Launch.vc Pitch Competition 2021

Foreign. We're gonna get going here. Once again, thanks everyone for joining us in our Launch pitch competition. We're really excited to showcase some of the great companies that have been working with us. I'll give you a quick rundown about Launch Ventures, who we are, what we're doing. We're essentially Launch Ventures owns and operates a network of accelerators, innovation studios, investment funds and then we also do large scale events. I'll kind of work my way backwards on the events. Traction Conference is one of our signature key events. You might have heard of it. We also do a series of private CEO events across North America. We are starting to do some international events as well. We also have a series of online content webinars, Traction Webinars. Twice a week we've got our podcast or Bits and Bytes Founder Journeys. We're also really integrated into a lot of different areas of the tech ecosystem, helped put together a couple different funds. Victory Square is one that you might have heard of, doing a lot of angel investments outside of that as well. On the Innovation Studio, we're primarily focusing on sports entertainment industry and looking to revolutionize the back office of sports entertainment, primarily blockchain and AI solutions. But we're most well known for our accelerator which is Launch Academy. And you're going to kind of see the fruits of the labor today. We've got a variety of different programs starting from early stage ideation, online content to incubation program that we've developed over the last few years that essentially is functioning all virtually online. We've gotten rid of the physical in person activities and have taken everything online, AMAs, mentors, resources and we also provide a international program called Maple. Maple is where we bring international companies that are at seed to Series A, ready to expand and grow into North America, introduce them to our network, our resources, but also if they qualify, allow them to participate in some of the great Canadian immigration programs. Startup Visa is probably the most popular where we're allowed to help international companies expand and grow their team and their families into North America through Canada with Canadian Permanent Residency. Some of the companies that you're seeing today are some of these participants. Others are in the Launchpad program. We had over 20 companies that were shortlisted that pitched and tried to spruce up their pitch and presentations and get themselves into the final six. And you're seeing the fruits of that labor right now. Six companies ready to go and pitch you their startups. I'm going to introduce you to our mc, Charlene Fothergill. Charlene has a long history with Launch Academy. She was actually there from day one. Launch Academy is going to be celebrating its 10 year anniversary in 2022 and she's seen all these gray hairs come in one by one. She was with Grow Lab at the time and then she grew into a senior role with Leidos Labs and now CTO AI. She is your go to person for anything hr. You can contract her. She knows the tech industry really well and she knows the HR sector really well. So I'm gonna hand it over to Charlene and she's gonna be your MC for the day.

Awesome. Thank you, Ray. Thank you everyone. This is so weird. Kind of talking one way and seeing some faces. I'm super stoked to be here. Super stoked to be your. So as Ray said, definitely grew up with Launch Academy in the heydays of pitch competitions. They're looking a little different today, but really excited to be here and get some good old fashioned pitch competitions happening and see what's been going on. Seeing lots of familiar names on the chat. Say hi, let's talk about things on the chat. Let's try to make this the least awkward to just talk at a blank screen as possible. For myself, for the judges as well, for the startups.

Cool.

So what are we going to do today? Let's just go through the plan. We are on a tight timeline, so in kind of the spirit of back in the day, your pitch times will be recorded and I will let you know if you're coming up on that timeline. And I'm going to be Mercilessness. Unmerciful, that's the word I was looking for and just cut you off if you're going over. We do need to make sure everyone gets the time for both their pitch as well as the questions. So hopefully everyone's well rehearsed. So round one, we are going to see six companies pitch for 90 seconds followed by a three minute Q& A with our esteemed judges, who I'll introduce in just a moment. Then the judges are going to sneak away and deliberate and we're going to get a chance to meet our sponsors, the people that have kind of helped make this event possible today. And they're going to actually do a little bit of a pitch to all you all. So we're going to put them on the hot seat and make them pitch and work for their sponsorship spot, so to speak. The judges are going to come back and they're going to whittle that down from six to a top three. So that'll be really exciting to see. Who Makes that cut. After we have the top three announced, we'll take a quick five minute break, grab some water, use washroom, all that kind of stuff and then come on back and we'll watch those three pitch. So they're going to be doing a three minute pitch, which I think is probably the most difficult time slot to get, followed by a 5 minute Q& A with the judges. Again, it's going to be a hard stop on that. And then the judges are going to pop away delivery. We'll get another kind of two or three minute break, come back to the room. And then Sam from Launch Academy is going to have the honor, honorable pleasure of announcing the winners and the prizes and all that exciting stuff that will follow. So that's what we're going to do today. We're hoping to get wrapped up at 4:30 and thanks everyone for your time and coming in today.

Cool.

So let's meet our judges. So maybe when I say your name, if you just want to pop on your camera and give a little wave. First up, we have, or in no particular order, I guess we have Adam o', Donnell, who's a startup mentor at techstars and a VC and a startup and works with the startup partnerships specifically at Zendesk. Thank you, Adam, for being here today. Next we have Monique Morden, a founder and advisor at Judy AI. Hi, Monique, welcome, welcome. Cool. Next we've got Milan Teskovic, general partner at expa, investor and advisor. Wonderful. And then I think the only person who's older in the startup scene other than Ray and I is Vern Patek, who definitely cannot summarize him in just two bullet points, but currently he's an investment partner and co founder at Northmark Ventures. If you want the real story on Vancouver and the world startup scene, this guy's got your got the goods. Thanks for being here, Bern. Nice to see you. And then Chris Newman is also someone who's been around the space a time or two and he's currently a partner at Panache Ventures. Thank you. Welcome, Chris. Okay, great. Well, we'll maybe put everyone back off camera. I guess that's a little bit easier for the judges. Take notes, Judges. Make sure you're kind of taking notes and filling out that scores card so deliberation can be nice and snappy. And without further ado, let's bring in our first company. We have Holly Mood. Holly Mood. Take off your camera, say hi. Right, do we have holly mood? Oh, do I see holly mood, Anyone? We got Bill. Bill.

Hello everyone. Hi, Bill. Yes, I successfully as a presenter now. So can you see my screen?

It's just loading now. Yeah, we are good to go and I will not press start until you you start.

Okay? Okay. Hello. Good morning everyone. Honeymoon is the leading booking platform of leisure activities in Hong Kong. We have over 1000 listed products and generate over 20 million USD revenue per year. We ranking number one in yachting, camping and water sports activities. We are familiar with the market and realize that most of the service providers are still using primitive ways to operate their business. Jotting down booking with paper and pens and using Google form to accept bookings are the most common practice. Only less than 10% of them have adapt e commerce solution. This number is far below the average of the industry with similar booking flows such as hotels and flight. The secret of success is we are not only providing an Airbnb like platform, we are creating an ecosystem that helps the service provider to optimize the internal operation and sales. We also provide the vertical SaaS. Enables the user to launch their booking site in an hour. Core features include CRM, no Coke, site builders and most importantly, it helps users to distribute the rate and availability with hundreds of distribution partners. This unique business model differentiates ourselves from the giants such as Caleb and ctrip. With our strong track record, we are competent to expand our business to more industry and countries. We are now looking for 2 million USD to expand the overseas market. Thank you.

Oh, that was exactly 90 seconds. Gold Star for practice in your pitch timing. Great job. All right, I don't think we have any way to showcase the clapping so I'll just clap for everybody just so it doesn't feel so weird. All right, we got three minutes for questions. Judges, questions for Bill at Hollymood. Explore your vibe.

I'll ask a question.

It's Monique here. Can you talk a little bit about the competition and kind of where their.

Strengths and weaknesses and how far ahead or behind they are from you guys. Can I clarify the question? Only strength and weakness and the next one is. The next question is how far we get to the. Yeah, just talk about the competition, their strengths and weaknesses. Okay, competitions and actually the competition. What we are facing right now is some software that providing similar function like helping the guest to helping our suppliers to build a booking site internationally. But however, the competition is not as keen as the solution as a normal shopping cart. Just like Shopify or Shopline and other giants in the market for us because we are only focusing on the booking industry and specifically for the outdoor experience and leisure activities, we have designed lots of customized Models for this kind of industry. We have over 30 customized pricing models and fits over 10 to 20 industries. So the competition is not that keen from our point of view. We have to do quite a lot of research online and we cannot find a very good solution right now. And what is our strength? And our strength is we have a very well developed booking platform right now which is harlem.com and we have established for a few years and we have over ten hundred thousand of users already. So it give us a lot of insights in the past few years for building up our latest SaaS solutions. However, our weakness is comparatively, we do not have a lot of international expansion experience and our team is mainly local person in Hong Kong. So this makes us some difficulties in uncertainty when we expanding our business overseas. Bill, what's the market size in Hong Kong? Why do need to expand? Frankly speaking, the market size in Hong Kong is not the biggest. We only have like 7 million populations in Hong Kong. That's why we like to expand our market to. To the overseas.

Bill, I'm gonna have to stop you there. I'm gonna have to stop you there. We're at three minutes for the questions.

Thank you. Thank you for the questions.

Awesome. All right, we got Pineapple. Pineapple's up on deck. Thank you, Bill. Never easy to go first, especially in this virtual world.

Perfect, thank you. Bye.

That was Bill from Hollymood. All right, we got Pineapple up next. Where's our friends at Pineapple? David going off mic. I just got to assume the person going off mic's our presenter. Here we go. Yeah, we're teed up and really ready to go. David's wasted no time. Whenever you're ready, David.

Okay, well, I'm gonna start right now, so. Hello everyone, it's David here from Pineapple. Pineapple lets you build apps with no code. It's kind of like wix but to build mobile apps. A little bit about me. I'm David Cruz. I'm the CEO and founder at Pineapple. I'm a software engineer and for me everything started when I created Vista and that helps blind people all around the world. Then I went to work for Meta and Google as a software engineer and I co founded two software development agencies. Creating an app changed my life and that's why I created Pineapple. So I'm going to try to challenge Pineapple on this one and try to create an app prototype doing this 90 second speech on the background. So let's get started. Okay, so let's say you need an app or a working prototype. Option A is to code yourself, but this is difficult and it can take time. Option B is to pay someone to build it for you, but this can get really expensive. Option C is to build it yourself with Pineapple. And how? With our intuitive drag and drop builder. It lets you add images, buttons, it lets you test and export your code directly on your device. It's easy. It's being used by students all around the world and non technical founders, even in a US congressional app challenge competition. It's fast. In less than 90 seconds you can create a prototype that would take an iOS engineer around two hours to do. It's affordable. Just 9.99 per month and we're close to 100,000 downloads within our first year. And this is 100% organic traffic. We've been top 100 since launch date, top one in the US during launch week and we've been featuring Apple. This is the result of our app. Thank you so much.

