AI Startups Showcased at Dent 2025
AI Startup Demo and Showcase on Sunday, September 14
As announced in this news item, in our Sunday “Activity Day” at Dent Santa Fe 2025, we will feature a curated demo series in the afternoon. It’ll spotlight AI-driven technologies and startups from within the Dent community. These talks are designed for innovators and entrepreneurs seeking feedback, early-stage funding, and strategic connections.
With our partners at the City of Santa Fe Office of Economic Development, we’ll also be inviting a select group of regional investors to attend as special guests—creating opportunities for founders to present their work to potential backers in a focused, high-trust setting. Plus, Dent attendees in the audience—many of whom are seasoned founders, executives, and technologists—bring a wealth of experience. They’re here to offer honest insights, thoughtful questions, and in some cases, long-term mentorship.
Dent co-founder Steve Broback introduces a recent Dent AI event.
Agenda
Intro Session: Investing in AI
Presenters: Marc Nager and Jason Preston
The AI investment landscape is riddled with inflated valuations, commoditization risks, and concerning capital concentration in mega-rounds that may not reflect business fundamentals. With over half of venture capital dollars flowing into AI startups in 2025, the critical challenge for investors and founders alike is clear: how do we separate transformative companies from hype-driven opportunities, and what frameworks can help us evaluate AI businesses for long-term viability?
Marc Nager, as a partner at Greater Colorado Venture Fund (GCVF), has been actively involved in investing in numerous AI-centric ventures, including KamiwazaAI, EnrollML, MyTownAI, View.io, BOPA, ScoutSpace, HumanProgram, ZioSec, and BettrData, all Colorado based startups focused on scalable artificial intelligence solutions. Marc was co-founder of Startup Weekend, and later Chief Community Officer at Techstars. His fund has deployed over $23M into 50 companies, focused on unlocking venture capital for rural markets. Marc brings a unique perspective to these challenges, having pioneered "flexible VC" approaches that prioritize practical problem-solving and profitable $5-20 million businesses over unicorn chasing. His investment philosophy focuses on AI companies that solve real-world problems
Joining Nager is Dent conference co-founder Jason Preston, who is a Partner at Alsop Louie Partners, which has backed breakthrough companies like Niantic and Twitch, and Jason is also a partner in TK MediaTech Ventures, a new VC firm focused on the tech layer of tomorrow’s media and entertainment, an industry undergoing massive transformation as a result of generative AI.
In this conversation, Marc Nager of Greater Colorado Venture Fund and Jason Preston of Alsop Louie Partners will share how they evaluate AI opportunities, what due diligence frameworks matter most, and where they see sustainable business models emerging. The discussion will highlight the tension between technological sophistication and business fundamentals, and offer practical insights for founders, investors, and technologists who want to engage with AI thoughtfully in a frothy market.
Neuromersive
Presenter: Veena Somareddy
Neuromersive is a digital health scale-up leveraging AI and immersive therapeutic experiences to reinvent patient engagement, streamline clinician workflows, and elevate operational performance. Its flagship Smart Therapy™ Complete Solution—an FDA-registered, HIPAA-compliant therapy solution—automates documentation, surfaces objective clinical insights, and personalizes treatment across neurological and physical rehabilitation. Co-founder and CEO Veena Somareddy has been recognized as a Top Innovator in North Texas, a Fast Company World Changing Ideas honoree, and featured in Forbes and Cosmopolitan—the company was one of the 10 selected from 427 applicants for Amazon’s inaugural AWS Healthcare Accelerator. Visit Neuromersive for more.
VerAI Discoveries
Presenter: Amitai Axelrod
VerAI is transforming mineral discovery through artificial intelligence, dramatically increasing the probability of discovering valuable mineral deposits. The company's advanced AI/ML Discovery Platform can detect concealed deposits in covered terrain where traditional methods fall short.
