A showcase event where select teams deliver one-minute pitches to a curated group of early-stage institutional and angel investors, with dedicated networking before and after the presentations.
Demo Day, a showcase of early-stage start-ups to the investor community, happens annually in the winter and is often a part of the New Venture Competition (NVC), an annual pitch competition open to HBS MBA students with early-stage ventures.
This year the Rock Center for Entrepreneurship hosted Demo Day at the Rock Venture Leadership Dinner, a signature gathering bringing together emerging founders, faculty, investors, alumni, and leaders from the Rock entrepreneurial ecosystem for an evening of connection, inspiration, and collaboration.
We walked into the Rock Venture Leadership Dinner with a closed pre-seed round of funding, and walked out with a commitment to add to it, a second investor moving to diligence, and introduction to two senior engineers we’re now actively recruiting. That’s a strong evening for any company.
Vidhan Bhaiya; Co-Founder, Cortex Ventures
The evening shone the spotlight on the top 20 semifinalists from the Rock Business Track. (See the list of teams below.)
The semifinalist teams delivered one-minute pitches to a carefully curated group of alumni and early-stage investors, using the opportunity to continue to develop their pitch with help and coaching from faculty, staff, and advisors.
Lindsey Chrismon (pictured above left), Co-Founder of Oply said, “The Rock Center definitely changed the trajectory of Oply. For one, at Demo Day, which is part of the New Venture Competition, we raised over $500,000 just from that one pitch competition. That does not happen on a normal basis. It takes a while to be able to raise that type of funding.”
Errol Clarke* (MBA 2026) AesthetiCart is building a B2B procurement platform for Med Spas, Plastic Surgery, and Dermatology practices that unifies ordering, inventory management, and spend analytics for medical aesthetic practices—eliminating fragmentation and unlocking up to 10% savings on product spend.
Jesse Kesner* (MBA 2026) Alnu Health is the first clinically backed AI-companion that delivers continuous, clinically aligned nutrition, behavior, and side-effect support to the GLP-1 community - improving adherence, reducing discontinuation, and lowering provider burden.
Stephen Buchanan (MBA 2026) Bandelier Technologies commercializes Los Alamos–born innovations in memory-free quantum radar for long-range, low-signature detection.
Sarah Casella (MBA 2026) CerberusAI protects modern applications from API abuse and emerging AI-agent threats by analyzing intent across users, services, and agents—delivering real-time detection far beyond today’s rule- or signature-based tool.
Vidhan Bhaiya* (MBA 2026) & Eashaan Gunapati* (MBA 2026) Cortex is building the world's best hardware engineer. Cortex takes majority stakes in engineering firms, absorb decades of real design decisions, and deploy AI that takes hardware designs from concept to production in weeks instead of years. Cortex will design hardware at the speed of software.
Morgan Hewett (MBA 2026) Devin is an AI-powered sexual wellness platform for single women, combining a patented biofeedback-enabled vibrator with an intimacy companion that learns a woman’s body and emotions in real time—creating the world's first large-scale dataset on female arousal.
William Gao* (MS/MBA 2026) Frootful converts orders from Whatsapp, email, text, and more automatically into ERPs using an AI-powered pipeline that handles extraction, validation, pricing, and invoicing. Distributors get fewer errors, faster settlement, and the ability to scale without extra headcount.
Lora AI
Bill Newman* (MBA 2026) & Eshan Tarneja* (MBA 2026) Lora AI helps food distributors price thousands of volatile SKUs in minutes, by ingest ERP, inventory, and market data to generate transparent, optimal prices that boost margin by over 33%.
Angelo Policicchio* (MBA 2026) & Akash Sadashivapeth* (MBA 2026) Luca IQ is an AI-powered workflow engine that helps CPA firms complete individual tax returns faster by automating many of the current manual tasks.
Andrea Corleto* (MBA 2026) & Jennifer Arnold* (MS/MBA 2026) Lyv is a platform that connects wellness businesses (such as medspas, health coaches and wellness centers) to clinical services they currently can’t provide but have customer demand for - including blood testing, prescriptions, and peptides.
Cristian Richard* (MBA 2026) Motex is a dispute resolution platform. It incorporates the business rules, the law, and past similar cases to reduce the time and costs associated with a traditional legal dispute.
Elif Memet* (MBA 2026) & Vincent Huang (MBA 2025) Omu is the company built to crack the $2T US labor-productivity gap: AI that uncovers the deep logic of human motivation and rearchitects incentives and structure to unlock the full potential of any organization.
John Yang-Sammataro* (MBA 2026) Onza Finance helps skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) get faster access to their own money so that they can provide quality care.
Harry Price (MS/MBA 2026) & Colman Truett (MBA 2027) Sensea is building the internet of the ocean via long-duration, persistent underwater network solutions that collect, process, and transmit data from the sea floor to satellites and everything else in between.
Goutam Gadiraju* (MBA 2026) Serosafe Surgical is a clinical-stage medtech startup developing medical devices that prevent pain and complications associated with post-operative surgical drains.
Siren
Audrey Hansen* (MBA 2026) Siren uses AI to turn offline customer feedback into structured SKU-level intelligence that reduces returns, improves product data quality, and unlocks new revenue through personalization.
Spectral Autonomy
David Neary (MBA 2027) Spectral Autonomy makes platform agnostic electronic warfare software, so the same techniques that can jam enemy missiles, avoid detection, and spot incoming threats on advanced jets can now also protect transport planes, trucks, and even civilian buildings, saving human lives.
Michael Neiswander (MBA 2027) & Ashvin Nagarajan (MBA 2027) TableIQ uses computer-vision AI on restaurants’ existing security cameras to optimize the guest journey, from wait time to service to table reset. It acts as a service copilot, with a color-coded table triage system for real-time prioritization & mutli-location accountability.
Kyle Weil* (MBA 2026) & Prakrit Baruah (MS/MBA 2026) Tummy is a digital app that provides IBS and IBD patients with personalized, actable insights and support to reduce GI symptoms through lifestyle interventions.
