The Next Big Tech Breakthroughs? Meet the Startups Betting Big at TechCrunch Disrupt

I'm Justine Miller with a special episode of Power Players here at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco. Now, this conference brings out thousands of founders and investors. There are tech startups, there are industry titans, all coming together to talk about and showcase the latest in tech. Welcome to Power Players, the show that takes you inside the boardroom with the CEOs and visionaries shaping the future of business. From TechCrunch Disrupt, we're here to break it all down. Yeah, absolutely. So there's a ton of AI in the world today. PopCam creates an activation, an experience that people really like. It's, say, instant smile. We have a camera kiosk. It's fully automated. People are able to walk up, take a couple of quick photos, and get a professional headshot that they would actually use on LinkedIn. They get a bunch of They get a bunch of colors, they get one for their company, their organization. They're brand, but they get a bunch of other colors too. A headshot is a very simple thing in most people's lives. We don't need to embed ourselves into every moment of your experience of the world. You can walk up, get a quick photo. It actually is authentically you. So we don't use generative AI to create the photo. We only use the pixels coming off the camera. And then we clean it up just a little bit. We give you a branded one, which today is TechCrunch branded, which we're grateful for the opportunity. And then they get a bunch of other colors too, right? They keep lifetime access, they get unlimited downloads, they never pay for the photos. And so someone who may have never had even access to a professional headshot in their life, maybe they didn't have a job that gave them one or they didn't have the money to pay somebody or they weren't really going to trust what came off their phone, they can walk up to one of our pop cams, they can get something, they can instantly put it on all the places that matter to them. And then they can move on and have fun at the rest of the conference. It's one thing to try to solve the problem for one person, right? But if you have a large group of people, a large employee base, or a large event, and you want to try to offer a service that is accessible to everybody, you can't do that on a phone. So, what PopCam offers is the ability to scale out to meet the size of any size population, any size audience, an employee base, a university student population, we serve a lot of universities as well. So, PopCam is a really simple solution. To a problem that on the surface of it, for a single individual, might seem really simple. But as you start to add people and increase the amount of people that you want to actually provide the service for, it gets really, really hard at scale. That's not just on the capture side. That's on the photo distribution side. So let's say you've got a photographer who's taking photos. Well, how do you get those photos to the people? We've seen everything from come over here and give me your phone number and I'll text it to you Here's a Dropbox folder that's public. ...publicly available, and everybody sees each other's photos. We don't do it that way. Individuals get their photos. The group has access to all of them so that they can use them if they want to. And so we started with headshots, which you do really, really well, and we've also now expanded into group photos so people can have all kinds of experiences, and the sponsors, the organization, can get their branding on it, and people can... Like I said, move on with their day and have a memento from the occasion, something they can actually use in their day-to-day lives. There's the equipment, and I'll talk about that in just a second. But one of the important things to consider is that if you were to have a person take your photo, they're telling you to turn your head, smile more. Did you know your left looks better than your right? Or whatever it is they might say. And that's all an opinion of another person. We give you a selfie. And yes, we also then use a high-quality mirrorless camera. to take the photo so we start with a really high quality raw image that you took of yourself and then we clean it up a little bit and we turn it around instantly and then you get a bunch of colors and you can do it again if you want to put your left shoulder forward or your right shoulder forward that's all unlimited use unlimited retakes and then you get all the colors with every one of them so the equipment is great and it's top of the line state of the art but really the experience is about you being in control. of your photos and what you look like and not being beholden to what someone else's opinion of you is, right? You get to take a selfie, but we give it in super high quality and we give you a bunch of fun colors. And also there's the technical side of photography, right? Are they getting the focus right? The depth, the field and all those things. And maybe they're really good at that, but their interpersonal skills are lacking and they don't come off right. And it's a little off-putting and you come away from that experience thinking, wow, I didn't enjoy that. And it wasn't anything about the photo itself, right? And so again, we kind of remove all of