After more than a month of competition and thousands of votes, we have a winner in our 2022 Inno Madness bracket competition.
Doorage took home first place after outlasting Every Body Eat with more than 61% of the vote. There were more than 3,400 votes cast in the championship round.
Founded in 2018, Doorage is a tech-enabled storage and moving startup led by CEO Sean Sandona. The company makes it easy to schedule and book a move or storage request online, making the process more efficient and accessible.
Doorage joins past Inno Madness winners Choobs (2021), Leaf Trade (2020), 2ndKitchen (2019), SpringCM (2018), GetSet (2017), SpotHero (2016) and Kapow Events (2015). Inno Madness is our friendly, bracket-style challenge where readers vote to advance companies based on one question: Who would you invest in?
"It's very cool," Sandona said of winning Inno Madness. "There’s so many huge companies out there with amazing stuff they’re doing. It's pretty amazing."
Doorage, which offers service in Chicago, Milwaukee and Madison and just recently expanded to Las Vegas and Columbus, Ohio, now has 32 employees. It has raised around $700,000 in seed funding, with plans to soon raise a Series A round, Sandona said.
The startup also recently launched a cross-country move option, as well as business storage and last-mile logistics services.
Part of Doorage's differentiator is its focus on security, Sandona said. All items are stored in large "Amazon-esque" warehouses, he said, which prevents theft.
"The break-ins that have plagued the storage industry for the past two decades, we’ve eliminated that," Sandona said.
Our Inno Madness runner-up this year was Every Body Eat, an allergen-free snack brand led by Trish Thomas and Nichole Wilson. The startup makes healthy crackers including its Cheese-Less snack thin, which is like a Cheez-It without the cheese.
The startup may have fallen just short in Inno Madness, but it's been racking up other wins this week. Every Body Eat is going national in Whole Foods this week, and it's also kicking off an accelerator program run by food giant Mondelez.
"For us, even though we lost, we won this week," Thomas said.
Whole Foods also agreed to sell the startup's newest product, a grain-free crisp bread, throughout the Midwest.
Every Body Eat is also in the process of raising new funding and will soon open a new production facility. Thomas said the company surpassed its March sales goal by more than 200%.
Every Body Eat, now at 28 employees, previously raised funding from Cleveland Avenue, the VC fund from former McDonald's CEO Don Thompson, and Kansas City-based 1248 Holdings.
