Tech Makers, powered by Qonto, ran another edition of its Monthly Tech Drinks + Pitching night at The Social Hub Amsterdam City — an evening built around the idea that entrepreneurship is not built in isolation. It grows through sharing ideas, testing assumptions in front of a room, and meeting people who might become co-founders, customers, or mentors.
Thanks to Fabien Bouhier, Oliver Rockall, and Julien Nathan Balanqueux for hosting and keeping the evening’s energy exactly where a startup pitch night should be: honest, a little unpolished, and genuinely useful.
Pitch: Videntic — Rebuilding Organic Traffic Around AI Visibility
One pitch landed squarely in territory I follow closely: Videntic, positioned against a wave of “AI visibility” tools like Profound and Peec AI. The framing on the slide was sharp: “Competitors monitor AI visibility. We rebuild organic traffic around it.”
The distinction matters. Tools like Peec AI and Profound tell you whether ChatGPT or Perplexity is mentioning your brand. Videntic’s bet is that monitoring alone is not the product — the value is in what you do with that signal, specifically rebuilding the organic traffic that AI answer engines are quietly diverting away from search results. Their positioning map put them at €400-800+, targeting inbound-led SMBs with an “agent native” action layer, versus enterprise/agency-focused competitors like Evertune (€800-2000+) and Goodie AI further up the price curve.
This is the same shift I have been tracking in how AI is changing SEO and content discovery — the market for “did an LLM mention us” tooling is getting crowded fast, and the founders who win will be the ones who close the loop from visibility signal to actual traffic recovery, not just a dashboard.
Founder Story: Lessons from the Edge
The most memorable talk of the night was not a pitch deck — it was a founder story, using the Cocodona 250 ultra-endurance race as the lens. Watching the top finishers’ names and splits on screen, the parallel drawn was obvious without being stated outright: building a startup and running 250 miles through Arizona desert both come down to the same unglamorous discipline — showing up for the next mile when the previous one went badly, without needing the whole race to make sense yet.
This is the part of “Monthly Tech Drinks + Pitching” that a straight pitch competition would not have: honest talks about failed experiments and what they cost, delivered by people who kept going anyway.
Pitch: Adaptive — Raising a €450k Pre-Seed
Karianne Kraaijestein, founder of Adaptive, closed with a live fundraising pitch: €450k pre-seed on a SAFE with a €2.5M valuation cap, structured to fund an 18-month runway covering a pilot, MVP, and core team. Pitching an active raise to a room of founders and operators — rather than to a VC panel — is a different exercise; the questions that followed were more “what would you actually do with month 4” than “what’s your TAM,” which is exactly the kind of scrutiny a pre-seed founder benefits from before taking the same pitch to an investor meeting.
The problem slide: “The research exists. It’s just never reached the training plan.”
The problem slide put the gap in one number: studies on female athletes in hormonal transition account for 6% of all sports science research, yet this population is described as one of the fastest-growing in endurance sport.
The “Why Now” slide, with four reasons on one page.
The “Why Now” slide gave four reasons: sports science on female physiology has advanced sharply in the last 3-4 years and longitudinal data on hormonal transition did not exist before; endurance sport is accelerating (UTMB trail-running participation roughly tripled since 2022, women’s cycling is up 20% since 2019, and triathlon alone is already a $3.8B global market); wearables now make daily physiological data universal; and the closest competitor, Wild.AI, was acquired and absorbed in 2025, so the category is open. As a consultant who reviews pitch logic for a living, I like that all four are checkable claims rather than adjectives.
Find Your Cofounder
One of the more useful discoveries of the evening was Find Your Cofounder, a platform built by the Tech Makers community specifically to solve the problem this event exists to address in person: matching entrepreneurs with potential co-founders. A pitch night is a good filter for finding people whose ideas you believe in; a dedicated platform is what makes that connection possible for everyone who could not be in the room.
Why This Format Keeps Working
The mix — product pitches, a live fundraising ask, and an unrelated endurance-racing founder story, all in one two-hour session — should not work as well as it does. What makes it work is that none of the talks were trying to be a polished conference keynote. They were closer to what founders actually tell each other after a bad week: here is what I am building, here is what I am raising, here is what nearly broke me and did not.
Thank you to Tech Makers, Qonto, and The Social Hub Amsterdam City for creating the room where that kind of honesty is normal. Looking forward to the next edition, and to seeing which of these ideas are still standing a year from now.
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About the Author
I am Luca Berton, AI and Cloud Advisor. I work with founders, freelancers, and enterprises on technology strategy and platform engineering. Book a consultation.
