Recap from Launch Academy HQ's eighth builders meetup showcasing Vancouver’s best new products

Last week, Launch Academy HQ — the tech incubator and accelerator — hosted its latest meetup showcasing demos of some of the best new products coming out of Vancouver at Microsoft.

If you missed out, we caught up with some of the founders who demoed to bring you a recap on what their product is, what problem it’s solving, why it’s so important, and what people can expect next from their team and product.

Andrew Zhong, founder of Revar and LightFeed

What: LightFeed is an automated news hub powered by large language models (LLM).

It uses the latest LLMs like ChatGPT and Llama 3 to read and understand any public website to produce a focused news feed. Users can use AI agents and their own prompt to query news by relevance and summarize. 

For example, anything related to gaming, open source and Microsoft from HackerNews or "Get key financial figures” from a Yahoo Finance article.

It’s automated daily and can be read anywhere from a browser, email or RSS.

Why: We all follow a large number of websites, whether for personal interests or business insights. But most of the time, these websites contain more than what we need, not to mention clutter and ads. 

I found a lot of time is wasted on scanning through pages for relevant articles, clicking and loading, reading and going back. This is especially true for productive individuals and teams who want to keep up-to-date with over 10 sites daily. 

This is why I created LightFeed, with the mission to streamline news and let users focus on what matters.

What’s next: We launched one month ago and are growing fast — getting 10 users per day from just one Reddit post.

Next, we will launch an enterprise plan. Think of it as a business-tailored Google Alert and real-time LLM query engine. It comes with a knowledge base of over 1,000 market news sources already indexed. 

Users can also add up to 100 custom sources, such as domain specific news or competitor sites. It also supports automation to Slack, Discord, 100k Context Windows, and more.

We will be at Collision next month and have been selected for their ALPHA program. Feel free to come say hi.

Hamid J. Fard, founder of AI-DBA 

What: Artificial Intelligence Database Administrator (AI-DBA) combines AI technology and traditional database administration. 

Simply, it involves using AI algorithms and techniques to automate and improve various tasks and processes carried out by database administrators.

Why: AI-DBA aims to optimize database management using machine learning, natural language processing, and other AI techniques to automate routine tasks such as performance tuning, query optimization, and system monitoring. 

It can also help in proactive problem detection and resolution, capacity planning, data security, and data governance. This mitigates the performance and security compromises and eases the human DBA’s workload.

What’s next: The future of AI-DBA looks promising, with rapid growth expected in the market. 

The product has already been developed and successfully adopted by many enterprise users, demonstrating its value and potential in database administration.

To attract investors by the end of 2024, it’s important to amplify the success of the AI-DBA product.

David Calderón, co-founder and creative director of Animagic Interactive's Stay Dead

What: Stay Dead is a wacky adventure survival game where you face the challenge to protect your zombie family and community from the menace of the cure and the horrors of going back to a regular human life.

Lead your family in a snake-like formation through chaotic and funny missions to destroy the cure bots and reclaim your zombie paradise. In Stay Dead, your family are your life points, so avoid getting jabbed with the cure at all costs. 

Missions are inspired by routine family activities, like a trip to Home Reap-O to buy things for the house, all while surviving the robots trying to cure you.

You can defend your kin by throwing some good punches, switch characters to use different abilities to overcome challenges, find collectibles, solve puzzles, and restore your zombie community to its original glory.

Why: This project started as a strategy to gain more independence as a studio and create an IP that could generate profit independently of client work. However, passion is always the main driver of our projects. 

In a world that can be overwhelming, we’re all about creating a space for fun, laughter, and good vibes. Alongside crafting a playful experience, we believe in spreading positive values like authenticity, community spirit, and looking out for each other, which are present in our game.

What's next: This is our first video game, and our next steps focus on building a strong community. 

We want to strengthen our social media presence, gather feedback, share updates, and bring everyone into our development journey. 

We aim to empower our community by giving them a voice in shaping some of our game’s characters, mechanics, and style. 

We're planning a crowdfunding campaign for the third quarter of this year, and we expect to release the game next year.

Austin Ross, founder of Bounce the Line

What: Bounce the Line is a line skip and guest list SAAS product for nightclubs. 

Bounce's mission is to create an amazing and memorable experience for guests — at a fraction of the cost of bottle service — while allowing nightclubs to create a new revenue stream. 

While line skipping with bouncers isn't a new thing, Bounce focuses on transparency, modernization and accountability to allow for software that fights for all key players to win — from owners, promoters, bouncers, and guests. 

Bounce creates a win-win atmosphere for all while giving guests the modern touch they deserve when going out. Just like how many prefer ride-hailing because they know the final price before they book, that’s the same premise that Bounce the Line possesses for our experience. 

Why: Bounce started when I wanted to go to a small local nightclub with only 10 people in the line but did not want to wait. 

I knew that others would prefer not to communicate with intimidating bouncers, know the price to get in and be done with waiting in lines. 

Bounce the Line has competition, but they all focus on an enterprise approach. For example, they focus on solutions for the nightclub alone while avoiding creating a community, hub, and ecosystem for guests and those who help the nightlife industry's day-to-day operations. 

Bounce attracts nightclubs by solving issues not just for them but for promoters, bouncers, and guests. 

What's next: Bounce is positioned to grow to other markets within hospitality such as restaurants in the future.

At the current moment, we’re working on scaling past the Western provinces of Canada and into new markets — mainly America. 

Bounce's main goal is to create a new revenue stream for owners, which we believe we can do for restaurants and nightclubs alike. 

We plan to stay different from the competition by positioning ourselves as user-facing and less based on an enterprise model.

We aim to become the trusted site for guests, and when that happens, we know we have won. 

Andreas Munk, founder of Evara AI

What: Evara ai offers a software solution based on a new category of AI and data modeling that provides predictability of enterprise profit, performance, and decision-making impact across industries. 

This technology enables precise control and management of uncertainties and facilitates continuous, automated data adaptation. It’s also essentially a probabilistic operating system and we’re already integrated in Excel.

Why: I founded Evara with the goal of democratizing probabilistic programming to elevate enterprise uncertainty and risk management, modeling, and data utilization — enabling superior risk-informed decision-making. 

Evara pushes the frontier of leveraging computing, data, and modeling to manage and understand uncertainties — turning uncertainty into opportunity.

What next: We are developing faster and better algorithms, enabling open source modularity.

While we currently support local computation on consumer laptops, we are expanding to support on-premise server and cloud computation. We will persistently spread awareness and educate people about the importance of careful decision-making in our unpredictable world. 

As Stephen Covey once said, "If there’s one thing that’s certain in business, it’s uncertainty." 

Our success lies in helping people embrace this mindset and start addressing their uncertainties across various industries. In five years, this concept will be widely recognized, much like ChatGPT is today — just wait and see.

Don't miss out on what’s happening in your backyard. Subscribe or become a member of Vancouver Tech Journal.