The Elite Eight of the 2017 Tech Madness Bracket is Live! [Voting Open]

By Will Flanagan

March 20, 2017, 04:55pm CDT

Who will cut down the .net?

After 56 matchups and more than 54,000 votes, we are down to the Elite Eight of the 2017 Tech Madness Bracket. We've posted the updated regions below, complete with the 8 Chicago tech companies that are still dancing, as well as how to vote for who you think should make it to the Final Four. (At the bottom of this post, as always, we've added a breakdown of the bracket, with information on the seeding and the selection process).

Round One Post and Overview Round Two Post and Overview Sweet Sixteen Post and Overview

As a reminder, Tech Madness is a friendly competition designed to generate awareness, excitement, and buzz for the city's thriving innovation economy and the companies that are helping shape and strengthen the ecosystem.

Each matchup in Tech Madness is determined by community voting, with readers just needing to answer one question to decide who moves on - Who do you think will have the greater impact in five years?

The Elite Eight will end on Thursday, 3/23 at 12PM CT; let's take a look at the eight that are still in and the updated bracket...

(1): Braintree - A 2007 New Venture Challenge winner that was acquired by PayPal in 2013 for $800M, Braintree is an all-in-one solution to accept, process, and split payments.
(14): GetSet - A social edtech platform that connects incoming college freshman to peers facing similar challenges in order to curb high dropout rates.
(16): Looplio - A new social app that allows users to easily edit and share videos, as well as collaborate on projects in real-time.
(10): Catalytic - A two-year-old SaaS startup from Sean Chou, the former CTO of Fieldglass, Catalytic helps companies automate business processes across workflows and teams via chatbots, machine learning, and more.
(13): EatPurely - A meal delivery service, Eat Purely uses locally-sourced ingredients and cuts out things like cream, butter, chemicals and preservatives to bring chef-crafted organic meals to health-conscious eaters.
(7): SpotHero - A fast-growing on-demand parking app and platform, SpotHero is the defending champion, having won the 2016 Tech Madness Bracket.
(8): Supernova - A fintech platform that focuses on the effective management of both sides of the balance sheet – a user's assets and liabilities together.
(15): Victory Lap - A new startup that finds, qualifies, and trains the next generation of top sellers, and helps employers hire better sales reps, faster.

Click 'View Full Bracket' to see all 64 teams and click 'Vote' to select your Elite Eight victors. (You can vote below or on the original post; it's the same embed and votes only count once per day). NOW LET'S GET TO THE ELITE EIGHT!

VOTING SCHEDULE:

Round 1: 3/9 - 3/13

Round 2: 3/13 - 3/16

Round 3: 3/16 - 3/20

Round 4: 3/20 - 3/23

Final 4: 3/23 - 3/29

Final Round: 3/29 - 4/3

THE INNO BRACKET BREAKDOWN:

Everybody gets one vote per matchup per day.
The bracket is designed to represent a snapshot of the entire 2017 tech ecosystem, complete with early-stage startups, public pillars, and representatives across every thriving industry in the city.
Seeding is based primarily on funding. For bootstrapped companies, seeding is determined by headcount and revenue. For public and acquired companies, we used Market Cap and the cost of the acquisition, respectively. For more information on how the bracket was assembled, see our overview here.
The seeding does NOT reflect an editorial statement on perceived value or “strength;” it’s just funding.
Because of this, do NOT approach the bracket like you would the NCAA one. (For March Madness, it’s logical to automatically pencil in top seeds through the first couple of rounds). Here, every “game” is a toss up and we expect to see a number of early upsets. Last year, our Final Four consisted of a 13, a 7, an 8, and a 1 seed.
These 64 companies were culled from the nominations that we received, as well as from internal research and reporting. There will be a number of companies not on this bracket that you believe deserve to be on here. And that's great; that's why this community's so strong. Let us know who you think we missed and we'll be sure to consider them for 2018.
Finally, like last year, if at ANYTIME you find yourself getting worked up over any seedings, omissions, inclusions, wins, or losses, shoot me an email immediately at will@chicagoinno.com and we’ll go grab a beer, take a few deep breaths together, and talk about how silly it is to get bent out of shape over a game that's architected specifically to generate excitement for the Chicago ecosystem.

The 64 Tech Companies:

The Tech Madness Bracket Reveal Event Was Sponsored By: