Startups impress biz gurus

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This article was published 18/06/2015 (3945 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Winnipeg startup ecosystem cleaned up nice and was in fine form at the Fort Garry Hotel on Wednesday for the annual Venture Challenge pitch competition.

Innovate Manitoba’s signature event featured pitches from six promising startups to four of the savviest judges the event has ever had, including California tech entrepreneur Randy Smerik (who also gave an eye-opening keynote on what to watch out for from venture capital investors).

The display of business accomplishment and serious enterprise from young Manitoba entrepreneurs was impressive.

Backed by the province and with substantial private-sector sponsorship, Innovate Manitoba is a major player in this community.

The six presenters at Wednesday’s Venture Challenge event were selected from a group of about 15 companies that took part in Innovate Manitoba’s three-day boot camp led by veteran investors who put these companies through the paces. The goal was to get to the point where they are ready to make a legitimate pitch to potential investors.

Jan Lederman, the head of Innovate Manitoba, said, “We have taken a systems approach to this.”

The system has started to produce amazing results.

For example, the three winners from the 2014 event — Kindoma, Permission Click and Exigence Technologies — have not only raised an average of $440,000 each since then, but all are operating entities. Each of them has hired additional staff in Winnipeg, and all three have the potential for significant scale.

“The growth has been phenomenal,” Lederman said in reference to the Venture Challenge event specifically and the startup community in general.

Many in attendance noted the marked improvement in the quality and sophistication of the presentations.

Among other things, the boot-camp experiences these young entrepreneurs have had access to is encouraging more of them to scale their businesses to national and international markets as opposed to the more modest local market approach more prevalent in the past.

Here are the three 2015 Venture Challenge winners who share a total of $30,000 in cash and in-kind prizes:

— Pricerazzi.com — first place. Serial entrepreneur Declan McDonald and his technology specialist partner Robert Keizer already have a number of satisfied customers for their web-based service that helps consumers get extra money back from purchases by mining retailers’ price-match policies and finding the lowest prices. It is on track to do $2.5 million in business this year — taking 10 per cent of the refunds as its fee — and has proved out its system. Shoppers sign up, take a picture of the receipt, then Pricerazzi directs them to the retailer with the lowest guaranteed price. It’s launching a mobile app in the U.S. in the coming weeks and the forecast to be doing $100 million in business by 2018 does not seem far-fetched at all.

— Portay Advertising — second place. Lifelong friends Kyle Boult and Greg Lipschitz developed their food-court-tray advertising concept the hard way. The first prototype was launched at St. Vital Centre in the holiday season of 2013. But some glitches in the way the paper advertising interacted with the trays kept them on-site working long hours for 85 days straight. “I found out I passed my third-level CFA while we were in the dish pit,” Lipschitz said. They’ve since filed for a patent on a new design tray that secures the paper advertising and have had increasingly encouraging support from advertisers and mall operators. They hope to launch in 14 malls this fall and have already pre-booked $250,000 in advertising from Fortune 500 companies.

— BecometheGamer — third place. Matt Doak is an avid online gamer, but he admits his chops are waning because his business prevents him from spending the time he needs to move up the rankings. He likens his business to a training gym for online gamers. The idea is to match coaches with competitive gamers who want to improve their scores and move up the global rankings. Improbable as it may sound to the uninitiated, the market is mammoth and becoming ever more professionalized, with the best players bringing in high six figures in prizes and some universities now offering full scholarship for top gamers.

Filling out the very competitive field this year were:

— FarmTrack Technologies — an innovative cattle nutrition-management solution.

— Pristine Prairie Organics — a certified organic beef producer.

— Crik Nutrition — a manufacturer of cricket-based protein powder.

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca