 So, as you all know, we're at a moment in the world today where we are emerging from a few years of COVID. We have unprecedented global strife, supply chain challenges, and recessionary pressures that are facing us today. And as a result, we've seen millions in the U.S. and around the world lose their jobs, face eviction, fall into poverty, and generally struggle with financial health and stability. And so, as we look forward, we really wanted to think about how startup innovation could play a role in building resilience against shock. And that goes for large macro shocks, like COVID, climate change, and economic pressures, as well as micro shocks, losing a job, someone in a family getting sick, things like that that are everyday experiences for millions of Americans. And so today, we're going to hear from entrepreneurs who are building businesses focused on employment, housing, and fintech or financial health. And they will talk a little bit about what they're building, how their businesses can promote recovery and resilience, and really help their customers be healthier and more stable as we go forward. So I'd like to introduce our judging panel. We have Yigal from the Employment Technology Fund to JFF Labs, Reem from Village Capital, and Matt from Axion Venture Lab. A little bit of background on each of these folks. I'll start with myself. I am a co-founder and managing partner at Resilience VC. We are an early stage fintech fund focused on embedded fintech models that build resilience for their users. Prior to Resilience, I worked at Venture Lab, which is where Matt is today, focused on supporting seed stage companies that are driving inclusive fintech models. In addition to investing, I've also been an entrepreneur working to build products and launch services that can help folks have more access to economic tools that can build their lives, help them move out of poverty. Yigal is the founding managing director of the Employment Technology Fund at JFF Labs. ETF is a seed stage fund investing in workforce development and future of work technologies. I'm focused on models that have the potential to improve economic mobility for low to middle wage earners. Yigal previously worked at the Rockefeller Foundation and has invested, deployed significant capital to transformative businesses around the world. Matt is an operating partner at Axion Venture Lab, building programs to really accelerate the growth trajectory of the fund's portfolio by improving financial performance and amplifying impact for those companies. He leads Venture Lab's portfolio engagement and platform strategy, providing in-depth strategic and operational support to those companies. And prior to Venture Lab, Matt led product marketing teams at Salesforce and was also at GitHub. And finally, Reem is the chief growth officer at Village Capital where she leads partnerships, communications, and innovation functions. Prior to Village Capital, she was the managing director of Endeavor and Jordan where she engaged with high-impact entrepreneurs, business leaders, and innovators from numerous markets around the world. So we have a really fantastic panel of judges here who are committed to supporting companies in financial health, in employment, in housing, and really building models that leverage innovation to drive resilience. So these folks are going to really be leading the show today. What we're going to be doing is hearing from five companies. These companies will be in the FinTech and financial health housing and employment spaces. And the way we're going to run the session is that each entrepreneur will pitch for five minutes, will take three minutes of Q&A from the judges, and then get a minute or two of judge feedback. It'll also give all of you a chance to hear details on these models, to hear the kinds of questions that impact investors are asking as they look at companies, and hear feedback from a set of investors who are looking to support a number of startups in this space. So without further ado, I will introduce our first entrepreneur, Eric from SHARE. And can we bring up the next set of slides? Thank you. Hello, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. My name is Eric Chabille, and I'm the CEO and founder of SHARE. Now SHARE is the first solution into affordable home ownership for primary residential units through co-ownership. Our co-ownership programs actually allow people to get two different loans onto the same home that can co-live together, and we also provide down payment assistance programs. Now we want to know, do people live in co-owned homes today? I mean, it may sound totally obscure, right? But in fact, in the last six years, there's been a 771% growth in co-ownership. In fact, in this TAM market, it's $330 billion industry. And so when we look at the last 12 months approximately, we see $1.5 billion raised in this co-ownership place, but this is just for secondary and vacation homes, which is only preventing more qualified individuals who are underserved into actual affordable home ownership. When you look at just the national average price, the average home across the US is $400,000. So you're probably thinking, okay, well, most people can afford a $400,000 home. They actually, they can't. This is a real life story of a lady named Elijah Smith, all right? She's 37 years old. Now her by herself, she was unable to qualify for a loan in a desirable area. We could get her a home for around $250,000 in an underserved community, where she'd be making anywhere between 3% to 4% on her investment, however, that was not her goal. And her mother was also homeless as well. And she was living in her driveway. And because of our solutions, they were able to actually co-own a $400,000 home, solve a portion of homelessness, and now they're actually in a double-digit appreciating area. Now, who is our target persona? We're looking at 80.1% in terms of people who first of all can't afford a home on their own. Now, our typical renters, these are some of their pain points. Now, they have the choices of living with their parents. They can add more roommates. They can leave California entirely, but unfortunately, as I mentioned, the average home price is $400K or become homeless. And unfortunately, in California, we have the highest homelessness rate in the entire US. Now, here's the reality. If you think that you're renting right now and we provided complete zero down payment assistance, if that was true, you'll be able to qualify for a $240,000 home. This is a screenshot, so I'm a real estate broker, mortgage broker, and engineer. Here's a screenshot of my MLS data as of last Friday. There are 808 homes available in the entire state of California that you could afford if you're paying that type of rent. So fortunately, there's millions of us, and that's not a reality. So how do we actually afford home ownership? And that's simply by sharing the mortgage payments. Our current client's concerns are, first of all, there's no primary residential marketplace to buy and sell fractionally. How to build equity, especially tick lenders. A problem right now is that the existing tick lenders, they have a lot of tough regulations such as what is the down payment, the credit score, and of course, the education process. And so the solution is that the individual renters today, we must co-own collectively to actually afford a home. Competitive advantage is that, yes, we are first to market. What's terrific is that we have all these co-owning models in the secondary and vacation space that are just dumping education and paying for our marketing. We are licensed real estate brokers, mortgage brokers. Our tech is built from scratch. We have a utility patent, also trademark. And what's nice