Rally conference pitch contest selects five startup winners

A trio of California-based startups, plus one each from Kentucky and Massachusetts, were declared winners Thursday afternoon in Elevate Ventures’ inaugural IN-Prize pitch contest, opening the door for them to receive up to $1 million each in funding for their businesses.

The winnings do come with strings attached—to receive funding, each company must agree to establish a “significant” Indiana presence for at least one year.

The event was part of the Rally innovation conference, a first-year event designed to bring together startup founders, investors and innovators to spur Indiana’s tech and innovation ecosystem. Indianapolis-based Elevate Ventures organized both the conference and the IN-Prize pitch contest. The Indiana Economic Development Corp. provided $1.5 million in support for the three-day conference, which wrapped up Thursday at the Indiana Convention Center.

The five winners:

– PawCo Foods, a San Francisco-based company which is developing vegan food for dogs;

– Xponent Power, a Fremont, California-based company that makes solar panels for use on recreational vehicles;

– Edge Sound Research, a Riverside, California-based company whose speakers allow people to both hear and feel sound;

– MyBiometry, a Lowell, Massachusetts-based health tech company that helps users predict and prevent asthma attacks;

– Louisville-based GoodMaps, whose wayfinding technology allows users to locate stairwells, information desks, restrooms and other areas of interest at a venue.

The contest is structured so that the five IN-Prize winners have the chance to land up to a $1 million investment, which includes up to $500,000 from Elevate Ventures.

Elevate Ventures, which acts as the venture investing arm of the IEDC, operates under a mandate that it be a co-investor—never the sole investor in a company. So if an IN-Prize winner secures $200,000 from outside investors, for instance, Elevate Ventures’ match will give the company a total of $400,000.

Per contest rules, in order to receive Elevate Ventures funding, the winners must commit to establishing a significant Indiana presence for at least a year. The contest rules define “significant presence” as having at least one full-time company executive or founder living in the state and at least one physical office or active co-working space membership within Indiana.

Elevate Ventures CEO Christopher Day told IBJ his organization will work with each of the five winners over the next 90 days or so to conduct due diligence and help the companies finalize their fundraising.

If a winner has already secured some funding from other sources, Day said, Elevate Ventures will be involved as a co-investor. If the company hasn’t yet secured funding, Elevate Ventures can take the role of lead investor and help the company bring in additional investors.

“All of these … will be wrapped up before the end of the year,” Day said. “But the ones who want to move forward, we will be welcoming them to Indiana with open arms the second week of January and rolling out a yearlong red carpet for them to try to be helpful in terms of talent, customers, partners, whatever that company needs.”

IN-Prize, and Rally itself, were structured this year around a series of tech sectors—areas in which Indiana has, or aspires to have, a significant presence. A total of 25 startups from around the world were selected to participate in the pitch contest—five finalists each in the sectors of food and agriculture, hard tech, health care, software and sports tech.

Over the past two days, the finalists delivered pitches to a panel of investors with expertise in that tech sector. In each of the five pitch sessions, each startup had two minutes to deliver a pitch, followed by five minutes of questions from the judges. From there, each judging panel selected one winner.

The 25 finalists included four Indiana-based companies: Indianapolis-based Revival Food Co. and Kovina Therapeutics, South Bend-based Vital View Technologies and Lafayette-based Quantum Research Sciences. Other finalists hailed from Alabama, California, Illinois, Michigan and New York.