Pryce is a two-time fintech founder who co-founded Utopia Labs, a crypto payments and treasury management platform that scaled to $450M in payment volume before being acquired by Coinbase in November 2024. He then co-founded Open Ledger, an AI-driven embedded accounting platform, through the HF0 residency program, raising a $3M pre-seed round led by Kindred Ventures. Open Ledger was subsequently acquired by Collective, a financial platform for solopreneurs, in April 2026.
Gateway X · Private Dinner
STL Founders Dinner, No. 1
The Vision for this Dinner
A closed room for STL’s AI founders to share ideas, trade secrets, and talk about what they’re building before it goes public. We’ll dig into the question a lot of founders are sitting with right now: seedstrapping versus the venture fund path.
The Expedition Fund
Gateway X closed a $50M fund in under 90 days to incubate the next generation of St. Louis startups. GX is also building a residency-to-fellowship pipeline to identify and build with the region’s most ambitious founders.
What is Gateway X?
Gateway X is the ONLY Founder Residency for Seedstrapped companies. We believe the future of company building will be AI-first and very capital-efficient. We aim to be your only round of capital and work to get you growing profitably. We’ve raised a ~$50M fund to invest in the best ideas that come out of our residency.
What is the Residency?
A membership program for founders who are in the idea maze. We provide founders with all the resources they need to get started. With our members, we provide: startup ideas, market opportunities, office space, potential co-founders, customer introductions, AI compute, launch coaching, and much much more.
Residents work with us for 3–6 months to refine and validate their idea. You can apply and join at any time.
What is the Fellowship?
Twice a year, we will run a 12-week fellowship. The best ideas out of the Residency will be funded and enter into an intensive program to get the business off the ground. During that time, we will help the founders focus and stay accountable to their goals. We will help drive growth. We will subtract everything from your life so you can focus on launching your startup.
Interested? Sign up here, and we will follow up soon.
Thanks and we can’t wait to build with you!
This Evening’s Hosts
This Evening’s Guests
7 Founders
Blake is the Co-Founder of Robot Health, a St. Louis-based startup at the intersection of physical AI and healthcare, building AI-powered robotic systems for continuous patient monitoring and care delivery. He previously founded CareSignal, a deviceless remote patient monitoring platform acquired by Lightbeam Health Solutions in 2021. At Robot Health, he is applying a decade of digital health experience to the emerging field of physical AI and robotics.
Francesco is a 2x Chief Product Officer who served as Head of Product at Photomath, which was acquired by Google, and at Outschool, a live online learning marketplace with over $200M raised to transform K–12 education. He also served as Head of Core Experience at Discord. He has since founded Lazyweb, a stealth AI startup currently in development.
Ryan is the Founder and CEO of Well Principled, a St. Louis-based AI company he co-founded in 2018 that went through Y Combinator’s Summer 2019 batch. Well Principled focuses on novel AI architecture, with current work directed toward autonomous robotics. Prior to founding Well Principled, Ryan scaled VC-backed CiBO Technologies from 7 to 70 engineers and holds degrees from Washington University’s Olin Business School.
Kenneth is the Co-Founder and CEO of OpsCompanion, a St. Louis-based AI control layer for DevOps that unifies engineering context to eliminate alert fatigue and improve enterprise reliability. He previously worked at Cloudflare as a Senior Systems Engineer on the R2 object storage team, and was an early engineering team member at Balto AI. He is active in the St. Louis startup community through Arch Grants and Venture Café St. Louis.
Alex is a St. Louis-based AI entrepreneur who founded Disruptel, an AI/ML startup focused on connected TV content recognition and contextual advertising, which he sold to Samba TV in November 2022 after raising over $2M and partnering with TCL. Following the acquisition, he founded Authentic Interactions, an AI lab building hyper-realistic digital human technology under brands including StoryFile and Lookalike.com, with an advisory board that includes Siri co-founder Adam Cheyer and Pluto TV co-founder Tom Ryan.
Sho is the Founder & CEO of PubGen.AI, an AI platform built to revitalize local news by equipping journalists with tools to tell meaningful stories and remain financially sustainable in a changing media landscape. He also leads SHO.AI, delivering brand services and operational frameworks for media organizations. His background spans design innovation and entrepreneurship, with brand collaborations including Disney, Nike, and Google. Born in Japan and raised in the U.S., he brings a global perspective to the intersection of creativity, technology, and community.