logo
Hundreds compete for Shark Tank spots at the Philly open casting call

Hundreds compete for Shark Tank spots at the Philly open casting call

Technical.ly12-04-2025

The Shark Tank team has its work cut out for it in Philadelphia.
Hundreds of entrepreneurs showed up on Friday at Rivers Casino for the ABC product pitch show to audition for a spot in Season 17 and the possibility of a deal with one of the celebrity 'shark' investors.
We don't have an official number of the entrepreneur hopefuls who showed up, but the casino announced that its event space had exceeded capacity, and the group would be split into two to accommodate everyone.
And the line was long, snaking through two aisles of the parking garage that led into the event space.
We didn't get to go past the registration area to see the pitches, but we did meet some of the entrepreneurs in line — some local, some from out of town.
Keep scrolling to see some of the entrepreneurs who came out. Who knows, maybe we'll see some of them on TV facing the sharks!
From New Jersey, Siena Rampulla pitched PULLATTracker, a safety app that is like carrying a silent alarm that contacts the help you need when you need it.
Philly stiltwalker Mafalda Thomas-Bouzy pitched an art hall filled with music and dance for kids.
Philly-based Monday Born Mentality uses the day of the week you were born to help strategize your life.
The founders of Philly's Mea Culpa clothing brand.
The founder of the Glass Slipper, a silicone product that sits in commercial glassware racks to prevent wear and tear.
The founder of a new technology for generators who came all the way from Houston.
Titi from Middletown, Delaware, pitched Titi's Kitchen chinchins, a crunchy snack originally from Nigeria.
A founder from Wiles-Barre, Pennsylvania, pitched an innovative garden stake system.
Full Moon from Philly is pitching Autistic Academy, an education program that focuses on of autistic people.
From Buffalo, New York, ALL Dream Sports, a platform that follows the journeys of youth athletes.
The founder of a new kind of ladder called Cube Ladder, from Media, Pennsylvania.
Nate McIntyre, founder of Bodyrock Bootcamp, pitched and demonstrated his simple but effective isometric fitness device.
Companies: Shark Tank

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Cyber startup raises $15M to open Baltimore office and expand sales team
Cyber startup raises $15M to open Baltimore office and expand sales team

Technical.ly

time12 hours ago

  • Technical.ly

Cyber startup raises $15M to open Baltimore office and expand sales team

With cyberattacks on the rise in the US, a startup with bicoastal founders automating the process of protecting systems has raised millions to reach more customers. Pixee, founded in 2022, announced a $15 million seed round in May. Its tech addresses a gap in the broader market for cybersecurity products: Many tools exist to automate the search for vulnerabilities, but not to fix those flaws, explained Pixee cofounder and CEO Surag Patel. Right now, firms largely handle that process manually. Pixee uses agentic AI to make sure what's flagged is an issue in the code, and automates repairing the code to avoid attacks, he said. Software is being created faster than ever before, thanks to generative AI tools — which Patel, who lives in San Francisco, sees as a positive. But with that increase in software comes more technology susceptible to attacks, whether it's developed by a bot or a human. Pixee's announcement of the raise pointed to a 2024 study, conducted by the market intelligence-focused International Data Corporation with sponsorship by the software company JFrog, that showed that developers are also spending more hours on application security than in previous years. 'This boom of code — with that comes vulnerabilities,' Patel told 'That's an inevitable reality. And what we need is we need automation to automate the fixing of those vulnerabilities.' Growing Baltimore roots with funds from Silicon Valley This is Pixee's first raise, and it was led by Decibel and Wing VC in Palo Alto, with participation from Maryland's venture arm TEDCO and PrimeSet in Dallas. TEDCO contributed $1.5 million to the round. Patel and his cofounder, Baltimore-based Arshan Dabirsiaghi, will be using the funds to expand Pixee's go-to-market team. Up until now, they've primarily focused on hiring engineers, many of whom live in the Baltimore region. The company recently hired its first sales staffer, per Patel. 'The going-forward plan is: We need to start scaling up the awareness of Pixee,' he said. Engineers will still be brought on, Patel said, and he hopes to hire 10 employees to join the current staff of about 20 by the end of 2025. The startup is also looking at opening a formal office in the Baltimore area, though the staff currently gets together once a quarter for about a week to work in person. The founders have been raising capital since shortly after they were founded, per Patel, and it's been a 'quiet' process. The founders reached out to a handful of known investors through previous work. 'For us, we've been so heads-down just building a product, proving out the product and the market, the opportunity,' Patel said, 'and then focusing on the seed funding as secondary, honestly.' Dabirsiaghi is the cofounder of Baltimore's Contrast Security, which automates identifying vulnerabilities in software. The duo met when Patel joined that cybersecurity firm as its chief strategy officer. Saving developers time to innovate The startup self-reports a 76% acceptance rate of changes using the Pixee product. About 30,000 projects are using the firm's open source software, per Patel. He declined to share how many paying customers Pixee has, but noted he sells the product to large companies with around 300 or more developers. Pixee doesn't focus on a specific industry, but regulated ones in sectors like finance, medicine and the government have shown a lot of interest. Pixee is in talks with the federal government about contracting services, but Patel declined to share which agencies. Partnerships are also a core part of Pixee's model, and the company recently announced one with HCLTech to get connected with more customers. By getting connected to more customers, Patel wants this tool to save effort for developers so they can focus on important things outside of cybersecurity concerns. 'Now they can re-spend that time on the stuff they want to spend it on, which is generally not security, right?' Patel said. 'They want to be building cool features for customers, and things that might drive business or ideas.'

