TYCON X TSVC Inaugural Pitch Competition

What Is Tsinghua Gen II Building?

In Silicon Valley, Five Startup Teams Offered One Answer

Five teams, and five approaches to bringing technology into the real world. A startup competition built by Tsinghua’s first and second generations together raised a larger question: Who is this second generation of the Tsinghua community becoming?

When people hear “Tsinghua Gen II,” the most immediate association is often an identity inherited through their parents. But that inheritance is only a starting point. Raised across different cities and cultures in North America and beyond, Gen II is building careers, communities, and networks of its own. That raises another question: What can this second generation create together?

On September 12, at TSVC headquarters in Los Altos, California, TYCon offered one concrete answer through its inaugural Pitch Competition.

From a Shared Identity to Real Action

At the TSVC × TYCon Pitch Competition, five finalist teams took the stage. Approximately 40 Tsinghua alumni, Gen II, founders, investors, and industry guests gathered in person, with three judges assessing each team. The event was also livestreamed online.

The competition brought weeks of startup selection and coaching onto the stage. Each team delivered a five-minute pitch followed by five minutes of judge Q&A.

Behind the stage, a six-person organizing team arrived in the Bay Area from Boston, Houston, Chicago, New York, Shenzhen, and beyond. Maggie Qian, Alexander He, Megan Zhang, Raymond Yao, Anthony Jin, and Jett Wang took responsibility for different parts of the event—from selecting startups and inviting judges to coordinating presentations, welcoming guests, collecting scores, managing the venue, and documenting the day.

A shared identity brought the organizers together. A shared goal gave them something concrete to build.

Five Minutes on Stage, Weeks in the Making

The competition began well before event day. As Program Director, Maggie led the process from initial planning and startup recruitment through finalist selection, then worked individually with each of the five teams on their pitches.

The coaching centered on essential questions: Whose problem is the team solving? How does the product work? What conclusions can the existing evidence support? How does the business model work? And what is the single most important thing the audience should remember after five minutes?

From narrative structure and data selection to deck presentation and Q&A preparation, Maggie worked with each team to clarify its logic while preserving the founders’ own judgment and voice. The pitches on stage reflected both the teams’ existing work and weeks of refinement leading up to the competition.

Five Teams, Five Approaches to Real-World Innovation

The five finalists represented rehabilitation medicine, trusted relationship networks, interactive entertainment, synthetic biology, and disability care. Each was at a different stage of maturity, with a different business model and different critical questions to answer. But they shared one characteristic: putting AI into specific contexts, where it must confront real users and real constraints.

Speech2Reach | Helping Patients Regain Control of Their Hands Through Voice

Speech2Reach presented a voice-controlled glove designed for stroke rehabilitation. The product combines speech recognition, language models, and mechanical components to translate spoken commands into finger flexion, extension, and grasping movements. The team hopes to help patients with limited upper-limb mobility—particularly those also affected by aphasia—perform rehabilitation exercises and everyday movements more naturally. The team has established contact with nine stroke-related organizations.

HiRey | Building a Trusted Relationship Network for Personal AI

If everyone eventually has a personal AI agent, how will that agent know who genuinely knows whom? And with a person’s consent, how can it make a trusted introduction? HiRey aims to turn real-world meetings, relationship verification, and personal content records into a trust network that personal AI can use. The project has accumulated 323 public media records and 39 interview profiles, beginning with an early community of founders, experts, and independent professionals in San Francisco.

Palimpsest | Letting Players Truly Participate in How Stories Unfold

Palimpsest’s product, Love at Dusk, brings generative AI into narrative gaming. Players can type their own responses directly, while NPCs respond based on character, setting, and story memory, allowing players’ own words to influence relationships and story progression. During a five-day test, the project attracted 257 active testers, with another 30 users joining the early-access waitlist.

Satori Life Tech | Using AI to Discover Ingredients and Algae to Produce Them

Satori Life Tech focuses on the high research, development, and manufacturing costs associated with skincare and anti-aging ingredients. The team proposes an end-to-end platform in which AI identifies potential targets and active compounds, while engineered algae produces the ingredients. The project has accumulated 18 research manuscripts, with more than 10 patent applications underway. Through white-label products and R&D services, the team hopes to create an integrated pathway from new ingredient discovery through biomanufacturing.