is that we do have our matching algorithm. Now, looking at the, or I should say the majority, but I want to emphasize on the impacting the minority, is that SHARE is the only platform that's entirely free. We don't charge management fees. We have a co-ownership marketplace. We provide financial literacy into co-ownership, and we focus on primary residential home ownership. Here's just a quick screenshot of our UI and US right now. So this is a desktop application. Our future fundraisers will be used towards developing mobile applications because a lot of our personas, they don't have access to desktop. So they typically use their mobile app. Our co-ownership process is that typically renters just come to us. They're looking for either a solution to co-own or they're looking to someone to co-own with. We actually will match them up and they can actually have their own space in a multifamily property, co-own, build equity in a higher appreciating area, and fractionally sell. Now what we've done today is that we've raised around $704,000. We've been fortunate enough to be part of Queen City FinTech, Mucker Venture Capital, as well as we've received some funding from grants from Freddie Mac, PayPal, and Village Capital as well. What we've done today is pretty incredible. We have approximately 50,000 users that are actively on our web-based solution. We're continuing to design new loans for Freddie Mac as well. And of course, we have actually closed homes and we are now looking for the next stage in our sustainable model. So why we're here today? Now you'll notice we're not just here for capital. To change home ownership fundamentally, it requires a maraud of everyone working together. So strategic policy makers outside of just working with GSE entities, we're looking for people to influence change. We're looking for additional tick lenders and 1.5 million to actually promote and boost our current infrastructure to build that Android application. What's going in our current momentum is that GSEs are already currently looking at us for loan developments. We're trying to implement for the California Housing Dream for All program, which for those of you who don't know, that's gonna be California co-owning equity with first-time home buyers. And the adoption of co-ownership models for large insurance carriers. Our 2027 revenue is shown here. Our primary source of revenue is going to be from originations and acting as a real estate broker, but our profitability is going to be dumped directly towards continued growth in lending our own money for the underserved communities. So they can get in and making it barriers to actually much easier than before. Our key personnel is shown here. So we have overall the standard timeline in real estate is around 20 years of experience. So we have people from the senior VP of Bank of America to it really just, I would say our team is one of the strongest you ask around. Our advisory board includes Will Adams who's Chief of Sales at Lending Tree, Kiran Hanan, globally rated 31st most influential CMOs in the world, as well as William Tsu co-founder of Mucker Capital. So without our collaboration and direct impact towards affordable home ownership through shared home ownership, we believe that owning a home is impossible for the majority and especially the minority. And so we hope we can have your support and connect with you after this event. Thank you so much. Thanks, Eric. Judges, questions? So the initial revenue stream, was that done through your web platform or was this something that you did on those transactions were actually transacted offline? Can you shed a bit more light on the revenue stream how it was achieved? Yes, and so we've done through our platform, through our beta software, we've done approximately $450,000 to date and that's been utilizing our tech right now. We are continuing to find the balance between where tech intersects human interaction, but given the lack of education with our typical persona, we find it that it's a bit of a balancing act right now. And where do you see the traction mostly on the seller side or on the buyer side? I mean the friction. The friction, it's absolutely on the buyer side. So with people who are selling fractionally or selling a home, they just want their highest ROI. And so we guide them into making those right decisions where is it in a good neighborhood which we try and make sure that they are co-owning in a good neighborhood and we try and find the highest offer for them. But for the buyers themselves, they're traditionally accustomed to buying a single family home where that's where they've lived before. And so getting past that point saying, look, here's a multi-family you can co-own, have your own mortgage, it's not traditional like how you've grown up with, but it's a huge step where you can make eight to 10% appreciating on your investment. One question, thank you Eric. Where are you finding buyers and creating partnerships and other things like that? Right now we are finding partnerships across California. We are looking into Texas as well, but some of our partnerships include Quicken Loans, Mer-West, Freddie Mac as well, and we're continuing to look at other locations, especially as home ownership rates are at the 400K, we want to continue to expand nationally. And I think from a global perspective, I think this is definitely a model that can be adapted. Where did this idea come about? I mean, did you like face it in your day-to-day work? Yeah, so I was a renter for many years, and so I was working at a company called Swinerton Builders, the largest GC on the West Coast. And it was great opportunity. I mean, I went from engineering to managing billion dollar projects. I was one of the few promoted every single year. But even though my wages were being increased around 10 to 12% with the promotions, that barely made enough for my rental income, or rental expenses I should say. And so I started to think, well, how can I actually afford a home of my own? And I asked my older sister who's an attorney, her husband's an attorney, and I said, how did you guys afford a home? And they said, oh, thank goodness, mom stepped in and paid for the down payment. And so, you know, my mom's a single mom, she's an entrepreneur, but a lot of people are not fortunate enough as I am to be able to have that type of down payment assistance. And so I said, well, look, I'm already paying someone else's mortgage, my landlords. Why can't I just do the exact same thing and build equity? What's stopping me? And that's how the solution came about. Eric, how does the shared ownership model compare to some of the other innovations that we've seen around housing access like rent to own? Yeah, terrific question. So with rent to own, the model is it's always a markup, right? So with us, we target people who either are already qualified and if they can't qualify on their own, we do provide lease to own. And so what's nice is that it's a win-win scenario because if we do provide that 15% down payment all the way up to 20%, the win is that the existing co-owners pay 20% less, obviously on their mortgage payments. The investor still makes a smaller turn of 8% and which is pretty competitive in the real estate industry. So I would say that the differentiating factor is that with rent to own, those are traditionally on single family residential homes and those models require significant amount of disposable income, somewhere around $67,000 a month, which I mean, that's upwards of the 19% of the entire US can even afford that. So I would say that's a big differentiating factor. Thank you. Reem, I'm gonna ask you to give some feedback. Yeah. So do you identify as a technology company or as an offline company? Because