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

On stage

We were one of twelve startups from the program selected to present to investors. We opened the pitch with a question everyone has asked themselves at the front door at least once: “Did I forget something?”

To answer it, we started from what people told us. Across workshops and focus groups we listened to more than a hundred of them, and six in ten said they forget something at home several times a month. The same scene kept coming back in their stories: the door closing, the documents or the medication left on the table, a morning that starts off wrong.

The point we built the pitch on is that the problem is timing more than memory. Apps remind you too early and get lost among all the other notifications. Geofencing reminds you too late, once you’re already on the street. The only moment a reminder really helps is the last one you spend at home, keys in hand.

That’s where Dory comes in: a smart key tray that recognizes who’s leaving and tells them out loud what they’re about to forget, while there’s still time to turn around. It reads your calendar and the weather, learns each person’s habits, and connects to the smart home you already have.

The aperitivo

Once the pitches were over everyone moved to the aperitivo, which turned out to be the most energizing 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, and asked questions.

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.