AI House Flies In Out-of-Town VCs as 25 Seattle Startups Pitch

Twenty-five early-stage startups pitched investors from Boston, New York, Colorado and the Bay Area at AI House Demo Day on Wednesday, an event designed to pull outside money into a city whose founders have long struggled to raise at home.

AI House, a Seattle startup incubator and venture capital fund, hosted the event at its offices on Pier 70. Many of the pitching companies were not in AI House's own portfolio, and that was deliberate, said Yifan Zhang, an AI House managing director who came up with the idea for the event.

"We all complained about not having enough capital here, but no one was doing anything about it," Zhang said. AI House tapped its own connections to investors elsewhere in the country, she said, and "people flew in from all over for this."

Attendees included Mike Vernal, a partner at San Francisco-based Conviction; Emily Melton, founder and managing partner of Threshold Ventures; and Rob Go, co-founder of Boston-based NextView Ventures. Many prominent Seattle-based venture capitalists also showed up.

Zhang said she wanted the lineup to show two sides of Seattle at once: startups built around real problems and revenue, and technologists doing "crazy ambitious things."

Theo Ellis, CEO of Seattle mortgage-tech startup Friday Harbor, called the event "Seattle's answer to YC Demo Day," a reference to Y Combinator's Bay Area showcase. Many of the city's startups are "not necessarily in the flashiest spaces," he said, but they have real customers and are growing fast. Mortgage lending technology is "not exactly nuclear-powered robots landing on Jupiter, but it's an enormous market with a lot of businesses willing to pay for it," Ellis said.

The numbers back him up. Ellis told the crowd that Friday Harbor underwrote 0.6% of all U.S. residential mortgage applications in August, and that the company is starting to raise its Series A round.

Several pitchers arrived with hard revenue metrics. Moria, co-founded by Chris Mutzel and Jimmy Voorhis, uses AI to produce technical studies for mining companies. Voorhis said one customer expanded a $100,000 contract to $900,000 in two months. Axel, an AI travel agent led by founder and CEO Stephen Grabowski that claims to find flight and hotel deals below public prices, has about $30 million in annualized travel bookings, Grabowski said. Suede, founded by former Pipe and Row merchandising director Danielle Dantche, automates product listings and purchase orders for independent boutiques and has processed $9.9 million in inventory over the past 90 days, she said.

The roster mixed familiar GeekWire-covered names — Friday Harbor, Optimly, Vantari, Jinn Labs, GateIn, Casium, Orbital Robotics, Viata, Ridge AI, Caddi, Lev, Aria (formerly Alpyne Labs) and Synthesize Bio — with newer entrants. Hubble, a Y Combinator Summer 2026 company co-founded by CEO Prabha Dublish and CTO Aaron Leon, is building an API to retrieve patients' medical records; Dublish pitched the company as the "Plaid for medical records." Atlas, co-founded by former Ai2 researcher Chandra Bhagavatula and Martín Ramírez, is developing AI to run much of a company's day-to-day operations. Reflection Robotics, led by co-founder and CEO Arsalan Mousavian, a former Nvidia robotics research manager, builds AI models that let factory robots learn precise tasks from a single demonstration.

Other newcomers included Eidol, an AI House portfolio company based in Los Angeles whose software listens to a live singer and keeps pre-recorded vocal tracks in sync; founder and CEO Clayton Janes pitched alongside chief artist officer Kay Hanley, singer of Letters to Cleo. Comment.io, led by former Microsoft and Textio product leader Jon Gordner and longtime Textio engineering leader Max Winderbaum, is building a tool for reviewing and approving work produced by AI agents. Caddi, which builds AI agents to automate back-office work at professional services firms, opened with co-founder and CEO Alejandro Castellano telling the crowd, "We're not a golf company, so relax."

Ergoly, co-founded by AJ Gleser and Dan Moore, helps small service firms train and deploy AI workers for each of their clients. Finch, founded by former Brightflow AI CEO Jeffrey Priebe, is building AI to plan and run in-person events that companies use to meet potential customers.

Closing the event, AI House co-founder and managing director Jacob Colker made the case to the visiting investors, building on his recent GeekWire guest column and a July Seattle Tech Week speech. The region is full of "space, science, tech, bio, health, startup builders," he said, with far more good ideas than local investors can fund. "The reality is there's just not enough capital in the Pacific Northwest," Colker said, predicting the visitors will find "great investment opportunities and great deals." Seattle, he said, "is worth your time, your investment, your focus, your energy."

If out-of-town checks follow the pitches, AI House may have given Seattle a repeatable template for closing its funding gap.