🥁 Demo Day is TOMORROW: here's our complete roster of pitches!
T-1 day to DEMO DAY! Meet the pitches coming out of our Product Studio cohort – they've been grinding the past 8 weeks on these projects. How did they do?
Demo Day is TOMORROW! Sign up before spots run out to meet Michigan’s best builders pitching everything from dating apps to geological sensors!
📅 Thursday, April 17th, 6:00 - 8:00 PM @ Blau Colloquium!
In addition to the 6 products announced earlier this week, 4 teams from V1’s Product Studio will be joining them in demoing on the big stage. These UMich students spent the past 8 weeks grinding for Demo Day, starting from zero to develop an idea, all with the goal of making something people want.
How did they do? Sign up below to find out 👇
Introducing Product Studio… 🛠️
For the past 2 months, they iterated, built, and scaled their ideas. They dug deep into a problem space, discovered inefficiencies, and built something that could solve hundreds of people’s pressing pain.
From developing MVPs to scaling projects, these students put themselves out there this semester by taking risks, embracing uncertainty, and having the courage to try.
We’re so excited for you to hear from them tomorrow! Here’s who they are 🌟
Bob Wei:
Embedder.dev, a better IDE specific to embedded systems developers.Nesa Shamdasani and Aashi Hirani: Claris, ChatGPT for researchers to organize, cite, and collaborate.
Daniel Ryckman: Fathom, an AI debugger that uses context of memory data and register content to catch bugs quicker.
Dylan Liu: wstwatch, a camera-powered dining hall food waste tracker.
Alex Salinas: M-Booking, a number that you can text to easily book a campus room.
Soyeon Kim: TagIt, a platform to automate tagging sports photography with metadata.
Aditya Bodanapu: Form, a personalized dance coach to help dancers practice better.
Sounds cool? Catch their demos tomorrow! ✨ Four of them will be joining other builders from the Michigan community in pitching on the big stage! Here is the complete set of pitches: 🥁🥁🥁
Our special guests 👥
Our Keynote speaker, Mike Vichich, will be talking about how he started a company, sold it for $187 million, and now is starting it all over again with pursuit.
In addition, we’ll have a roster of guests consisting of investors, founders, and representatives:
Nick Arnett, a partner from the 1517 fund, a VC backing founders with $1k grants and $500K pre-seed rounds alike.
Turner Novak, founder of Banana Capital, an early-stage fund that invested in companies like BeReal and Secureframe.
Zell Lurie Institute For Entrepreneurship, a University of Michigan-affiliated organization building leaders in entrepreneurship.
UpRound Ventures, Michigan’s premier student-run VC club.
Bullmont Capital, a student-run venture studio giving 10k checks to help young founders go from the dorm room to the board room.
Not sold yet? Here’s the final kicker: dinner’s on us :)
Recap: Y Combinator visits Michigan 🗣️
Yesterday, V1 welcomed over 300 builders from the University of Michigan in an off-the-record talk with Y Combinator partners Jared Friedman, Brad Flora, Ankit Gupta alongside Managing Director Jon Levy and alumni founders Danny Sheridan & Deep Singhvi (Fern) and Paul Gross (Remora).
To our community, it was way more than just an event. It was a glimpse of what’s possible when you spark startup curiosity and give builders the space to become founders — by putting them in the right room, sharing the right stories, and surrounding them with the right community.
And this is just the beginning.