Okay, perfect. Good job. I mean, that was ambitious getting a demo in and a pitch in just like 1 minute and 38 seconds. So great job, David. All right, we'll hand it over to our judges. What do we want to know about Pineapple? Very intriguing. Hey, it's that.

Oh, yeah, go ahead, go for it. Sorry, Adam, Go for it. Yeah. Just quick question. How much have you raised so far and any name investors? We've been bootstrapping all the way. It's been from what I got from Facebook and Google. That's what we've been living off right now. And we have some subscribed users, so we definitely want to raise. David, I had a question about the market day Raptor. Sorry, Chris, I just saw your photo pop up. Take time. Are you going after more complex apps that have data driven backends or is this more for basic sample that doesn't really require a backend. So we are going for those complex apps. We're working on backend integrations. We're developing our own self deployed server with no code and we're also working with different databases to make sure you can create the most complex, complex app. And also if I get the opportunity, I'll share with you more. But with Pineapple, you can export your code in native code. So you can give this to an engineer and it can be as powerful as you want it to be.

All right, we'll let Chris sneak in there next.

All right, simple question. You got 100,000 downloads, what's your revenue? How many of them are paying? Well, we started being free for a while, but just after. To answer your question, after four months of turning on our subscriptions, we were sitting at around $4,000 in monthly recurring revenue. We still have a few months to go to finish our first year, but that's where we're sitting right now. $4,000 monthly recurring revenue.

We got a whole minute left. Judges, what do we need to know about Pineapple?

Let's go. What's your best channel right now in terms of customer acquisition? So it's because it's been 100% organic. Our best channel right now. We've been featured by Apple multiple times. I guess because of the quality of the app, we really invest in design. So we've gotten a lot, a lot of featuring by our friends at Apple. Again, if I get the opportunity, I'll share with you our future plans with web deploying Pineapple to web. So we will definitely explore new channels to get. You know, that's a huge market, probably the biggest out there. Web users.

30 seconds left.

Yeah, is this. Sorry, go ahead.

What kind of support do you provide?

Is it completely self serve or do you have some sort of tech support? We have support channels. Recently we got someone into the team that's helping us, you know, kind of gather people that have issues. And also we're building a learning center because no code community really loves that, like tutorials and boot camps. So that's. That's something we're working on. So we have.

Stop it there. David, thank you so much. That was a lot in your time. Great job. Okay, let's get Perception moving right along. Snappy, snappy, 90 second pitches. Back in the day, there was no time to even go the bar in between 90 second pitches. It was on to the next one. Where's our team at Perception? All right, great job. Jumping right in. I like it. Whenever you're ready.

All right, you can hear me and you can see the background.

Yep, you're good.

Hold on. I need to hide this panel. All right.

Go ahead. Take it away.

Okay. Professional sports are the pinnacle of human performance, where teams are constantly trying to identify and develop the next superstar. And as a former pro athlete and coach, I discovered that only one out of four components of human performance are actually deemed, deemed tangible and are currently trained and measured in the highly competitive 11 billion sports. $11 billion sports tech industry. We're the only company that can train and measure all four components of performance where it matters most. On the field and with full teams in the environment where every inch counts, we've been able to make over 650 pro amateur and varsity athletes 0.24 seconds quicker with only four hours of training with our prototype so far. And while that may not sound like a lot, it actually looks like this. The difference between Usain Bolt at the Olympics and Second Place, whom no one even remembers. Our product as a Service model generates B2B subscription revenue with arms race style technologies that can easily scale. And with our first product, Pro Instinct, ready for launch in January after a successful paid beta release in July. With over 200 athletes, this is the result of work by an excellent team, including former professional athletes and coaches, three PhDs, and over 120 years of experience in tech, sports and research. We're launching our seed round in January and are looking to connect with investors passionate about sport and human performance.

All right, perfect. Nice slide into home plate there, to use a sports analogy. All right, well, all the rest of us are googling Lee to find out what professional sport he played and what team he coached. I'll hand it over to the judges if they have any questions about perception.

I'll make it easy. It was soccer and I coached with Whitecaps as well as SFU and some others.

Congratulations. All right, judges, what do we want to know?

Yeah, do you have any patents? We have one that is just in the final stages and will be pending and that's specifically for the hardware component. Is this personalized to every player or is this more of like a generic rule set that anybody can follow and they can get faster? So it's specifically targeted towards teams. We're starting with soccer and then going into a couple other team sports, but we actually use entire teams at the same time and go into their team training and. But we also give the individual the ability to train on their own within it. So in a team environment we can give more value, but there's still benefit on their own. Specifically with our first software only product. Yeah. And would you say this is service based power by software? Is this software with a hint of service? So it's a subscription for software first and then we're going more into the product side when the hardware comes in and putting that all together as a package. Lee, how does this look when it's scaled to a very large degree, say four years out? So on the software only side with Pro Instinct, that what will. What we'll end up having is pretty easy deployment through app stores and then the clubs largely managing their own. So that can scale actually quite easily with minimal fuss when we get into the hardware point and why we're doing that is it does require More hands on setup where we have probably about a 30 day onboarding platform with there. However, that allows us to collect about a billion data points every training session. So we have that trade off of a lot more deployment, but then collecting a lot more on the back end. So in short, in four years we'll just have to navigate how quickly to turn on the tap with the more resource intensive hardware side.

