NC Tweener Madness Bracket
8 startups. 3 rounds. $25k investment prize.
Exceptional Eight
Fabulous Four
Championship
Selection Committee
Competing will compete with one another to move forward, starting in the Exceptional Eight. After pitching, the selection committee will ask questions. Then, after hearing the competing company's pitch, the three selection committee members will vote independently.
Who’s who?
Exceptional Eight
Utilyst VS BeneDoc
Utilyst
PowerTech
View Utilyst's Website
50% of America's water utility operators retire by 2030. They carry 30 years of institutional knowledge — which pipes fail in cold snaps, which pumps cavitate under load, which neighborhoods flood when it rains hard. That knowledge lives in their heads, not in any system.
At the same time, 70% of utilities are legally prohibited from using cloud AI due to federal cybersecurity mandates. So when the next generation of operators arrives, they inherit aging infrastructure, disconnected data systems, and no way to access what their predecessors knew.
vs
BeneDoc
HealthTech
View BeneDoc's Website
In the medical technology sector, the path from breakthrough to bedside is often blocked by a mountain of paperwork. BeneDoc simplifies regulatory compliance, empowering innovators to shift their focus from administrative hurdles to saving lives.
Their mission was born from witnessing this inefficiency firsthand while consulting for a UNC research group. The team had developed safe, validated algorithmic inventions poised to revolutionize maternity care, yet they stalled during FDA preparation. Even after hiring elite consultants, they were forced to choose between competing strategies—each carrying massive costs and the risk of extensive rework—without a clear, data-driven path forward.
Iguana Cyber VS HAM
Iguana Cyber
CyberSecurity
View Iguana Cyber's Website
vs
HAM
AITech
View HAM's Website
Druid Agriculture VS HuVia Technologies
Druid Agriculture Inc
Agtech
View Druid Agriculture Inc's Website
vs
HuVia Technologies
EdTech
View HuVia Technologies's Website
Marla Amplification VS Build-A-Bookie
Marla Amplification LLC
Consumer Hardware
View Marla Amplification LLC's Website
vs
Build-A-Bookie
SportsTech
View Build-A-Bookie's Website
Fabulous Four
Utilyst VS HAM
Utilyst
PowerTech
View Utilyst's Website
50% of America's water utility operators retire by 2030. They carry 30 years of institutional knowledge — which pipes fail in cold snaps, which pumps cavitate under load, which neighborhoods flood when it rains hard. That knowledge lives in their heads, not in any system.
At the same time, 70% of utilities are legally prohibited from using cloud AI due to federal cybersecurity mandates. So when the next generation of operators arrives, they inherit aging infrastructure, disconnected data systems, and no way to access what their predecessors knew.
The result: utilities spend billions reactively fixing failures instead of preventing them. Utilyst solves this with an on-premises AI platform that captures operator knowledge, fuses all infrastructure data, and gives every engineer the ability to ask in plain language: "which 10 miles of pipe fail next?" and get a map-based answer in seconds.
vs
HAM
AITech
View HAM's Website
AI coding agents waste tokens by reloading entire codebases on every interaction. Hierarchical Agent Memory (HAM) gives agents structured, directory-scoped memory files so they load only relevant context, cutting token consumption dramatically up to 80%.
Existing memory tools (Mem0, Zep, Letta) solve conversational memory, not codebase-scoped agent memory. CLAUDE.md is flat and manual. HAM is hierarchical, auto-updating, model-agnostic, and the only solution with an intelligent routing layer that selects the right context file for the right task.
Druid Agriculture VS Marla Amplification
Druid Agriculture Inc
Agtech
View Druid Agriculture Inc's Website
vs
Marla Amplification LLC
Consumer Hardware
View Marla Amplification LLC's Website
Championships
Druid Agriculture Inc
Agtech
View Druid Agriculture Inc's Website
vs
HAM
AITech
View HAM's Website
