Echo AI is heading to Silicon Valley
We're thrilled to share that Echo AI has been selected for Techscaler's 5th Silicon Valley cohort. From 3 to 17 October 2026, our co-founders Florian Vagner and Dens Akoka will be on the ground in San Francisco, timed with a16z's SF Tech Week.
Why we're going
The US is already our most active market. 41% of our traffic is American, and organic signups keep landing from New York, California and across the country. Two weeks in San Francisco is the biggest bet we can make on Echo this year, because our customers, partners, operators and investors all sit within a few miles of each other.
We also built Echo on San Francisco infrastructure without ever being in the room. Our AI technology runs on OpenAI, payments on Stripe, backend on Supabase, hosting on Netlify, and we built the MVP and v1 with Lovable, all headquartered within a few miles of each other. This is our chance to finally meet the ecosystem we've been building on.
What we want to achieve
We're going with four clear priorities:
Convert our live US pipeline into face-to-face meetings. We're targeting 15+ meetings with US SMBs that are already using or exploring Echo. American users are our fastest-growing segment, and we want to learn directly what they need next.
Deepen partnerships built entirely by email. We're a Meta partner, an ElevenLabs grant recipient, and NVIDIA Inception members. We're also an upcoming Shopify Partner. All of them host SF Tech Week events, and we want to turn those relationships into in-person conversations.
Learn from operators who scaled SMB software. We'll be at SF Tech Week sessions to hear from founders and operators who turned early product-market fit into repeatable growth. We'll be in the room with questions ready.
Advance our £500K pre-seed round. The round is SEIS/EIS structured for UK angels and fully open to US angels on the same terms, closing by early 2027. a16z speedrun's Demo Day week falls on 6 October, right in the middle of the programme.
What success looks like
A strong pipeline of US leads converted into active paying customers, at least one US success story we can turn into a case study, and enough investor momentum to accelerate Echo's growth. Everything we've built so far, 250+ users in 26 countries, paying customers in the US and UK, nine live channels and an iOS app, has been built by a lean, global team. San Francisco is where that changes.
What's next
We'll be sharing updates from San Francisco once we touch down. If you're based in the Bay Area and want to meet Florian and Dens in person, get in touch and we'll make it happen.
Learn more about Techscaler at techscaler.co.uk