How we helped raise $50k for these UMich students' startup: Demo Day Recap!
V1's W25 semester ended on a high! Check out our Demo Day speakers, pitches, and prizes -- and find out how we got $50k pledged for one of the Product Studio companies!
At V1’s 7th Demo Day, our Product Studio Cohort, Build Blue participants, and community builders presented what they’ve been up to this semester. Here’s how it went… 🚀
Our special guests 🎯
We want to thank the very special guests that made Demo Day such a wonderful event:
Our keynote speaker, Mike Vichich, who founded Pursuit after exiting his previous startup for $187 Million.
Bullmont Capital, a student-run venture studio giving 10k checks to help young founders go from the dorm room to the board room – who graciously sponsored the Demo Day prize.
Nick Arnett, a partner from the 1517 fund, a VC backing founders with $1k grants and $500K pre-seed rounds alike.
Zell Lurie Institute For Entrepreneurship, a University of Michigan-affiliated organization building leaders in entrepreneurship through their semester and summer programs.
The pitches 🥁
Demo Day consisted of a total of 10 pitches — 4 from Product Studio and 6 from Build Blue & the community. These products are at different stages: some are just starting off, some are figuring out monetizing their idea, and some others are already busy fundraising!
These pitches span from chemically-activated geological sensors to mail APIs for AI agents. Though they share one similarity: they’re all founded by ambitious builders in the V1 community just like you!
The winners 🏆
Last Demo Day, we helped a startup raise $40k, so we did it again and got one of V1’s very own startups even more money!
🥇 Our first place winner is a team produced by V1’s very own Product Studio – our 0-to-1 incubator program!
Embedder.dev is a startup that makes embedded systems developers work 10x as fast. Co-founders Bob Wei, an embedded systems engineer at Tesla and member of V1’s Product Studio, and Ethan Gibbs took home the first-place prize.
To implement a device driver, engineers need to read and understand 100+ pages long technical documents while writing extremely low level code to manipulate memory addresses. With embedder, all of this is now automated saving hours to days of dev time for every component in your system.
In addition to the $200 prize graciously sponsored by Bullmont, they won something even bigger… Mike Vichich, the keynote speaker of Demo Day, pledged $50k in angel investing to Embedder.dev to develop a new set of tools for embedded systems engineers! 👀
Starting off with data sheets automation, Embedder’s goal is to revolutionize tooling for embedded development for the AI-native workflow. Want to follow their journey? Subscribe to the V1 newsletter to stay up to date with their story!
The V1 team that made these events possible
V1 had itself a massive semester: we organized a trek to New York City for 60 people, we ran a Comedy Show with Varun Rana, and we hosted Y Combinator at the end of the semester!
None of these things would have been possible without the V1 team working tirelessly behind the scenes: every flight arrangement, every room booking, every poster took hours and hours.
Together this semester, V1 did things that were never done before, and this would not have been possible without these amazing people. 👏
If you want to join us in building the premier community for builders at the University of Michigan, V1 team applications are now open until May 31st! Read about open positions here and apply now!
V1 Summer… ⛱️
And that’s it from us for this semester! V1 doesn’t end there though… We can’t wait to share with you what we have planned for the summer! In the meantime, here’s some things you can do to stay up to date 👀
Join our slack for location-based channels to meet 100+ builders in Bay Area, Seattle, and NYC and see what they’re up to! 📍
Follow our instagram for day-in-the-life content of V1 members taking you through a day in their life! ⏰
Stay tuned on our newsletter for summer events! 📜