B4i Investor Day: the day we put Dory in front of investors

On stage

We were one of six startups from the program selected to present to investors, and we built the whole pitch around a single moment: walking out of your front door.

Nobody needs that explained to them. The door shuts behind you and the documents or the medication are still sitting on the table inside. Dory was born from that moment: a key tray that recognizes who's leaving from the weight of their keys and says out loud what they're about to forget, while there's still time to turn around.

The aperitivo

Once the pitches were over everyone moved to the aperitivo, which turned out to be the most useful part of our day. We had brought the MVP and set it down on a table with a set of keys next to it. From then on we never stopped: people came over, tried it, asked questions, went off to bring someone else.

Having a product that actually exists changes the conversation you get to have with an investor: you stop reasoning in hypotheticals and start talking timelines, unit costs and the first production run. Some of those conversations are still open.

Three months of Saturdays

B4i is Bocconi University's entrepreneurial hub, and its pre-accelerator runs for three months: eleven Saturday morning workshops, fifty-five hours, plus mentorship and legal desks.

In March Dory was a prototype and a conviction. By June it was a product a room of investors wanted to pick up. In between sit those eleven mornings, the mentors who made us redo our numbers more than once, and a pitch rewritten more times than we can count.

Thank you

Thank you to B4i and its team, to the mentors who asked us the most uncomfortable questions at exactly the right time, and to the other founders of Batch XIII: three months surrounded by people building hard things changes how you build your own.

The Investor Day on July 1 was also the last event under the B4i name: from here the journey continues inside Tech Europe Foundation, alongside PoliHub. Closing out the thirteenth and final batch is an ending we never planned and one that means a lot to us.

Now it's heads down on industrialization and the first production run. The day before we were at the Deep Tech Matching Day, and we wrote about it here.