All right, we're going to wrap it up there. So we got three seconds left. Great job, Lee. Congratulations. And we're moving on. Right on. Okay, so we got On Tracker. Up next with our 92nd pitch. Where's our on tracker friends? Any mics going off? Hello? Anyone here?

I'm here.

Hi.

Hi.

You're here. You made it. Come on in. All right, whenever you're ready to go.

We'Re good to go.

You're good to go.

All right. Hi everyone. I'm Syed, CEO at OnTracker. Construction is one of the oldest and largest industries in history. Yet construction businesses have long been managing projects using outdated and inefficient manual methods. Companies are still using ancient tools such as paper and spreadsheets or poorly built project management or ERP software systems. All of these methods are based on manual entry. And manual entry is not only highly inefficient, but it continues to cost companies significant amounts of time and money in productivity losses every single week. OnTracker is the industry's first specialized workflow automation platform that enables companies to automate their project management workflows and minimize the amount of manual entry needed across their entire business. After spending our first few months going from concept to build to iteration, we now have four companies paying for annual subscriptions. We've launched active pilot programs with seven more companies happening right now. And we're negotiating enterprise deals with two of the largest sub trades contractors in bc. Our founding team has experienced the pain of manual entry firsthand throughout our many years of experience in construction. And we've also just added a former president of leadcore Group, one of the largest construction companies in North America, to our advisory board. With investment into construction tech reaching record levels this year, we truly believe we have the right team for the right market at the right time. We'll be raising our seed round in Q3 of next year and we're looking for investors to come join us on our mission to bring automation to construction. Thank you.

Amazing. With five seconds to stare. Great job. Way to hit the nail on the head. Like that one, Sam. Anyways. All right, hand over the judges. Get me off the stage.

Hey, Saad, what's the title of the person that buys the software? 1 and 2, what's the trigger that happens in their life before they come to you? So the title. Typically we're interacting with a lot of SMB companies right now. That's where we're seeing the most traction. And we are typically dealing directly with owners because they tend to be more actively involved in their operations. But at the slightly larger companies, we are also interacting with VPs of construction and project managers as additional influencers as well. And the trigger that typically brings them to us is when they've just been overburdened by all the paperwork, number one. Number two is a labor shortage as well. They're dealing with short staff, short staffing issues and they simply need more assistance with managing their workflows.

Right, Judges, Anyone else? Construction, project management. Sorry, can you repeat? Everything goes so fast. I don't always catch up your sort of traction.

Like how many customers and clients and revenue. Yeah. So currently right now we have 11 companies currently paying for or using our services. Across the paying customers, which are four companies, we have just above 80 users currently using and paying for the services. We're at about 700 in MRR, but we got a wave of MRR tied to those pilot programs that we're trying to convert.

Anyone else? Any other questions?

What will be your best channel, do you think, over the next year and a half, as you start to scale this, how are you going to reach the customers that you're targeting? Yeah, great question. So right now we are seeing the most success with a direct sales approach because we do need to take an account based model to deploy the solution. But we do see avenues for partnerships through things like IT systems integrators as well as technology partners through integrations as well. So we think that's going to be a big channel for us. Great.

Just under a minute left. One more quick question, judges. Seattle did such a good job. Very concise presentation. All right, we'll take back the few seconds then. Thank you so much for that. Great. We'll move right along. All right, up next we have Chewy. Let's see how do we get you to pop on mute there when you're done? Thank you. Perfect. Okay.

You can see my screen.

We can see your screen. Yes.

Awesome.

Take it away whenever you're ready.

All right, so I'm Raf and I'm going to tell you about Chewy. So building a product is hard. Chewy makes it accessible to junior developers. How? Through the Chewy stack, which we've been building and testing with real products for six months, as well as educational resources and a supportive community. Meet Carla, one of hundreds of thousands of Bootcamp grads worldwide this last year. She's going to face challenges launching a SaaS platform when she realizes how much stuff wasn't covered in Bootcamp. The Chui stack will provide solutions to a lot of her challenges out of the box. Chewy will also provide educational content for why its components are key to building a product and business. Eventually will also include paid certification. Carla's not alone. We're putting together a lot of emphasis on building community and building an ecosystem beyond the tools. She'll also be ready for growth. When our deployment system is ready, Carla will be able to launch her product to our paid hosting solution tailored to the stack so she doesn't need to learn how to manage complex infrastructure. Chewy's for everyone. We've been building workflows specifically considering folks with underpowered laptops and crappy Internet connections. We want to blow open this market to people who previously could only dream of it. So if you know an ambitious junior dev, send them to we got so that we can build this together with them.

That was great. 1 minute and 20 seconds. Awesome. Great presentation and love it, love it. Judges.

Adam? Yep, I'll go ahead.

Chris, sorry if I missed this, but.

