Neal Sáles-Griffin
Investor on The Pitch Season 9
Neal Sáles-Griffin is an entrepreneur, teacher, and nonprofit leader. He co-founded the first beginner-focused in-person coding bootcamp, and ran for mayor of Chicago in 2019. He's currently the Managing Director of the Techstars Chicago accelerator as well as the Techstars Rising Stars fund, and is an Adjunct Professor at Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering where he teaches entrepreneurship.
May 17, 2023
#114 Brevity: Your AI Pitch Coach
Co-founders Kelvin Johnson and Max Huc know first impressions are everything. That’s why they created Brevity, an AI powered software to help craft a persuasive first pitch. But pitching a pitch product to a room full of pit…
May 10, 2023
#113 HILOS: Is This The Perfect Business?
The fashion industry is one of the most wasteful and inefficient industries on the planet, and Elias Stahl wants to reinvent it. His company, HILOS, is creating an entirely new supply chain for shoes, made on demand with 3D …
April 19, 2023
#112 Natrion: The Holy Grail of Battery Tech
Alex Kosyakov claims to have discovered the holy grail of battery technology, a solid-state battery capable of mass production for electric vehicles. And with the ever increasing demand for EVs, investors are supercharged by…
April 12, 2023
#111 Stigma: Whose Business Is It Anyway?
Founder Ariana Vargas wants to destigmatize talking about mental health. So she built a social app. No wait, now it’s a Slack app for the workplace? This founder is willing to do whatever it takes to secure investment - mayb…
April 5, 2023
#110 HandsDown: The Accelerator Pitch
Jenna Sereni believes the best product recommendations come from family and friends. That’s the genesis of her social shopping app, HandsDown. Her pitch starts out like normal - until the investors flip the script and start …
March 29, 2023
#109 Modern Picnic: Surviving the Adpocalypse
When Ali Kaminetsky started her first job out of college, she quickly realized she didn’t have a stylish way to pack her lunch every day. So, she created Modern Picnic, a company that makes insulated vegan leather lunch boxe…
March 15, 2023
#107 Terrascope: A Computer Vision Tale
This tale starts with a problem Kehan Zhou found when trying to buy a hobby farm. Zillow didn’t have good search options for land and LandWatch.com was even worse, so Kehan ventured off to combine computer vision technology …
March 8, 2023
#106 Dotcal: The Calendar Wars
There are tons of companies popping up in the scheduling space now that Calendly is valued at 6 billion dollars. Everyone wants to build the next billion dollar calendar app, including David Matthews, founder of Dotcal. He t…
March 1, 2023
#105 Teffola: Granola Guy Approved
A few years ago, Claire Smith moved back to her family farm, where they practice sustainable farming, and created Teffola. It’s granola made with an ancient Ethiopian grain called teff, which is filled with lots of protein, …
Feb. 22, 2023
#104 Dressd: Red Carpet or Red Ocean?
Clothing rental companies get a bad rap in the VC world. It seems like no matter how much money investors sink into them, they always just… fail? But today’s founder thinks she found a way to make it work. Capri Wheaton is g…
Feb. 15, 2023
#103 Get Lost in the AWSM Sauce
AWSM Sauce founders Carl and Paul have perfected a sustainable way of making sauce. But then, they had another idea – a futuristic way of getting sauce on our plates. Will the investors see this as a two-innovations-in-one d…
Feb. 8, 2023
#102 Tether: Bodyguard of the Grid
Founder Luis Medina Rivas travels across the world to pitch his big vision on how to solve one of the most important problems of our time - energy. His pitch is close to perfect. However, the VCs worry about the location of …
Nov. 30, 2022
#101 Josh Pitches The Pitch
The Pitch is back! And a whole lot has changed since buying the show from Gimlet, bringing host Josh Muccio and cofounder Lisa Muccio somewhere they never thought they’d be — pitching in front of the investors…on their own s…
Nov. 23, 2022
Our Comeback Season Is Here!
Welcome back to The Pitch! This season, we head to Chicago to meet 14 founders with 12 business ideas big enough to change the world. Everything from a better ketchup to a potential solution to one of the biggest problems of…