this changes the landscape, I mean, completely for you into the future and how investable you are as a company and your ability to scale, definitely. So you're definitely coming in with a, you're coming in with a non-traditional product and this will definitely appeal, let's say to the younger demographic and they're already online, they're very willing to jump on a platform or a mobile app and just engage in that process. I see a bit of a challenge maybe on the seller side because they do have a very vibrant traditional market. So having them explore a completely different route might be a bit challenging and then getting them also to be on the platform and down the road on a mobile app, this is going to be a bit challenging. My advice to you is to laser focus on a very specific demographic and maybe a very narrow type of property so that you have a seamless process entirely from A to Z. This is going to be paramount for you. I mean, it's still, you know, it will require some human friction. This is an emotional product. People are buying a home. It's, you know, you cannot do it completely online. There has to be some offline element to that. But my advice to you is to try as much as possible to have an extremely pleasant experience from A to Z. Laser focus on a specific type of property, master it, and then maybe move on to other types as well. The other thing I noticed is that if eventually you're going to be a technology company, you're going to need technical talent on the team. You should not be outsourcing this function. Eventually this has to be, you know, an integral part of who you are because that's what you need to aspire to be a technology company at the end of the day. Thank you, Reem. Thank you, Eric. Thank you, everyone. Our next entrepreneur is Claire from Let's Get Set. Hi, everyone. It's so nice to be here. I'm Claire. I'm the CEO and founder of Let's Get Set where we're building an app to guide everyday households on path to financial security. I care deeply about financial inclusion and it's what I've worked on my whole career. So I've spent a decade investing in and scaling different solutions in low-income communities and saw firsthand that they had unique financial needs that were going unmet. And at the same time, I was excited about the potential for using profitable business models and technology to actually drive financial access. So I went back to school, got my MBA at MIT, and that's where I launched this venture. In the U.S., there are 92 million working-age adult households that make less than $75,000 a year and they have unique financial needs that are going unmet. These are needs like getting all their tax credits at tax time, saving while navigating asset limits or finding a bank account. At Let's Get Set, our vision is to be their trusted financial partner to guide them through every major financial decision. And these households are spending billions of dollars on financial services every year and significantly more than their higher-income counterparts as I'm sure you all know. And yet these needs are going unmet. So we start with tax time. It's this moment where families are leaving $12 billion of tax credits unclaimed every year because they're not filing taxes because legally they don't have to or they're making mistakes when they do. And tax time is the most important financial moment to get right. It's the moment where these families get the largest influx of cash that they're gonna receive all year, usually about $5,500. So our product is designed to guide these households end to end through tax time and beyond to get that 5,500 that they risk missing. We do that through a web app and a text line that are built for their mobile device to meet them exactly where they're at. The web app includes individualized tools that help them decide that they should even be filing and then get them ready by knowing what forms they're gonna need and then they can actually file directly with us. At the same time, they're on our text line where they're getting consistent contact and support from us via automated reminders and nudges. And they have a direct line to us where they're able to get their questions answered. So far, this product has secured over $9.3 million in tax credits for 1,400 families and it has secured over $200,000 in revenue. We start with a beachhead of parents making less than $75,000 a year with a kid under the age of three with a 1.6 million moms in that group. And we start there because they have the largest lifetime value of the customer because they're looking for a financial partner and they're looking for us to help grow with their families. So our plan is to start with this narrow beachhead but then grow with them and ultimately beyond them to single households in this demographic as well. But given that beachhead focus, we're able to reach moms through a really unique go-to-market. So we partner nationally with organizations that work one-on-one with our demographic through trusted messengers. So that could be a nurse, a pediatrician, a social worker and they make referrals to us because they're looking for a financial solution that can advance the financial health of their clients and ultimately help their organization meet its business outcomes. This allows us to reach our users with high trust and low customer acquisition cost. So we monetize our core tax product at $60 a year per user. That's for the app, the text line and the filing for reference, family spend $400 on average getting their taxes filed at tax time. And from there, the vision is to support them outside of the tax filing moment as well with year-round financial support as well as tax support that will monetize through a subscription and then supplement with lead gen from mission-aligned financial partners. Our team has a deep understanding of our user strong behavioral design tech and partnership expertise to realize this vision. And we're supported by an incredible team of investors and advisors and have participated in multiple accelerators to really get the FinTech startup and tax policy expertise to launch this. So we're now raising $2.5 million to solidify our product path and scale user acquisition via our proven distribution channels. We're really raising against a few milestones around improving our core tax product, building out year-round tax features and financial support features and testing and scaling user acquisition to reach 250,000 users and generate eight million in revenue over the next two years. If you're interested in learning more about our vision or our raise, please reach out. Thanks. Thanks, Claire. One thing I was curious about of the customers you have right now that you're generating revenue from, how many of them fit into this income bracket you mentioned? Yeah, so 100% of them fit into that income bracket and 95% of them make less than $40,000 a year. Half of them legally don't have to file and 50% are women of color. Got it. And have all of those come through those partnerships that you have formed or they come through other channels? Yeah, so the main way that we acquired users this past tax season was from a partnership with Nurse Family Partnership. So they're one of the, they're the premier national home visiting organization. They serve 20,000 first-time moms every year. And so 1,200 of the 1,400 came from them and that also because of the mission alignment enabled us to reach this user base effectively. I have a quick question, Claire. So given kind of the competitive landscape in low-cost, zero-cost tax filing, how are you thinking about building a moat and send defensibility around the product? Yeah, so fun fact, in the US, if you make less than $70,000 a year, you can get your taxes filed