Using specialized datasets designed for subsurface exploration, VerAI's platform directly identifies locations with high economic potential. This systematic methodology increases discovery success rates by two orders of magnitude while reducing targeting time from years to months and cutting costs by over 90%.
VerAI leverages its AI Discovery Platform to build a global mineral asset portfolio of base and precious metals, across multiple locations throughout North and South America. The company's scalable business model creates value through two key channels: developing fully-owned projects via strategic partnerships with investors and explorers, and identifying promising targets on partner ground to unlock value through equity positions and royalties. Visit VerAI for more.
TimeLike Systems
Presenter: Steve Coy
TimeLike™: a very different kind of artificial intelligence is designed to help human beings find near-optimal solutions to complex and consequential real-world problems. It doesn’t generate text, or images, or videos, it doesn’t hallucinate, and it doesn’t generate disinformation. Instead, it helps its users make sound decisions even in highly complex, rapidly changing, and unfamiliar real-world decision-making situations, in many cases enabling them to obtain much better outcomes than would otherwise be possible.
To do this, TimeLike™ implements a very general problem-solving approach we call SECHI, for Simulation-Enabled Cooperative Human Intelligence. In SECHI we use computer modeling and simulation to predict the probable consequences of different possible courses of action open to our users, and then use model-based optimization to help them zero in on the course of action with the most desirable (or least undesirable) expected consequences.
Unlike conventional AI, TimeLike™ intrinsically “understands” time, space, causality, and the laws of physics. And TimeLike™ users can readily extend the set of things it “understands” to include many other kinds of practically useful human knowledge, simply by encoding that knowledge in the form of composable causal models, which can be coupled together to form computer models of larger and more complex systems, ready for use in modeling and simulation and model-based optimization.
TimeLike™ is the first and only AI platform that has been expressly designed to support cooperative model-based decision-making at scale, thus enabling its users to readily find and take advantage of omni-win-win opportunities while deftly avoiding multipolar lose-lose traps. Visit TimeLike Systems for more.
Microsurgical Guidance Solutions
Presenter: Dr. Yannek I. Leiderman
Microsurgical Guidance Solutions is pioneering the integration of artificial intelligence into operating rooms, creating state-of-the-art surgical guidance tools that enhance precision and safety in microsurgery. The company's deep learning platform provides real-time feature extraction, instrument tracking, and tissue visualization enhancement, transforming how surgeons navigate complex procedures at the microscopic level.
Dr. Yannek Leiderman, founder and vitreoretinal surgeon at Duke Eye Center, brings over two decades of clinical expertise combined with cutting-edge research in AI-mediated surgical guidance. His work has earned recognition including an honorable mention at The Winning Pitch Challenge, where Microsurgical Guidance Solutions was selected among the top 6 startups from over 150 submissions at the prestigious Eyecelerator conference. The company's technology integrates seamlessly with existing surgical microscopes, offering surgeons enhanced decision-making capabilities through real-time AI analysis of surgical procedures. Visit Microsurgical Guidance Solutions for more.
NewCollarAI
Presenter: Sarah Boisvert
NewCollarAI, founded by Sarah Boisvert in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has partnered with Dash2Labs in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to develop a closed-loop Large Language Model (LLM) specifically designed for manufacturing applications. The LLM is curated, deeply accurate, and empowering for manufacturing tasks.
Products:
Tutor on Your Shoulder(TM) expedites and increases quality of outcomes for workforce training programs in order to scale via online platforms.
Mfg AI Assistant keeps workflows on track and serves as a repository for an industry's expert knowledge on the factory floor.
Additive Readiness Expert System (ARES) is specific to training and deployment of the AI Assistant to DOD. The new DOD budget has almost doubled its commitment to additive resulting in the need for rapid execution. We are approved for the Federal GSA list and have interest from the US Navy’s Supplier Modernization program in adding ARES to their trainings. ARES can also organize processes such as in supply chain functions to better track Technical Data Packages. Visit New Collar Network for more.