Tell me about your experience as well as your co founders. So I'm Raf and I'm sorry about that. I was looking at the wrong. I'm sorry about that. No worries. Basically, I've been working in and around startups, early stage startups generally for around seven years, either as a freelancer, a co founder, an advisor. Yeah, we have one other developer who was actually. It's practical experience in that he was just in a boot camp about a year and a half ago. Two years ago. And we have an advisor who is a marketer who's done some community building and stuff like that in the past. She works at Bench primarily. Got it. Thank you. Can I ask you to let's say narrow down for us or restate for us who your target customer is? Because I'm a little confused because on the one hand you started with a detailed description of coming through a boot camp and by the end you were talking about underpowered laptops and no Internet. So there's a little bit all over the place. So who are you looking at as your initial market? Basically we want junior devs, people who are out of a boot camp, maybe just getting into tech. So they don't. Yeah, they're new to tech, they know the basics, the very basics. They've just started to learn how it works, and we're going to give them sort of the building blocks to build a product. Okay, so can I clarify it's specifically junior devs who are trying to build their own product? Yeah. Okay, got it. Thank you. Yep.

Judges, anything else? Just one minute in. Lots of time for questions. Let's unpack this. Hey, so it's Monique here. So again, what's your revenue model connected to this? How are you going to get these.

Young, young, new devs to pay? We have three. Three revenue streams that we anticipate. So initially, probably through training. The other one will be. Sorry, training. The deployment system, once we have that in place, and that's probably the most scalable one. And honestly, consulting, we. We see this being like a. Yeah. Something where. Where we can help other people build their products initially. And that's something we would only want to do in the short term and taper it off as we. As we use that to learn more about people's problems and what we can do to solve them.

All right, any more questions, judges? Going once, going twice. All right, well, great job. Thanks, Raph. All right, and moving right on. Last but certainly not least, and our 92nd pitches, we have Smart arm. Come on up to the stage. Smart Arm.

Hey.

Hello. Go ahead and share your screen.

There we go.

You are good to go. When you're ready.

I want you to meet a good friend of mine, actually, Annalisa. We went to school together. She's 24 years old, and she was born a Hann amputee. One day she was telling me how, despite all the available options, she's never actually had the chance to use a bionic hand. What started out as a fun project to help her was eventually launched as smarter. And today we're on a mission to empower amputees to interact with the world around them more intimately. You see, there are over 9 million other hand amputees in the same boat as Annalisa, and they all have the same problem, which is bionics are expensive, yet they still don't do a whole lot. That's an untapped market of $21 billion. Our solution to this has been using 3D printing and machine learning to provide a low cost yet powerful bionic hand. An embedded camera in the palm identifies any object the amputee wants to interact with. And our software algorithm calculates the best grasp for it. And the results so far have been astounding. Not only have we captivated the attention of hand amputees all around the world. But our technology also impressed tech giants like Microsoft. Even the Prime Minister couldn't resist coming to check us out. We're backed by a world class team of engineers with combined experience ranging from Tesla, Microsoft, Oxford and even CERN. We recently raised a small pre seed round of $350,000 back in June. And we want to spend the 10k from this competition further towards commercializing Smarterm to help Analisa and millions of other hand amputees just like her all around the world.

All right, and time. Good timing. Thank you. Very cool. All right, judges, what do we want to know about this?

How are you getting paid through the insurer, through insurance companies, or are they paying directly? Yeah, that's a good question. So currently, to give you some context, that right now if an amputee wants a device, they have to go through this very convoluted process of going to a clinic. The clinic then contacts their insurance company and the manufacturer of the device. All three of them work together to come up with a cost. And if that cost is like favorable to the clinic, they'll go forward with it if there's like a high profit margin. If not, they'll kind of just chuck the user aside. What we're doing is making it affordable enough so that the user can pay for it directly. In many cases, 9 out of 10 cases, the user gets denied funding and they want to pay. But clinics currently simply don't work with those kind of users. So we're starting by going directly to the user. They kind of subscribe onto the device straight from us. And in the future we're looking to kind of build into the prosthetic clinic ecosystem as well.

Manikar, are you just in Canada right now? Sorry, are you North American? What are you geographically?

Where do you see your best chances.

Being to really expand?

Yeah. So for right upon launch, we're looking at focusing on both the North American, Canada and US markets as well as the NHS in the uk primarily because they all have very similar ways in which the kind of the clinic, insurance and all those agencies operate. And so our business model, the way it is set up right now, works perfectly in those geographies.

One other sort of follow up question.

Is there beyond the immediate current application you have for this technology, is there.

The next phase or other uses that.

You can see for this? Yeah, I'm glad you asked that. Part of what makes smartarm really interesting is it comes pre trained with a bunch of objects. It knows how to Grab. But over the course of the time, we've actually implemented the functionality for users to input new objects and custom train how they want the hand to interact with them. I mean, there are going to be tons of objects. Like, despite being thousands of object screen programmed into it, there are a ton of objects that the user will come across that they want the hand to interact with differently or just new objects it hasn't seen before. And so not only does that improve the ecosystem for all the bionic hands, but our next step with this is to incorporate it into a general purpose sort of humanoid robot that's able to help anyone do anything. And our thinking behind that is if we're able to create an arm powerful enough to replace a human hand, it makes all the sense to put it on a general purpose robot that's able to help anyone do anything. So imagine one of the things our users really enjoy doing is being able to cook with two hands in the kitchen. We don't realize just how many of those tasks involve two hands. And so once we're able to train Smart Arm to do that, we can incorporate that into the general purpose robot and have them operating ghost kitchens just as an example.

