We’re excited to announce a new strategic partnership between Silicon Foundry and SwitchPitch that is set to bring together the best of technology platforms and human expertise and connections, in a way that’s never been done before. This collaboration represents a significant milestone in how corporations, startups, and global innovators unite to drive impactful, measurable outcomes.
SwitchPitch paved the way for large corporates to discover and partner with early-stage startups. The company’s platform connects startups, enterprises, and innovation ecosystems to facilitate seamless collaboration and deal-making. By enabling enterprises to articulate their innovation needs through a “reverse pitch” model, SwitchPitch allows startups to align their solutions directly with corporate demands communicated by corporate innovation leaders. The platform offers features such as an extensive startup database, innovation dashboards, startup trackers, market intelligence reports, and AI-driven scouting tools, all designed to streamline the corporate innovation process and accelerate proof-of-concept outcomes. Leveraging generative AI, the platform gathers hard-to-find startup data, analyzes corporate initiatives, and matches startups to those needs based on their unique capabilities, ensuring highly targeted and effective connections.
At Silicon Foundry, we’ve spent the past decade building a reputation for helping our Members— comprised of Fortune 1000 corporations and some of the most forward-thinking governments and investors around the globe —navigate the increasingly complex, fragmented and fast moving innovation landscape. From human-centered, high-touch relationship building to in-depth market insights garnered from the field and front lines across the major innovation ecosystems, we’ve always prided ourselves on being at the intersection of startups and corporations. Yet, with the ever-growing breadth of emerging technologies and the geographic distributions and sheer volume of startups around the world, identifying and bringing together the top and most relevant players with the right corporate innovation decision makers has become more challenging and complex than ever before. This partnership with SwitchPitch comes at the perfect time to address those challenges and to empower our team with the leading, purpose built platform in this category.
In this Q&A with Neal Hansch, CEO of Silicon Foundry, and Michael Goldstein, Founder/CEO of SwitchPitch, we discuss the background, purpose and power of this new partnership and how it marries the best of human intelligence and connections with a best in class AI-powered technology platform.
What inspired the partnership between Silicon Foundry and SwitchPitch?
Neal: The focus and core differentiator of our advisory business has always been on the human element—that can only come from decades of experience married with deep and expansive relationships across the major technology ecosystems. But we kept asking ourselves: how do we most efficiently navigate the vast landscape of near a half million startups around the globe? Complementing our day-to-day interactions out in the field, how do we leverage a technology platform to discover, track, assess, and manage relevant startups for our Members? For most of our history, we relied on email, spreadsheets and slide decks for knowledge sharing and to collaborate with our Members. We appreciated the need to adopt a more streamlined system to capture communication and collaborate with our Members. After evaluating many platforms since our inception, the stars aligned when we crossed paths with Michael and first learned of the SwitchPitch platform. Now seemed like the perfect time to fully commit to a core platform that our entire Foundry team could use daily for discovery, insights, filtering, and capturing startup data based on our Members’ areas of interest. SwitchPitch provides that unified platform, allowing us not only to manage tracking lists, but also to enhance collaboration with our Members. In fact, we’ve made it a default part of every membership for the corporate partners we work with.
Michael: What truly showcased the strength of this partnership was when Neal connected us with one of their long standing Members, Southwest Airlines, several years ago. Southwest subsequently became a client of SwitchPitch and Silicon Foundry began to manage their platform navigation. Southwest has continued the partnership each year since, and it’s been one of the most seamless, mutually beneficial partnerships I’ve experienced. I often tell Neal it’s like “chocolate and peanut butter—each great on its own, but together, it’s magical.”
How do you envision the collaboration advancing or driving innovation?
Michael: The goal is for Silicon Foundry’s services to seamlessly blend into Members’ workflows, making startup identification, qualification and communication feel effortless. This approach allows Members to focus on making decisions and driving outcomes without the need to build separate processes—Silicon Foundry becomes an extension of their team. When questions arise, such as “How do you manage pilots?” the response is straightforward: “Silicon Foundry does, let us connect you with them.” We’re here to streamline operations, so Members experience an intuitive, collaborative partnership as the new standard way of doing business.
What specific challenges does this partnership address?
Michael: Each of us focuses on our strengths: we aggregate and analyze startups, and Silicon Foundry makes sense of it all, delivering a comprehensive package that maximizes value for members. The depth and exhaustiveness of Silicon Foundry’s diligence—combined with our data—produces a complete and actionable report. In an era of generative AI, we believe a combined platform-and-service approach is the winning formula. While AI can handle specific data tasks, it can’t replace the full suite of tools and services that make up this end-to-end solution.
Neal: One of the powerful aspects here is how we’re truly leveraging AI through SwitchPitch to enhance our work and efficiency every day. Another key point is the potential this creates for the Members we work with. It’s about exposure, adoption, and expansion with SwitchPitch becoming a core part of their corporate innovation efforts and workflows across their organizations. The journey we envision starts with exposure to SwitchPitch through our work with them, followed by adoption, and then a natural expansion across their organizations as innovation teams find ways to collaborate. This also means more opportunities for new projects at Foundry, greater engagement and platform usage for us, and, ultimately, longer-lasting and more satisfied clients and ultimately outcomes.