for free. And you can do that through these volunteer organizations at local nonprofits, as well as some free versions of software that the software company can choose, basically the requirements around what's free to who. And unfortunately, those options, they don't work for everyone. So we see our product really as complimentary to a lot of the free tax preps support that exists out there. So for example, a lot of our users, this past tax season, we didn't file taxes. We instead referred after we got folks anchored on how many credits they were eligible for and the forms they needed to file and what credits they were gonna get. And then we found that only a minority of them actually used the free tax prep support that we had matched them with, often because of capacity constraints at those local sites and just inaccessibility issues. At the end of the day, these families are working hard to make ends meet and they don't necessarily have the time to go in the middle of the day to go get their taxes filed somewhere. And even in those cases, we also have seen examples where folks don't get the credits successfully, even though they've gone to the effort to use the free resources. So we think that they pay for them with their time, as opposed to financially. What's your customer acquisition cost? Yeah, so right now it's $4. The lifetime value is over a hundred. It's really low because of the go-to-market through these trusted messenger partners because you're basically cultivating a partnership at the national level and you're making a sell that is either a sell around the financial health of the end user or around improving the maternal or infant health outcomes of those users. So these are always key metrics that the national organization hears about hitting and you're positioning this solution basically as a way to help them hit that metric. And so once you get folks bought in at the top level, we've had success basically building referral materials and just kind of standardizing what that referral looks like to empower the trusted messenger who's on the ground. So it's very replicable and pretty exciting because there's a lot of, I would say applications, especially in like the healthcare space. I got one kind of burning question. So I really wanted to, if I go and do this one year and it's a simple process, wouldn't I do it on my own the next year or what's keeping me coming back? Yeah, so good question. So folks, so no, so I think what's interesting about this landscape, right, is that the rules around these credits are often changing every year. And we've seen that especially in the last couple of years. Last year was like a particularly confusing year for tax filers and there were also a lot of COVID benefits that people weren't successfully getting. But in a standard year, the income thresholds are changing. Something might have changed about your situation, especially if you've had a kid, right? Maybe you've had another kid or you're now paying for childcare, right? All of that changes your tax situation. And so we're basically the first folks to help you realize, hey, you're now newly eligible for these certain credits, right? And this is how much it means for your family. So part of our moat and value add, right, is that we're presenting the information that's relevant to users in a way that they can actually access, right? We're actually at time for the Q&A. I know there's a lot more questions. So Claire, I'm sure you'll get people coming up to you afterwards. But Matt, I'm gonna ask you to give a couple of minutes if you can. Yeah, sure, Claire, this is really impressive. I think this is absolutely something that is a challenge for a lot of low-income individuals and families in the US. So Kooders, do you for identifying this? The one thing I brought this question up, but that was when I first looked at it, it was like, okay, I wanna make sure that all the customers you really want are the ones that are using this product. So just making that very explicit that you've achieved product market fit from your perspective with these lower-income customers with the willingness to pay. Because that's a big one, too. I always worry about freemium models and the ability to really have a sustained customer in that regard. So maybe something else to consider is how you might form a revenue model with the partners that come through. So perhaps you could even charge a per user fee to them if they're on the platform. And maybe because it's at scale, you don't charge them $5 per user per year, it could be something lower. So then you kind of have a split revenue model where you may get acquisition just through organic, social, whatever. And you can charge that flat rate for a customer willingness to pay, but then also you're getting the benefit from the inbound from those partners. The final thing I mentioned, too, is it's great that you found that moat. I think really emphasizing, because you mentioned about five or six different partners you're working with, wherever we see B2B with an acquisition to try to get customers on an existing partnership, it's really helpful to understand the why behind it and what kind of sustained characteristics you want to have in that partner because their platform may not be the right one to adopt for integrating technologies with their platform. So it's really being clear around long-term, what are the criteria you're utilizing to evaluate partners and does it get you to your core customer at the end of the day? It's really great that you found one that seems to fit your goals and your model. I would just want to make sure that every partner you work with in the future, you can tell it's going to be a long-term benefit to you and them in long run. But yeah, great job here. Thank you. Thank you, Claire. Next we'll have Mercedes from Kipu. Hello, everybody. I'm Mercedes from Kipu. I'm the co-founder and CEO. So you will hear a pitch with an accent here. I hope you bear with me. We are building the first digital, the centralized bank for the informal economy in Latin America. In our region, 51% of our economy is informal and we are serving micro-businesses in informality. So they are the engine of our economy. Nine out of 10 of MSME in the region are micro-businesses but they are still not accessing the funding that they need. There's a 1.14 trillion funding gap and in Colombia, that is our beachhead market, just 9% of micro-businesses access formal credit and there's where we are working with. So they face three main problems right now. The first one is that they are offline. They are eight out of 10 are informal and 90% of them are blacklisted. So even though they are having a thriving business, they can't access formal credit. So they are being excluded by the formal financial system and they rely on paid lenders. They are violent and they are abusive. They can charge more than 400% annual interest rate for loans. So we said, okay, if we wanna accomplish this mission of serving informal entrepreneurs in Latin America, there are 78 million, first we need to digitize them and understand their commercial activity. We need to understand what they are doing, what they are selling to whom and by understanding the social capital, then we can start assessing their great worthiness in an alternative way. We've been doing a pilot with the IDV Lab on Columbia's Caribbean coast for a year and we really learned how to record data of informal micro-businesses. So first we started by building a platform where they can digitize what they are selling, which are their products, where they are located, who are their main clients and based on that social capital is that we use AI to build their new digital financial ID in order to start building