How Lithero is using AI to speed up pharma marketing compliance
How Lithero is using AI to speed up pharma marketing compliance

Technical.ly

time6 days ago

  • Technical.ly

How Lithero is using AI to speed up pharma marketing compliance

Startup profile: Lithero Founded by: Nyron Burke Year founded: 2015 Headquarters: Philadelphia, PA Sector: Life sciences, AI Funding and valuation: $0.68 million raised as of May 2022, according to PitchBook Key ecosystem partners: Ben Franklin Technology Partners, Morgan Lewis, Drexel University, University City Science Center, Broad Street Angels, Ic@3401 In life sciences, everything takes longer. Nyron Burke, cofounder and CEO of the Philadelphia-based AI for life sciences company Lithero, learned that through years of working as a consultant with pharmaceutical companies that were always looking for ways to speed up the process of creating marketing materials. What may seem relatively simple, like a pharmaceutical pamphlet for a doctor's office, can take months to finalize due to compliance issues. The final draft, with its medical language and side effects disclosures, has to be just right, requiring multiple reviews by medical lawyers before it goes to print. It's a stark contrast to consumer marketing, where a marketing professional might be able to create a one-pager in a day. 'With life sciences, that just wasn't possible,' Burke told noting that the extra time it takes to make biotech marketing materials compliant also increases the cost tenfold. Burke founded Lithero in 2015, years before AI became a common part of everyday life. He knew that machine learning could make the process considerably faster by screening for compliance issues before a medical lawyer reviews it, cutting down on the number of reviews — and, crucially, time. 'Divine intervention' led to the development of the engine Before Lithero, Burke spent eight years working for the global professional services company Accenture, with a focus on pharma and biotech companies. 'The three things I spent my consulting career on were speed, cost and compliance in pharma marketing specifically,' he said. 'But with the aspirations that my clients had, I had to not just do a good job, but to fundamentally do something that was transformative.' The speed he wanted for his clients was impossible in the 2010s — each human review for compliance was necessary, but time-consuming. AI, Burke said, had no hype around it in 2015 when he had the idea to use it to help achieve the speed he was looking for. The one thing holding him back was that he didn't know enough about AI to build an engine that could do what he needed to do. Then he met Brandon Morton, an AI researcher at Drexel who was working on his doctorate at the time. 'We met at church randomly,' Burke said. 'It was like divine intervention … His research is really what powered our ability to actually do what we're doing.' Morton effectively became a cofounder of Lithero. Even with his leadership, Burke said, it was a challenge. 'AI is very, very difficult,' Burke said. 'People don't appreciate the beauty and the power of the human mind and how hard it is to get machines to simulate what we do.' An AI assistant that doesn't hallucinate The technology Lithero created is called LARA, Lithero Artificial Review Assistant. 'You could think of it sort of like an artificial lawyer,' Burke said. Once LARA has all of a client's necessary information, it essentially pre-screens the content. It's not meant to replace the client's human lawyer, just to make it so that the lawyer has less to do on each individual piece of marketing. Then, he said, LARA will understand the client-specific content well enough that the client can use the tool for other things as well, such as creating annotations and comparing content to customer behavioral data. While today people tend to think of large language model generative AI like ChatGPT when they think of AI, LARA still isn't generative — it doesn't generate content based on prompts, it is a screening and correlation tool that can be trained to know everything about a specific brand. As such, it is not susceptible to drawbacks like hallucinations, when an AI model randomly answers with false information presented as fact, often a result of insufficient data or bias. The public launch of generative AI did help the company, though, by making the concept of an AI tool less obscure. 'It has normalized what we're doing,' Burke said. 'We're in a very conservative, cautious, slow industry — it changed the conversations that I was having.' Now, he says, there is a lot of demand, and a lot of clients bringing them new ideas on how the company can continue to grow. 'Our future is not just compliance, it's also creative,' Burke said. 'We recently launched some creative assistants, and are seeing this amazing amount of excitement.' From one to ten To get to where Lithero is today, with a team of ten and a growing roster of clients, it spent years based at Ic@3401, a University City coworking and incubation space sponsored by Drexel University and the University City Science Center that closed in 2024. One of its earliest investors, apart from friends and family, was Ben Franklin Technology Partners. Burke also credits its law firm Morgan Lewis as a big supporter, as well as angel investment group Broad Street Angels.

