Dent:AI San Diego Reception & Startup Showcase, January 27, 2025
San Diego tech community members gathered with the founders of some of the most innovative AI startups in San Diego, along with investors supporting these new ventures at the Dent:AI reception and startup showcase, from 5:00–9:00 PM on Monday, January 27, 2025 at UC San Diego Park & Market.
“Spent the evening yesterday with some smart people at the Dent:AI showcase. CIBC Innovation Banking is ‘all in’ on AI and anxious to help these companies as they scale.”
Talks & Speakers
An exclusive series of talks kick off the evening starting at 5:00 PM, illuminating the AI landscape and presented by key pioneers and thought leaders in the field.
Sessions include:
Friction, Belonging, and AI: Unlocking the Future of Innovation
Innovation thrives on diverse perspectives—but that diversity also creates friction. When managed well, friction fuels creativity and breakthrough ideas. When ignored, it leads to dysfunction and stagnation. In this keynote, Charlene Li, a leading expert on disruptive innovation, will explore how belonging is the key to turning friction into innovation. She’ll share how AI can help startups build high-performing teams by fostering diverse perspectives, ensuring equitable advancement, and creating cultures where bold ideas can thrive. Whether you're hiring your first employees or scaling a fast-growing company, this session will give you the insights to harness AI and belonging as competitive advantages in the age of innovation.
Creating a Supportive Environment in San Diego for AI Startups
Cheryl Goodman (Founder of FindGood.tech, and Co-Founder of AskTuring.ai) along with Andy White of Keshif Ventures, will join Aaron Fulkerson, CEO at Opaque Systems for a fireside chat to explore San Diego’s AI startup landscape and its unique challenges. The conversation will touch on how startups can navigate San Diego’s evolving infrastructure, scaling difficulties, and the importance of building strong professional networks. This informal, conversational session aims to provide valuable insights for anyone interested in fostering San Diego’s growth as an AI innovation hub, addressing both the opportunities and obstacles in our city’s tech landscape.
The Human Side of Generative AI: Creating a Path to Productivity
Our panel of experts will explore how generative AI is reshaping the workplace, focusing on both leadership perspectives and its impact on individual workers. Join us as Curt Jacobsen, a Partner at McKinsey & Company specializing in digital transformations, tech entrepreneur Mel Lim, CEO of Chateauz (an AI-driven XR platform), and Manish Sirdeshmukh, a tech product executive at Qualcomm with prior experience at Netflix and Unity, share their insights.
This discussion will move beyond a purely technical overview of AI to delve into its strategic implications, the human element, and how to harness its potential for productivity. The panelists will address how organizations can adopt AI technologies effectively, emphasizing clear vision, leadership mindset, and the importance of identifying impactful problems to address.
Curt, Manish, and Mel will share some real-world examples of how AI is being implemented today, and will consider the long-term implications for the workforce’s future. They will also explore how AI impacts the current workforce, offering practical advice for maximizing opportunities in an AI-driven world. Specifically, they will discuss how the roles of both specialists and generalists will evolve in the AI era and the importance of skills development in adapting to these changes. They will also cover how AI is redefining work to include more creativity, emphasizing a human-centered approach to AI that incorporates emotional and spatial intelligence—not just automation. Finally, the panelists will provide guidance on approaching AI adoption with conviction while remaining realistic about the changes ahead.
“We had a great time last night at the Dent:AI event showing off all the custom AI models our team has built over the last few months. For 3 hours we had a line of people waiting to talk to us ... I can’t remember the last time I ran out of business cards!”
“The diversity and innovation showcased by these AI startups are truly commendable, reflecting the vibrant ecosystem of AI entrepreneurship.”
“Thank you for the opportunity to present and to meet folks in the Dent community. Looking forward to the next one.”
Reception
Following the talks, attendees visited demo tables set up throughout the reception, with a chance to engage with some of the top AI startups and entrepreneurs from around the region. Attendees came away with a firsthand look at what’s in development across the world of AI innovation today.
Appetizers and beverages were provided by Dent the Future, featuring special wine selections, picked by Dent’s official sommelier, Greg Kisor. (The bar will also served beer and soda throughout the evening.)
Participating in the Dent:AI San Diego Startup Showcase:
Creativ Company: Consumer research reinvented. Ingest, synthesize, and summarize millions of online opinions into simple, visual insights.
DejaVuAI: DejaVuAI® gives you a 100% reliable and explainable way to match and compare images, saving time and ensuring accuracy. It easily identifies specific patterns across images, even with variations in angle, skew, or sensor type, where other solutions fall short. With DejaVuAI®, you get precise, trustworthy results that help you work faster and more effectively, going way beyond others in the market.
EdgerunnerAI: EdgeRunner Athena is an on-device AI assistant enhancing productivity by managing emails, scheduling, coding, and real-time translation, ensuring data privacy.
EyePop.ai: Unlock the full potential of computer vision technology with EyePop.ai, designed to empower startups at every technical level. Purpose built to give teams without ML Expertise capabilities in real-time object and people detection and analysis, all through a user-friendly platform.
Finjy: AI financial accountant and auditor. Connect your bank accounts and let AI give you insightful findings, patterns and data-driven advice. Get a better picture of your financial health by looking at multiple bank accounts at once with AI. Integrated with ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok and more to come.
Gravity.ai: GravityAI is a production-ready AI Ops platform offering a model catalog and deployment process enabling accessible API/UI integration, organization-wide model visibility, and governance aligned with AI ethics and regulations.
Hal9: Hal9 empowers companies with self-service data solutions that leverage generative AI to seamlessly get insights from data sources.
Juice Labs: Provides GPU-over-IP: Seamlessly enables remote access, sharing, and dynamic scaling of GPU resources across Windows, Linux, and cross-platform environments. See GPU-over-IP and its benefits, including efficient use of resources, flexibility, scalability, easy deployment, and more.
Loopholes: Loopholes is an AI-powered SaaS platform scanning text, images, video, and audio to flag compliance risks, ensure policy alignment, and provide actionable fixes.
Peregrine OKB: They “put the analog back into digital” by designing and delivering experiential media systems, support and structural fabrication concepts, media content, and conceptual technology design.
Wallabi: The first generative data analytics solution for marketing and revenue teams. Ask business questions in plain language. No data warehouses. No coding. No dashboards.
Thanks also to our sponsors, including findgood.tech and AskTuring.ai. AskTuring.ai designs intelligent AI solutions to help your business operate more efficiently. With patent-pending technology, they make AI secure, private, easy, affordable, and user-friendly on your data, so you can focus on what you do best—running your business. Also, become AI-Fluent with findgood.tech using AI workforce trainings based on the top selling book, "How to Win Friends & Influence Robots: AI for Non-Tech Brilliant Minds." Discover your AI roadmap with easy-to-understand, curated content and resources that empower you and your team to get in the game.
“Thank you for the opportunity to present and to meet folks in the Dent community. Looking forward to the next one.” — Boaz Ashkenazy, CEO of Augmented AI“Thank you for hosting us and driving Davos-style conversation ... The event was a huge success.”
““Such a fabulous event! My brain is still spinning with all the information””
For over a decade, Dent the Future has been bringing curious, adventurous, and diverse professionals together to explore new approaches to thinking and push you to breakthrough ideas and new insights.
#TechNetworking #StartupShowcase #DentAI2025
Thanks to our partners and sponsors, including Experiences for Mankind, Peregrine OKB, Innovation and Tech Today, and Dent the Future.