses, particularly affecting the food, health, wellness, and beauty sectors, impacting their bottom line. (11m8s)
• Satia addresses this problem by streamlining the entire process of inventory management, from offers and negotiations to credit checks and logistics, including coordinating pallet pickup. (11m25s)
• The company has partnered with major instant commerce companies in the US and has launched with grocery delivery companies, beauty and CPG brands, and fulfillment centers, generating six figures in annual recurring revenue (ARR). (11m37s)
• Satia is venture-backed by top Silicon Valley investors and won second place at the 2023 AWS Amazon Web Services startup competition. The company charges a SaaS fee and a take rate based on volume and consistency. (11m49s)
• The primary focus is on food, particularly dry grocery and ambient shelf-stable items, as well as health, wellness, beauty, and cosmetics, due to their shelf life and expiration dates. (12m36s)
• Satia operates by partnering with major companies in instant commerce, working directly from their warehouses and micro-fulfillment centers, and collaborating with third-party logistics centers and brands. (13m4s)
• The platform integrates with warehouse management systems to manage inventory data, identify items to clear based on opportunity costs, and streamline the offloading process, including transactions and logistics. (13m39s)
• The pitch highlights the importance of explaining the motivation behind focusing on this specific problem and the unique approach taken by Satia. (14m15s)
• The startup is currently wrapping up a fundraising round, with plans to announce it soon, and is using the capital primarily to grow the team by hiring engineers and customer experience staff to expand partnerships with new fulfillment centers and brands, and serve them consistently (14m40s).
• The company's product roadmap involves expanding its services to help customers with issues such as palet packing and optimizing truck packing to reduce carbon footprints and improve sustainability (15m35s).
• The startup is focused on the Surplus problem, which involves handling physical goods with expiration dates and UPCs, and is looking to expand its services to help customers with other inefficiencies, such as truck logistics (15m20s).
• The company is already working with big customers, including billion-dollar companies, and is looking to expand its services to help them with other opportunities, such as generating compliance reports (16m15s).
• The startup's focus on reverse logistics and sustainability is a key part of its mission, and it may make sense to emphasize this aspect more in the pitch to appeal to customers who value environmental responsibility (16m53s).
• The company's services can help businesses save money and reduce their environmental impact, which is a key selling point for customers who are looking to improve their bottom line and reduce their carbon footprint (17m11s).

Wing Driver Pitch and Feedback

• Andre Azavedo, CEO of Wing Driver, shared a personal story of a car accident he had on March 7, 2014, due to falling asleep while driving, which motivated him to create a transformative impact on driver safety (17m43s).
• Wing Driver uses AI and computer vision to watch drivers' faces and generate audio and visual alerts if they fall asleep or get distracted, with the technology working on various devices such as smartphones and tablets (18m34s).
• The company is targeting a huge market of 544 million cars in Europe and the US, with a $7 billion market opportunity, and is in the right moment in time with consumers demanding the technology and governments mandating it in new cars (18m52s).
• Wing Driver's go-to-market strategy involves targeting four different markets: Fleet Management solution companies, ride-hailing companies, insurance companies, and auto manufacturers (19m19s).
• The company has an amazing mobile software development kit that can be integrated into existing apps with a large user base, and the team has experience working on driver monitoring systems since 2014 (19m32s).
• The co-founders, Andre and Philip, already have a successful exit in the space, having developed technology for Bosch to monitor passengers in vehicle systems (19m48s).
• Wing Driver is currently fundraising for a $2.5 million round and has already secured $700k in soft commitments from two VCs, with the company booking its first revenue and having three companies deploying its technology (20m5s).
• The company's objective is to bring people home safely, and it is working towards this goal with new prospects from all over the world (20m31s).
• The business model involves selling per vehicle per month a licensing fee to fleets, per mileage to ride-hailing companies, per person to insurance companies, and per vehicle to automotive manufacturers (21m13s).
• The startup's founding story is compelling, particularly because many people have experienced or know someone who has been in a serious crash. The technology behind the startup is sophisticated and AI-based, with development starting in 2014. Initially, the company focused on hardware and software solutions but shifted to AI modules for phones in 2021. The technology aims to prevent issues like sleep and distraction by understanding driver behavior. (21m40s)
• The startup has developed its technology in-house, covering data collection, labeling, AI model building, SDKs for Android and iOS, apps, and cloud dashboards. The focus is on preventing fatigue and distraction in drivers by using AI to predict and prevent these issues before they occur. (22m50s)
• The company has a B2B strategy and currently has three customers, including a fleet management solution company, the largest oil and gas company in Portugal, and the largest highway maintenance company in Portugal. They are also piloting with the second-largest ride-hailing company in Portugal. The technology helps companies quantify and address distraction and fatigue issues using KPIs and data. (23m12s)
• The startup's go-to-market strategy involves customers building their solutions on top of the company's SDK. The company is in the early stages and aims to grow quickly by teaching the market about the existence and benefits of their technology. (24m54s)
• A startup presented an app and Cloud solution that aims to reduce driver fatigue and distraction by generating audio and visual alerts to wake up or focus the driver on the driving task, with the alerts changing according to the severity of the problem (25m27s).
• The app uses speakers and the screen to alert the driver, giving them a few seconds to correct their behavior before receiving another alert, and it automatically trains drivers to avoid bad behaviors (25m51s).
• The importance of clearly describing a product was emphasized, as it can be difficult for the audience to understand the value proposition (26m15s).

