On May 7, Stanford Founders Demo Day | Spring 2026 filled the Tresidder Oak Lounge: three pitch blocks, more than 50 Stanford founders, over 1,000 attendees, and 400+ investors. The whole event ran on a custom app called Demo Day Connect, built by MentorMates and powered by InsForge underneath.
We partnered with MentorMates on this. They led the design, the build, and the on the ground hosting. We provided the backend primitives.
Chinat Yu cohosted Stanford Founders Demo Day as part of the Stanford Founders team and led the MentorMates build of Demo Day Connect. He told me why they reached for InsForge:
We suddenly had this amazing idea to make the event 10x better. We needed it fast, working, and reliable. So we thought of InsForge.
I came in as the on-call site reliability engineer, sitting in the back with my laptop open, watching dashboards while the room filled up.
The Event
The cohort: more than 50 curated Stanford founders. A small slice of the lineup, for flavor:
- SamWise is the AI operating system for food formulation. R&D teams brief in product specs and a Bayesian optimization engine maps the Pareto-optimal trade-off space.
- ascend does real-time detection of soil and water nutrients at 1/10th the cost, with novel chemical processes. IP already acquired.
- Tactiligy builds the tactile nervous system for Physical AI, using Stanford-born e-skin.
Last year's cohort raised about $50M collectively. The bar is high. Stanford CS professor James Landay opened the day; an investor panel on evaluating founders in the AI era anchored the afternoon.
Over 1,000 attendees moved through Tresidder during the day, and around 400 investors signed in to Demo Day Connect to actually play. The room was full from the first session, filtering by industry and working through their $100K of game money one bet at a time. By Session 3, the like and bookmark counts were already telling a story about which teams were getting traction.
Nearly everyone I talked to called it a really fun twist on the usual demo day format. Most fun I've had at a tech event in a while.
The infra held up cleanly through the day.
What the App Does
Investors and founders both sign in. The header shows your portfolio in game money: $100,000 to start, $10,000 minimum per investment.
The cohort view groups every team by session and lets you filter by industry. Each card has a one line pitch, the founder's name, a like count, and a bookmark. Click into a team for the long form pitch, the founding team, and the action panel.
Investors can:
- Like and bookmark teams to triage during the session
- Invest game money in any team, subject to the $10K minimum
- Open a chat with the founder to ask follow-up questions
- Request the slide deck from the founder
Open a team and you see the full pitch, the founding team, and industry tags. The right rail is where investors take action: like, bookmark, invest game money, open a chat with the founder, or request the deck. Decks aren't open access. They go through a request flow, so founders see exactly who's engaged.
Chats stay open after the session. That's where the real follow-up happens. Investors came back the next day to message founders they'd bookmarked.
What InsForge Does Underneath
MentorMates used InsForge for the underlying backend of Demo Day Connect. Every API call from the app terminates at an InsForge primitive.
- Auth for the two roles, founder and investor, with role-based access on the rest of the app
- Postgres for the cohort, sessions, likes, bookmarks, and the investment ledger
- Realtime for chat threads between investors and founders
- Storage for slide decks and avatars
- RLS so a founder only sees chats with investors who messaged them, and an investor only sees their own portfolio
That's what made three days possible. With Postgres, auth, realtime, and storage already there behind one SDK, the MentorMates team focused on the product.
By the Numbers
The Stanford Founders team is happy with the engagement, which is a win for MentorMates and InsForge.
- 1,000+ unique visitors hit the app in a single day
- $12M+ of game money deployed across the cohort
- 300+ likes logged through the day
- 300+ bookmarks saved across the cohort
Investors weren't just clicking through. They were leaning in on the teams they wanted to back.
Why It Worked
A few details mattered more than I expected.
The portfolio counter in the top right turned the event into a game. You're watching pitches with a running tally of how much of your $100K you've committed. By the third session, every investor had a strategy.
The chat thread per team meant nothing got lost. Without persistent threads, my notes app would have been a mess. Instead, the conversation history is right there, attached to the team I'm trying to remember.
Bookmarks did the obvious thing. They let investors mark "circle back later." A surprising amount of the post event traffic has been investors working through their bookmarks one team at a time.
What's Next
Demo Day Connect keeps running for the next couple of weeks while founders close conversations with investors. If you went, your portfolio and bookmarks are still live. Go follow up.
We'll keep partnering with MentorMates on events like this.
If you're running a demo day at your school or institution, or any event where investors and founders need to actually connect, not just shake hands, reach out to Chinat and the MentorMates team. They can bring this gamified format to your event, with InsForge powering it underneath.
Connect with Chinat: linkedin.com/in/chinat-yu
MentorMates: mentormates.ai