Okay, awesome. And we'll end right on that note. Well, thank you very much to all of the entrepreneurs. So again, just quickly give everyone a round of applause. 90 seconds is not easy. Thank you, judges, for your questions. So Alana is going to whisk the judges magically away into the deliberation room, and they'll have some really tough decisions to make and get us down to a top three and we can hear some more and dig in. And on that note, I think Alana has a fun little poll for the audience to do here, and we can actually vote for our favorite. So just a reminder, we have Holly Mood, we have Pineapple Perception on Tracker, Chewy and Smartarm. So let Alanna launch that poll.

Oh, boom.

Done. We got some zoom experts in the house at Launch Academy. No surprise. No surprise. All right, folks, who did you see? I mean, listen, we all know Pineapple's got the best emoji game, but let's. Let's really think about the pitches and the business and what we enjoyed about everything and make our vote.

Oh.

Host and panelists can't vote, so I will not vote, but I'm eagerly waiting for the results. All right, get your votes in. Let's see what the crowd favorite is. How did our votes compare to the judges? What do we think? I mean, I definitely, if I ever start a startup I will make sure my company title has something to do with an emoji because I just feel like Pineapples winning the chat marketing game here, hands down. Sam's thrown in some construction workers. I tried to do the strong arm. We're trying, we're trying for all y'. All some soccer balls. All right, chat's blowing up. Chat's blowing up. Who you voting for? We've got a trap. Oh, the tractor emojis coming out. Nice, nice. Let's get literal with that. Got a not sure what. Oh, the Cheetah one. That's right. Chewy the Cheetah. That was a very good logo. Almost an emoji. Good job, Ralph. Lana, how are we doing on the poll here? I think we're gonna give about 10 more seconds. We have 25 people that haven't voted yet, so five more seconds and we're gonna end the poll.

Four.

Three screenshots. One. Done. All right, in first place, we have Syed, 38% and pineapple in a close second. But again, this is just the. The audience vote. But this goes towards the end score. So thank you guys so much, all of the audience, for voting. So. Yes, wonderful. Well, there we go. We proved, you know, anyone getting marketing advice, make sure you're including your emojis. It worked. It worked. We had. We had the Moji game coming in strong and helping that vote along.

Cool.

Without further ado, anytime we do these kind of events, whether they're virtual or live, we can't do it without sponsors. And Launch Academy has some amazing sponsors that are super involved in the community and I'm really excited today to call up to the stage. We have boasted as well as MEP Business Council with us today, so they are going to work for their sponsorship spots day and they're actually going to pitch all y' all and then, you know, if you have any questions or comments, you can throw them in the chat. Alanish. We just get people to throw them in the chat to kind of keep the chaos at bay. Perfect. So questions or comments to our sponsors, throw them in the chat and then we'll. We'll kind of take a short break after. So without further ado, we will get Anastasia, who actually is just as much part of the history of Launch Academy as I am. She worked at Growlab with me way back in the day and she's going to speak to us about Boast AI Anastasia. Unfortunately, we've run into some technical issues, so Anastasia is unfortunately not able to join us, so she's asked me to speak on both behalf, which is fine because both have been her partners for as long as I've been at launch, which has been four and a half years. They're also our co founders of Traction Conference which is coming back next year. Stay tuned for details. So, yeah, so Boast, for all of you guys that don't know, I'm just going to give a little bit of, you know, my pitch on both so you guys know who they are. You can look at more details online when we post the finalists for the event. Jesse from MEP is going to be speaking so he'll have a much more flashy, flashy pitch for you guys. But again, our partners at Boast help founders and government funding to cover product development costs for companies like yours. Boast AI streamlines and automates the process for you to get your money faster. Almost 5 times less the time and risk for yourself. They've also developed a handy online calculator to estimate how much you can get back in those R and D costs. To try it, just visit Boast AI. Boast is also going to be offering our top three finalists a thousand dollar credit for their first year working with Boast. So thank you so much to everyone at Boast. I didn't do as good of a job as they probably would have done in three minutes, but I hope I did them justice. So on that note, I am going to give the stage over to our friends at mep, specifically Jesse, who is here today to tell you a little bit more about what they do. So Jesse, if you're there, I will give the floor to you.

Perfect. Thank you. Let me just get my screen share up here. There we are. Can you see that? Okay.

Yeah, we're good to go.

Perfect. So my name is Jesse Ahuja. I'm a partner at MEP Business Council. I know this is a pitch competition and it's my chance to pitch, but I'm going to keep it relatively casual. Truth be told, I would much prefer to be doing this in person, probably over a cold beer, but thought I'd throw up a few slides to at least take your attention off of my face. So what's MEP Business Council all about? In a nutshell, we're a law firm that feels like a boutique but performs like a big firm. And that's what our clients really want. High caliber advice and sophisticated experience, but at the same time, highly practical and efficient. It's the best of both worlds and it's actually quite rare. So we have a pretty interesting origin story which unfortunately won't fit in a three minute pitch. So here's the concise version. Every one of our lawyers has trained at big national or international firms, including lawyers from New York and Toronto and Montreal and London, where we worked on big, complex sort of front page of the business section type deals. We started MEP once we realized that, you know, we all love the business in business law, hence our name, Business Council. We loved helping companies grow and we realized that, you know, before us, entrepreneurs had to choose either top quality legal advice or practical business advice. And we bridge the gap and do both. We launched in 2014 and we've been recognized as a top 10 corporate boutique in Canada every year since. So it turns out I'm not the only person who likes our business model. Thankfully for a seven year old business, quite frankly, we've enjoyed more than our fair share of recognition. Well, this is what I look like in a suit. I'm thrilled to say that I haven't worn one since COVID started and I hope to never wear one again. But quite sincerely, my team and I would be thrilled to help build your dream business. Thank you and I'll take any questions.

