The madness has concluded, at least for now, after 22 entrepreneurs pitched their companies at Venture Madness 2021 on Thursday and judges selected winners in five categories.
Venture Madness is the longest running pitch contest in Arizona. This year category winners took home $10,000 each after winning the judges' favor. Here are this year’s winners:
- Consumer category: HomeKey, a Phoenix company that makes an intelligent home maintenance management system, currently integrating with new homebuilders.
- Growth category: Aesthetics Biomedical, a Phoenix company that develops and sells medical devices (including a radio frequency microneedling product) to the aesthetics industry.
- Medical category: SaiOx, a Tucson company that developed a patent pending breathing technology for people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, or COPD.
- Software as a Service (SaaS) category: Better Agency, a Mesa company that makes customer relationship management software for independent insurance agents.
- Tech category: OZZI, a Phoenix company that makes a real-time, mobile safety application for users in the U.S. military and federal government.
In addition to these five category winners, attendees at this year’s Venture Madness selected Rubitection as the 2021 People’s Choice award winner, a title that came with a $2,500 prize. Rubitection was founded by academics and entrepreneurs from the East Coast and the company makes a device for early detection of dermatological conditions that lead to bedsores.
The name Venture Madness is a play on the name of a famous, springtime college basketball tournament and historically the event has been held in March. Last year, VM 2020 happened in February, before the Covid-19 pandemic was widely spreading in Arizona, and this year's event was delayed because of the pandemic.
On Thursday evening Andy Lombard, head of innovation and venture development at the Arizona Commerce Authority and chair of next year’s event, said that Venture Madness 2022 will take place on March 2-3, taking the event back to its regular springtime standing.
Inside the event
This year’s pitch contest took place at the Phoenix Biomedical Campus downtown, inside the Virginia G. Piper Auditorium on Van Buren Ave.
It was a day-long affair with the 22 presenting companies taking five minutes each to pitch their ventures and then fielding questions from the judges for an additional five minutes. Check out some photos from the Venture Madness event in the gallery below:
Venture Madness 2021
In the past, pitching would happen simultaneously on multiple stages so the audience would inevitably miss out on some of the presentations. But this year, all five categories presented on the same stage over the course of the day.
Ticket sales maxed out, with scores of founders, supporters, startup incubators, bankers and investors filling the auditorium to listen to each pitch.
This year part of the Venture Madness appeal, especially for out-of-state venture capitalists, was that the event butted up against the Unmet Conference, which is happening on Friday, Oct. 8.
The Unmet Conference is centered on the idea that there is an unmet capital need for startups in many parts of the country outside of coastal tech hubs. The conference was started by Denver-based Stout Street Capital and about 75 venture capital firms were expected at this year's Arizona event, the vast majority of which came in from other states.
Chaining multiple events together in the same week inspired some to make a weeklong trip to the Valley as opposed to coming in for a single day or simply skipping things all together.
Boosters in and around Arizona’s startup ecosystem continually talk about how drastically things have changed in the past five to 10 years, with deal fundings and exits picking up momentum, and how the next five to ten will hopefully put Arizona into an even higher status among tech hubs in the U.S.
Venture Madness is ostensibly a pitch contest, but in reality all participants gain something from the experience; Entrepreneurs work with mentors to hone their pitches, get exposure to investors and pick up new ideas and connections to help their business flourish, even if they don’t struggle to squeeze a gargantuan check into their car at the end of the night.
Editor's Note: The Phoenix Business Journal was a media sponsor for Venture Madness 2021.
