Last week our team went to Paris to for the first time in our history present our company on stage and participate in a start-up competition. We were one of the 48 participants that made it to the final eight and were invited to come to the main event in Paris and present our pitch live on stage.
This was our first time going public and sharing our story with the world, so we were pretty nervous how it would land. But those nerves weren’t needed: WE WON!
PAUA
This year’s PAUA conference focussed on consciousness, creating connections between the material world and ancient knowledge. In other words, what can individuals and businesses do to treat this world better and create more conscious and regenerative businesses and products. Even more, how can we embrace that consciousness and apply it in the future of web3, the metaverse and AI.
Many speakers, from many countries and with a broad variety of backgrounds opened up the minds of those participating in the conference, from the Kogi’s –a Colombian tribe that shared their ancient knowledge– to a Q&A with Tim Chang –Tech entrepreneur & Investor who decided to not invest in business that rely on advertisement anymore– and insights on product development from Tony Fadell –one of the co-inventors of the first Iphone–.
The PAUA event itself was very insightful and interesting but the main reason for us to go to Paris was to participate in the first edition of the PAUA StartUp awards!
Our pitch
When we got the news that we were among the final eight, we were very excited, but quickly realised that the hardest part still needed to happen.
We had only 5 minutes to present our ideas, and even though we recently critically reviewed our strategy and business approach and got more clarity during the process, being able to convey the problem, our solution, and our approach in such a short time required a lot of iterating and work on the presentation itself.
The new addition to our narrative was the concept of Regenerative-AI, a new approach in which we, together with others, consciously create machine learning tools & ai-apps that have a positive impact on the world and provide privacy, security and agency to users over their personal data and the things they do with it.
We explained the concept of the POD, the personal online data-storage, where the user’s data is stored safe and encrypted. The POD lays at the core of our innovation, with capabilities for users to pull data from external data-sources, keep it safe and turn it to something they can use. Through the Memri-Marketplace they can install ai-apps to run on their data and enhance it.
To showcase how such an app could look like, we shared a demo of the Memri Now app showing the potential. The app, that we’re currently testing with the first users, was received with enthusiasm as well!
By creating a regenerative AI platform we bring all these different components together. To increase our impact we are searching for partners and communities that want to co-create the future of AI with us.
The outcome
Our pitch turned out to be a success! We not only won the PAUA start-up award but also got praise from those attending the conference. The jury, consisting of experienced investors and VCs, unanimously selected us to be one of the winners:
“We’re not talking about disruption, we’re talking about regeneration, healing, and fixing what unicorns may have damaged. Memri’s selection as a winner was an easy choice when considering their impact-driven approach to AI, one AI we can trust with our data and privacy.”
Future plans
With this experience and recognition we’re hungry to go out there for more and start co-creating with many others as well. In the near future we expect to organise events and workshops ourselves to help the community forward. When we have more concrete content to share we’ll definitely do that! For now we’re enjoying the price and using the energy we got from it to continue working hard.