GEA/GAIN Alumni Pitch Competition

NextMinder builds AI-powered “synthetic populations” that simulate how real consumers behave, allowing companies to test decisions such as pricing, product features, and messaging before launching in the real world. By combining large-scale data, behavioral modeling, and AI agents, NextMinder enables faster, more cost-effective, and more predictive market insights across the U.S. and Latin America.

ChargeMate is the AI reliability platform for distributed energy infrastructure. The company’s software automatically diagnoses and resolves failures across EV charging networks—where 1 in 4 public charging sessions fail today—replacing expensive call centers and manual troubleshooting with AI that resolves over 90% of issues in real time.

ChargeMate is live with 5 customers including Mercedes-Benz High Power Charging and Hypercharge, generating ~$150K ARR with 85-90% gross margins. The company has a $6.3M qualified pipeline that includes names like Francis Energy, ChargePoint, Blink, EVgo, and Walmart, with a clear path to $1.5M ARR from ~20 logos.

The platform’s data network effects—spanning 200+ hardware SKUs, thousands of driver interactions, and cross-network fault resolution data—create compounding advantages that no single operator or software vendor can replicate. ChargeMate is raising a $2M SAFE at a $13M post-money cap to scale the team, deepen integrations, and expand from its EV charging beachhead into adjacent distributed energy assets like solar, batteries, and building systems—a $50B+ software opportunity.

Maka Media is building the first AI-powered system for measuring the developmental quality of children’s content, closing the gap between what children consume digitally and what child development science says is actually good for them. Launching in Spring 2026 as an iOS streaming app for families of children ages 0–6, Maka gives parents access to healthy, developmentally aligned content, backed by research partnerships with the Yale Child Study Center and Harvard. Founded by leaders with deep expertise in children’s media, technology, and child development, the company recently closed an oversubscribed pre-seed round and has built a waitlist of 2,000+ families ahead of launch. Headquartered in the Midwest with an innovation hub in San Francisco, Maka is focused on becoming the infrastructure layer for children’s digital wellbeing: enabling parents, platforms, and creators to evaluate and surface content at scale, based on what kids truly need to thrive.