that extra baggage that comes along with really just like I said, taking a selfie and getting a really high quality zone really quickly. First and foremost, we're a B2B company. So for the attendees at an event or for the employees at an organization, it doesn't cost anything, right? We never charge for the photos. We're never priced by the photo. So, we... We work with the organization, be it the conference organizer, the company, or the university, and we're deploying into all those types of organizations. We start at $800 a day, all-inclusive pricing, taxes, shipping, unlimited usage, and then we actually go out to annual leases for $12,000 a year. And in all those cases, use it as much as you want. There are no hidden fees. You have lifetime access to the photos, so there's no ongoing charges beyond that. We also do the take a selfie version on your phone if you want to do that for your remote employees, virtual programs, online aspects to whatever your programming may be, and that's incorporated into our product as well. But we find most people really enjoy the quality that comes off the physical kiosk. It also creates a reason to bring people in person, right? So we're having professional headshot day in the office. Make sure you come in this week and get your photo. interact with your colleagues, and it creates a draw point to bring an entire community together over, again, something that's just really simple and easy. And ultimately, it feels really good you come out the other side of it with something you actually are going to use in your life. So a couple of these units are going to go back to us to storage, but a couple are actually going to go to other customers. We've got one going to a university. We've got one going to a corporation in New York. And so they ship in portable cases. They are dead simple to set up. They set up in It's been two minutes or less. And then they're fully automated, so you can just leave them alone and people can use them at their convenience. That's another benefit in contrast to maybe trying to have a photographer as they're only available at certain times versus you set it up and you leave it alone and just say, hey, whenever you're ready, go over there and take care of it and get your updated profile picture for your Zoom circles, your email signatures, all those places online where you want to represent yourself and your organization appropriately and consistently across the board. Thank you very much. So we have 50 of these units in our fleet, and they are circling the country at any given time. There may be one in your city right now, but obviously you can go to our website. You can check out everything that we do. You can even place an order online without ever even talking to a human. Obviously, we'll get back to you and make sure that we got all your details of your event, your logistics, and get everything in place ahead of time before you actually receive our equipment. Create this experience at your events. We've spent the last five years getting really good at logistics. So we have a fulfillment engine behind the scenes, which makes sure that we communicate well with our customers when it ships. We give you a tracking number and an expected arrival date. We stay on top of the shipping itself. We plan for it to ride ahead of time. And then when you're all done, you pack it back up and we have UPS pick it up from you and take it away. So the hardware is on version three. We've got that lockdown solid. And we are now scaling up. When I started with this a couple of years ago, we had seven of these units. And we're ordering parts for our next set of 20 to 30 units here over the next two to three months. So we're really excited about the growth opportunities. There's a ton of events going on in the professional space, conferences, trade shows. We do career fairs at universities around the country. And we're really going to be prepping for that spring season as we go through the winter period. So Hellerobot, we build and manufacture this robot right here named Stretch, right? We've been around for nine years. We've been developing it for the home, so to help people at home by actually not starting with chores, laundry, dishes, what you might imagine. What we're really looking at is how do we help older adults age independently at home? How do we help people with motor impairments? We have more agency at home and so we're starting there, we're still in the pilot phase, but outside of that we sell Stretch all around the world to researchers, developers, etc. Hopefully soon it will be available for the home. The way it works today, so if you are motor impaired, you're in a chair, you're in a bed throughout the day, it's hard for you to get up. First off, you can control the robot, you can say go to the kitchen. Go to the kitchen, pick up a glass of water, for example, bring it to yourself. I mean, hydration is very important for people in this situation. I think it's a good situation. So today, you interact with it through voice, and you can command it. In time, it'll be fully autonomous to be able to do simple things around the house, particularly if you're aging in place at home and just need a little bit more security, peace of mind. It can do safety patrols. connectivity for telehealth appointments and that type of