San Diego AI Showcase #3 (North County) April 2026
Note: we are charging $10 just to help with food and drinks, we already have an awesome space. If you don't feel like paying, please choose the INVITEE ticket (free). Thanks!
For our April event, we are joining forces with Builders Roundtable, an amazing San Diego Mastermind group for Making and Marketing Great Products. Supportive, safe peer discussions with local Product owners, managers, developers, UX/designers, marketers.
San Diego AI Showcase (North County)
A Homebrew-style night for AI experiments and demos. Safe space. No recordings.
This is a monthly, in-person gathering for San Diego founders who are actively building with AI, and who are willing to show their work before it’s perfect.
Inspired by the original Homebrew Computer Club, where builders like Steve Wozniak casually shared what they were experimenting with, this is a space for real demos, early prototypes, bold ideas, and honest lessons. No polished pitch decks. No sales. No pressure.
This is about learning in public, helping each other think sharper, and accelerating progress through thoughtful feedback.
The San Diego AI Showcase is designed to grow a tight, curious, builder-driven founder community in the region.
What you’ll see
• Early AI products, tools, agents, workflows, and experiments
• Things that are half-working, just launched, or still a little rough
• Lessons from what didn’t work (often the most valuable part)
• Live demos, screen shares, short walkthroughs
Format
• 5–10 founders present for ~10 minutes each
• 3-minute Q&A and group discussion after every presentation
• Hang out, meet other builders, and keep the conversation going
Who this is for
• Founders actively building with AI (pre-seed to growth)
• Engineers, designers, and product leaders experimenting hands-on
• People who value curiosity, humility, and substance over hype
What this is not
• Not a pitch night
• Not an investor demo day
• Not a sales event
Just builders helping builders.
📍 Event Details
When: April 7, 2026, from 6 pm to 9 pm
Where: LVLUP USA (North County San Diego. Vista, California)
Organizer: Demian Borba, Founder and CEO of Pactto (Stanford StartX S25, ex-Adobe, Intuit, PayPal, BlackBerry)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/demianborba/
If you’re interested in presenting, attending, or shaping the future of this meetup, please email Demian at [email protected]. The goal is to create something long-lasting for San Diego — a place where meaningful work gets shared early, and momentum compounds over time.
Presenters:
6:15 pm
Demian Borba, Founder and CEO of Pactto (Stanford StartX S25, ex-Adobe, Intuit, PayPal, BlackBerry)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/demianborba/
Title: Pactto: a brand-new studio for teams to present, review and approve creative work
Details:
Zero-latency video playback, crystal-clear audio, high-quality assets, real-time annotations. All fueled by your company’s knowledge in a powerful intelligent canvas.
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6:30 pm
Hussein Yahfoufi, Founder & CEO, Eventship (Mentor at Techstars, Investor, GPT Hacks founder)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/husseinyahfoufi/
Title: Eventship MCP Server - Let AI book or host your next event
Details:
We’ve been building an MCP server for Eventship that will allow AI agents find and book events for you or help you host your next event. I’ll do a demo of what we have working so far.
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6:45 pm
Weslyn (Yare Ace NoK) Whitehead, Founder, MetaGaia.Co (Author, MaiiaM Physics Founder, Tech Lead, Unity3D Architect, EdTech, Musician)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/weslyn/
Title: Modern AI and Ancient Wisdom. Building a Consciousness Platform
Details:
AsAManThinks is an AI-powered self-awareness platform synthesizing six ancient wisdom traditions into a single living system — not a meditation app, not a wellness tracker, but a new category entirely. The ecosystem spans MaiiaM Oracle, published books, a multiple lab environments, and practical tools (80+ apps) for deep exploration and learning of self, all unified by one premise: ancient wisdom and artificial intelligence belong together. As A Man Thinks so is he.