again their trade history. So we designed financial services that are just fair, easy fair and an alternative. So we build our own trade score using AI, assessing their great worthiness, really different from trade bulls. Trade bulls are not able to analyze in a good way this type of business. We provide rotative loans that starting $25 and that starting increasing as we see repayment. So it's a way of getting back into the financial life. And we built a way of disbursing the loans that is not just by giving out the money in digital wallets, that is what they mostly use in Colombia, but actually through a buy and out pay later model where we open for them credit lines in suppliers and then they can access supplies at a better cost. So we are not just solving the financial side but also the access to supplies at better rates. That this is something that micro businesses struggle a lot with. In our platform they can apply for a loan in 15 minutes, they can download the app, you can do it, it's keep a bank on the stores or they can do it through a chat button, WhatsApp. So it's basically adding all the information that we need through WhatsApp or through a platform and we give them the money in three days. We are really designed not just to give money and that's it but actually to build a really strong community of users that they are not just clients but members of what we are doing. So we build a way in which they get rewarded by their engagement on the platform. We have a capacity building program on WhatsApp and we help them to sell more through our platform too. This is really important because just accessing money is not the way you will get out of poverty but actually you need to start building wealth. And that's what we are trying to do in Kipu. So this is a little bit about Web 3. What we are doing is really trying to access capital faster and at better rates for our users. That's why we built a liquidity pool on Web 3 where we are getting funded and adding liquidity to our user but not just adding liquidity but also they get rewarded by paying on time their loan by getting and making this community bigger and in this way they can start getting access to a world that just 1% of the world is getting access. So it's really doing that connection between the liquidity on Web 3 and our users in their everyday life. So 80% of our users are women between 30 and 60 years old. Since they joined Kipu, they increase their sales by a 10%. Their business is their main source of income and their income is around $300 a month. And even though 90% are blacklisted, 90% of them are paying on time. So this is really a big market that is being untapped completely. We started giving working capital since COVID kind of ended right after COVID and we've been growing really fast, 25% week over week. We have 15,000 clients, users and 1,000 clients for the loans. We are starting in Colombia where we expect to close a year with 3,000 clients. We are going to skate to Mexico next year and we expect to be all across Latin America. We are a team from different countries in Latin America. I'm Argentinian, my co-founder is Colombian. My other co-founder is Argentinian. We met while we were doing our masters at MIT and we have really different backgrounds. I have a background of urban economic development. My co-founder, the CTO, she's an expert on AI and machine learning and we really bring all this experience together to build the new evolution of financial services for the informal economy. This week it's been announced we are one of the 50 more inclusive fintechs. So we're really proud and happy with this and this is my contact information. Thank you. So just a point of clarification, when you're saying they're blacklisted so that they're not incorporated, right? They're not formal businesses, they're informal. What do you mean by blacklisted? As a person, right? As a person, like as a person they've been blacklisted so they haven't paid the telecommunic, maybe like they haven't paid like AT&T here or that kind of stuff. So they got blacklisted and then our insight is saying these are people that are being assessed by the bank as people but actually they have a business and the business is informal so then there's no, they don't have ways in which they can get to see the business. So if you can quickly just tell us your sources of funds, cost of funds and what's the average interest rate that the borrower ends up paying? Yeah, so we are funded in two ways. One is equity, right? And the other one for the loans is debt and this is why Work3 comes in. So we've been accessing debt at really high rates so it's around 20% annual and we can charge, in Colombia, the highest amount you can charge for loans is at 36 annual interest rate right now. So in a way and it's in dollars that we got, right? So it's like really, we're happy with that but at the same time we really need to tap into capital at better rates in order to charge less our customers. So that's why we are building the protocol on Work3 because it's giving us the opportunity to access individuals like anybody in the world can be investing in these businesses, you know? Giving them lower return than the institutional debt but still a good return and we can provide better services to our users. Mercedes, you just talked about one of the benefits of using Web3 in terms of being able to access the debt that you need to lend to your borrowers. From a customer perspective though, why is a decentralized Web3 model using tokens more effective than a traditional centralized model that just has a traditional loyalty or customer engagement program? For sure. So for the customer, they don't need to see that there's Web3 on the other side. It's really important for them to be the easiest. That's why we say we need to be easy for an alternative because if we are not easy to use, then we lose in this segment, right? So they don't need to know that there's blockchain or Web3 on the other side, it's just they will see that their loans have a better interest rate but then what we are doing already is giving them Kipple points, it's our loyalty program. These Kipple points now are not backed by USDC but by connecting the loans with the loyalty program is really saying, okay, you by being part of this ecosystem is not just that you get these points and now they can use it in other merchants of the platform but by backing them by USDC is, okay, they start getting rewards with which they can save, they can pay back their loan, they can even invest in a currency that is really far from them. Like saving in USDC for a business like this one, it's like super kind of far from what they are doing in their everyday lives but that's why we call it points, right? And they will still be points, it's just that they will start having more value than before. These points though, you won't have them on some type of exchange, like it's gonna be a fairly closed loop system, right? So there's no like assigned US dollar value to them because it's all self-contained. Yeah, so now they're self-contained, they just can't use it to buy to other merchants that are also part of the ecosystem. But what we're doing is when they pay back their loans, a piece of the interest rate comes back to back that reward actually. So they start, you know, the token increases as our cohorts repay their loans. So it's backed by the real economy and not by like demand and offer but still has a connection with USDC. Thank you so much. A couple of quick points of feedback. I would say the credit system in a lot of Latin American countries is based on this blacklisted model as Reem asked about, which is different than it is in the US. So when you're talking to American investors, here it's a credit score-based system and there isn't a blacklist in the same way. So again, making sure you're contextualizing your pitch for the investor audience can be really important. Secondly, and this was a little bit too, and my question is if you're using Web3 and that is the core technology that you're building your platform on, making it clear why the use of that technology enables a better customer experience and enables better outcomes for investors is really important. You know, why does it let you raise debt more effectively and easily and at better prices? How does that translate into more affordability and better engagement on the customer side? And how is that going to ultimately drive value for your investors? Great, really good points. Great, thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Next we'll have Manoj from Ramped. