Assertion AI won the St. Louis regional finals of the Startup World Cup and now moves on to represent the region at October’s grand finale in San Francisco.
The artificial intelligence company topped a field of 100 St. Louis-area startups that pitched their ventures at 10 different STL TechWeek events earlier this year, which yielded the 10 finalists who presented Friday night.
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“It’s great to win, but it’s also a responsibility to me to make sure we can grow, get actual sales numbers, revenue growth,” says Assertion AI co-founder and CEO Yao Shepherd. “I feel like it’s not only about us, it’s about representing St. Louis.”
Assertion AI will compete against winners from the 100-plus other regional Startup World Cup semifinals in cities worldwide for a $1 million investment prize from Pegasus Tech Ventures.
Shepherd’s company has developed a platform that automates the process of building predictive machine learning models, like ones that can forecast customer churn or predict fraud based on the swipe of a credit card. Building something that answers predictive questions like these can sometimes take six months because of manual tasks traditionally performed by experienced data scientists such as business understanding, data extraction, and feature development.
“We cut that six months to be less than an hour,” he says. “We built a platform that’s based on language model reasoning, which can think like a senior data scientist.”
While the company is quite young, just founded in January, it’s already finding solid traction, having scored up to $100,000 in pre-seed funding from the Missouri Technology Corporation and having joined the Seattle-based AI2 Incubator, which Shepherd says comes with $500,000 in pre-seed funding. He adds he’s proud to represent St. Louis as the only company ever tapped from the region to join the incubator.
“They really liked our technology and they are helping us go to market,” he says. “We’re targeting early stage companies. They don’t really have internal machine learning, [but] they have a lot of needs to deliver predictive models. And we’re seeing a very strong signal.”
The company’s pitch clearly resonated with the panel of three judges in the St. Louis competition, beating out nine other startups with a range of ideas including growing produce in shipping containers, streamlining the production of printed circuit boards, creating distress buttons for nurses, gamifying study materials, and others.
“I’m always listening for what is the definition of the problem,” says Atul Kamra, one of the competitions’ judges. “I tend to gravitate to somebody that’s got what I call a high def problem statement: Are you solving a really large, understandable, compelling problem that you’re really passionate about?”
Kamra says it’s what he looks for as the managing partner of the local venture capital firm SixThirty too. He wants to know that a founder understands the pain of the problem they’re solving for and has a clear angle of attack.
“That’s what I’m trying to tease out in almost every case. First is, do you have the clarity around the problem that you’re solving? And then are you building the right community around you to solve the problem and then take the idea to market and have people pay for solving that problem?” Kamra explains.
There were a few familiar faces pitching again, like Heath Rutledge-Jukes, one of the co-founders of the digital study platform King of the Curve. “Competition has been fierce both years,” Rutledge-Jukes says.
Since last year, Rutledge-Jukes says his startup’s key metrics have nearly doubled, with $610,000 in annually occurring revenue and about 500,000 students now using the platform. The company strives to help students study for college courses or major exams like Medical College Admission Test and predicts the scores they’ll achieve based on past users with similar educational levels and study habits.
Rutledge-Jukes says he took the feedback last year to heart and pivoted the company into more of a general educational product beyond just high stakes tests, like the MCAT, “because students have exams all the time,” he says. It also spurred his team to seek more growth with educational institutions, which now make up a quarter of the revenue that his company pulls in.
“The majority of our revenue was [business to consumer], focused on students [and] selling directly to them. But [business to business] is stickier,” he says. “You know, institutions, they sign it and then file it away for years.”
For first-time participant Adjo Honsou, founder of West African restaurant FUFU N’ SAUCE, the competition was both an opportunity to highlight her cultural heritage and gain valuable feedback on her long-term vision.
“When I got the opportunity to be part of the pitch competition, I knew I had to do it,” she says. “Representing my people with something that is the most important thing about us, which is food.”
Honsou says support from the community in St. Louis has been instrumental in launching her brand of West African cuisine, but she has her eyes set on bigger targets too, especially after finding success when others doubted her in the past.
“I’m gonna keep going until the wheels fall off,” she says. “Franchising is the goal, because we have the business model to do that. We have the essentials of West African cuisine,”
Friday’s pitch competition was hosted by TechSTL, the region’s tech council, and something executive director Emily Hemingway says is important to offer year after year.
“Our startup ecosystem needs more repetitive programming, that we’re creating these traditions, that the founders are able to mark their growth,” she says. “It helps create stickiness within the ecosystem that we have a mechanism to engage investors, nonprofit programs, accelerators.”
A strong example is the local AI firm Capacity, which pitched at last year’s Startup World Cup regional, and has gone on to make multiple acquisitions, raise nearly $100 million, and begin turning a profit.
“Theyr’e definitely the startup to emulate,” Hemingway says.
She says the region’s entrepreneurial and tech ecosystem is at a place where a lot of the programming that supports startups is resetting. Hemingway argues the region needs to rebuild connections between founders and the programs, investors, and other organizations that engage with them.
The Startup World Cup’s format as a public pitch competition among scores of companies at varying development stages can both help make connections and define the type of support an individual company needs, she says.
“A healthy ecosystem is healthy based upon the quality of the handoffs,” Hemingway says. “And so graduating founders from stage to stage is really dependent on us making it clear when they’ve graduated and then where they go and who they work with.”
Shepherd adds that he thinks St. Louis is a great place to build a startup, and that it’s closer than people may think to becoming a strong hub for them: “To develop a local startup community we just need a few successful startups; then it will attract a lot of investors.”
