25 Arizona startups compete for prize money in pitch contest finals

Twenty early-stage Arizona startups have been named as finalists, and five more have been selected to make main-stage pitches, for the IdeaFunding event that will hand out more than $50,000 in prize money for winning funding presentations next month.

The Nov. 3 IdeaFunding event is a part of the Tenwest Festival that is co-led by Startup Tucson and the University of Arizona Center for Innovation (UACI). At the event, the finalists will present their pitches — and the five additional teams will be presenting in front of a live audience.

The companies have already been honing their pitch skills over the past two months during the competition’s first two rounds. During that time they received training and mentorship from both Startup Tucson and UACI.

Organizers said the finalists were selected from the IdeaFunding semifinals on Oct. 5-6, with judges made up of local community leaders making selections based on merit.

Event organizers said they selected 25 companies to mark IdeaFunding’s 25th anniversary as part of southern Arizona’s entrepreneurial landscape. They said it is the region’s largest and longest entrepreneurial conference and pitch competition.

The main-stage companies will be competing for the biggest money prize at the event. The grand prize will be $25,000 in funding, and the second-place prize will be $5,000 in cash and a year of incubation programming and space at UACI valued at $10,000.

The five main-stage presenters include the following companies:

1. Divine Hair Goods: Divine Hair Goods specialize in salon products that make the salon experience better for the client and the stylist. Their flagship product, the Speedee Cap, cuts drying time in half, and allows the stylist to increase the capacity of their salon.

2. Fraqtals Innovations: Fraqtals is the iPhone of screen-printing machines. It’s an innovation to the world’s most commonly used apparel printing process. Fraqtals sells speed, simplicity and efficiency to brand makers, print shops and crafters.

3. Imanyco: Imanyco is a real-time transcription app to help deaf people with group conversations. This app transcribes and separates multiple speakers’ voices in real-time. The same audio file allows a deaf person to easily follow along with the natural flow of speech during conversations.

4. MindReady: MindReady provides sport psychology coaching and education for athletes. By combining the world's best coaches with athletes, parents, practitioners, and sports industry leaders, we're creating a better environment for developing young athletes

5. Orgo: Orgo is developing technology to enable disparate groups of people to rapidly unite, share information across system boundaries, and work together to solve common problems.

The finalists come from across southern Arizona, with some of their inventions coming from UArizona. They were divided into four vertical stages within the technology, consumer products, bio/life sciences and social impacts categories. The finalists will be competing in four rooms based on the categories and are aiming to win $2,500 cash prizes in each category.

The finalists, listed by category, are the following:

Tech:

Consumer:

Bio/Life Sciences:

Impact:

Startup Tucson is a nonprofit organization that works to enhance entrepreneurship. The UACI is a startup incubator network working throughout southern Arizona that has served hundreds of companies and thousands of entrepreneurs over the past two decades.