Florence | Connecting the Complex Processes of Disability Care

Florence addresses the administrative burden many families affected by disability face over the long term. Medical records, school documents, government programs, insurance, legal services, and rehabilitation resources are fragmented across different institutions, forcing families to repeatedly organize and transfer information. Through AI intake, patient profiles, and case-management workflows, Florence helps families and service providers organize documentation and move applications forward. Within two months, the project began working with more than 50 pilot families and 10 enterprise design partners, with another three pilots awaiting HIPAA readiness and verbal expressions of partnership from three U.S. state governments.

Together, the five teams demonstrated the breadth of expertise within the TYCon community—from high school students to working professionals, and across industries with very different applications of emerging technology.

Putting the Ideas to the Test

Each team had five minutes to pitch, followed by five minutes of judge Q&A and a two-minute scoring and transition period. The competition brought together three judges from TSVC, Silicon Valley Bank, and the robotics industry. Chun Xia represented TSVC, while Li Song represented Silicon Valley Bank. Their questions focused on customer needs, product differentiation, business models, go-to-market strategy, existing validation, and execution. Founders had to move quickly from presenting their vision to addressing practical questions: Who will pay? How much can the existing evidence support? What is the moat beyond the technology itself? What is the most important milestone for the next stage?

For young founders, being seriously questioned can be as valuable as being seriously heard. The discussion gave teams new questions to consider, assumptions to test, and connections to draw on as they continue building.

Two Generations, Building Together

The event brought together Tsinghua alumni with decades of experience and Gen II raised across North America, alongside young founders, investors, and industry partners.

Gen I brought experience, judgment, and paths already traveled. Gen II brought new perspectives, questions, and ideas of its own. Throughout the competition, the two generations participated not simply as mentors and mentees, but as contributors to the same undertaking. Some served as judges, some selected and coached teams, some organized the event, and others stood on stage presenting their work.

That exchange continued after the final pitch. As the judges entered closed-door deliberations, TYCon President Megan hosted a Fireside Chat with Lihang, President of the Silicon Valley Tsinghua Alumni Association, and Jett of TSVC and TYCon. Drawing on their own experiences, they expanded the conversation beyond the five startups on stage to a broader question: In an innovation ecosystem like Silicon Valley, how can the Tsinghua community support young people while allowing experience, resources, and new ideas to flow more naturally between generations?

This is also the role TYCon hopes to play. Bringing together the children of Tsinghua alumni is the starting point; the larger opportunity is to create spaces where generations can actively build together. Through that exchange, experience and networks can move between generations while Gen II contributes its own ideas, judgment, and capacity to build.

Florence Takes First Place

Following independent scoring and closed-door deliberation, Florence was named the winner of the TSVC × TYCon Pitch Competition.

Florence applies technology to an area with clearly defined needs and significant room for further development across the service ecosystem. In its pitch, the team presented the complex processes facing families affected by disability, how its product works, its existing pilot progress, and its plans for the next stage.

Speech2Reach, HiRey, Palimpsest, and Satori Life Tech each brought strong ideas and energy to the stage, showcasing distinct strengths across technology, product development, and market opportunity. Together, the five teams reflected a range of approaches to building and applying new ideas.

Tsinghua Gen II Will Ultimately Be Defined by Its Own Actions

A Pitch Competition is only one expression of this community, but it offers a window into what “Tsinghua Gen II” can come to mean.

Raised across different cities, languages, and cultures, we inherited a connection to Tsinghua without being defined solely by it. The generation before us built the memories, experience, and networks that made this starting point possible. What we do with that inheritance is now increasingly ours to determine.

What problems do we choose to care about? Who do we choose to build with? How do we use the connections we inherited? And what responsibility are we willing to take for creating something together?

TYCon hopes to create space for those questions to be answered through action—not by defining what Tsinghua Gen II should become, but by giving more young people opportunities to build, contribute, and be recognized for what they bring.

Over time, “Tsinghua Gen II” will take on meaning through the people who carry it forward—not simply through what we inherit, but through what we choose to build from it.

From Tsinghua in our name to Tsinghua in our actions.