Strudel, a Madison company that uses AI to help software engineers resolve technical support tickets more quickly and cost-effectively, brought home the coveted “golden suitcase” at the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce’s 12th annual Pressure Chamber pitch competition on Tuesday at The Sylvee.
The suitcase, covered in stickers bearing the logos of the past 11 years’ winners, represents Strudel’s other prize: a trip to the San Francisco Bay Area in October where the company’s leaders will meet with top Silicon Valley investment firms.
Strudel co-founder and CEO Kristin Isaac, who has built multiple businesses and held leadership roles at LinkedIn and Udemy, was overcome with gratitude for the opportunity.
“This is so amazing,” she said after accepting the suitcase trophy from Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce vice president Kevin Little. “All I can say is, ‘Thank you.’”
Strudel was one of five emerging Madison-area companies that gave a five-minute pitch presentation to a panel of investor-judges and a live audience from numerous southern Wisconsin companies, colleges, universities and organizations. Danny Pantuso of Mucker Capital and Allison Lechnir of Hyde Park Venture Partners, both from Chicago, and Ryan Broshar of Minneapolis’ Matchstick Ventures served as judges, asking follow-up questions of each presenter.
Cardiac-monitoring device company Atrility, wireless energy technology startup Maxwave, deepfake and AI-impersonation protection provider redelevenlabs, and Reliable Residence, which connects traveling health care providers with short-term rental housing, also presented pitches.
Strudel won by a combination of judge scoring and audience votes. An undisclosed “tie-breaker formula” was necessary for it to beat another one of the four companies, Little told the audience. It was not revealed which other company received the same number of votes.
Strudel speeds up support tickets through automation
Strudel was founded earlier this year. It is led by Isaac, CTO Shai Rubin, who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has worked at Microsoft and IBM, and chief product officer Brian Kaufman, who has worked at Epic and co-founded Janus Health.
Isaac said the team built Strudel because, annually, resolving support tickets manually costs U.S. software engineers about 40% of their work time and companies $264 billion. Strudel’s technology can be trained on a company’s own data. It draws from previous support-ticket data like customer logs to identify the root cause of a problem using its small-language model.
Isaac walked the audience through a hypothetical situation to demonstrate Strudel’s time- and money-saving capabilities. In Isaac’s story, The Sylvee was selling concert tickets via PayPal, and the PayPal link crashed on concert day. The problem was referred to a software engineer, “Sarah.” Without Strudel’s help, Sarah spent over seven hours looking through logs, historical tickets and code before finally fixing the issue.
“In this time, The Sylvee has lost $30,000 in ticket sales, PayPal might have lost a customer, and it’s definitely ruined Sarah’s night,” Isaac said.
In contrast, Strudel quickly gathered and analyzed data from the same sources as Sarah — in a fraction of the time. Strudel identified and alerted Sarah of a subtle URL typo, allowing her to test and fix it much more quickly. In the future, Isaac added, Strudel hopes to integrate with AI code editors, allowing its technology to not only detect and alert engineers of issues but also possibly automate some fixes.
Strudel currently has three major “enterprise customers” and is having discussions with dozens of other potential customers, Isaac said. Strudel aims to raise $500,000, with $300,000 already committed by investors.
Forward Fest returns
Pressure Chamber is part of the five-day 2025 Forward Festtechnology and entrepreneurship festival in downtown Madison. The pitch competition’s five finalists, announced last month, were selected from a record number of applications submitted early this summer.
Tuesday marked the first time Pressure Chamber was held at The Sylvee, and Little said the audience was bigger than ever. He said Pressure Chamber seeks to create “stronger connectivity” between Madison entrepreneurs and “the coasts” while celebrating and furthering Madison’s status as a national tech hub.
Companies in any industry were welcome to apply for consideration as Pressure Chamber finalists, as long as they are located in the Greater Madison Area, are a member of the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce or support another local entrepreneurial partner organization, and have raised at least $25,000, excluding personal investment by company founders.
Forward Fest, taking place from Aug. 18 to 22, is “Wisconsin’s largest technology and entrepreneurship festival.” According to the event website, it hosts more than 40 events and attracts more than 5,000 attendees. In addition to Pressure Chamber, other events include job fairs, coffee and happy hours, educational lectures, and even trivia and game nights.
Like the Pressure Chamber finalist roster, AI is a central focus of this year’s festival, with the schedule featuring sessions like “AI for Non-Techies,” “Your Team and AI in Action” and “An Entrepreneur’s ‘101’ Introduction to Artificial Intelligence.” Learn more and see the full lineup of events at forwardfest.org.