Fore Biotherapeutics raises another $38M for cancer drug trial, bringing its latest round to $113M
Fore Biotherapeutics raises another $38M for cancer drug trial, bringing its latest round to $113M

Technical.ly

time7 days ago

  • Technical.ly

Fore Biotherapeutics raises another $38M for cancer drug trial, bringing its latest round to $113M

Philly life sciences companies are still seeing massive raises, despite analyst chatter about the sector's shortcomings. Biotech company Fore Biotherapeutics brought in $38 million, the second installment to a later-stage round that began in 2023. Local orgs are also getting funding to expand tech education and job training in Philadelphia and beyond. Tech education nonprofit Hopeworks received a $1.2 million grant to expand its workforce development programming to two new cities on the East Coast. Plus, developers received $30 million from the state to continue creating manufacturing and commercialization space at the Navy Yard, which will hopefully eventually lead to business attraction and job creation, a partner organization said. Get all the details on the latest money moves below the chart, where we look at the top 10 companies hiring for tech jobs in the Philadelphia market and how that's changed since the previous month. Life sciences giant Fore Biotherapeutics rakes in another massive round University City-based biotech company Fore Biotherapeutics raised $38 million, it announced last week. The company develops therapies for cancer, specifically a treatment called plixorafenib. The funding will advance a phase two clinical trial for the drug called the FORTE Master Protocol. 'We are well-positioned to continue our capitally efficient execution and make significant strides in delivering the ongoing FORTE Master Protocol,' said William Hinshaw, CEO of Fore. 'As we look to multiple anticipated interim analyses and clinical data supporting potential registration under the accelerated approval pathway, with FDA submissions potentially at the end of next year.' This round was an extension of its $75 million Series D in 2023, meaning the round now totals $113 million. Hopeworks plans expansion thanks to $1.2M grant Tech education and workforce development organization Hopeworks received a $1.2 million grant from the Hg Foundation earlier this month. Over the next three years, the grant will help expand the nonprofit's reach to two new cities: Newark, New Jersey, and an undetermined second location. The plan is to expand to Newark first, Dan Rhoton, CEO of Hopeworks, told The plan for the second location is to target somewhere along the I-95 corridor, likely in Delaware or Maryland. But Hopeworks isn't in a rush to move forward with this expansion, it wants to make sure the program in Newark is solid before moving forward, he said. 'We don't need Hopeworks to be in 20 cities,' he said. 'We need young adults to get their lives changed. That's the really important part.' Hopeworks' model provides trauma-informed tech training and paid work opportunities to young adults with the goal of getting young adults from low-income backgrounds into sustainable, well-paying careers. The organization started in Camden in 1999 and expanded to Kensington in 2022. In those locations, it offers programs in web design, geographic information services, data analytics and business. Only the web design program will be expanding to the new cities. 'We continue to prove that young adults in Camden, Kensington and now maybe Newark are the folks who can fill the jobs you need,' Rhoton said. 'It's changing the conversation about where you go looking for talent.' DCED awards $30M to the Philly Navy Yard The Shapiro administration awarded $30 million to real estate developers Ensemble/Mosaic Navy Yard to build the Navy Yard Greenway District. This money comes from the Pennsylvania Strategic Investments to Enhance Sites program run by the Department of Community and Economic Development (DCED), which awarded $64 million to 11 projects throughout the state in its first round. The funding will specifically be used for utility infrastructure, soil excavation, grading and stormwater management to eventually turn 700,000 square feet into advanced manufacturing and commercialization space. '[The funding] will help attract new businesses, support the expansion of our life sciences and advanced manufacturing industries, and create hundreds of good-paying jobs across a wide range of skill and educational levels,' said Jodie Harris, president of the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation, which partners with Ensemble/Mosaic. More money moves: The Montgomery County Investment Development Authority plans to commit $500,000 to the Montco Made Investment Initiative, a partnership with Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania. King of Prussia-based fintech company PowerPay closed a $400 million 'committed warehouse facility,' which means the company can borrow up to that amount to fund its customers' loans. The DCED awarded $2 million to venture capital firm Neovate Life Sciences through the Ben Franklin Technology Development Authority. This funding will be invested in life sciences companies in Pennsylvania. Governor Josh Shapiro's 2025 to 2026 budget proposes $50 million for a new PA Innovation program. This is broken down into a $30 million initiative to expand life sciences job growth and $20 million to support large-scale innovation. 2025 RealLIST Startup Civic received a $50,000 grant from the Draper Foundation through the Wharton Bridge Fund, the company told Biotech company Nuevocor, which is based in Singapore but has its US headquarters in Montgomery County, raised a $45 million Series B round.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store