The 4th Annual Pitch Competition was a great success! The winners were:

• 1st Place - Fonda Technologies for $5,000

• 2nd Place - Belay Securities for $2,500

• 3rd Place - Climatize for $1,500

Videos of the pitches are available here. Meanwhile, here are a few photos from the event.

Santa Cruz Works is proud to announce our Pitch Contest for the 4th cohort of the Santa Cruz Works Accelerator Program. Join us as six (6) exciting new startups each give 5-minute presentations to 4 Judges / VCs. The third-place winner will take home $1,000 in cash, $500 in Santa Cruz Downtown Dollars, sponsored by City of Santa Cruz Economic Development. Santa Cruz Works will award the second-place winner with $2,500, and $5,000 to 1st place (seed capital SAFE convertible/debt-equity). All of the startup finalists will have the opportunity to seek further funding from the judges.

We will kick off this event with an announcement from the X Academy ROV Team. See article.

Finalists

Out of 34 applicants, here are the six who made it to the finale:

• AirSet - providing advanced airflow controls for healthcare HVAC systems. Precise airflow control in hospital buildings is an immediate-need problem that is currently being handled by manual adjustments to complicated HVAC systems.

• Belay Securities - Millions of gig workers face uncertain income without the guarantees associated with employment. Belay eliminates this issue by using state-of-the-art in-house forecasting tech to cover drivers on their bad days in exchange for a share of their good days.

• Climatize - the Climatize app enables you to take climate action while earning money and avoiding your personal carbon footprint by simply investing the spare change from your everyday purchases into crowdfunding clean energy projects. Climatize’s innovative model gives you a return on investment all while protecting our planet!

• Fonda Technologies - formerly known as The Apptopus, Fonda Technologies aims to empower Latino & minority-owned restaurants with the same online commerce abilities as the world's largest restaurant chains. Fonda Technologies uses an integrated set of software and services that bring online orders, menu building and optimization, online business listing configuration, and online revenue monitoring under one solution.

• Immergo Labs - Immergo’s mission is to redefine telehealth for all physical therapists and patients towards enabling greater accessibility, affordability, and accuracy of remote care. Their goal is to provide an all-in-one physical therapy clinic through off-the-shelf VR headsets: giving therapists and patients the ability to be in the same room, walk around each other in 3D, and capture in-person success metrics with intelligent movement analysis from anywhere across the world.

• Purcell - Purcell provides simplified refill solutions for food and everyday essentials. Brothers David and Russell Conway started Purcell after realizing the answer to reducing household trash relies heavily on the elimination of excessive food packaging. Food packaging comprises ~75% of American household waste, the largest single component in landfills. Food packaging relies heavily on plastic which is causing worrisome pollution. Purcell is dedicated to bringing bulk food from niche to mass-market to solve the problem of excessive packaging.

Judges

• Craig Vachon: Chowdahead Growth Fund, Central Coast Angels, AI Redefined (AIR), author

• Hillary Talbot: Founder @ Sail Community Capital | Impact Investor | Advisor @ Sierra Small Business Development Center | Sales & Marketing Consultant @ California Manufacturing Technology Consulting

• Ian McHenry: Optimization SaaS investor, co-founder of Beyond Pricing

• Marilyn Calciano: Central Coast Angels, Board of Directors at Community Foundation of Santa Cruz County