Last Thursday through Friday, RevTech Labs presented the 2025 Venture135 Conference at the Truist Center in Charlotte. Organized as an official Global Entrepreneurship Week activity, the event was described as the “premier fintech and insurtech deal flow conference.”
Venture135 was designed to present seed-ready startups “from traditionally underrepresented demographics” to an audience of investors and others from the entrepreneurial ecosystem. The program consisted of conversations with former Carolina Panthers great-turned-Axum Capital Managing Partner, Muhsin Muhammad; showcases and demos for the RevTech Labs Accelerator’s “Class 23” cohort; and a number of additional “pitch party” sessions.
Read on for a recap of the agenda and a few words on the (many!) startups that pitched throughout the event.
An Entrepreneur Trapped in a Football Player’s Body
This was the title given to the conference’s opening session, during which RevTech Labs Co-Founder and Managing Director Dan Roselli held a conversation with Muhsin Muhammad. Once a star wide receiver for Charlotte’s own Carolina Panthers, Muhammad is now leading a Queen City private equity company with a focus on health- and wellness-oriented food and beverage companies.
Muhammad walked the audience through his experience transitioning from professional sports into his current life in private equity, noting that “there’s a lot in common between sports and business.” He discussed his challenges owning restaurants that had to fight to survive during the COVID pandemic (naturally likening the need to “come back” to the tendency of his 2003 Panthers team, nicknamed “Cardiac Cats,” to survive close contests) and noted that the experience had granted him “a great story about how to keep people in jobs.”
The takeaway was that Muhammad has continued to prioritize people and resilience with Axum, where the focus is on mission-driven success and “true partnership” rather than just capital. Muhammad also offered a few general nuggets of wisdom for the founders in the room, including:
- “You’re foolish if you don’t incorporate AI into your business in some type of way.”
- “You’ve got to be great at one thing before you’re great at everything; it comes down to picking your spots, especially for a startup.”
Following this fireside chat, Muhammad was kind enough to sit down with GrepBeat for a few additional words.
As a private equity firm investing in wellness-oriented food and beverage companies, Axum (and by extension its portfolio) falls somewhat outside the typical scope of GrepBeat’s early-stage tech startup coverage. Nevertheless, Muhammad offered some interesting words on his and his partners’ approach—primarily with regard to their drive and ability to be useful partners, rather than just sources of capital.
“For us it started with picking a couple of sectors that… resonate with our investment style,” he said. “Our access and influence, through our LP base and through our operational network… it allows us to add real value throughout our whole investment cycle to our portfolio companies. And I think that resonates well with founders.”
On the influencer edge he and his partners (some of whom are also former professional athletes) bring to the table, Muhammad added, “It brings [distinction], because everyone is intrigued by athletes…. That ‘Axum Edge,’ for us, resonates with founders, too, because they’re getting… exposure in a different way, and then obviously capital as well, and expertise on how to run their business.”
As we wrapped up our conversation, I asked Muhammad about how he views the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Charlotte and whether he’s noticing changes on the North Carolina startup scene. Not surprisingly, he was enthusiastic about where he’s doing business.
“I see a lot of new businesses moving to Charlotte,” he said. “The [startup activity], especially around technology, is increasing because of education, because we’ve got all these universities around here. I appreciate platforms like Venture135,” he added, “because it’s highlighting what is sort of incubating under the surface. I feel like this is the next tech area to sort of boom… and it’s because there are so many great minds that are coming together here with so many great ideas.”
Then, in closing and unprompted, Muhammad offered a spectacular pitch for the necessity of the very platform you’re reading on: “The only thing that’s missing is, people don’t know about us, right?”
Following these conversations with Muhammad, it was on to the RTL 23 showcases and pitch parties (which we’ve divided for coverage below).
RevTech Labs Class 23 Founder Showcase
This founder showcase, divided into two parts, marked the culmination of the RevTech Labs accelerator experience for the latest cohort. This accelerator is described as a program where “mentorship meets momentum” and fintech and insurtech leaders take steps forward in their startup journeys. Each of these startups had five minutes on stage.
