The Pitch

Ava Chen stared out over the polished glass atrium, nerves wound into knots beneath her crisp blazer. The accelerator’s lobby was a fishbowl, all glossy surfaces and purposeful footsteps—mirrored ceilings reflecting both her anxious posture and the parade of loaded VCs, tech reporters, and hungry founders.

Sometimes she wondered if she would ever belong here, if this space would ever feel less predatory.

Raj hovered to her left. “Don’t pace. You’re making me seasick.”

“Easy for you to say,” Ava muttered. He’d perfected his role as the technical voice, could talk about the product’s algorithmic edge in his sleep. She, on the other hand, had to transmute their underdog grind into a story of inevitable victory—while pretending she wasn’t terrified of the sharks waiting beyond those glass doors.

Raj ran a thumb over his wedding band. “You’ve got this. We know their questions. Focus on the problem. Don’t get bogged down in the math.”

If only the problem were just the code.

She flipped through her decks on the battered iPad, voice low. “Run through the questions again?”

Raj responded by launching into a rapid-fire Q&A: “How is your system different from existing endpoint protection?”

“We catch zero-days in real time—”

“And what distinguishes your team from, say, the twenty other AI security hopefuls who’ve been here this week?” Raj asked, shifting into a faux-VC baritone.

Ava’s heart thudded. “Execution. Our data pipeline is private, not outsourced. We’re ex-Palo Alto, Genentech—deep tech meets market focus.”

Raj’s eyes flickered approval. “Good. Don’t forget: numbers matter. Show outcomes.”

Ava nodded. She’d memorized the stats—99.3% threat detection in pilot, two Fortune 500s in pilot.

The glass doors hissed open. Victor Stone entered like he owned the room—a navy suit fit so well it made Ava conscious of how her own looked off the rack. He was followed by two junior associates who watched him as if he were Moses at the shoreline.

He made a beeline for Ava and Raj. “Heard you’re up next, Ava. Break a leg.”

She forced a smile, nerves skating under her skin. “Victor.”

He leaned in, voice just low enough for only them to hear. “Nerve-wracking, isn’t it? Showing AI to people who’ll eat you alive for a probability error.”

Ava bristled. “We’re not worried.”

“Really?” Victor grinned. “Last I checked, your anomaly detector’s recall rates were tanking on external datasets. But hey, there’s always post-seed pivots.”

Raj stiffened. Ava’s cheeks burned.

Victor straightened, voice suddenly louder. “Loved your last blog post, by the way. So much promise.” A few investors nearby looked over, curiosity piqued by the name-drop.

Before Ava could retort, Victor glided away, a smirk lingering.

Raj’s jaw twitched. “Asshole.”

Ava forced her breath steady, fighting the tremor clamping her voice. “Ignore him. Can you check the demo instance?”

Raj unlocked his phone, frowning. “It glitched during last night’s push, but I fixed it first thing.”

Her iPad pinged—a Slack from their lead engineer, Maya: Did you swap the prod DB permission keys? Getting auth errors. Can’t start backend container.

Ava’s stomach dropped.

Quick as she could, she thumbed open SecureStack’s admin dashboard. 401 errors were spiking. Manual logouts. Unauthorized requests from an unrecognized IP.

Raj’s eyes widened, reading over her shoulder. “Someone’s inside our demo server.”

Ava’s mind raced. Sabotage. Now? Who had access? Was Victor behind this—could he actually have broken into their stack, or just screwed with them through some mole?

Raj’s phone vibrated again. “We can’t re-provision in time. The system’s locked us out.”

Panic threatened, but Ava squashed it. She hit the PA system button. “Maya,” she hissed, “run the static build, fake the live demo—just enough for sample screen flows. I’ll improvise from there.”

She turned to Raj, gritting her teeth. “We go in with what we have. You focus on product vision. I’ll stall if they try to probe the backend.”

Raj nodded, eyes hollow. “We need this, Ava. Our burn rate—”

She cut him off. “I know.”

Their names were called.

The pitch theater was a terraced bowl of tension. Spotlights set the stage aglow, too hot, and Ava blinked from darkness into luminescence. Judges faced her: one was the legendary Clara Duval, whose last startup went public at $9B; next to her, investors she’d chased for months.

Ava launched, voice slightly unsteady. “Good morning. I’m Ava Chen, co-founder and CEO of SecureStack AI. We’re building next-gen protection against a new wave of cyber threats—deepfakes, social engineering, targeted zero-days.”

The slide advanced smoothly, but Ava’s mind screamed at every potential technical snag.

“As threat actors evolve, legacy security solutions are just… not enough.”

She described their edge: adaptive deep learning models that close the window between exploit discovery and detection.

On cue, Raj demoed the UI mockup Maya had cobbled together—a clickable walk-through, not a real live session. Ava’s hands trembled behind her back, hiding the fact from the judges.

An investor squinted. “This is live, right?”

Ava invoked her best poker face. “The demo simulates a real attack vector. Let me show you how we neutralize a polymorphic phishing exploit….”

She narrated over the canned workflow, cutting off further probing by redirecting to their detection graphs—real results from client pilots.

After six nerve-shredding minutes, she reached the summary. “We’ve already prevented attacks in two Fortune 500 pilots. Our ask: $3 million for 20% equity, to scale our tech and hit key regulatory markets.”

Silence. The investors flipped through notes; Clara Duval leaned forward.

“Impressive adoption, Ava,” Clara said, voice even. “But if your live demo is so robust, why not show a real attack?”

Ava swallowed, channeling all the composure she could muster. “In security, we’re always balancing transparency with caution. I’d be happy to share a full system walkthrough, under NDA, after today.”

Clara studied her a beat too long—did she hear the edge in Ava’s voice? Or did she understand?

A round of mild applause—not thunderous, but not deathly polite either—followed. As Ava walked offstage, the adrenaline curdled to bitterness. She knew Victor’s sabotage would cost them—maybe a deal, maybe just their pride.

Backstage, Raj was shaking. “We pulled it off,” he murmured.

Ava managed a taut smile. “Barely. But we’re still in the game.”

Behind her, in the shadowed doorway, Victor Stone’s smirk gleamed like a knife.