MindTrace Technologies crowned as champion of inaugural Pittsburgh Inno Madness competition

After nearly 2,000 votes cast across four rounds of voting, the inaugural INNO MADNESS champion from Pittsburgh Inno's first-ever bracket-style competition can now be announced.

Having secured 69% of the 368 votes cast in the final round, MindTrace Technologies succeeded over runner-up Honeycomb Credit for the crowing title of INNO MADNESS champion. The victory for MindTrace — a health care spinout from Carnegie Mellon University that has developed a machine learning platform for neurosurgeons that aims to simulate surgical plans and predict a patient's potential cognitive outcome all before surgery even begins — is the result of three other back-to-back-to-back victories throughout the tournament's duration, obtaining about 1,000 votes from Pittsburgh Inno readers amid a competition that started out with 16 startup companies.

According to Max Sims, MindTrace's co-founder and CEO, it's the personal connections that the startup has made with others over the past few years that ultimately is what he thinks led to the startup's championship finish. The victory, he said, is also a testament to the continued impetus the startup is experiencing as it readies itself for outside investments and the upcoming Demo Day event from AlphaLab Health, the local health care-focused accelerator from Pittsburgh-based startup investment group Innovation Works and the Allegheny Health Network, which counts MindTrace and four other companies among the ranks of its current cohort.

"We are very grateful to our network for being engaged in this and willing to donate their time to vote for us; we've made a very concerted effort over the last two years to really build out not just our Pittsburgh network but our national health care network," Sims said. "For us, it's more wind in the sails heading into the Demo Day for AlphaLab, it's more wind in the sails heading into our pre-seed round and our seed round later this year. For a company that's spent zero dollars on marketing, I think for us this has been a lot of fun and definitely a tip of the hat to Honeycomb…for us to be at the same stage with them, in fact, I'm very thankful that they were a part of this with us and all the other teams."

Sims also said that this year's tournament and the excitement it brought with it could also serve as a sort of illustration of the broader accelerations that have been seen in Pittsburgh's budding startup ecosystem in recent months.

"Pittsburgh is really on an upswing right now and I think the city can feel that momentum in the startup community, in the startup ecosystem. I think in the health care niche that MindTrace sits within that we're feeling that as well," Sims said. "For us, it's been a fun ride and we look forward to the next one."

And while only one victor could be crowned, second place finisher and business crowdfunding platform Honeycomb Credit also spoke to the level of enjoyment the startup had by participating in this year's tournament, with its CEO and co-founder George Cook stating that Honeycomb had an all-hands Slack channel devoted to creating new ideas to drive its fans to participate in the poll.

"It was a lot of fun, the team had a really good time with it," Cook said. "It was a fun opportunity to take a step back. We're so in the weeds on a day-to-day basis of what Honeycomb is doing, it was fun to see ourselves up against 15 other amazing startups in Pittsburgh and realizing that the ecosystem here is growing so much and there's some really exciting stuff happening that I don't think about every day."

Pittsburgh Inno Madness was a bracket-style challenge where readers voted to advance companies based on one question: Who would you invest in? Its first of four total rounds of matchups began on March 1, and each round lasted for one week.

This year's tournament featured the following local startup companies, all of whom were selected to participate based on Pittsburgh Inno reader nominations, which were then narrowed down by Inno's editorial team: