The second round of Pittsburgh Inno Madness got even more intense than the first, with nearly every pairing hovering around an even split the day before Monday's close of the most-recent matchups.
But with less than three hours before that close, about 330 participants cast a vote out of the 776 total participants throughout the whole round, a figure that accounted for nearly 43% of all of those who participated in Round 2.
Upon further analysis of the vote counts, these last-minute participants actually accounted for a small but repeating fraction of individual users who were voting in this week's round when identified by their IP address and, per the contest rules, therefore had all of their votes stricken from the total count. This also occurred to any voter's votes that were cast more than once throughout the round, and while that also ended up occurring since the first day of voting, it did so at a much smaller and less impactful scale.
After removing these hundreds of votes cast by those who voted more than once in the last round, the actual winners for the second round of Pittsburgh Inno Madness are ready to be announced.
Advancing to the third and semi-final round are the following startup companies:
- Carnegie Foundry
- Honeycomb Credit
- MindTrace
- TouchWood Labs
The third round of voting begins now and continues until 6 p.m. on Monday, March 21. Readers can cast one vote per round. We'll open up voting round by round, ultimately crowning an INNO MADNESS winner on March 29. Be sure to be subscribed to the free and twice-weekly Pittsburgh Inno email newsletter, the Beat, to be up-to-date on the latest round results and future pairings.
Meet the Players in the third round (in alphabetical order):
Carnegie Foundry | robotics and AI venture studio in partnership with the National Robotics Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon University to commercialize innovative IP and advanced prototypes for new applications in industrial automation
Honeycomb Credit | small business loan crowdfunding platform where businesses can borrow funds from their own customers and fans
MindTrace | software developer creating tools that aid neurosurgeons in surgical planning through its machine learning platform, which claims to simulate surgical plans that can then predict a patient's potential cognitive outcome before surgery
TouchWood Labs | maker of a modular IoT unit that embeds into an assortment of materials that can then turn any surface into an interactive digital display
Vote in the third round here. Read contest rules here.
Did you miss the first round or need an Inno Madness refresher?
In summary, Inno Madness is a bracket-style challenge where readers vote to advance companies based on one question: Who would you invest in? Whether you believe in one mission or product slightly over the other or would prefer to back a more established company versus an early stage startup, how you answer that question is entirely up to you. The overall bracket is designed to shine a spotlight on 16 innovative, fast-growing local businesses.
This year's bracket was assembled based on reader nominations. Because this is the first year of Pittsburgh Inno Madness' launch, seeding was determined by alphabetical order out of the nominations Pittsburgh Inno's editorial team selected. Meet the participants below and read the contest rules here.
The goal of Inno Madness is to give a snapshot of some of the most promising tech companies in Pittsburgh. It is by no means a complete list of Pittsburgh's best startups, nor is it a list of the 16 most-funded startups in the region.
Instead, the bracket is meant to ideally represent the full breadth and diversity of the ecosystem. In the end, think of the bracket as just another fun look into some of the other local tech companies you need to know about in 2022.