thing. It's very complicated technology, and one thing we really focused on at Hello Robot was to make it both safe and trustworthy. We think these are some of the most important attributes. A part of that safety is being very simple, minimal. So unlike a humanoid, which is like this large mechanical man clomping around your house, this is more like a Roomba with an arm, right? And to get to that simplicity, we tried to not throw out the capability. So it's still very capable. It can do maybe 80% of the things a person might. But we can do it much more affordably and much more safely, importantly. There's a lot to bring together from the hardware to the software to the AI. On the AI side, some things are much further along, right? So we can, the robot can be in a home. It can recognize this is a couch, this is a door, what objects are, how to move about the home safely. That's much more doable today. Doing things with its hands are still very challenging. While it can do it, it can do it reliably enough. You don't want it to break something, for example. So the AI still has a long ways to go there, although it's making rapid advances. At the same time, you know, we build and manufacture this robot in California. And so there's supply chain issues around that, right? We have to get all our parts overseas, bring them here, assemble them here. At the same time, there's new FCC regulations about, you know, things being domestically made. So it's an added challenge for a startup like ourselves. Right now, we're pushing in two directions. One is enterprise, so we're actually seeing Adoption in places like data centers, right? Automation and sort of building, maintaining, inspecting enterprise sites, workplaces of all types. So that's one aspect. The other aspect is, like I said, into the home. It's longer term. To us, that's really where this technology can make a difference and benefit society. I think we're on a three to five year timeline to really get out there and have that impact. So the biggest problem in CNS drug development is getting the drugs across into the brain. And we have a natural defense mechanism, we could call that, called the blood-brain barrier. And unfortunately, this barrier blocks 98% of molecules. So what we're doing here at Avertum is trying to disrupt temporally this barrier to allow drugs to flow into the brain. So we partner with BioPharma, so they give us the drug. Be it a small molecule all the way to a viral vector, we just kind of opened the door to deliver this drug into the brain of patients. I think it's an experience we've been working in neurotech for the past 10 years, and we always look at how can we use technology platforms to treat other types of indications. And what's interesting with our, instead of just treating one indication, we could potentially treat multiple indications if we could allow different drugs to pass through. Using a mechanical disruption is what we call this kind of an original intake, but I think we have so few options for brain drugs that will take anything as long as it works for patients. There's always the biological funding, but also the funding aspect, right? Today, AI has taken a lot of the funding for biotechs and medtechs, so it's always kind of getting to the next milestone, getting that money to fund the next clinical trials has been kind of the challenges in the past few years. But above that, you know, There's always the regulatory aspect to it, but it comes along. But I would say for now, if I speak for all the biotechs out there, I think funding is kind of the challenge nowadays. So we just completed our non-human primate study. We managed to prove delivery of viral vectors of gene therapeutics. And now we just submitted to the FDA our protocol to do a 30-patient trial for patients with glioblastoma. So this is our phase one study for safety that we'll be doing in Oklahoma in partnership with Oklahoma University. Well, hopefully, you know, in the past 10 years, there's been more than 700 failed clinical trials in CNS due to this delivery issue. So I'm hoping in the next five years, when our solution comes to market, we can help revive those failed shelled assets thanks to our technology. That would be my goal. So at Flux Intelligence, we are building the nature intelligence layer for infrastructure and machines. So that we can keep wild animals away from infrastructure and all the places where they are not supposed to be. So you might have heard in the media about bird strikes with airplanes or trains or cars colliding with wild animals or crops being eaten by wild boars. So there are a lot of different human wildlife conflicts today and they are only getting worse because we are taking more space from animals and we are expanding the infrastructure. Also, a lot of the vehicles are actually getting more autonomous, more quiet and faster. So we give them the ability to actually be scanning for the area and detect the animals that are in high probability for collision and talk to them in their own language so that they understand and can get away in time. So this is the device speaking in the animal language that they understand. So we are... in the business of AI and bioacoustics and pairing it with wildlife science so that we actually communicate back to animals in the language that they understand