Session I
- GoodTrust (San Francisco, CA) offers smart estate planning and a digital executor service to extend end-of-life planning to consider the preservation of digital memories and the handling of online accounts.
- SnapRefund (Philadelphia, PA) provides automation and analytics for digital payment processing in insurance, streamlining both claim payment and agent billing processes.
- Eleos (London, UK) uses AI voice and text agents to help users find the right life and disability insurance, and also bundles options with wellbeing benefits (such as mental health support, physiotherapy, etc.).
- Aries Fraud Solutions (Boerne, TX) delivers a patented approach to credit card fraud prevention without requiring changes to cardholder behavior.
- Drip7 (Spokane, WA) is taking on cybersecurity and compliance vulnerabilities by providing a gamified, job-specific microlearning platform (with AI-enabled fintech and insurtech training elements on the way).
- Guide AI (Los Angeles, CA) is using an AI-powered, voice-based platform to streamline customer onboarding processes with simplified, one-stop guidance.
Session II
- Sonar (Charlotte, NC) helps banks and fintechs share real-time insights through a member-run data consortium with the aim of combatting financial crime.
- Standard Information (New York, NY) provides an all-in-one platform for sales operation management, helping brands buy, sell, and route leads and deploy AI call centers.
- Clox.ai (San Francisco, CA) offers a document-intelligence-as-a-service platform aimed at detecting and preventing document fraud.
- Spatial Risk Systems (New York, NY) addresses the problem of fragmentation in GIS data, using an AI-powered platform to transform how organizations measure, model, and quantify asset-level spatial risk.
Following this second round of pitches, awards for outstanding mentors for Rev23 were handed out to Angi Milano (Founder and CEO of Maven Advisory) and Jamie Berniker (Advisor, formerly SVP, Corporate Ventures and Partnership Director for Huntington National Bank). Paraj Mathur, VP of BIP Ventures, then took the stage to share insights from an annual “State of Startups in the Southeast” report.
Alongside the RevTech Class 23 showcase and accompanying fanfare, though, there were also more than two dozen other fintech and insurtech startups that presented at Venture135. Here’s a brief look at those companies (with asterisks denoting those based in North Carolina).
“Pitch Party” startup presentations
Interspersed with the RevTech Labs Class 23 startup showcases, Venture135 also featured four separate “pitch party” sessions. Each one was presented by a different sponsor and put the spotlight on a different batch of fintech and insurtech startups from around the country (and in a few cases the world).
Pitch Party I (presented by AvidXchange)
- ROOK (Miami, FL) promotes health-data-as-a-service, providing an API that enables companies to process data from hundreds of wearables to gain actionable insights.
- EverSafe (Bethesda, MD) offers AI-powered financial monitoring, watching for unusual activity across all financial accounts to protect the financial security of older adults and disabled users in particular.
- air (New York, NY), aka Artificial Intelligence Risk, Inc., helps financial institutions integrate AI safely, delivering on the premise that “AI is the gold rush and air sells shovels.”
- Sobo (Atlanta, GA) helps small businesses scale via patent-pending, AI-driven consultant matching and insights.
- BetaScore (Chicago, IL) is building “the intelligence layer for small business lending,” providing small business credit scoring enhanced with contextual signals.
- Abacus (Chicago, IL) provides a multi-faceted AI operating system for regulated industries, helping banks, credit unions, and more gain complete control over data, responses, and processing.
Pitch Party II (presented by Fifth Third Bank)
- *Shuttlebee (Asheville, NC) is an insurance-powered marketplace for student transportation, aiming to build a network of operators with low risk and peace of mind as priorities.
- Tap2Pay (Białystok, Poland) helps businesses seamlessly accept payments within social websites and messaging platforms.
