Startups Pitch Big AI Ideas During Small Competition on GeekWire’s ‘Agents of Transformation’
Big Tech is not alone in the AI innovation race. Four budding innovators took the stage at GeekWire’s Agents of Transformation event Tuesday in Seattle for a heated competition.
Ideas from Pay-i, Cascade, Autessa and GemateG were pitched to the crowd and a panel of judges, with Pay-i founder David Tepper emerging as the winner and most impressive under pressure.
Judges Bryan Hale of Anthos Capital, Yifan Zhang of AI House, and TA McCann of Pioneer Square Labs said they were looking for someone who is “good at presenting but also good at answering questions.”
Read more about each pitch:
Pay it (disputed by David Tepper, founder/CEO)
An AI spend management platform that tracks ROI across an organization’s AI history — not just tokens, but the full spend stack including models, tools, and GPU resources.
David Tepper argued that tokens only account for 72% of the total costs associated with AI, and that the complexity multiplies quickly when agents draw multiple models, business discounts, and GPU rental banks at the same time.
Born from his days following Microsoft’s internal Gen AI spent on Excel spreadsheets — a time when he says he once saved his department $300,000 a week by asking the right questions — the company targets businesses that spend at least $500,000 on AI annually.
“After all the hype and FOMO has died down, there are three characters that will survive the AI revolution, and that’s ROI,” he said.
Cascade AI (voice of Ana-Maria Constantin, founder/CEO)
An HR and IT support platform that uses AI agents to manage critical employee situations – benefits navigation, mental health services, leave management – confidentially and around the clock, freeing HR teams to judge people.
Ana-Maria Constantin opened her forum with a show of hands, asking the audience if they ever hesitated to go to HR because they weren’t sure whose side HR would be on.
“Imagine if that is the case for the people in this room, the senior leaders who work for the most successful companies in the world,” he said. “Just imagine how ordinary workers feel. That’s the problem we’re working on at Cascade AI.”
Autessa (contributed by Roshnee Sharma, CEO)
A platform that replaces off-the-shelf SaaS with custom-built software that runs “AI workers” – agents that manage workflows like lead qualification and order processing.
Roshnee Sharma’s forum opened during crowd participation: what exactly is SaaS? “Software is like money,” he said.
The company targets mid-market businesses with revenues of $20 million to $500 million, and costs its AI workers about $7 to $10 each.
The judges are looking back on whether the results were really cost-effective or not; Sharma said the savings are real because clients avoid hiring more people: “We didn’t fire people. We found people were able to do a lot of the work they wanted to do.”
GemaTEG (pitch by Manfred Markevitch, co-founder/CEO)
The outlier of the group: a thermal management hardware company that targets AI data centers, uses solid cooling technology that does not require water and uses 40% less energy than conventional systems.
“AI works with hardware. It’s not just software,” founder and CEO Manfred Markevitch told the crowd, noting that a typical hybrid-scale data center can consume a million gallons of water per day.
GemaTEG’s granular approach cools at the individual chip level rather than the entire structure, and the company says its systems are twice as efficient as conventional systems per watt. The company already has installations with the US Department of Energy, as well as partners in Italy and Switzerland.
Hyperscaler shipments are one to two years away, with chip manufacturer design discussions already underway. Judges have pressed hard on the risk of shutting down customers; Markevitch compared the stickiness of their solution to Intel Inside – if it’s built in, it includes multiple generations of chips.
Related entries:
- Beyond the chatbot: At the GeekWire conference, AI leaders say the era of autonomous agents has arrived.
- Recruiters are starting to negotiate AI token budgets, changing the hiring dynamic
