PATH Intelligence Selected to Pitch at CED Venture Connect 2026
A Charlotte spatial intelligence company, built on nearly a decade of creating digital twins for luxury developers, joins the Southeast's top scaling startups on stage in Durham this March.
You can tell a company is gaining ground before anyone writes the headline. The signs show up quietly. A grant. An accelerator acceptance. Then an invitation to pitch in a room full of investors who are paid to be skeptical.
PATH Intelligence just got that invitation.
The Charlotte-based company has been selected to pitch at CED Venture Connect 2026, which CED (the Council for Entrepreneurial Development) has run for years as the Southeast's premier summit for scaling startups. The event takes place March 24–25 at DPAC in Durham, NC, and the lineup is curated, not open. Companies apply. Most don't get selected. PATH did.
The Backstory Matters Here
Founder and CEO Nate Robert-Eze didn't start in AI. He started in architecture.
He spent nearly a decade building VSN, a visualization studio that creates digital twins of unbuilt properties. Think cinematic, walkable 3D environments built from architectural plans, designed to help developers sell spaces that don't physically exist yet. VSN has served over 700 real estate developers nationwide. Ritz-Carlton Residences, Hines, Kolter Homes. The studio has helped drive billions in property sales through virtual tours and spatial experiences.
That work is where PATH came from. Not from a pitch deck brainstorm, but from a problem Nate watched play out hundreds of times.
Year after year, VSN would deliver these rich 3D environments to developers. Buyers would tour them. Sales teams would wait by the phone. And nobody could answer what seems like an obvious question: which of those virtual visitors are actually serious about buying?
The real estate industry had poured money into the creation side of spatial technology. Beautiful 3D tours. Photorealistic renderings. But no one had built anything to understand what happens after a buyer walks through the digital front door. No behavioral tracking. No intent signals. Nothing.
VSN gave Nate a front-row seat to that gap for years before he did anything about it.
PATH Intelligence is what he built to close it.
The Problem Is Specific
Real estate professionals have a name for it: the "silent buyer problem."
Virtual tours generate traffic. Lots of it. But that traffic is opaque. There's no way to distinguish the buyer who spent 40 minutes examining kitchen finishes and asking about HOA fees from the person who clicked through six rooms in two minutes on their lunch break. A page view is a page view. Before PATH, that's all you got.
PATH sits on top of existing virtual tour platforms (it doesn't replace them) and captures behavioral data from inside 3D spaces. Movement patterns. Engagement depth. The kinds of questions buyers ask an AI concierge at 11pm on a Tuesday, which tend to be far more revealing than anything they'd say to a sales agent during a scheduled showing.
For sales teams, this changes the math. Instead of chasing every lead with equal effort, they can see who's worth a phone call. And in the post-NAR settlement environment, where agents face real pressure to prove their value with something more concrete than "I know the market," that kind of intelligence is hard to argue against.
The Momentum
In November 2025, NC IDEA awarded PATH a $50,000 SEED grant, one of only six companies chosen in the program's 40th cycle. NC IDEA has distributed over $10.6 million to 231 North Carolina startups since the program launched, and the selection bar is high. Their description of PATH was direct: a company that "transforms real estate sales with AI-guided virtual tours that engage buyers inside immersive 3D spaces while capturing detailed behavioral data."
PATH has also been accepted into NVIDIA's Inception program, which gives AI startups access to developer resources, preferred hardware pricing, and connections to NVIDIA's venture capital network.
Individual credentials are easy to list. What's harder to replicate is the combination: a working product, institutional backing, and nearly a decade of spatial expertise through VSN that most AI startups simply don't have in their history. That depth of experience doesn't show up on a pitch slide, but investors who pay attention to founder-market fit will notice it.
Why Venture Connect, Why Now
Selling unbuilt luxury real estate has always been difficult. Sales cycles run 12–18 months. Buyers visit properties across multiple countries. Decisions involve family members who may never physically enter the space. The margins for error are thin and the cost of chasing the wrong prospect for months is real.
PATH's platform supports 22 languages and complies with fair housing regulations, which positions it for the cross-border luxury market where buyers increasingly explore properties virtually before booking a flight. But the broader relevance goes beyond luxury. Any market segment where virtual tours are part of the sales process has the same blind spot PATH was built to address.
For the investors and partners gathering at Venture Connect, Nate's pitch carries a dimension that most founder stories don't. He didn't identify this problem by reading industry reports. He lived inside it for years, building the very environments that made the problem visible. And then he built the thing that solves it.
What's Next
PATH pitches at DPAC in Durham on March 24–25. For a company that has been quietly compiling wins for the past year, this is a bigger stage and a more concentrated audience than anything prior. What happens after that depends on the conversations that follow.
To learn more about Venture Connect 2026, visit cednc.org/venture-connect.
To learn more about PATH Intelligence, visit trypath.io.
PATH Intelligence is headquartered in Charlotte, NC.
Nate Robert-Eze is the founder and CEO of PATH Intelligence .