SCALE at GMI Cohort 1 Recap

900+ RSVPs. 300+ attendees.

A packed house at AGI House.

16 founders on stage, pitching to investors and partners who flew in, drove in, and stayed late.

That was Demo Day for SCALE Cohort 1 — and this is just the start of the story.

SCALE

SCALE is GMI Cloud's accelerator for early-stage AI founders. Equity-free, co-hort based, with hybrid programming.

This was a five-week operating room for founders who are building real AI products and need three things at once: infrastructure that won't buckle under load, GTM clarity before they run out of runway, and direct access to people who can actually move the needle.

We accepted 30% of applicants into Cohort 1. The founders who made it were building agents, voice and video AI, developer infrastructure, creative tooling, and vertical AI across finance, health, and e-commerce. Teams joined from Spain, Argentina, India, Hong Kong, and across the US.

Usage broke down across three core workloads:

• video and media generation workloads
• LLM-based agents and applications
• GPU-heavy inference and experimentation

Cohort 1 by the Numbers

• 92B tokens burned/month across companies
• $26M raised collectively
• $11M largest single raise
• 30% acceptance rate
• 900+ people at Demo Day
• 16 founders on stage

DEMO DAY

Cohort 1 wrapped at AGI House — 900+ RSVPs, a stacked room, and an agenda built around live demos, real traction, and direct access.

The day opened at noon with arrival, lunch, and early access networking —with over 60 VCs in the room— alongside operators and builders across the AI ecosystem

THE DEMOS

Estuary — Spencer Lin. A single API for developers to ship AI characters with long-term memory and multimodal perception.

Touchdown Labs — William Chen. Benchmarking and optimization layer for AI inference.

Zen Trading — Yvette Pan. Agentic research platform for quantamental investors. Real-time AI insights for stocks, options, and private markets.

Anthum — Joseph Weinerman & Orri Bogdan. Monetization platform for AI video creators.

SignalLift — Eugene Lin. Real-time AI sales coach delivered via smart glasses for medical device reps.

Phinite.ai — Shashank Somal. Infrastructure for enterprise multi-agent systems — deploy, manage, and scale AI agents 10x faster.

StorySense AI — David Turner. AI workflow that turns raw footage and transcripts into story-driven rough cuts for documentary filmmakers.

Lingowhales — Ashley Xu. Immersive language learning for intermediate learners, built for depth over drills.

RocketRide — Joe Maionchi. Helping developers build robust, scalable AI-native applications faster.

Pixero — Ryan Zambrano. AI agents for paid advertising automation, targeting enterprise ad campaign optimization.

WZRD.tech — Avi Rao. AI creative platform for musicians and educators. Design partners with major music distributors, 300 users in alpha.

Claude-Mem — Alex Newman. Persistent memory layer for AI coding agents.

character.app — Paul Jaski. Build and monetize consistent AI characters and story worlds using the latest GenAI models.

Agentic Sciences — Qihong Ruan. Interactive financial research and trading strategy analysis for professional investors.

QCut — Donghao Zhang. Agentic video editor where AI executes multi-step edits via natural language commands.

IKI Health — Patricia Puiggròs (joining remotely from Spain). AI clinical decision support for women's metabolic and hormonal health, ages 40–60.

Besides the 16 demos shared at demo, 9 other startup founders participated in the program remotely.

The Mentors

SCALE runs on mentorship. Across five weeks, founders had direct access to operators and builders who've built, scaled, and shipped:

External mentors: Patrick Kriwanek, Zainab Ghadiyali, Willow Marcon, Mo Salah, Shikha Kansal, Charles Ding, Kingsong Chen, Josh Schwartz.

Internal mentors from GMI Cloud: Louisa Guo, Yijie Hong, Yujing Qian, Lillian Ma, Zen Duan.

The Partners Who Made It Happen

Cohort 1 wouldn't exist without the organizations that showed up week after week — with infrastructure, credits, expertise, and genuine time invested in each founder.

NVIDIA Inception Program was central to the cohort from day one. Skye Hart joined us for a GTM session. Suman Tatiraju walked founders through inference economics with Dynamo and Triton. NVIDIA's support wasn't symbolic — it was substantive, technical, and woven through the program.

And alongside NVIDIA: Rho hosted our kickoff. Pilot.com showed up for our launch mixer. PixVerse, Vidu, Bria AI and MiniMax brought frontier AI models to the cohort. Inworld AI ran live hands-on voice sessions and office hours.

Composio and TiDB (powered by PingCAP) provided infrastructure and database tooling — TiDB with $3K in credits per team. smallest.ai co-hosted our GTM Social and provided access to its grant program

HydraDB shared the story behind a $6.5M solo raise. Phinite.ai became both a cohort company and a partner. GLO and Roundtable Ventures joined us for VC Week office hours. Newport AI contributed as a demo day activation.

To every partner who contributed: you didn't just support a program. You helped shape what 25 AI companies will build next.

The companies in Cohort 1 are building on infrastructure, tools, and relationships they discovered through SCALE. When a partner brings real expertise — not a logo, but a session — founders remember. They build with the tools they learned on. They recommend what actually worked.

If you're a company, fund, or operator who wants direct access to the next generation of AI startups — and genuine visibility as a brand that bets on founders early — we'd love to talk about Cohort 2.

Apply to Cohort 2

Cohort 1 set the bar. We're accepting applications for Cohort 2 now. The next cohort will take place in multiple cities globally.

If you're an early-stage AI founder building something in Agentic AI, multi-model applications, or robotics — and you want infrastructure, mentorship, GTM support, and a room full of people who are rooting for you — apply here.

SCALE at GMI is led by Yuqi Hou ([email protected]) and Nicole Gong ([email protected]). Reach out if you have any questions or feedback about the program.