SCALE at GMI Cohort 2 Demo Day: What 14 Startups Demoed

On October 23, 2026, GMI Cloud hosted the Demo Day for SCALE Cohort 2, where 14 startups presented what they had built during the program.

100+ people came to AGI House in Hillsborough for demo day. The house was dressed up for Halloween with fog, pumpkins and a balloon skeleton by the door.

Some guests flew in from Singapore, Berlin, and LA. Some guests were at their very first SF event and some were coming back for the second time as alumni. 

That was Spooky Demo Day for SCALE Cohort 2. Here's how it went.

SCALE is GMI Cloud's accelerator for early stage AI founders.

Cohort 2 ran for six weeks. Founders built on GMI Cloud GPUs with NVIDIA under the hood, and teams joined from six countries: the US, Canada, Mexico, the Netherlands, India and Singapore.

Cohort 2 by the Numbers

- 100+ attendees at Demo Day

- 14 teams on stage from 6 countries

- $3.9M+ combined annual revenue

- 55K+ users and customers across the cohort

- Backed by YC, Antler, Cornell Tech and NVIDIA Inception

On Oct 23, Cohort 2 took the stage at AGI House, Hillsborough.

The day started at noon with lunch and early networking. GMI Cloud opened the program, and then the founders took over with live demos. Later in the afternoon, mentors shared their experience with their paired startup team and advice to founders in the room. Then the startup floor opened so everyone could meet the teams up close, and the evening reception kept going with drinks, music and the house after dark.

Investors in the room included USAsia Venture Partners, Vauxhall Capital, Intro Capital, Luminara Capital, Neuco Academy Fund, Oriza Holdings, IVP, Angel Launch and Brookstone Capital Management.

The Lineup

Retriever AI · Arjun Chintapalli: web agent platform for builders

Conbiz · Aaron Jiménez: voice and messaging agents for high-volume operations

AgentGrid · Souren Khetcho: all your coding agents in one visual workspace

Atlas · Drew Dawson: an AI-native Mac browser with a built-in research agent

Whentor AI · Diogo Moreira: an AI that comes back until you actually do the thing

Veriqa · Harris Dalal: catches pharma manufacturing quality failures before they happen

Advanced Imagination Labs (Lumo) · Simon Rötzer: daily nutrition guidance between dietitian visits

Align AI · Spandana Govindgari: eval infrastructure to test and ship reliable agents

RapidReview (Merv) · Gural Nuriyev: coding agents as autonomous ML researchers

Proofpress · Richard Tang: an intelligence ledger for AI research teams

Noah Labs · Murat Can Isik: the first AI IDE for regulated industries

Flinter · Dave Zhang: dirty data to robotics-ready pipelines

Glovebox · Kareem Amin: AI-native game studio building games that run in your browser

Defex · Husan Mavlonov: self-teaching assembly robots

The Mentors

SCALE runs on mentorship. Over six weeks, founders had direct access to operators, investors and builders who gave their time to these teams. Mentors had 1:1 time to meet their assigned founding team and give feedback on their pitch presentation for demo day. Internal mentors supported teams on GMI Cloud infrastructure needs and questions. 

External mentors: Shikha Kansal (angel investor), Dorothy Yuan (Protégé Ventures), Loc H. Nguyen (Bayhaus Creative), Sukone Hong (BlueBrown Partners and AttentionX), Willow Marcon (Alliance), Brandon Johnson (NVIDIA), Anil Ravindranath (rapt.ai), Vince Kohli (impact investor), Jake Schwartz (Element 14 Capital).

Internal mentors from GMI Cloud: Louisa Guo (VP of Marketing and Growth), Lisa Wang (US Head of Corporate Development), Barack Liu (Technical Account Manager), Yijie Hong (Director of Software Engineering), Lillian Ma (Global Partnerships and Product Growth), Amanda Zhang (AI Cloud Solutions Architect), Mingjun Sun (Product Manager), Jason Zhu (Forward Deployed Engineer).

At Demo Day, Loc H. Nguyen, Barack Liu, Shikha Kansal, and Brandon Johnson joined us for Partner and Mentor Signals. To every mentor who showed up for these teams: thank you.

The Partners Who Made It Happen

Cohort 2 was supported by NVIDIA and the NVIDIA Inception Program, NVIDIA’s free program that helps AI startups grow with technical training, tools, cloud credits and access to investors. 

NVIDIA HQ: ahead of Demo Day, founders visited NVIDIA HQ for a tour and lunch.

Mentorship: Brandon Johnson from NVIDIA mentored Cohort 2 founders.

NVIDIA open models: founders had access to NVIDIA Nemotron models on GMI Cloud, including Nemotron 3.5 Super VL, which launched on GMI Cloud on day one in the middle of the cohort.

NVIDIA was a founding partner for SCALE at GMI. And to every partner who backed our founders these six weeks, thank you:

Credits to build with: OpenAI, Daytona, smallest.ai, HydraDB, TiDB, PixVerse, Vidu, BRIA and Inworld, Moonshot AI, Composio, AdaL, Amplitude, Photon, and Exa

Tools to run the company: Notion, Pilot, Pulley, Corgi, HSBC Innovation Banking, and hellyeah

Sponsors and event partners: Deel, Rho, Newport AI, GLO 

Corgi got so many of you to the house, with a free shuttle from Corgi Cafe in SF and a ride home after dark. Thank you for making Hillsborough feel close.

If you're a company, fund, or operator who wants to meet the next cohort of AI founders early, we'd love to talk. To everyone who came out to Hillsborough: thank you.

Yuqi Hou, Nicole Gong, Omar Bawa

Apply to the Next Cohort

Applications are open now. If you're an early stage AI founder and you want infrastructure, mentorship, GTM support and a room full of people rooting for you, apply here.

SCALE is GMI Cloud's accelerator for early stage AI founders.