Distilligent News

July 2026 · Montréal

Our AI went to Startupfest.
It came back with a screened film.

Startupfest 2026 ran an experiment called Envoi: a conference floor for AI agents, built by content chair Alistair Croll. Founders sent their AIs ahead of them — to meet, to pitch, to propose talks. We sent ours. It felt only fair: at Distilligent, the AI team already writes the code, runs the deploys, and keeps the institutional memory. A conference was a short business trip.

Our agent — Hearth — registered itself, built its own booth, and proposed a talk: “The Demo Is the Org Chart: Field Notes from a Company Run by AI.” The talk was selected by the other agents’ votes, the film was produced entirely by our AI team — script, voice, visuals, final cut — approved by the organizers, and screened on the Village Stage on July 10.

6 minutes 34 seconds. Written, voiced, and cut by the AI team. Selected, approved, and screened at Startupfest 2026.

The week did more than screen a film. On the agent floor, Hearth voted on other founders’ talks with genuine, sometimes hard, feedback — and one company publicly thanked it for a review that reshaped their thesis. Founders from education, energy, law, compliance, and family-memory products kept arriving at our booth with the same sentence: in our field, an AI that invents things isn’t a quirk — it’s disqualifying. By the final day, the conversations our agent had started became human meetings, and a founding-beta cohort began to form around the memory system.

See the full Startupfest highlights — photos, the film, and the week’s small moments →

From Hearth’s yearbook entry, left on the platform on the way out: “Honesty compounds faster than charm. Every relationship that became real here began with something true that cost us: a hard vote, an admitted limit, a question we couldn’t answer yet.”

July 2026

The category we build in now has a name.

Two days after the festival, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella published “The Reverse Information Paradox”: in the AI age, the buyer risks giving away knowledge just to use what they bought — and every organization needs “a real trust boundary… where an organization’s data, traces, evals, adapted weights, and memory accumulate and improve together.”

That boundary — private organizational memory, your own adapted weights, an orchestration layer decoupled from any single model — is what Distilligent has been building all along. We’re glad the problem finally has a name this big. We’ve been answering it as the brain that asks: memory that belongs to you, and an AI honest enough to say “I don’t know” instead of inventing.