*NDRC Accelerator Director, Lorraine Curham, MCs Demo Day with 400 ecosystem builders*

The crackle of energy was the first thing people felt as they walked into Dogpatch Labs. Four hundred souls swept through the glazed doors and under the ancient steel beams, climbing stairs as the babble grew louder and louder. Waiters slalomed between tables with wine and water and the stage was set for fifteen founders to lay bare their ideas with a three-minute pitch, delivered blind without notes. Gossip and laughter amped up the tension. Coats were removed and gilets unzipped. Demo Day had arrived.

The biannual Demo Day is the headline event at the end of the NDRC Accelerator programme, but this one was different. For the first time, there would be additional participants alongside the six NDRC Accelerator startups slated to pitch. The Founders programme, Ireland’s flagship talent accelerator designed to match co-founders, was showcasing nine of its startups on a public stage for the first time.

*Veronica Breene of Vesta Insights live onstage*

As the crowd settled, Ian Browne, MD of NDRC, took to the stage to set the scene and establish house rules before introducing Lorraine Curham, NDRC’s Accelerator Director, to MC the opening pitches. The energy floating from the crowd was elevated by a pre-show selfie (pictured above); then the fun began. Conor Moules of Barespace opened proceedings, detailing his journey from leaving school without a Leaving Cert to building the operating system for the beauty industry. Danny Stuart told us in a Belfast brogue how he and his co-founder Sophie McDonald plan to reshape the world of construction project planning with Workstream; before Veronica Breene, CEO of Vesta Insights, explained her vision for a mortgage arrears market smoothened and streamlined by machine-learning algorithms.

The interesting thing about Demo Day is the variation: in business models, industries, and the shape of the startups onstage. Peter Blennerhassett from Blynksolve was fourth up, changing the tone by delving into pharmaceutical manufacturing and how he and co-founder Bartek Baran want to bring cross-team collaboration to a higher level with visual tools. Karl O’Brien talked about his switch from running a digital marketing agency to founding Storehero with Thomas Gleeson, a startup helping e-commerce companies move away from betting the family farm on acquisition channels, focusing instead on profitability metrics: they’ve built the analytics platform that helps business owners see the wood from the trees.

*Audience of 400 strong cheer on the founders*

Dave Neville from Nurture closed a rapid-fire first half - perhaps the tallest founder on the day, he nearly clipped his head on the old tobacco warehouse beams as he ascended to the stage. But he took his chance in the limelight, showing how his team has leveraged AI to turn the digital classroom into a place where students receive stronger, deeply personalised feedback to help them learn more, faster.

As Neville and the NDRC cohort took their bows to close the first half, the crowd had a moment to catch their breath. With presentations clocking in at three minutes, rapid transitions, and breaks for applause, the clock had barely struck the thirty-minute mark. Rain pelted the roof of the CHQ as the mic was passed to Heather Morris, MD of the Founders programme. Morris was an investment banker and Chief Strategy Officer at edtech giant Chegg in a past life but had been persuaded to take a gamble on a new, experimental programme: Founders.

Founders is a talent accelerator, the first of its kind in Ireland, that marries gifted technical experts with commercial minds to form co-founding teams. By matchmaking duos, Morris and her team make a big bet on several things: the symbiosis of the CEO/CTO pairing, compatibility of vision, and trust that people will work well together, having never met before. Forty-two ambitious and exceptional people began the programme and were whittled down to nine teams scheduled to pitch at Demo Day, having received pre-seed investment via the programme.

*Heather Morris, MD of Founders talent accelerator, introduce the first-ever cohort*

The first founder onstage, Adam Hankin, has a background leading GTM units at Revolut, &Open, and LetsGetChecked, but his nascent startup was cut from a different cloth. Gemell generates photorealistic digital twins of fabrics, cutting out waste and helping both designers and textile mills get their products faster. He was followed by Oran O’Flynn of Talio - one of the youngest founders onstage but already seeking to shake up the consumer insights space with an AI solution that allows market researchers to tag and segment data with the greatest of detail.

AI, unsurprisingly, was the theme of the day. Louisamay Hanrahan, CEO of Cocu, demonstrated how her product employs AI to help craft tender applications 80% faster, speeding up the draft, edit, and review processes. Shoden AI, presented onstage by founder Steve Rock, uses AI to draft higher quality messaging for sales teams to deploy on prospects; a co-pilot to slash time spent on laborious admin so it can be reallocated to higher-value tasks.

*Nocomed’s Rosemary Durcan pitches her life sciences startup*

The rain had stopped by the time Rosemary Durcan took to the stage. The co-founder/CEO of Nocomed has an impressive background in healthcare but is conscious of how it needs to change: her platform helps life science companies reduce emissions and adds the lens of sustainability to their customer and supplier relationships.

The intersection of gaming and advertising is a niche where Ireland’s reputation is going from strength to strength. This was apparent as Conor Deane, co-founder of GamesGrid, strode onstage. He outlined how their games distribution platform acts as a growth engine for brands looking to bolster their revenue figures, and increase conversion rates and engagement. Following him was Aisling Browne. Like Deane, helping brands to keep customers interested is her stock-in-trade. The CEO and co-founder of Glitch examines how AI can be used to acquire customers at scale online; their platform automates decision-making to choose the most impactful ad campaigns and remove the guesswork.

The number of founders remaining was dwindling but if anything the crowd was growing as drifters still filtered into the back of the room and stood, squinting from the back, at the faraway figure of Oliver Begley taking the stage. If there were nerves from seeing the crowd stretching into the distance, they didn’t show. His pitch was full of impressive visuals that demonstrated how his startup, Biota, blends AI and Earth Observation (EO) to measure the biodiversity impact of agricultural supply chains.

*Demo Day’s final pitch: Ram of Inspeq.ai*

The drums rolled and hands clapped for one final founder, one more pitch, and yes, one more AI-driven startup. Ram Vijayakuma, the co-founder of Inspeq.ai, knows that every team and organisation will want to build applications using the technology that the world can’t stop talking about. Their LLM ops platform performs quality control on the AI apps that organisations build, evaluating and improving their reliability, and helping to catch issues before they arise.

Demo Day is like a startup Debutante Ball, and the fifteen belles had strutted their stuff with a swagger befitting the big occasion. After Dogpatch CEO Patrick Walsh closed proceedings, the crowd lingered, soaking up the positivity and palpable adrenaline released by a group of people putting their dreams on display. Bottles were cracked open and people gathered around high-top tables. The talk was about the future, and a little bit of it had just been built.