Four entrepreneurs took the stage at the Steelworkers Hall in Sudbury to pitch their business ventures to a panel of judges and a crowd of hundreds.
NORCAT Innovation Mill hosted PITCH 2017 on April 27, an event that offers startup companies the opportunity to showcase their idea and secure angel investments.
Sudbury's Jamie Fairchild, CEO of The Yoak walked away with both the judges' choice and the people's choice for his multi-modal training device.
The Yoak is a uniquely designed stability training product that Fairchild came up with when recovering from shoulder surgery. The design of the product allows for a multitude of uses; it can function as both a barbell or a chin-up bar, and weighing in at less than 10 pounds it's easily transportable.
Fairchild was up against three three other pitches on the evening, all of which impressed the judges.
Sudbury's Calvin Henderson kicked off the evening and was also the youngest of the entrepreneurs to take the stage. Henderson is the co-founder and CEO of Gripp, an app that launched on April 27.
Gripp, according to Henderson, fills in a gap in today's social media landscape with the ability to allow users to create stories that function as progressive streams of photos and/or videos.
The app allows users to create stories individually or as a group.
"Say you're at a party, everyone can contribute to the story, adding their own photos from their own perspective, and these all go into one story," said Henderson. "Currently, there's no way for friends to sync their photos and videos together in real-time to show a shared experience."
Next up to the stage was Stephen Thurlbeck, CEO of EventsWearables. The company has created a cashless wristband system that can be used at events such as music festivals or concerts.
The product has already been used at the Manitoulin Country Festival and is designed to reduce cash handling within a venue. Users are able to purchase their wristbands and load them with cash through an app that is synced to the user's bank account or credit card.
Melissa Kargiannakis perhaps had the loftiest goals on the evening, with her Sault Ste. Marie based startup, Heuristext. The platform has the potential to change the way information is consumed online by creating information equity.
Heuristext is like the Google Translate of literacy, where instead of translating to different languages, it will break down text according to reading levels.
The app is is currently being tested on Android, covering 118,000 topics. Creating an increase in the literacy rate in Canada by just one per cent has the potential to lead to a ripple effect of $18 billion in economic growth for every one per cent increase per year.
