DC Tech & Venture Coalition (DCTAV) packed last Wednesday with a series of events and made it awesome! They warmed up the day with a cozy co-working environment at ThinkNimble. Then, there was the Developer-Founder speed dating event. And it all culminated with the last and the best DCTech meetup of 2023! There were great presentations, exciting announcements, and opportunities to meet all the great people of the DC Startup community. Here are some quick highlights:
- Steve Drucker from Volato presented Fly Vaunt. Did you know you can fly private jets for less than $1000/year? Yes, per YEAR! I didn't! And guess what? They got listed on NYSE the same day! So keep an eye on SOAR, that’s a unicorn in the making.
- Andrew Sheves presented DCDR - his unique approach to risk-based decision making and demonstrated how his approach speeds up your work and allows switching between different AI models while keeping the context.
- Dumi Mabhena demonstrated Shanda. If you’re running a podcast (or dreaming about making one), check it out, this app greatly speeds up the production cycle by using, guess what? Multiple AI models.
- GovPro AI, presented by Alexander Cohen, came up with a solution that automates writing government proposal drafts. The cool aspect of their approach is that they only use 3rd party APIs (ChatGPT) for the public information, while preparing the confidential part using the models they trained specifically for each client and run on-prem.
- Orderly, presented by Mike Ganz, parses all those gazillions of order notifications, aggregates and presents them in an easy-to-use interface. This tool makes sure that you will never miss the return deadline anymore.
- Joell Stocchero presented how Standd helps to organize and navigate huge piles of legal and financial documentation using, yes, you guessed it, AI. If you’ve ever dealt with this sort of documents, you know how difficult it is to work with this kind of documentation, so Standd is indispensable.
- Philippe Brégeon announced a huge milestone in The Pitch Place development by securing an investment (a mission impossible in Q4’23, but not for Philippe!). The Pitch Place is a news and media marketplace connecting editors and freelancers to deliver better news to all of us.
- Kevin Morgan and Katie McKenzie presented their largest (so far) QR code. Looking forward to 2024, I’m sure they will beat this record at least x2! ??
So, the bottom line (besides the obvious “AI is everywhere”) is that DC startup scene is booming, despite the harsh investment climate of 2023. All thanks to Washington’s startup community and organizations like DC Tech & Venture Coalition (DCTAV) that help entrepreneurs to connect and promote their great products. So huge thanks to DCTAV, which keeps delivering these awesome events, and their captains who steered this awesome day: Kevin Morgan, Katie McKenzie, Kaitlin Moran and Ashtan Moore!
#dctav #startup #washingtondc #ai
