Kansas City-based Critical Materials Crossroads (CMC) is building a national hub towards 100,000 tons per year of critical mineral production capacity and looking for investors and corporate partners to build it with. In this reverse pitch, the CMC, backed by a $160 million U.S. National Science Foundation award, presents the challenges between promising technologies and commercial scale across materials for energy, communications, transportation, defense, and health markets including battery supply chains, rare earth elements, recycling and more. Anthony Caruso and Ashlynn Horras will share how CMC and its ecosystem partners are forging industry partnerships and developing industrial sites to de-risk the leap from pilot to plant. Come with a solution, a problem, or an appetite for co-investment.

What happens when a 100+ year-old professional services firm starts operating like a venture studio? KPMG's newly launched Client Technology & Innovation group is setting out to incubate AI-native businesses, back startups, and co-build products with frontier AI labs. In this session, KPMG shares the thinking behind the model, how it plans to evaluate and fund new ideas, what large enterprises need from early-stage partners, and where corporate capital and co-development deals are heading. Founders will learn how to get in front of and partner with enterprise buyers. Investors will get a read on where incumbents plan to build, buy, or partner in AI, and what that means for their portfolios.

Sports organizations are adopting technology across fan experience, venue operations, athlete performance, and health, but the path from first conversation to signed pilot varies widely depending on who's buying. This panel brings together a Major League Soccer club, a Big 12 athletics program, an academic health system, a first-year professional women's softball team, and a global technology integrator to show how sports innovation actually gets adopted in Kansas City. Panelists will share their priorities, how they evaluate new solutions, and where startups can create meaningful partnerships.

Now that AI is helping all of us speed up development and improve our GTM operations, the most important lever is now the input: the actual voice of the customer. Finally!

Matt will share his perspective from his own ventures and working with dozens of software dev clients on how to use AI and customer conversations to:

• Drive product ideas
• Improve sales
• Reduce customer churn
• Create marketing content, and more