and also thanks to AI maturing and if you pair it with edge sensing and also bioacoustics and wildlife science you are able to actually push the boundaries of interspecies communication and the way that we've been understanding wildlife so the stuff that we are doing now we could not have been doing it even two years ago. So it's really a good momentum for building in the AI and interspecies communication space. So we launched the devices in May this year after five years of validations with prototypes. So now we are live with some of the world's largest international airports. We work with departments of transportation or different land managers or farmers. So everywhere where you have problems with grizzlies or mountain lions or Or, um... wild boars so we work with a lot of different species now we are really about scaling and introducing the technologies and the devices to more and more segments and especially if you have problems with human I don't even know what, uh... especially if you have problems with wildlife we are here to help so you can just reach out to us So we're developing an AI model that detects heart failure worsening from just 10 seconds of speaking. So the principle is when the heart failure worsens, pressure inside your heart increases and this causes pulmonary condition which is fluids like water accumulates in your lung. And this makes subtle changes such as vibration in your breathing mechanics and vocal characteristics. And we captured this as voice biomarkers and our AI learned those patterns. One of our key differentiators is that our AI was trained with both voice characteristics and with key heart failure indicators simultaneously. So we have higher predictive performance. So our CMO and co-founder is a cardiologist at Korean University Hospital. So he's leading clinical research right now. So our model has been validated through two clinical studies. So in our first study we achieved AUROC which is accuracy of 90.4% and received award from American Heart Association in 2023. And we just completed our second clinical study and we achieved AUC of 95%. So we are currently preparing for our confirmatory final clinical study for regulatory approval in Korea. So after that we plan to enter the Korean market in the first half of 2027. So yeah, our key growth market is U.S. market because in the U.S. hospitals can get penalties when the readmission rates are too high and our goal is reducing readmission. And so yeah, that's why RPM and CCM systems are already in place in the U.S. market for remote patient care. So we see U.S. market as a key growth market. So yeah, we want to find some partners to do POC and clinical validation first. And then enter the US market with partnerships through RPM operators and healthcare providers. And then we plan to get FDA approval in 2029. Yeah, so we do pediatric near-feedback platform for kids with attention deficit and kids with autism spectrum disorder. We developed the protocol for non-verbal kids, so our mission is to help these kids to be more socialized, more attentive, more productive in the future life. Yeah, so this is the device. It looks like over-ear headphones, but we read EEG, we read brain signals. And most important part, according to the brain patterns and kids' requests, we create personalized content. So instead of asking them to play the same game from day to day, We create the game and other audio-video content on the fly for them every day. Because of that, it's much, much more effective than like a standard neurofeedback in a clinic, because it also can be used at home. We are manufacturing the devices. We need additional funding to manufacture, but it's going to be soon available. We will sell through the clinics first, but our mission is that mom, in the middle of nowhere, will buy the device, connect to the platform, find the right therapist if she needs it. and just start enhancing the kid's condition. Science, it's a big, huge science under the hood. We don't reinvent the bicycle. We use the neurofeedback technology. It's well known since the 90s. What we have done, portable, wearable device from home and personalized content. We have done paid pilot study and since the inception we have helped around 100 kids. So again, non-verbal kids, severe cases, we work with them and have some success. It's very important. It took us three years to develop and patent this device. Why? We have 3D printed hundred prototypes and kids with autism especially, they have the sensory issue and they don't want to put anything. So special materials, special form factor. Like we need some brain zones but it's kind of most important criteria is to make it comfortable and like later affordable and engaging. Yeah next year early next year is going to be shipping to the first clients to the clinics again but we think we strongly believe it is the best form factor for neuro device over ear headphones and it's applicable to other like a brain issues so Other companies can use their device. Generally speaking, we want to create a Toyota, like a reliable and affordable headset for a lot of cases. For example, when a non-verbal kid starts speaking, it's for parents, it's everything. And for us, it's also when we see thousands of devices we'll be using. For me, it's like a mission of my life when I see this.