You can automate the marking, but not the nerves.

We have recently joined BLOCK71 Global's Spring Cohort 2026, and for a company like ours it is a good place to be. The cohort was introduced under a rather fitting banner: rethinking how we learn, teach and grow. That is the right question to be asking in 2026, and it is one we think about constantly, though we arrive at it from a slightly unusual direction.

Much of what is being built in education right now, sensibly, is about automating the machinery of it. The marking, the note-taking, the summarising, the small mountain of thankless tasks that eat a teacher's evenings and a student's weekends. It is properly useful work, and I mean that without a flicker of irony. Anyone who has spent a Sunday night marking forty near-identical scripts knows exactly which problem is worth solving.

The one thing that stays quite human

You cannot automate your way out of speaking nerves. There is no clever pipeline that swallows your fear of the room and returns a polished, confident you at the other end. BLOCK71 put it neatly when they asked what people would most want to automate from their student days: marking, note-taking, or speaking nerves. The first two are software problems. The third is a human one, and it is the one we chose.

That choice looks far stranger than it is. As AI quietly absorbs all the mechanical parts of learning, the parts it cannot reach become more valuable, not less. The ability to stand up, say what you mean, and be believed does not get automated away. In a world where anyone can generate a tidy paragraph in seconds, speaking like a real person becomes the rarer skill, not the lesser one.

What we have built and intend to improve.

That is what pitchMe is built to train. Not to replace the nerve-wracking moment with a machine, but to give people enough honest practice at it that the moment stops running the show. We have watched it happen: someone who could barely reach the end of a first sentence coming back steadier on the second attempt. It never looked like automation. It looked like practice, which is the entire point. The nerves do not vanish. You simply stop handing them the microphone.

A confident speaker is not born fully formed and unafraid. They are usually just someone who has done the frightening thing enough times that it stopped being frightening. Our job is to make those repetitions available to far more people than the lucky few who grew up with a debate club or a drama teacher.

Good company

So being incubated at BLOCK71 matters to us for reasons beyond the obvious and welcome ones of space, support and a serious room of founders. It matters because we get to build this in a place that is seriously asking how learning should change, and to keep making the case, quietly and often, that some of the most important learning has nothing to do with software at all. It is a person, on their feet, finally saying the thing they were afraid to say.

A real thank you to the BLOCK71 team for having us. We intend to make good use of the resources and opportunity.

If you would like to see what confident speaking looks like when it is trained rather than left to luck, come and say hello. Out loud, ideally.