Awesome. Thank you very much. Yeah, I just want to give a shout out to these service providers. So I know yes, they're sponsors of the event, but you know, when you're a startup and when you're working in this tech industry, service providers that really get the stage of business you're at, that really get the industry and some of the realities that come with working in this crazy tech industry is really, really important. And I would definitely always take a referral from places like Launch Academy if you're looking for a lawyer or to do some of your shred credits and some of the other stuff that I know Boast has quite an expansive offering now. They kind of started with humble beginnings of shred consulting. So definitely don't take it lightly what service providers you engage with and trust. Places like Launch Academy, they wouldn't be allowing these people on the stage to speak to you all if it wasn't a good fit with startups, with these earlier stage companies and with companies that are working within tech, which just has different realities. So it's always a good idea. So thank you again for the work that both Boast and MEP do in the community and thank you. Thanks for being here today, Jesse, and always encouraging when you hear a lawyer say, I don't want to be wearing no suit. So I mean, that's got my vote if I need a lawyer.

Anyways, good Advice across the board. Thanks very much.

No worries. Does anyone have any questions for Jesse at all in the comments or anybody got access to Anastasia? Lena can pass you on that information as well as Boast AI. Wonderful. Okay, so we're just waiting. Got a few more moments. Throw some. Let's throw some. Some more emojis in the. In the chat. I wish we could, like, have a bit of a GIF thing going on. GIF or gif? Which one? Which one are we doing here? Vote GIF or gif? Are you. Are you over 30 or under 30? Right? R. GIF.

GIF.

Oh, we got a gif. We got a gif. We got a hard G. I like it. I like it. This is the great debate. Should have got Salmon Ray debating GIF or gif. The different generations sock G. If you want a Google assistance to voice type it. So. Oh, Dave, that is. You know, we're going to have to choose an answer that's. Let's just get Alexa to be our deciding factor. Right. And then Flavin just went straight back to the Pineapple. It all circles back. When it all comes down to it. Oh, we had the tractor before. And then Brian is just drafting it. Just. Just doing his own thing. Sounds good. I love the emoji game.

Okay.

Okay. What do we think? What do we think the judges are going to come back with? So. So we had a tractor. Not Tractor. Sorry. That's not the name of the company. That is the name of the moji that we have all been putting around. So from. From. From our point we had on Tracker and then Pineapple is a close second. Who do we think the judges. Judges are going to do? Three? Throw. Throw me in your top threes of who you think the judges are going to pick. Who do we think the judges are going to pick? Well, you got to give me three. You got to give me three. Oh, I see some judges coming back. You guys got to give me three. Your top three. Not just the top one. I know, I know.

We got.

We got team track track on Tracker. This is terrible. You're just gonna have to be called Tractor now because we've just rebranded you based on the emojis that are happening here. Smart arm.

Yeah.

That's pretty cool. Robots. I like it. Robots with a 3D printing. It's cool to see something. I feel like I haven't heard a lot about 3D printing. It used to be when I was running the grow lab program, it was the hotel space. Everyone is doing something with 3D printing. And then you know, Grey's Anatomy was making skin cells and cows hearts and stuff. And then I don't really know what happened. 3D printing. Happy to see it moving into, into the mainstream and being picked up again. Okay, all right. I have a top three. Okay. Oh, I'm losing in the chat. Everyone's, everyone's drowning my, my top three with emojis in the chat. I guess I got. I guess I get what I asked for. Okay, all, here we go. We've got a top three. So in order of appearance. Not sure what that means. I'm just going to go the top three. Oh, in no particular order. Okay, perfect.

Awesome.

So just clarify in no particular order. I mean. Yeah, so I think the audience where we all could just be as great as the judges and venture capitalists because we know how to pick some people with a more mature pitch and who are able to kind of articulate their companies. So we've got smartarm in the top three. So we'll give a hand to smartarm. Everyone can strong arm smartarm. We've got on Tracker, not Traktor, on Tracker in the top three. And last but not least and no surprise, we have Pineapple, who has made it to the top three. So congratulations to the top three. To the bottom three. Thank you so much for your time and definitely keep on practicing those pitches. Keep on refining your messaging on how you talk about your businesses. Pitch competitions are just as much about learning to talk about your business in a way that's understandable and intriguing as it is about the business itself. So keep practicing those pitch sessions and lean on the resources in the community to get your business next level. And we definitely hope to see you all again. So we're going to take a quick break here and basically let smartarm on Tracker and Pineapple get their heads back in the game. They're switching gears to a three minute pitch. Five minutes of questions. The questions are going to be tougher. Get your KPIs and your metrics ready and we'll all come back here in. I think we've got about two minutes before we need to be back for the second round, the championship round. Oh, sorry. We actually have five minutes. Good job, everyone. We kept really good time so you can all take a break for five minutes. We'll meet you back here. Let's get back here in about three and a half minutes just so we can get started right away. Cool.

We'Re here.

