With more than a thousand entrepreneurs and investors expected this Thursday in downtown Redwood City, the 9th edition of the Startup Conference is one of the largest annual events in Silicon Valley focused on helping early-stage companies grow and succeed.
A startup conference for founders, by founders
Some of the founders speaking this year include Jyoti Bansal, founder of App Dynamics (sold to Cisco for $3.7 billion), Mada Seghete co-founder at Branch ($113 million raised), Ali Vahabzadeh co-founder of Chariot (sold to Ford for $65 million), Adeo Ressi of the Founder Institute or Eric Yuan, the founder, and CEO of Zoom ($145 million raised) that I will interview on-stage.
"With the Startup Conference, we're focused on useful advice and stories from successful founders, and less on current hot topics or trends," explains co-organizer Nima Adelkhani. "We also don't have any corporate presentations or demos, unlike many other startup events."
Alongside famous startup founders, entrepreneurs will also be able to meet and pitch early-stage investors including Harper Chang, of Sand Hill Angels, Varun Jain, head of Qualcomm Ventures' early-stage fund, Soma Somasegar, the managing director at Madron Venture, Rama Sekhar, a partner at Norwest Ventures or Jonathan Charles from the Samsung Catalyst Fund.
In addition to the International Startup Fair exhibition, the 6 startups below were selected, out of the hundreds that have applied, to participate in the event's live pitch competition.
- Alysia is an artificial intelligence (AI) system that makes songwriting accessible to everyone, regardless of musical training or expertise.
- Apollo Robotics Systems built a fully autonomous digital surveying drone leveraging technologies like machine learning, 3D digitation, and sensing technologies including LiDAR, RGB cameras, and thermal cameras built into a drone.
- SportFiction creates an alternative reality world for sports fans by organizing simulated sports tournaments and reporting about them just as if they were real (game casts, live commentary, game recaps, photos, etc.). It's like The Onion but for sports fans.
- Informu's Mu tag is one of the world's smallest predictive loss prevention device, and if your belongings got stolen, the company will reimburse you with Ethereum tokens.
- HashCut uses machine learning to automate the creation of video highlights from any YouTube video, add text and stickers and even combine various clips to create highlight reels, all in a matter of seconds.
- Bipronum is a SaaS collaboration platform that combines the ease and openness of Slack, with process and visualization features.
If you haven't registered yet to the event, you can use the special code "ATHERTONRESEARCH" to get a 20% discount.
