Burners Investing for Good PITCH NIGHT
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Bites by Malcom
COVEN is a creative placemaking nonprofit accelerator (501c3) amplifying the sidelined voices of women, BIPOC, and immigrants through monumental art and activating Third Place community hubs. Collaborative initiatives include Save the Box Shop and Djerassi capital campaigns, Naga in Golden Gate Park, Black Burner Project Barbershop Roadshow, and Farmer the Rigger at Midway.
Following on the spirit of Burners coming together for the unveiling of Marco Cochrane's R-EVOLUTION at Embarcadero Plaza, COVEN and Kinlia have teamed up to bring founders and funders together for one night to spotlight Burner-inspired projects–both nonprofit & for-profit ventures.
SCHEDULE:
6:00 - 6:30 Networking
6:25 - 6:30 Welcome
6:30 - 7:25 5-min Pitches
7:25 - 7:45 Investor Panel
7:45 - 7:55 Rapid Fire Pitches
7:55 - 8:00 Closing Circle
100 people from our tech, arts & culture, and Burner communities have RSVP'd, forgoing tacos to come out to hear the pitch line-up of 11 changemakers driving real-world impact through art, climate, civic engagement, and community impact, which includes:
FOR-PROFIT STARTUPS:
- Nathalie Brochstein | Karibu AI
- Joseph Perla | Hangout
- Gina Levy | Kinlia
- Matt Gillespie | Emergence Field Labs (EFL)
- Katie Joseph | Amulet AI
- Jon Stein | Alchemy Springs
NON-PROFITS:
- Ryan Rising, Burners without Borders
- Pouneh Mortazavi, The Box Shop
- Hristiyan Atanasov, SoilDAO
- Ariel Vegosen, Gender Illumination
- Ben Davis, Illuminate the Arts
Panelists will follow with insights from the perspectives of venture capital, impact investing and philanthropy. Kat Steinmetz, Good Trouble Ventures, is an impact VC investing in future of entertainment & creativity and Jan D'Alessandro is the Chief Legal & Philanthropy Officer of Pledge 1%, who built a network of 100 VC's unlocking $3B for social and environmental impact.
We will open up the last leg to the audience to do 1-minute rapid fire pitches.
Join us for good vibes, convos, and bites at beautiful Heron Arts. Together, we will be the change we want to see in the world.
If you are among the 70+ who've already RSVP'd via Kinlia, no need to RSVP again on COVEN's Partiful.
More about the presenting projects:
Amulet AI (for-profit tech startup) transforms fragmented conversational and ambient data into real-time support—engaging older adults, supplementing caregivers, and scaling home care to the middle income market. Amulet AI was founded in 2024 by Katie Joseff and Patrick Deegan, PhD.
The Box Shop (501c3 nonprofit real estate project) is San Francisco’s last industrial art makerspace, home to 120 artist residents and the 200+ Flaming Lotus Girls, with public art placed in over 30 cities across the country and around the world, with no less than a 6M in annual cultural tourism impact. Save the Box Shop is 40% through its $5.5M capital campaign and has secured a permanent home in February 2025. They are actively raising $1M from foundation grants and private donations in 2025 to support construction buildout and relocation with minimal impact to its 300 artists in Bayview-Hunters Point. The Box Shop was founded in 2004 by Charles Gadeken and Pouneh Mortazavi, and is run by Kyana van Houten.
Burners without Borders (BWB) is a grassroots, volunteer-driven, community leadership program of the Burning Man Project. BWB has over 1,000 volunteers who contribute over 12,000 hours of civic service annually, with 16 BWB chapters and 13 active working groups, focusing on grassroots projects and mutual aid to bolster community resiliency and civic solutions. They mobilized the first responders to Hurricane Katrina from Burning Man in 2005 and have gifted over $1M worth of reconstruction and debris removal to the residents of Mississippi and rebuilding a Vietnamese temple following the Biloxi floods. BWB was co-founded by Carmen Mauk and Tom Price and is run by Christpher Breedlove.
Emergence Field Labs (for-profit tech startup) is a peer-to-peer (P2P) data learning platform for impact organizations and academic and research institutions to unlock AI and collective intelligence, with no-code tools such as a research framework builder, AI surveys, and learning community builder. For the first time, researchers and grassroots organizations will be able to own, structure, and monetize their data on their terms. EFL is a stealth-mode startup founded in 2025 by Matt Gillespie, Scott Shadian, Ben Valentino, and Ahn Lee.
Gender Illumination (501c3 nonprofit) creates liberation for trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, and gender nonconforming people through the tools of education, healing, leadership, mentorship, ritual, and community building. We serve to educate the general public, shift cultural narratives, create safer spaces for gender exploration, and build a world in which multiple genders are celebrated and honored. We are committed to working from a place of intersectionality and acknowledging how racism, sexism, transphobia, ableism, and classism are directly connected. We counter the harms of systematic oppression by building upon and creating new systems of liberation. Gender Illumination is founded by Ariel Vegosen.
Hangout (for-profit tech startup) is a social platform connecting groups in real-time to music streaming, providing access to over 100 million tracks, including from Sony Music, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and licensing partner Merlin. Hangout was spun out of Turntable Labs in 2023 by serial entrepreneur Joseph Perla.
Illuminate the Arts (501c3 nonprofit) rallies large groups of people together to create impossible works of public art that, through awe, free humanity’s better nature. Founded in 2011 to revitalize the city of San Francisco through large-scale public art, Illuminate’s projects include The Bay Lights, The Golden Mile @JFK Promenade in Golden Gate Park, laser art exhibits for SF Pride and Summer of Awe, and over 200 free live performances throughout the city of San Francisco.
Karibu AI (for-profit tech startup) is a future work tech platform providing fast and cost-effective onboarding for new healthcare professionals while delivering personalized training for consistent, high-quality care.
Kinlia (for-profit tech startup) is an event platform app using AI to connect people, addressing the social health crisis by designing a world where we gather more. Kinlia community events span art, music, dance, social causes, yoga, meditation, tech, and the creative underground, with members in cities from Ecstatic Dance LA, Collab to Alchemy, House of Yes and SexPositiveWorld. Kinlia was founded in 2024 by Gina Levy and Andy Stevko.
SoilDAO (508c1a nonprofit & DAO tech startup) is an innovative solution for regenerative land stewardship, combining web3 technology, real estate land trusts, and sustainability. SoilDAO was founded in 2023 by Hristiyan Atanasov and Austin Hill Shaw.
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