VeloCity Presents the Winners of the VeloCity Fund Finals!

What an amazing day! We would like to thank everyone who participated in the event, from the audience to the pitching teams; VFF would not be possible without your support! But let’s get down to the good stuff, what happened at the event?

The eighth VeloCity Fund Finals was held at the Great Hall in the Student Life Centre. Ten startups competed for one of four $25,000 grants and the opportunity to build their businesses at the VeloCity Garage workspace in downtown Kitchener. There were also nine aspiring entrepreneurs pitching for a chance to win 3 prizes of $1,000. Some of the judges for the $25K included Mike Stork, President at Stork Holdings, Karam Nijjar, Venture Capitalist at iNovia Capital and Cameron Hay, Partner at Front Burner Consulting.

Past winners of the VeloCity Fund include Thalmic Labs, the makers of the MYO gesture control armband who launched from the VeloCity Garage in July, as well as Weston Expressions, makers of the Linkett interactive digital signage system, and MappedIn, makers of indoor “way-finding” technology.

But without delaying any longer, here are the winners of the $25K and $1K Competitions!

$25K Winners

Light-bot – Gets kids hooked on Computer Science by playing games.

MetricWire – Accelerates groundbreaking academic research by making it easy to collect rich scientific data via smartphones.

PiinPoint – Uses demographic, real estate, traffic, and municipal data to identify optimal new store locations.

uMentioned – A college location-based app that lets you anonymously flirt and make new friends with people nearby.

$1K Winners

Helios won most innovative pitch and is developing a technology that continually charges the battery of a cellphone throughout the day using sub-pixel solar cells embedded into the display. These solar cells will be unnoticeable to the naked eye during usage, and will channel energy from ambient light to charge the cellphone.

PetroPredictwon the people’s choice award and best pitch. PetroPredict is a well integrity prediction engine for the oil and gas industry. It enables subsurface engineers to identify low capital, high reward opportunities in their fields.