Jun 12, 2024 · 36m · the-pitch
"Burnt Out Engineers Rejoice! AI-Driven Cloud Scaling & Anomaly Detection Saves the Day!"
Nilo Rahmani · 12m spoken Josh Muccio · 6m spoken Charles Hudson · 2m spoken Jen Rahmani · 2m spoken Cyan Banister · 2m spoken Elizabeth Yin · 1m spoken Paige Finn Doherty · 43s spoken Lisa Muccio · 14s spoken News Anchor · 11s spoken
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Twin co-founders Nilo and Jen Rahmani pitch Thoris AI, an autonomous cloud reliability and predictive scaling platform, winning $150,000 in on-air commitments on The Pitch before closing an oversubscribed $1.5 million seed round.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Josh holds 23.3% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Josh as informed peer 2.0 Guest teaching 2.6 Guest disagreement 0.6 Josh pushing back 1.1
speaking balance: gold is Josh, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 10:38 Reframing AI trust against human error
Nilo challenges the common skepticism around trusting AI models, pointing out that human engineers are far more prone to bad days and fatigue.
Hardest push from Josh ▶ 17:16 Pushing founders to pay themselvesCharles firmly rejects Nilo's plan to defer founder salaries, explaining that personal financial strain harms company decision-making.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 4:41 Displacing legacy observability dashboardsNilo educates Charles on why incumbents like Datadog only provide passive graphs while Thoris offers active, autonomous infrastructure scaling.
Josh holds their own ▶ 21:40 Questioning competitive defensibilityJosh challenges the panel of investors on why they are not worried about fierce competition from incumbent multi-billion dollar observability platforms.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Josh as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Josh pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Episode Break and Podcast App Promotion | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0 | The segment opens with an ad read and transitions into Nilo and Jen delivering their opening pitch about Thoris AI and cloud reliability. The investors listen politely without intervening. | |
| Technical Differentiation, Pilot Validation, and Founder Domain Experience | 3 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Charles asks technical questions about incumbents like Datadog, prompting Nilo to explain their autonomous scaling edge and her Slack and Georgia Tech background. | |
| Algorithm Validation, Investment Terms, and Displacing SRE Burnout | 2 | 4 | 1 | 1 | The discussion covers algorithm testing and fundraising terms. Nilo explains why AI models avoid the human pitfalls of SRE burnout and turnover. | |
| Host Commentary on SRE Fatigue and Pre-Pitch Dynamics | 3 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Charles presses the founders on their commercial pricing and ideal customer profiles. Nilo outlines enterprise value propositions and their sister co-founder agreement. | |
| Burn Rate Analysis and Securing Three Investor Commitments | 3 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Charles pushes back against the founders' plan not to pay themselves. Elizabeth, Charles, and Cyan all commit $50k checks each, closing the round in the room. | |
| Investor Post-Pitch Debrief and Syndicate Reflections | 3 | 3 | 0 | 2 | Josh pushes the room on competition risks in cloud monitoring, but Cyan and Elizabeth defend the investment citing twin founder chemistry and strong federal/Slack backgrounds. | |
| Post-Show Follow-Up: Oversubscribed Round and Women in Tech Leadership | 2 | 3 | 1 | 1 | In the post-show interview, Nilo and Jen discuss expanding their round to $1.5M and navigating stereotypes as female immigrant founders in infrastructure AI. | |
| Episode Conclusion, The Pitch Fund Update, and Next Week's Teaser | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Josh delivers a concluding solo commentary regarding The Pitch Fund portfolio and introduces a teaser clip for the upcoming episode. |
Statements from this episode (16)
Thoris AI claims its platform cuts cloud costs and boosts reliability 50%
“Our studies have shown that we can increase reliability and efficiency by up to 50% for a cloud-based system while decreasing cloud costs by up to 50% as well.”
Nilo Rahmani: Thoris AI has five design partnerships and growing pipeline
“And so currently we have five design partnerships And we have a very large and fast-growing customer pipeline as well.”
Nilo Rahmani: Datadog users are just paying for insights and graphs
“When you're paying for something like Datadog, I like to say you're just paying for your insights and graphs. And people pay a lot of money for that.”
Jen Rahmani: Thoras AI pilot design partnerships pay $500 to $1,500 monthly
“They're paid pilots. They range between 500 to 1500 dollars.”
Nilo Rahmani: Thoras AI has $800,000 in soft commitments for $1M round
“We have soft commits for about 800,000 of the million, and so we're going through diligence with the lead investor who's offered to lead the round, and then we are also working with angel investors and a small family office.”
Nilo Rahmani: Thoras AI is raising $1M on $6M post-money cap
“So it's one on a six million dollar post money file cap.”
Nilo Rahmani: SRE engineer turnover averages one to two years from burnout
“Like the average turnover for engineers like us is one to two years. We experienced a lot of burnout.”
Nilo Rahmani: Enterprise software fails if developers do not embrace the brand
“You can build a really cool product, but if developers don't want to use it, it's out of there. So while you're selling to the executive buyer, it's important to brand for them.”
Charles Hudson: Unpaid founders make suboptimal decisions due to financial stress
“I find that, like, when people don't pay themselves, the external money issues sometimes creep into, like, company decision making in a way that's suboptimal, so I generally, I also think it's, the goal, the startup should be able to support you financially, a…”
Elizabeth Yin commits $50,000 to Thoras AI seed round
“If you would have me on this seemingly oversubscribed round, I would be in on these terms for 50 K.”
Charles Hudson commits $50,000 to Thoras AI seed round
“I know what the status quo is for products in this category, and there are multiple, multi-billion dollar public companies in this space, and I think it'd be really interesting to go on this journey with you at the same level that Elizabeth mentioned.”
Cyan Banister: Investing in sibling co-founders has never gone wrong for me
“I also love investing in siblings. I have never gone wrong there, and I just really love the dynamic between siblings.”
Charles Hudson: A $6M seed valuation gets strong founders with little data
“The fact that it was six, I was like, well, this is what you get for six. Like really good people and like not a lot of data.”