FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SAN ANTONIO, Texas — October 3, 2026 — SkillSail AI concluded a productive week of product demonstrations, founder conversations, and relationship-building during San Antonio Startup + Tech Week, held September 28 through October 2, 2026.

Throughout the week, SkillSail Founder and CEO Chris Osterhaug attended technology, startup, investment, and networking events across San Antonio. The events created opportunities to introduce SkillSail to founders, venture capital professionals, angel investors, corporate leaders, recruiters, human-resources professionals, university representatives, and other members of San Antonio’s growing entrepreneurial community.

Osterhaug held numerous one-on-one conversations about persistent problems affecting recruiting and employment. These discussions addressed inefficient applicant-tracking systems, overwhelming volumes of low-signal applications, automatic rejection, hiring bias, privacy concerns, limited transparency, candidate ghosting, and the loss of meaningful human interaction during the recruiting process.

“San Antonio Startup + Tech Week gave me the opportunity to move SkillSail beyond a traditional verbal pitch,” said Osterhaug. “People could see the platform, experience Persona AI, ask detailed questions, and understand how SkillSail approaches recruiting differently. The conversations confirmed that the problems we are addressing are real, widespread, and important to employers, recruiters, job seekers, and interns.”

During the week, Osterhaug conducted private demonstrations of the SkillSail Investor Portal and the company’s interactive Persona AI experience.

Persona AI allows visitors to explore SkillSail’s company story, technology, market opportunity, recruiting model, privacy principles, product strategy, early traction, and long-term vision through an interactive experience. Instead of relying exclusively on a conventional pitch deck or static webpage, visitors can engage directly with Persona AI and learn about the platform in a more conversational format.

The private demonstrations generated interest from:

• Startup founders and technology builders
• Venture capital and angel-investment professionals
• Human-resources and recruiting leaders
• Corporate and institutional representatives
• University and business-education leaders
• Potential strategic partners
• Prospective job-seeker and intern beta participants
• Professionals interested in helping recruit or evaluate beta testers

SkillSail’s demonstration platform remained available through both mobile and web browsers, giving attendees the opportunity to experience the company’s technology during and after the week’s events.

Several HR and recruiting professionals expressed interest in evaluating SkillSail as prospective private-beta testers. SkillSail is developing a structured testing program that will include participants from both sides of the employment process.

HR professionals and recruiters will be invited to evaluate areas including:

• Candidate discovery and recruiting workflows
• Skills-based matching
• Candidate profiles and professional presentation
• Privacy and transparency
• Bias reduction
• Recruiter-candidate communication
• Persona AI interactions
• SkillSail’s ability to complement or eventually replace parts of conventional applicant-tracking workflows

Job seekers and interns will be invited to evaluate:

• The candidate onboarding experience
• Skills and experience profiles
• Video-based introductions
• Privacy controls
• Platform clarity and ease of use
• Their ability to communicate professional value beyond a traditional résumé
• Their interactions with Persona AI

Following the convention, SkillSail began contacting prospective participants to discuss availability, onboarding, confidentiality documentation, and the requirements for taking part in the private beta.

Osterhaug also met with venture capital representatives, angel investors, private investors, business leaders, and fellow founders to discuss SkillSail’s strategy and potential path to growth.

These conversations addressed:

• Market opportunity
• Product readiness
• Initial customer segments
• Private-beta validation
• Technology development
• Potential pilot programs
• Fundraising strategy
• Long-term scalability

SkillSail’s immediate focus remains the development and validation of its core recruiting platform. Although the company has designed concepts for additional markets, SkillSail intends to establish its recruiting technology before expanding into specialized verticals.

The company is preparing for a potential early fundraising round of approximately $200,000 to $400,000, based on a proposed $4 million valuation. Any fundraising terms remain subject to continued discussion, investor due diligence, applicable legal requirements, and finalized agreements.

In addition to investor and beta-testing discussions, SkillSail has entered preliminary conversations with a prospective enterprise customer in the Washington, D.C. area that has expressed interest in learning more about a potential licensing relationship.

The interest represents an encouraging opportunity to explore how SkillSail’s technology could support a larger organization’s recruiting, workforce, or talent-management needs. Discussions remain at an early stage and will require further evaluation of the prospective customer’s use case, technical requirements, implementation needs, security expectations, and commercial terms.

No licensing agreement, pilot, purchase commitment, or commercial partnership has been finalized. Any future relationship will be subject to continued discussions, technical evaluation, due diligence, legal review, and mutually acceptable terms.

Conversations with university and community leaders created additional opportunities involving:

• Student and intern beta participation
• Career-readiness programs
• Skills-based candidate profiles
• Student feedback and product research
• University-employer connections
• Potential institutional pilot programs
• Founder and technology collaboration

SkillSail believes that colleges, universities, career-development organizations, and community partners can provide valuable insight into the challenges students and early-career professionals experience while entering the workforce.

SkillSail is being developed as a more transparent, privacy-conscious, and human-centered alternative to traditional recruiting systems.

The platform’s guiding principles include:

• Privacy-conscious product design
• Meaningful human involvement in hiring decisions
• Skills-based candidate discovery
• Greater transparency for candidates and recruiters
• Reduced dependence on automatic rejection
• Tools that support recruiters rather than replace professional judgment
• Better communication throughout the recruiting process
• Responsible use of artificial intelligence
• Appropriate safeguards, monitoring, and operational controls

SkillSail is designed to help qualified people demonstrate what they can do while helping recruiters identify relevant candidates without being overwhelmed by hundreds of low-signal applications.

San Antonio Startup + Tech Week also provided SkillSail with a valuable real-world testing environment.

Before and during the events, the company strengthened its operational systems, health monitoring, public demonstration path, controlled visitor admission, safety safeguards, automated recovery processes, and post-reboot service restoration.

The live demonstrations also produced practical product feedback involving:

• Mobile-browser performance
• Microphone pickup in noisy event spaces
• Media-loading behavior on cellular connections
• Instructions for first-time visitors
• Persona AI interaction clarity
• Overall demonstration flow and accessibility

This feedback will help guide product improvements as SkillSail prepares for broader private-beta testing.

Following San Antonio Startup + Tech Week, SkillSail’s priorities include:

1. Onboarding qualified HR, recruiter, job-seeker, and intern beta testers
2. Collecting structured feedback from both sides of the recruiting process
3. Improving Persona AI and the mobile demonstration experience
4. Exploring university, employer, and community partnerships
5. Developing potential pilot opportunities
6. Advancing preliminary licensing discussions with a prospective enterprise customer in the Washington, D.C. area
7. Continuing conversations with venture capital and angel-investment professionals
8. Expanding SkillSail’s presence in the San Antonio startup community
9. Preparing responsibly for fundraising and future growth

“This week was about much more than handing out business cards,” said Osterhaug. “It was about demonstrating the technology, listening to people, understanding their pain points, and identifying the right partners to help us test and improve the platform. We now have meaningful follow-up conversations with HR professionals, founders, investors, educators, and potential enterprise users. That gives us a strong foundation for the next stage of SkillSail’s development.”

SkillSail AI is developing a privacy-conscious, human-centered recruiting platform designed to improve how employers discover talent and how candidates demonstrate their abilities.

The platform combines skills-based discovery, interactive professional profiles, artificial intelligence, video-based introductions, and recruiting tools intended to reduce bias, wasted time, low-signal applications, and communication breakdowns.

SkillSail’s Persona AI experience gives investors, partners, recruiters, and prospective users an interactive way to learn about the company, its technology, and its vision for the future of recruiting.

Chris Osterhaug
Founder & CEO
SkillSail AI
founders@skillsail.ai