All right, perfect. Share your screen. I'm going to get the timer ready. Here we are. Ready when you are.

Hey again, everyone, we're smartarm in case you forgot. And now we're going to explain how this thing actually works. So smartarm is building low cost yet ultra powerful bionic hands. And to walk you through this, basically, as you begin grabbing an object, smartarm automatically cross references what's in front of it. With over a thousand different objects already in its database. And you know, the camera and algorithm recognize the object and the hand moves the fingers to the pre recording, pre recorded position, allowing you to successfully grasp the object. Now it does all this in, you know, a couple milliseconds. But the secret sauce to this is, you know, yeah, it comes preloaded with a bunch of objects, but amputees can actually add custom grips for new objects for them. The machine learning network effect improves the experience for all users that are on the platform. For us, this means the proprietary data actually incentivizes amputees to stay within the smarter ecosystem, thereby strengthening our monopoly on the proprietary data. This increases our defensibility in the data mode we have around any next competitor, but also creates new monetization opportunities. Like we alluded to earlier, all of these network effects will be compounded by the over 9 million hand and amputees there are worldwide. However, currently less than 5% of the hand amputee population actually has access to these devices. And so developing an affordable and accessible solution allows us to untap a $21 billion global market, which is current largely of which is currently untapped. The primary reason for this disparity is the conventional dinosaur business model, which forces users to funnel through a consortium of insurance agencies, clinics and prosthetic manufacturers. And nine out of ten times they're turned away by insurance or lack of funds themselves. On the off trends, this doesn't happen. The process takes anywhere from eight months to two years. And we have basically listened to these pain points by our users and have worked with them to offer a more accessible business model, which, by the way, in the long run will help us scale far beyond any existing competitor. You see, instead of using physical clinics, users are able to use their smartphones to digitally scan and send us the residual limb from anywhere in the world. And our team takes care of everything else. Within two to three weeks from initial contact, the user ends up with a custom 3D printed bionic hand. And when we do sell this, we'll offer it for a price of a computer rather than the $80,000 that our competitors charge. So we can unlock that 95% of amputees who currently have access to a device like this. We're starting trials for our current prototype in March and we will be looking to raise our seed in Q2 of 2022, basically this summer. And we'd love to have some of you investors join us.

Wonderful. Almost right on the dot. Almost three minutes. Great job. Thanks for giving us a little more clarity on Smart Army. Cool. Judges, you have up to five minutes for questions. It's Monique here. I have a question just so I totally understand. Do you have an actual working prototype now? And if the answer is yes, how.

Many people do you have using it? Yes, we have a beta group here in. I'm actually in London right now, but back in Toronto where we're based out of, we have five people right into the downtown core. And our goal for the beta is to get to a just a pre launch prototype that we're looking to test out the actual remote scanning capabilities with and give that a soft launch to a larger global customer base. Hi, it's Bernd. You could easily choose to fund a project like this entirely with, let's call it non diluted funding, with grants and so on and so forth. There's lots available for very good causes like this. But obviously you're going for an investor round and that means those investors have made commitments to produce returns for their investors. How do you see this unfolding over time so that you can get your investors a return? Who are you going to sell this to? How's this going to evolve from an investment perspective? Yeah, so the way we're approaching the market, I mean, you know, the conventional way this sort of industry or market has been run is very outdated. And like I said earlier, dinosaur, like we're coming in fresh. And like the one thing that we've realized that is, you know, if you make something that's useful for kind of the rest of the 95%, it's impossible, you know, to get to or to access that user base and not make a lot of money as a byproduct, if that's important. And the other thing that we're really looking forward to and what this investment helps accelerate is we've realized very early on that this technology is applicable to a broad application of robotics. And the data that we're collecting from how amputees and the users are interacting with everyday objects around them is very crucial data. We like to call that dexterity, dexterity data. And there's nothing or nobody else really collecting anything like that right now. And that kind of goes on to fuel our kind of the Other applications of robotics that we're looking at kind of general purpose robot as an example. And you know, the really neat thing that ties, ties into current times is, you know, you hear about these labor shortages. People don't want to work, you know, entry level, minimum wage labor jobs anymore. And so eventually what we're going to have to see is a lot of those jobs are going to get automated. You know, there's an antidote or the true story, I guess. In the 1950s, the elevator operators went on strike for like the third time. It tied up a lot of people trying to get to work. Think about Wall Street. The elevator manufacturers came in and said, you know, hey, turns out we actually don't need operators, we can just add buttons. And so, you know, Fast forward what, 70, 80 years? That's kind of essentially what we're on the precipice of and we want to lead the world into that robotic stage. And we're starting with amputees. Very cool. What's your approval process like with the FDA? Are you doing 5, 10K? And if so, when is. When is that projection? Yeah, so what we really like about this and what allows us to work directly with our users is prosthetic hands are classified as Class 1 medical devices with exemption. So basically that means we don't really need to go through any long approval for the actual product. We just need to register for a business license. Very cool. And who do you plan on selling this to? What are like one or two companies.

Or.

Yeah. What's your exit strategy? If you're not planning on that? Maybe you're. Yeah, so I mean the, the typical thing that happens if you want to look at, you know, what the innovative startups or what, you know, a lot of them end up doing, is there are basically two industry giants, Oser and Oser and Ottobock. Oser is an Icelandic company, Ottobock is a German company. And any new, you know, technology.