.png)
Hatch competed at the Global Finale of The Pitch by Deel in Paris on 18 May 2026, having won the New York regional in April. We did not win. We are writing it up anyway, because a room that has no reason to be polite is the only free product research a founder ever gets.
The format
Deel launched The Pitch in February 2026 as a global seed-stage tournament presented by J.P. Morgan. Regional finals ran from March to May across Tel Aviv, Dubai, Singapore, Berlin, London, Paris and New York, with each regional winner taking a $50,000 SAFE. Deel put the field at more than 50,000 applicant companies.
The Global Finale brought 80 founders to the stage in Paris. Five companies were selected to move into investment discussions with Deel's venture partner network, each with up to $1 million on the table: Zeely AI, Smart Bricks, nybl, Acceler8 and Alpic. Smart Bricks, a proptech company based in the UAE, was reported as taking the $1 million grand prize.
Hatch was not one of the five. Worth saying plainly.
What we put on the screen
One slide, two numbers. A $44 million payroll against a $125 million payroll. Oakland against New York. The cheaper roster won the same number of regular season games, because somebody in Oakland was measuring a thing the rest of the league had decided was not measurable.
Companies are in the same position now, and most of them do not know it. Payroll is the largest line on the P&L and the one leadership understands worst. Finance can tell you to the dollar what the workforce costs. Almost nobody can tell you what it returned, which teams compounded, or which quiet person is holding three projects together.
That gap used to be tolerable. It stopped being tolerable when half the work started being done by agents that show up on the cloud bill instead of the org chart. Two workforces, one of them invisible to every system you own, and no shared unit of output between them. You cannot run a roster you cannot see.
What a finale is actually worth
We flew to Paris, pitched, lost, and flew home. The honest ledger stops there on the money.
The useful part is narrower. Ten minutes in front of investors and operators who owe you nothing compresses an argument faster than six months of customer calls. Anything decorative falls off. What survived was the accounting problem, and the questions afterwards were not about the product at all. They were about whether a CFO would admit, out loud, that the number does not exist today.
That is the right thing to be arguing about, and it is the argument Hatch is built around. Paris confirmed it holds up in front of people who are paid to find the hole in it.
The exposure was real too. Being one of 80 companies on a stage that started with 50,000 is a filter worth having been through, win or not.