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Manoj, co-founder and CEO of Ramped, a virtual job readiness platform that creates better job seekers and helps employers hire 12 times faster. I'm gonna start by saying that trying to find a job in hiring sucks, it really, really does. Today more than ever, employers are struggling to hire skilled talent. The talent gap is growing so quickly that employers are barely able to keep up. And the problem is so much worse for entry-level jobs and for people who are looking for entry-level jobs. You'll take a look at any entry-level job posting that's out there today, and you'll see that these employers expect job seekers to have what a year or two worth of experience, a college degree, or at a minimum, some job skills. Meet Callie. She's the director of sales at Quadion and she's a customer of Ramped. Now Callie is responsible for hiring over 50 entry-level salespeople every single year. Despite getting thousands of applications for every open role that Callie has, she still can't hire enough salespeople. Why? Well Callie says that the vast majority of the applicants that she gets either lack hard skills, which means they know nothing about the job, they don't know how to do it, or they lack soft skills. They can't come in and sell themselves during the interview process. Meet Yaakov. This is the face of one of those applicants. Yaakov desperately wants a sales job at Quadion. But because he does not have a college degree and because he does not have job skills or experience, he's struggling to get interviews and he's struggling to make progress. But not anymore. Yaakov has ramped, where he can learn everything that he needs to become a top tech sales rep. For example, he can learn how to cold email by watching engaging short form content. And then he can complete a cold email simulation so that he can learn by doing and demonstrate these learnings to employers like Callie. In addition, he can also learn interview skills. He can learn how to answer the most common interview questions, and then he can practice some interview exercises so that he can perfect his pitch. And he can also do a psychometric so that he can get a sense of whether he'll enjoy doing a sales job. The point is that Yaakov does not have to rely on an empty resume anymore. Instead, he can objectively demonstrate his skills and learnings to hiring managers like Callie. Using ramp, Yaakov was able to land an entry level job at Quadriot. Because he was able to upskill on ramp, the fact that he did not have a college degree, or the fact that he didn't have any experience, it simply didn't matter anymore. And Callie was able to hire 12 more people like Yaakov using ramp, and she continues to use ramp to fill her sales hiring needs. And it doesn't stop with just Yaakov and Callie. This year alone, over 7,500 job seekers signed up to upskill on the ramp platform. That's a 400% increase in job-seeker signups just from the beginning of the year. The coolest thing about ramp is the impact that it has on job seekers every single day. We've seen folks go from being truck drivers to financial advisors at companies like Northwestern Mutual. We've seen folks who are single moms that have taken 10-year career gaps find jobs as top-performing sales reps because they've upskilled on ramp. Ramp is absolutely free for job seekers. Anybody that has access to a computer and internet connection and a willingness to learn can upskill on ramp and find meaningful employment outcomes, which is why over 150 employers, including really large companies like Northwestern Mutual, Moody's, Quadiant, they're all customers of ramp. We monetize exclusively from employers. These employers either pay us a license fee for our scaling platform or they pay us an access fee to tap into our robust talent marketplace. We're well over half a million dollars in revenue already this year and are on pace for more than doubling our revenue compared to last year. Now, job boards and conventional staffing firms and other learning platforms, they only saw one piece of the puzzle. It's either access to jobs or upskilling. Ramp is the only platform that focuses exclusively on entry-level job seekers and helps them not just upskill, but also find jobs at scale and fully online. We're just scratching the surface. We launched just one career track, which is sales. We've identified at least 50 other career tracks that'll help us get to over $100 million in revenue by 2027. We're a team of founders who worked together in the past and have experienced building and scaling the startup. We're back with some of the best investors and we don't intend on stopping until we change the way people find jobs. Again, I'm Manoj, co-founder of Ramp, a virtual job readiness platform that creates better job seekers and helps employers hire 12-tenths faster. You're hiring for folks. Think of us, you're an investor and want to invest, think of us. Thank you for your time. Well, thanks Manoj. I'm curious, because one thing that came to mind is disintermediation and the potential for platforms like hired and others to add this e-learning. What do you think has been the continued reason for them not to do so, number one and number two? What do you think is gonna be the continuous discovery that that's not the approach they want to take that gives you this particular mode? Yeah, so it's a question of focus, right? I think one of the challenges is when you look at something like hiring, it's very difficult to be everything for everybody. It's hard to be a learning platform and a job board for entry-level people, mid-level people, senior-level people. But you're doing it. We're not. So we're focusing exclusively on two things. We're focusing on entry-level jobs and we're focusing on non-technical and quasi-technical jobs. And the reason is that those are the types of skills that folks can reasonably learn in a short period of time on a digital-first platform. So that is an area of focus, but there's a lot of volume there, right? In America today, there are way more jobs, entry-level jobs in roles like sales and customer service compliance operations than you'll find being a CEO or a full-stack engineer. So that's our area of focus. And because we're focused, we're able to do that thing and that one thing really, really well. And so you have the employers who are paying. Are they, I mean, do you, once they go through that process, are they promised a job or they go, I mean, through an interview process? How does it work? Can you take us through the process for that to see? Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that we learned really early is that because job seekers are putting in some effort to upskill before even they're walking to an interview, we're awarding these job seekers points and we're negotiating cool benefits with employers. Northwestern usual, for example, is an employer that's guaranteed an interview. No questions asked. There's no HR screen. There's no first interview, nothing. You get direct access to the hiring manager and the decision gets made in two days or less, right? And so we're negotiating benefits with employers and we're saying, hey, here's a job seeker that spent time out of their own schedule to learn a set of skills that's largely going to benefit you. So employer, what benefit are you going to offer these candidates? Are you gonna put them through the same interview process? No, you're gonna shorten the interview process or you gotta pay them a little bit more money because it's a better candidate pool than what you usually get. So we are negotiating these benefits with employers as we put candidates through the fall. How are you prioritizing the employers that you're targeting and what is the sales cycle like with the average employer? Yeah, so today our focus is on employers that are hiring a high volume of folks, right? So volume based hiring is a good place for us to start at the enterprise level. And typically for an enterprise customer, Northwestern mutual took about four months to close. We are in the process of finalizing the pilot fidelity. That has taken us about six months, right? But the good thing is once we have an entry point into an employer, we have our hooks in because we start with one career pathway. NM started with sales. Now they're wanting us to pilot talent acquisition as the second pathway. We can do sales for them. We can do a customer service and so on. And so the first entry point is a four to six month cycle, but after that there is tremendous opportunity for us to land and expand. Thanks Manoj, Yigal, I'll ask you to give some feedback to Manoj. Yeah, thanks Manoj, good seeing you. I saw you pitch a month ago and one of the feedback from the judges or the questions was how do you get to a hundred million dollar business? And I see you added it in your slide, so that's pretty cool. No, I mean, a couple of thoughts, free for learners, users, I really like that. I think highlighting that and it's important from an impact perspective, I think emphasizing why companies want to do the pre-skilling, because pre-skilling is fairly a new notion, and so really highlighting that, I think going forward is important as well. And then one, I'll be fairly brief, but one last question that's not on your slide. Have you considered working with the government in terms of fairly entry-level roles, high volume, as we head into 2023 with some uncertainty with some of these early-stage companies and their hiring, just kind of laying that out there, you don't have to answer, but that's an interesting opportunity, I think so. Thank you. And our final entrepreneur is Nirij from Savings Oak. Wow, thanks for the opportunity. What an awesome set of speakers prior to me. Before I start, I've got a show of hands here who thinks that they're gonna be spending any money on healthcare in their retirement, okay? And for those who did raise their hands, do you think you've already have saved enough for your retirement, or do you have any way of knowing that? Probably not. Well, allow me to talk about the pandemic of financial and health benefits. In the United States alone, where 55% of businesses are considered small-mid-sized businesses, there are 99.7% of employees are actually belonging to those businesses. And in 2020, when we had the pandemic, we had approximately 20 million people lose their jobs. I used to work in a 401k company prior to that, and with 75,000 people on our platform, what I learned was people were not worried about losing jobs. They were more worried about the fact that with their job, they lost their healthcare that after two or three months, what were they gonna do? How are they gonna pay for those healthcare benefits? Not only is it a problem that the rising costs are a issue for small-mid-sized businesses, approximately looking at 40% increase year over year, that's about $2,000 each employee, but more importantly is the part that is very, very low awareness of what those benefits actually give to the employer and to the employees. How many people have actually heard about PPO, HMO, HDHP, HSA, show of hands? Who here knows about health savings accounts? Very few people. And you are amongst the less than 3% of people in the United States who are actually aware of the term health savings accounts, which were introduced in 2003. Not only are you, there is such a huge jargon, but the choices and the time given to you to make the choices is three weeks in November, pretty much at the enrollment time, or 30 days when you join a new job, other than it's pretty much on autopilot. 2003, that's when President Bush signed HSAs, and this is one of the most tax advantage program that there is, and it's the least utilized right now. The fact that it's actually, the money goes in tax-free, the money grows tax-free, and as long as it's taken out for a qualified medical expense, which ranges from OTC medication to getting a hip replacement, it is actually tax-free. In many ways, HSAs are even better than a 401k plan. And yet, only 50% of people who are eligible to actually open an HSA account and roll for them, only 7% people are currently investing those amounts, even though the balance is $16,000, over $16,000 for each of these accounts. You know why? Because most of the banks and credit unions who helped people open these accounts did not tell them that they could actually invest those dollars and grow. They actually kept, because they were business models, the banks' business models is based on having the cash and the interchange. It's time to actually change that and help people move away from looking at HSAs as just a tax advantage spending account to be more about an account that you can use to save and invest for your retirement now, for your healthcare expenses now, and in retirement. Why us, why now? It is the age of HSAs as past 17, 18 years. It's moved from interest rates have gone down and now they're back up, although, and the market is actually moving more towards more investment dollars to help people move away from commoditized healthcare PPUHMO models and enable SME employers to be able to offer benefits to people so they can cover themselves as well as lower their healthcare costs. We've built the first multi-path investment product which allows people to not only just be able to have a RIA or a managed path, but be able to bring the more commercialized, more brokerage style investment style so you can figure out what you want to do for yourself or through an RIA. We built the challenge that I talked about from an education standpoint is bringing just-in-time education into the product so that during the workflow when you are signing up for your benefits, during the time when you're getting your paycheck, we prod you to actually take proactive action and be able to make the right decision for yourself and for your families. Why us, all of us have HSAs. We've dealt with it firsthand. As a matter of fact, the head of product, Emerja, had $12,000 sitting in cash in her HSA. She did not know that she could actually invest those dollars herself. Same goes for Mimi. She did not know that HSA has also covered a lot of the alternative medication that she sometimes likes to explore and get benefit from. We've built the product, the MVP. We have the founding team in place already. We've integrated already with an online brokerage, a bank, and we cater to 120 plus payrolls because we realize we're dealing with small and mid-sized businesses so they can have any of those and we are ready to actually take ourselves out into the market. Our competition is not with fidelity. Our competition