Diffy AI Pitch and Feedback

• Shen Goo from Diffy AI presented an open-source application building platform for AI-native applications, which has gained significant traction with over 2 million downloads and a community of 480+ global contributors (26m51s).
• Diffy AI is at a crossing point in software development, where AI is not just a chat button, but a new paradigm that demands rethinking how we interact with software (27m33s).
• The platform enables entrepreneurs to ship products from idea to product at unprecedented speed, allows enterprises to leverage AI to improve their flows, and helps developers manage an evolving AI stack (27m45s).
• Diffy AI cuts through complexities by letting users design AI applications as a workflow, managing and adjusting complex business logic visually, and is model-agnostic and highly extensible (28m12s).
• The platform is built for entire teams, not just developers, and allows business owners and product managers to define business logic directly as prompts without needing to write code (28m33s).
• Diffy AI has thousands of developers and enterprises using the platform, including YC startups and major players like Theral Fisher and Volvo (29m25s).
• The startup has gained significant traction and popularity quickly, which is exciting, but the pitch deck needs improvement for a presentation, as it's hard to follow with too much information on each slide (29m50s).
• The Gen AI stack slide is particularly difficult to digest and understand the key points being made (30m15s).
• The drive behind starting the company comes from a lack of better tools in the AI landscape, and the founders want to bring AI building to a bigger market and make it more accessible for people to collaborate (31m7s).
• The company has four founders, and the person being questioned joined as an early employee, sharing the same motivation as the founders (30m56s).
• A team slide would be a great addition to the presentation, showcasing the talent that has joined the company and the type of talent being sought to achieve the mission (31m50s).
• The traction slide is impressive, but it would be helpful to hear more about the hypothesis or user quotes on why the product took off and what excited users about it (32m16s).
• The company has received a lot of feedback from Twitter users, mostly developers who are more technical and shy about giving enthusiastic feedback, but there are tons of Twitter feedback that can be utilized (32m44s).
• The space is very competitive, and it's essential to highlight what sets the company apart (33m1s).
• Building AI applications that function effectively in real-world enterprise settings is challenging, with a need for clarity on the ideal customer profile and how the application addresses real-world concerns like accuracy and avoiding hallucinations. (33m8s)
• A horizontal company has been seeing diverse use cases across various industries, including a major testing provider in the US automating compliance checking processes using large language models (LLMs). (34m1s)

General Feedback and Conclusion

• General feedback for startup presentations emphasizes the importance of clearly defining the product, whether it is an SDK, API, or middleware, and explaining how it works. (35m18s)
• The significance of personal motivation and the story behind starting a company is highlighted, along with the importance of explaining why the team is best positioned to pursue the venture. (35m30s)
• Early-stage investing focuses heavily on the team, as the product may evolve significantly from initial stages to later stages like IPO filings, but the team should remain consistent. (35m52s)
• Emphasizing the "why" includes not only the reason for starting the company but also the vision and the big market opportunity it aims to capture. (36m21s)
• The discussion revolves around the growth of a startup's target market over time, specifically how it expands from one area to become a huge opportunity (36m33s).
• The growth of the target market is a key aspect to consider when evaluating a startup's potential (36m36s).
• Appreciation is expressed to the partners who participated on stage and to the audience members for their attendance (36m42s).
• The audience is thanked multiple times for their participation (36m49s).