Back in June, I walked into The Houston Ion for Founder's Live, expecting to catch a handful of people nursing weak cocktails and aimlessly milling about the presentation room floor. Instead? Standing room only. A cavernous space packed tightly with over 100 founders, operators, and investors. Even if half of Houston was on vacation, here we all were, sweating through an electric calvary of rapid-fire startup pitches.
Welcome to Founder's Live Houston. Five startups. 99 seconds.
Here's what went down.
I've heard the "horror" stories for years: week-long weddings with well over 500 guests heralding from all around the world. Thousands spent on wedding planning; even more spent on therapy to recover from the stress of it all. South Asian weddings are an intense, beautiful chaos.
AyeDu seeks to use AI to dial down that heat; to extract all of that stress and guarantee a perfect wedding. Integrating seamless planning with cultural templates and smart vendor matching, AyeDu will revolutionize the traditional wedding planning process for South Asians everywhere.
Online customer acquisition costs have doubled since 2017. DTC brands need retail partnerships to survive but breaking into stores is painfully slow. With the current landscape, if you sell a physical product, financial success is a losing battle. Omniscale will change that.
Leveraging human expertise with AI tools, Omniscale simplifies both the customer acquisition and partnership processes. With it's proprietary agentic system, Omniscale promises to land any deal - big or small - in just 30 days.
Sales teams scale fast. It's not uncommon to have an army of sales experts pushing a product. But not all armies are equal: new reps have to spend weeks learning what veterans know by heart, creating a vaccuum in expertise that forces teams to spend more time training and less time selling.
AnswerPath, by providing new hires instant access to expert-verified answers, plans to cut onboarding time and speed up deals. It's the all-in-one solution: the expert on a product, able to field and answer any question. With AnswerPath, sales teams can grow, and grow, and grow, without ever having to slow down.
Ever tried turning a Zoom call into a podcast? It's a nightmare of editing, cleanup, and formatting that eats away at your precious weekend. Katana.video gives you that time back, automating the whole process in minutes.
With Katana.video, you can develop your own social media content - no need for expensive editors or messy software. Katana puts the power of content creation back into your hands, enabling entrepreneurs to do more with their socials.
Lost packages are profit killers: margins diappear, insurance claims drag on forever, and customers get angry (I know we've all been that customer before).
TraceWrap solves this with a simple, cost-effective solution. By hiding a GPS tracker inside a one-time-use shipping label, TraceWrap enables real-time visibility, instant protection, and no extra hassle for merchant or customer.
Why she won? Zero fluff. TraceWrap offers a clean solution to an expensive problem that every business with a shipping department has nightmares over.
After the event, The Ion was buzzing. Conversations exploded all throughout the bar; they spilled into the hallway and the elevator and the parking lot. Investors swapped cards, founders compared war stories, and even community members like me got in on the action.
Fernando Moguel captured it all on camera, and somehow made a room full of sweaty entrepreneurs late on a June night look like they belonged on the cover of Vogue. This wasn't just networking: this was an entire community unto itself.
Founders Live gives early-stage startups a shot at being seen and heard (think Shark Tank energy without any of the manufactured drama). If you're ready to pitch, apply at founderslive.com/pitch. Or, if you just want to watch, grab a free ticket to the next event at founderslive.com and keep a lookout for more events like this Rocketnetwork.ai.
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