is with folks like Optum who cater or think that they cater or say that they cater to small and mid-sized businesses but do not really provide the service or back up with the service that small and mid-sized businesses need. They are not investment focused. They're still hoarding cash and commoditizing it and more importantly, they're not giving the choices. They're stuck with traditional mutual funds which are high in expense ratios and not offering their participants, their customers the ability to take EDFs or other alternative, other investment things such as digital currency. HSA contributions are growing rapidly. For a savings oak, it's a huge opportunity to come in and be able to take a portion of the 71 plus billion dollars that are available that are sitting in cash in many of these accounts and it's projected by Devin here, one of the prominent reports is 32 million accounts we'll have by 30, 24 in HSAs. We already got four letters of intent. We continue to start, we just hired our head of sales and making progress directly selling and expanding through direct to consumer model as well and our go-to-market strategy is to go direct as well as partner with payrolls or PEOs to be able to get in the market faster and have distribution available. As I talked about banks, we are not just looking at interest on cash or interchange or we are more about monthly fees providing value to not just the employers but also to the employees and at the same time being able to have a diverse revenue line that allows us to actually push things more towards investments and write things for the employees rather than actually just having them spend the tax free money. We're raising a million and a half to spend more on sales and marketing and building our mobile app. At the same time, our goal is for this year to onboard about 10 customers and 500 participants. If you're interested in helping people coming out of COVID take care of their finances and start thinking from now and into the future. I'd love to speak with you as we're aggressively fundraising at this time. Thank you. I'm curious about in the same fashion around whether or not we have small business owners or even independent business owners contributing into their SEP IRA as that solo retirement savings account. I imagine that the same sort of barriers to them actually contributing to an HSA is very similar. So how do you, what have you discovered I guess in your experience working in retirement plans where there's been a barrier to these solopreneurs or small business owners contributing into that and how do you think that carries over into contributing to an HSA? Where are the similarities and where might be some slight differences there? Yeah, it's a great question. From a SEP standpoint, so if we think about where 401Ks are today there's a whole lot of regulation but it's become very a common thing for people to go and put money into 401K. In SEP and similar to HSA it's a lot about lack of awareness and more importantly from a taxation standpoint not fully rocking that actually you get multiple tax benefits whether you put money into SEP IRA plans or through the HSAs. So we are promoting that and helping them kind of see where the benefits are not just from a taxation standpoint now but also the capability SEP does not allow you to invest yet but HSAs do. So it's a long-term planning rather than just thinking year by year. Could you see potentially though maybe like an extension of your work could be an encouraging SEP investment beyond the HSA? Yes, so our long-term vision actually is to build a retirement savings platform moving from HSAs also into IRA and eventually tackle both of them because it enables us to have sticky assets with our users and not just care about small mid-sized businesses but also go out for solar priors. What's the age bracket that you're after? I mean, when do people really start worrying about this issue? And what's your target, let's say segment? Yeah, great question. So we're finding that anyone between 25 and 45 is prime and that's who we are going after. What we also learned over the last six months is professionals, especially into accounting, legal, who are looking for other cave-ins to be able to have tax advantages are looking at this more pragmatically not just for themselves but also for their staff and their people. Neeraj, can you talk a little bit about how you are going to acquire the business owners, how you're finding those businesses and selling to them? Yeah, no, great question. It's more about our multi-fold approach from a distribution standpoint. So what we've learned, we're not trying to be a benefits company. There are plenty of them out there. What we are trying to be is a retirement savings platform and what we've learned and actually the dense of experiments is that most people who are going to do their taxation through CPAs, so that's one venue, there are a lot of PEOs that offer these benefits packaged them together and so we're actually actively working with a couple of those that are targeted at SMBs to do that. And the last bit that we're doing is from a distribution standpoint is payroll integrators. So there is a immense amount of competition in perils. So some smaller perils are looking for how could they prevent the leakage of their customers. So they're looking for other value add providers to their offering and because we actually integrate with a lot of different perils, it allows for them to say, okay, you don't have to deal with paper because enrollment and paperwork is a huge hassle from an administration standpoint. So they're looking at us saying, okay, this is all digitized. It's all from a record keeping perspective. Easy for me. So that's what I'm gonna do. But that's not to say that we're not going direct as well, but we're making sure we go after that. Can people sign up individually or they have to sign up individually or they have to go through a business? Excellent question. So our strategy has always been about going through businesses, but we've found in the last six to eight months of doing this, that there are a lot of people looking for who may have accounts. One of the things I didn't touch on is the artificial constraints, meaning the existing providers have up to $2,100 or $1,500 before you can invest those dollars. We've taken that away, so we're actually opening up our platform next week for individual signers. That's not the core of where we wanna be, but we wanna make sure that we are providing service to anyone who wants to sign up. If you have $500 or $1,000 in HSA and you're looking for ability to invest, you can do that on Saving Silk. Thank you. Reem, do you wanna share some feedback? Just like the feedback I gave to Eric, I'd not see this is a technology company also, so you might need to have technical talent on the team as well, eventually. I would definitely encourage you to pursue the B2C model and not the B2B model. I think you can scale much faster and you can offer different products, different ages. So at 25-year-old, we definitely need a different product than a 40-year-old, right? So because at 25, you probably don't have a family. At 40, it's a completely different dynamic. So that's my advice to you. I think you should go the B2C route and not the B2B route and they're completely different animals, right? I don't know if I agree with that, but I get where you say you're coming from. I think you do both, but I think there is that benefit. I do think especially the PEO route, like working with JustWorks, this probably isn't something that we're doing as a focused effort, that I think that is a really great beachhead. I do take your point though. Great, thank you so much, Narage. Thank you so much.