SheBoot and PitchFest gave away a total of $310,000 at the conference.
The important tradition continued at the tenth annual SAAS NORTH conference last week when founders poured their hearts out to judges and the public for a chance to win thousands of dollars in prize money.
“[This] was a celebration of these entrepreneurs who drive innovation and fuel our economy.”
At SAAS NORTH, thousands of people from Canada's software-as-a-service (SaaS) and artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem attended two days of talks, discussions and networking events at the Rogers Center in downtown Ottawa. Between Vidyard founder Michael Litt declaring SaaS “dead” and the “Hot Tub Time Machine,” this year's conference awarded $310,000 in pitch competition.
SheBoot, a national program for women-led, early-stage and technology companies, gave away $300,000 when it announced the winning investments of its sixth annual cohort at the BetaKit Keynote Stage.
The top prize of $150,000 went to Nifemi Oguntuase, founder and CEO of the Dartmouth-based company. Laboratory 4 Inc.. The startup has developed an advanced mining technology that can extract minerals from mining waste that has traditionally been considered too expensive to recycle.
Second place – investment of $100,000 – Maria Zhuldybina, CEO and co-founder of the Montreal company Traqc. Trakk provides a quality control mechanism for electronics manufacturing. Finally, Anja Geerts, CEO and co-founder of event planning software. Palomareceived the remaining $50,000.
“The SheBoot Grand Finale was a celebration of these entrepreneurs who are driving innovation and energizing our economy, and the SheBoot Champions who continue to support them by supporting their work, their vision and their success,” the organization said in a statement. Post on LinkedIn.
In addition, this year the SAAS NORTH PitchFest festival returned, in which 23 finalists battling it out in front of an audience of SaaS investors and entrepreneurs, as well as a panel of judges that included NAventures Principal James Powitz, BKR Capital General Partner Isaac Olowolafe, Kanata Ventures Investment Partner Jennifer Renda, Graphite Ventures Managing Director Lance Leiking, Sandpiper Ventures' Andrea King, and Solink Director of Enterprise Programs Patrick White.
After defeating the finalists in a series of qualifying rounds, founders from Construction Clock, Resiliocs, Serenity Vet and Xena Intelligence entered the final battle in the BetaKit Keynote stage. The competition ended with a live audience poll, and according to voting data displayed behind the scenes, Xena Intelligence ran away with the $10,000 grand prize. SAAS NORTH presenter Manuela Barcenas called Xena's performance is “one of the best I've seen.”
Based in Louisville, Kentucky, Xena provides e-commerce merchants with a single sales intelligence platform that integrates sales tracking, ad optimization and operational data from multiple platforms such as Walmart, Shopify, TikTok and more. It also provides AI-powered analytics and marketing tools.
Xena founder and CEO Akhil Suresh Nair seems to be quite adept at pitching competitions, claiming that is LinkedIn win over $1.6 million in pitch competitions such as Startup World Cup and Techstars. He can add another $10,000 to that.
All images courtesy of SaaS North.
