I went to Demo Day LA in Los Angeles. Here's what I learned from the LA tech scene

This week I attended my first Demo Day LA at BLANKSPACES co-working in the beachside neighbourhood of Venice, Los Angeles. The quarterly event invites early stage LA-based startups to pitch to an audience including angel and VC investors, and is hosted by nerdstage who support the LA tech-scene with meetups and community events.

The evening consisted of two pitch sessions, a fireside chat, and networking. Startups also hosted demo booths which provided a great opportunity to chat to the founders and learn more.

From Restaurant Bots to Reality TV Game Shows

Here’s a quick rundown of the startups who pitched (photos in the gallery above):

• Swapnice — a company powering NFC tags that can be embedded in collectables such as trading cards or sneakers to keep track of the story and history of the item.
• The Earthineering Company — a small nuclear power plant that converts plants into synthetic fuels that can be used by vehicles and jet engines. They need a cool $470M.
• Axon — an AI scoring system for CRM data to identify and prioritize high-value sales leads.
• Pinto —  This startup makes cooking robots to automate restaurant prep work for customers such as KFC. They built a machine that automates the dispensing of sauce containers with lids.
• Thallus Foods — this sustainable-focused startup is cultivating a hard-to-find variety of tasty mushrooms for restaurants and kitchens that are high in protein and “taste like chicken”.
• Advanced Drone Solutions — This startup is bringing automotive-style HD mapping to the drone industry and was the first drone company cleaning buildings in LA.
• Haus.me home — autonomous, sustainable, ultra energy efficient 1-3 bedroom homes that can be installed in a day almost anywhere. The homes generate their own water from the air.
• Starcade Live! — a gameshow platform (from the producer behind the reality TV show “Robot Combat League”) that livestreams people playing arcade games.
• Gemist — this platform creates professional grade stock images and videos of real jewellery and gemstones for online stores using AI and CAD models, improving the UX for online stores.

From a travel and tourism perspective, quite a few startups had some touch points.

Earthineering could address soaring demand for jet fuel with their synthetic fuel generator. Pinto’s food prep devices could soon be operating in airports and hotels. Your next Airbnb or remote work stay could be in a home manufactured by Haus.me. Thallus Foods’ mushrooms could make vegan airplane food finally taste good. And any travel company with business customers could score and improve their CRM leads with Axon’s AI plugin to improve their sales.

There’s also a few things the travel industry could learn from non-travel startups. For example, Gemist are improving online retailing of expensive jewelery with sophisticated AI rendered images and videos. Similar processes could be applied to luxury travel products and merchandising.

A Demo Day LA Success Story: Local Startup Stanify launches their AI Agent for Social Media

In a fireside chat with host Zach Sekar (co-founder of nerdstage), Hank Leber shared the fundraising and launch story of Stanify — an AI agent that helps large brands respond to millions of online comments and DMs on Facebook, TikTok, and other social media platforms. They oversubscribed their seed round after pitching at Demo Day LA last September.

Hank shared his entrepreneur journey from dropping out of TV advertising to failing and learning from multiple startup ventures, and why founders should practice their pitch 50 times (yes, fifty) to nail their confidence on stage. Hank believes that now is the best time for anyone to create their own startup with AI (he recommends Claude Code), but warns that you can’t wing it — founders need to be experts at their craft and know every element of their subject domain to be successful.

Overall, it was a great evening with lots of practical insights and takeaways. Thanks to Zach and the team for creating a fantastic event! And thanks to Lainie Clary from Sage Local for catering.

Head to demoday.la to learn more about the LA tech community and upcoming events.