People’s Choice Winner Shines at City Ventures Demo Night Feb 2026

MetaSonixx took home the people’s choice crown at last night’s City Ventures Demo Night – in a room full of first-time founders, early-stage investors and ecosystem builders, their story clearly resonated.

A night built for early-stage founders and investors

From the first slide, this Demo Night was designed around founder learning, investor insight and real community. People weren’t just there for pitches; they came to “learn how founders pitch ideas”, “be at the ground floor of next gen start ups”, and to get “friendly feedbacks” and “inspiring conversations” that early-stage founders rarely find on their own.

The panel – John Feldmanis (NatWest Entrepreneur Acceleration Manager), Sam Steele (Entrepreneur in Residence, City Ventures) and Shervin Mashayekh (Senior Product Manager, Notion) – brought exactly the mix first-time founders and early-stage investors want: practical experience, honest questions, and a sense that the people on stage are worth taking seriously.

Celebrating MetaSonixx: the people’s choice winner

MetaSonixx are engineering acoustic metamaterials to give unprecedented performance on sound and noise control – and they’ve already turned that science into a product, SonoBlind, aimed squarely at the pain of noisy open-plan offices.

With 70% of open office workers complaining about noise and productivity dropping by 66%, MetaSonixx are going after a huge market and a massive productivity leak that both founders and investors understand instinctively. Their desk dividers and partitions are lighter, thinner, transparent, and tackle low frequencies in very little space, offering up to 95–99.9% noise reduction in their high-end SonoBlind panels.

They already sell B2B, subcontract manufacturing, and count global names – from major corporates to universities and hospitals – among their customers, while raising £1,000,000 over the next 24 months to scale SonoBlind and launch two more products. Their goal is bold and simple: to be “the iPhone of office desk dividers”, with pricing from £200/m² for low-cost panels up to £600/m² for ceiling-height absorption and £400/m² for their flagship solution.

On the night, the audience responded. MetaSonixx topped the live people’s choice poll and earned strong scores on “I get it”, “I’d use it”, “I’d invest in it” and “I’d recommend it to a friend” – the kind of signals early-stage investors look for when backing deeply technical teams solving real, painful problems.

Meet the startups: what they’re building

Four founders stepped into the spotlight and showed first-time founders and investors what early-stage execution really looks like:

• GPCDS – Pier
  Pier puts humans – not dashboards – at the heart of the data visualisation stack, helping organisations make dataviz accessible, understandable and genuinely useful. They combine tool-agnostic dataviz coaching with Level 4 Data Analyst apprenticeships focused on dataviz, and tool-specific bootcamps to give consequence to the explosion of data and AI tools in modern businesses. With apprenticeship-levy funded programmes (from August 2026) and accessibility legislation accelerating demand, they’re building a scalable coaching model where one data coach can support 40–50 apprentices at a time.

• Pera – Becca, your proactive assistant
  Pera’s Becca lives on your Mac and connects across your apps to proactively help you manage relationships, not just your inbox. Born from the founders’ own pain – ghosting friends and drowning in 8,000+ emails and 135+ notifications – Becca reviews your communications and nudges you before people fall through the cracks, helping founders “make room for life” while they build. On the night, the audience showed strong understanding and willingness to use and recommend Pera, and the team invited everyone to “Try Becca”, talk to her, and share feedback.

• Bastion AI
  Bastion is an AI-native investment platform that scales an investor’s thesis across the entire public equity market. In a world where tens of thousands of stocks move on real-time global events and human cognition can’t keep up, Bastion ingests those events to instantly quantify their impact on every listed company, extracting directional signals from a chaotic information environment. They’re raising £1.3M after already hitting their funding target and securing their first five major customers, with funds going into product development, customer acquisition, and AI infrastructure – a story early-stage investors in the room leaned into.

• MetaSonixx – SonoBlind
  As the people’s choice, MetaSonixx showed what happens when deep science meets a painfully familiar problem: office noise. Their modular, passive (no electricity), sustainable panels can be reconfigured at home or in the office, with up to 99.9% noise reduction in their top-tier products. For first-time founders in the room, it was a masterclass in clear problem framing, differentiated tech and commercial traction – all in a tight demo.

Why Demo Night matters for first-time founders and early-stage investors

The feedback wall read like a love letter to early-stage founders: “encouraging for founders”, “great event, great pitches and well organised”, “it’s fantastic to hear ideas and support with constructive criticism”, and “the atmosphere is great…I felt brave to push my limits.” People also asked for “more demos”, “more time for questions”, “more food!” and even name badges – a good sign that the appetite for connection, learning and investor-ready practice is only growing.

For first-time founders, Demo Night is a low-risk way to practise telling your story, test your pitch with real humans, and hear what early-stage investors actually respond to. For angels and early-stage funds, it’s a curated glimpse of how founders think, communicate and respond under gentle pressure – often more revealing than a polished deck in a meeting room.

And yes, the overall event scored a 9.0/10 on “How likely are you to recommend this to a friend or colleague?” – strong social proof that this format works.

Join us at the next Demo Night

If this Demo Night proved anything, it’s that when you bring first-time founders, experienced entrepreneurs and early-stage investors into the same room, everyone leaves braver, sharper and better connected.

If you’re a founder looking for feedback, or an investor looking for your next signal-rich room, join us at the next Demo Night – in person or online.

Reserve your spot here: lu.ma/canopy