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7 pm
Val Kucherenko, Founder & CEO, ValueViewpoint.ai (ex-Google, AWS, SAP, Oracle)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kucherenko/
Title: From AI Hype to CFO-Grade Business Cases: Turning GTM into an Economic Engine
Details:
Most AI-powered sales and GTM tools generate content — but lack economic grounding. I’ll demo how we use ValueViewpoint.ai (VVP) to turn early-stage conversations into quantified, CFO-ready business cases. This includes translating product capabilities into measurable financial impact, aligning stakeholders (CFO, Ops, Sales), and accelerating deal conversion. I’ll also show how this approach can be scaled across SDRs and AEs without requiring a full Value Engineering team.
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7:15 pm
Vesh Thakker, PHD, MBA, Founder & CEO, Aspired Future (ex-Senior Engineer for Satellite Communication Systems at Raytheon, Program Manager, Teaching Assistant at University of Illinois)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vesht/
Title: VILL-50 Legion (50 Ants): Multi-Agent Test and Verification Infrastructure
Details:
An agentic orchestration engine for autonomous software validation and stress-testing. Deploy specialized Agent Colonies that test at the speed of development, ensuring systems remain trustworthy as they scale beyond human oversight.
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7:30 pm
Jude Abishek Rayan, PhD Candidate at UCSD Design Lab, Human-AI Collaboration, Creativity
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jude-abishek-rayan/
Title: Exploring the role of Generative-AI to Support Real-time Conversations
Details:
Generative AI is reshaping creative workflows across domains, yet its role within live, verbal conversation remains underexplored. Introducing AI into conversation requires being cognizant of the fragile dynamics of attention and turn-taking that make dialogue productive. We examine how to best situate AI to facilitate creative exchange, offer design implications for future facilitation systems, and explore opportunities where facilitation extends beyond the conversation itself.
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7:45 pm
Nicolas dos Santos, Software Engineer at Datacurve (YC W24) & UCSD ITS, Co-Founder @ strvx, Air Force National Guard Cyber Defense Operations
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolas2007/
Title: Custos: managed AI agent infrastructure for business
Details:
Secure, fully managed OpenClaw hosting that gives non-technical business owners their own AI agent without touching Docker, a terminal, or a config file. Each client gets an isolated VPS with OpenClaw pre-configured, a dashboard for managing tasks and skills, and NemoClaw security layer on top. The Vercel of AI agents for SMBs.
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8 pm
Galen Wilkerson, Founder of Komplexity AI (mathematical physics, complex systems, machine learning, and computer science)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/galenwilkerson/
Title: Real-Time Hallucination Detection for LLM Outputs (Live Demo)
Details:
Galen will demo a working system that analyzes prompt/response pairs and flags hallucination risk in real time. This is an early prototype focused on practical use during development and testing. He’ll show examples, what it catches well, and where it still breaks.
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8:15 pm
Jennifer, Fouquier, Bioinformatics Consultant and Post-doctoral researcher
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-fouquier/
Title: Identifying key drivers of research outcomes with EXPLANA
Details:
EXPLANA simplifies the cumbersome analytics needed to find important variables in complex cross-sectional or longitudinal datasets. Standard tools rank features without explanation, which is insufficient for hypothesis generation. EXPLANA clarifies why variables matter using a combination of existing and novel machine-learning methods. Reports with figures and written explanations are generated to improve interpretability and collaboration, ultimately de-risking and streamlining discovery.
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8:30 pm
Dan Mercede, Systems Architect, Runtime-Enforced Governed AI OS, Fail-closed execution, audit receipts, measurable reliability
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danmercede/
Title: What AI Governance Looks Like at Runtime: A Fail-Closed Demo
Details:
I’ll give a short live walkthrough of Cosmocrat, an enterprise AI operating system focused on governed execution and runtime control. The demo shows a real decision flow where an AI agent attempts a regulated external client communication, is stopped when authorization is missing, is allowed only after explicit human approval, and is then replayed and verified through receipts. The focus is on what control looks like at the moment of execution, not just logging after the fact.