One by one, representatives from 18 startups took to the podium at Carnegie Mellon University's AI and Robotics Venture Fair. Equally dominant to the technologists was the crowd — a captive audience of industry insiders and, most importantly, investors.
"The event is wonderful because it brings both national and international investors together to see what's going on in Pittsburgh," Xiaouyu Kaess, COO and co-founder of autonomous aquatic robot startup Aquatonomy, said. "It helps to lift Pittsburgh up as a home city for the development of high-tech solutions."
Outside investment is critical for the Pittsburgh startup ecosystem — last year, the ecosystem raised its second-highest funding year on record. Only 2% of that came from resident sources.
"Pittsburgh is a fantastic places to start a company in robotics or AI because of the technical resources we have," Jared Glover, CEO of CapSen Robotics, a software company that pitched during the event, said. "But, and this is a big but, we don't have the investor pool that you have on the coast in California, New York or Boston. It's not even close. … Without these kind of events, a lot of these companies wouldn't be able to start at all, or wouldn't survive when they hit the first bump in the road. These events are fantastic."
The event was organized by both CMU and early stage investor Innovation Works.
"I was actually getting investors messaging me on LinkedIn until about 11:30 last night," Jordan Marinkovich, Innovation Works' platform community manager, said. "We've had over 50 investors and about 20 of them were local, so it's good to see outside investment coming. We've had people from New York, we have the Bay Area, we've had people representing global funds as well. It's really great to bring them to Pittsburgh, some funds who come are coming for the very first time."
The local ecosystem has benefited from several investment tailwinds in the 2020s, namely because of interest in artificial intelligence — a field that's research originates at CMU.
"This is a pivotal moment where exactly the things that we have great strength in, AI and robotics, are what the world wants," Meredith Meyer Grelli, who was recently appointed director of CMU's entrepreneurial program Project Olympus, said. "We have this beautiful moment in time, and we just have to capitalize on it. Events like this one are certainly intended to increase the profile and give people reasons to come to town and take a look at our enterprising people in the town."
