The Platforms You Didn’t Know Were Broken - Until Now.
FF (July 11, 2025): Three overlooked systems. Three real-world rebuilds. You’ll want to meet these founders.
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This #FounderFriday, meet three operators who’ve turned real-world frustration into systems-level innovation. Tech that moves people, not just markets.
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Building can feel isolating. But friction is a signal, not a stop sign..
Trust gaps in home services, liquidity failures in bond markets, and even forgotten experiences in the customer buying journey, these aren’t flashy builds. They’re necessary ones.
The founders we’re spotlighting today didn’t wait for market buzz, they followed the problems they knew too well and started laying down tracks where the market forgot to pave.
Let’s Dive In.
🌬️ Avner Gal of iRomaScents® – It Makes Scents™
Avner Gal is no stranger to building complex systems. After 23 years in the Israeli Navy as a senior R&D engineer, he moved into the private sector, leading multiple deep-tech ventures and filing over 40 patents across hardware, consumer electronics, and health tech.
His latest company, iRomaScents®, tackles a space retail forgot: fragrance discovery. Spray-and-sniff sampling hasn’t evolved in centuries - still wasteful, impersonal, and impossible to track. Avner’s team engineered a patented scent pod that delivers AI-matched recommendations via sealed cartridges in under 60 seconds.
Since launch, iRomaScents® has:
Filed 18+ global patents across scent hardware and user experience design
Showcased at CES, Cosmoprof, NRF, and IFA Berlin
Entered early discussions with a major LATAM distributor
Won Gold for Best Innovation Technology at the Global Green Beauty Awards (2025)
With commercialization now underway, we’re backing more than a product - we’re backing a builder, a Technion lecturer, and a published author who’s spent decades turning ideas into infrastructure. Avner’s depth of experience is what gives iRomaScents® real lift.
📎 Deck | Meet Avner | Company | Website | Intro Call
📉 Douglas E. Miles - Founder & CEO, Olden Street Machine Learning (OSML)
Douglas Miles brings over two decades of experience at the intersection of Wall Street and fintech innovation. He spent 20+ years in institutional fixed income, managing non-dollar trading desks and structuring swap and FX-option strategies at global firms including Deutsche Bank, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch.
In 2023, Doug partnered with Princeton-trained machine learning engineers to build Liquidity Sherpa™: a pre-trade signal engine that quietly surfaces high-probability bond matches from missed bids and behavioral patterns.
Think of it as Waze for bond trading matching buyers and sellers before the order even goes live. The platform is patent-backed, fully anonymous, and designed to integrate seamlessly into existing workflows making it both compliance-friendly and highly scalable.
Under Doug’s leadership, OSML has:
Built and tested its AI-powered matching engine with early users
Filed patents related to OTC discovery and pre-trade signal extraction
Entered conversations with major OMS/PMS platforms
Opened early-stage discussions with aligned strategic partners
Doug’s combination of trading fluency and product discipline makes OSML a company to watch and Liquidity Sherpa™ a potential category-definer in signal-driven fixed income infrastructure.
📎 Deck | Meet Douglas | Company | Website | Intro Call
🛠️ Corey Chase - Founder & CEO, Resident Review
Homeowners have Yelp. Contractors had nothing, until now.
After years running a residential construction firm, Corey Chase built Resident Review to solve the problem most platforms ignored: contractors need to qualify customers, too.
Home service businesses can now rate, review, and search customers helping them avoid disputes and unpaid work before the first handshake. It’s the first B2B review platform for the trades, built with privacy, usability, and contractor margins in mind.
Since launching RR, Corey has:
Built a tiered SaaS platform with integrated CRM tools
Attracted 200+ businesses to the early access waitlist
Onboarded paying users ahead of soft launch
In a $2T+ industry projected to reach $5T+ by 2026, Resident Review is unlocking the missing risk layer for contractors - led by a founder who knows the stakes firsthand.
📎 Deck | Meet Corey | Company | Website | Intro Call
🧠 Your ThinkFISH Edge
Whether it’s rebuilding trust, rethinking liquidity, or reprogramming scent, each of them is quietly transforming how people make choices and how businesses engage.
As you head into the weekend, a reminder: The best products don’t always start with market validation. They start with frustration.
And the founders who move first?
They didn’t wait for permission, they built what they wish they had.
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