- Paywint (San Jose, CA) provides “cross-payment magic,” enabling small businesses to conduct seamless transactions, addressing the issue of fragmented payments systems.
- TrackStar AI (Chandler, AZ) uses machine learning to identify errors in credit reporting in real time, helping those who have a hard time accessing credit gain more insight and avoid being left behind.
- Lucid Financials (New York, NY) helps businesses with bookkeeping, taxes, and CFO services via agentic AI.
- Munivestor (New Orleans, LA) provides an online marketplace designed to help municipalities raise capital directly from investors around the world, ultimately aiming to “reinvent” the municipal bond market.
- *ARMAI (Charlotte, NC) assists banks, fintechs, and credit unions with automated, proactive risk protection.
- Instarails (Alpharetta, GA) is an amalgam of “instant payment rails,” and provides high-speed, low-cost, frictionless solutions for cross-border financial transactions.
- *Straata (Charlotte, NC) provides a revenue optimization platform for embedded fintech, aiming to help teams “uncover margin, streamline decisions, and drive measurable growth.”
Pitch Party III (presented by AIG)
- AlgoEdge is empowering investors by delivering strategies backed by proprietary research and quantitative expertise.
- Mayflower (New York, NY) is providing a new insurance platform built for the liabilities that come with enterprise AI adoption, filling a gap not addressed by legacy insurers.
- *Infintegration (Wilmington, NC) aims to make financial institutions’ software ecosystems more flexible and cohesive, connecting systems for fraud, compliance, loans, payments, etc.
- *Solvrays (Winston-Salem, NC) provides “the interoperability intelligence layer for insurance,” assisting insurers via AI-driven workflow solutions.
- Remynt (San Francisco, CA) is an outsourced, digital debt collection solution designed to give agency back to the consumer by providing flexibility and combining debt collection with credit-building assistance.
- KredFeed (Guadalajara, Mexico) uses an AI-powered platform to give manufacturing SMEs invoicing and financing solutions that help them compete amidst the nearshoring boom.
- *Majentics (Durham, NC) wants to help businesses adjust to the rise of AI agents and the altered online search landscape, ultimately helping them to become “the business AI recommends.”
- Gabriel Money (Atlanta, GA) provides an AI-based financial “safe zone” aimed at banking the unbanked, and specifically aiming to “help first-generation young Latinos make better financial decisions and develop healthy financial habits.”
Pitch Party IV (presented by Wagner Hicks)
- Conductiv (New York, NY) helps lenders expand their portfolios by identifying additional loan opportunities within existing applications.
- *Disctopia (Charlotte, NC) is bringing “verified stability” to streaming, helping music, podcast, and film creators stream, verify, monetize, and activate their audiences.
- Lenme (San Francisco, CA) is using AI to facilitate connections between borrowers and lenders.
- *Agingo (Charlotte, NC) is building next-gen blockchain solutions for tokenizing assets and enabling secure exchanges.
- SyncData, Inc. (Ft. Lauderdale, FL) delivers an AI-enhanced dashboard that simplifies compliance processes and helps clients stay on top of regulatory adherence.
- CargoLabs (Charlottesville, VA) bills itself as “Shopify for truck insurance agents,” helping truck operators acquire insurance in three minutes (rather than the three weeks it can take now).
- Calibrate (Philadelphia, PA) is the “behavioral operating system for modern fintech,” connecting financial and emotional wellbeing to help teams better engage with clients.
- Guala (Atlanta, GA) serves as a financial operating system for micro-sellers, helping people turn side hustles into legitimate businesses via a payment-agnostic mobile point-of-sale app.
The remainder of the Venture135 Conference was comprised of assorted workshops and investor ask-me-anything sessions (each featuring a different panel of investors).
When all was said and done, a $200K grand prize from Connetic Ventures was awarded to Guide AI for winning the pitch competition. Founder Phil Hong was on hand to accept the award in classic giant-check form.
And that was a wrap for 2025! The conference will return next year.
