Big ideas, early traction: AI founders pitch VCs at Seattle-area startup showcase

Imagine you’re a property manager, and a washing machine breaks in one of your units. You text a vendor, who shows up without context and replaces it for $1,200. Turns out it was still under warranty. Had you known that, the repair would have cost $150.

Multiply that across 200 units and dozens of appliances, said Nicole Rémy, and you start to see how mid-size property managers lose tens of thousands of dollars a year — not from negligence, but from the absence of shared visibility.

“I’m not guessing at customer problems,” said Rémy, founder of Pelly and a property manager herself. “I am a customer.”

Pelly is a coordination platform that puts property managers, vendors, residents, and owners on the same page: tracking assets, warranties, and service history in one place. Rémy runs a 215-unit property management company and built Pelly in part to solve her own problem.

Rémy was one of the founders who pitched Friday, March 20, in Bellevue at the Seattle AI Startup Showcase, hosted by B.E.L.L.E (Boundless, Entrepreneurship, Liberty, Liaison, Empowerment), a nonprofit focused on connecting early-stage founders with investors. 

Ten startup leaders pitched their companies, which covered everything from mental health and fintech to R&D infrastructure and online fraud prevention. 

Anna Hong, who co-founded B.E.L.L.E with Lenka Huang, said she started the organization to empower female founders, though the community is inclusive and welcomes founders of all backgrounds, as reflected in the diversity of the founders who pitched at the showcase.

Hong is a three-time startup founder and venture partner at Aves Ventures; Huang is a lead AI strategist at Qurrent and former product manager at Meta and Zynga. 

The showcase was designed to give founders a stage and direct feedback from investors.

A panel of venture capitalists — Brooke Borseth from FUSE, Nate Bek from Ascend, and Hang Huang from InsForge — offered feedback on the pitches. Ke Du, a senior product manager at Apple and VP of programs at B.E.L.L.E, led the Q&A session.

“We’re looking for big ideas, and fundamentally we’re just looking to back exceptional people who are building big things,” Borseth said.

The panelists gave advice on what they look for in a pitch, red flags they see, and what information founders need to bring to an investor meeting. One of the biggest takeaways: the best pitches show “inevitable” growth — projections that sell a vision of a huge opportunity, educating investors on why the space is ready for a massive shift.

The founders weren’t pitching AI as a novelty. They were pitching it as a way to fix slow, regulated, and deeply inefficient systems where automation alone isn’t enough.

Examples include Precognition Labs, which is building tools to help marketplaces catch fraud in real time; Kednus, an AI compliance platform for model governance and digital asset monitoring; and Forge, which helps R&D projects manage budgets and stay compliant with government funding requirements.

In many cases, the pitches weren’t about replacing existing systems, but combining intelligence to make decisions faster and more reliable. 

The pitches included companies at various stages of development. Some founders had customers, revenue, and pilots, while others were in early stages with prototypes and market projections but no signed customers. 

The panelists emphasized that for a founder to be ready to pitch, they must be able to articulate how big their product can be and demonstrate that it warrants venture capital.

Founders who pitched: Jordan Bain, Forge; Andy Yu, MeowSprout; Vinaya Kansal, Naptick; Rachel Wilka, Groforma; Suhas Manangi, Precognition Labs; Bella Davis, Monarch AI; Clement Utuk, Kednus; Victoria Yang, vicino.ai; Peeyush Kumar, Aquarius; Nicole Rémy, Pelly.