New Mexico State University's Arrowhead Center wants to give promising startups in the Land of Enchantment the opportunity to showcase their companies in front of prominent investors at an upcoming Albuquerque forum, all for the chance to win $1 million at a national pitch competition in California's Bay Area.
Carlos Murguia, senior economic development officer for the Arrowhead Center, told New Mexico Inno the Center's partnering with Pegasus Tech Ventures, a venture firm based in San Jose, California, to host one of the firm's regional pitch competitions. The regional competitions allow local startups to compete for a spot in a "Startup World Cup" competition, held in San Francisco in early October.
The top startup from each regional competition will be able to compete in the World Cup's Grand Finale pitch. Pegasus awards the Grand Finale winner a $1 million prize.
This is the first year New Mexico is hosting one of the 100-plus regional pitch competitions, which include dozens of locations around the world.
New Mexico's pitch competition will take place at a "New Mexico Startup Forum" that Arrowhead Center plans to host Sept. 4-5 at Isleta Resort and Casino in Albuquerque. It's the first time NMSU is hosting the statewide event, which Murguia said will combine several different pieces of the Center's programming.
The Forum will have four different focus areas — clean energy, Native entrepreneurship, female founders and early stage companies — each led by different partner organizations.
The Arrowhead Center's U.S. Department of Energy-funded Clean Energy Resilience and Growth (CERG) cluster will lead the clean energy programming, while the Center's Scale Up New Mexico program will lead the programming around early stage companies; the American Indian Business Center at NMSU will lead the Native entrepreneurship programming, and Diversity and Inclusion in InVentorship and EntrepReneurship Strategies and Engagement — Women, or DIVERSE-W, an initiative out of Sandia National Laboratories, will lead the female founders' programming.
Applications are currently open for New Mexico-based startups to take part in the competition; the application form closes Aug. 21. A steering committee will select eight startup applicants to take part in the regional pitch competition; two additional startups will come from the winners of CERG and Scale Up New Mexico pitches at the Forum, respectively.
While New Mexico startups won't be able to earn any financing through the regional competition, NMSU plans to cover all travel expenses for the winning startup's trip to San Francisco for the World Cup Grand Finale. Judges will include both in-state and national investors, Murguia said.
He said the Arrowhead Center and Pegasus Tech Ventures first connected via LinkedIn to discuss hosting the regional competition in New Mexico. Recent Pegasus investments have gone to startups including Tokyo-based Carbon Fly, Atom Computing, based in Berkeley, California, and Houston's Axiom Space.
Pegasus has also hosted speakers like Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, Barbara Corcoran, a judge on the popular TV show "Shark Tank," and Vinod Khosla, the founder of Menlo Park, California-based venture firm Khosla Ventures, at its annual Startup World Cup.
"If anything, it's a lot of visibility," Murguia said about Pegasus holding the regional competition in New Mexico. "Imagine having a New Mexican company pitching at the final or the semi-final, or even meeting these guys. It would be very cool."
