Judges crowned three startups that helm from around America's Rust Belt region as the victors of the inaugural RustBuilt Startup Showdown, one of several dozen events that took place throughout Pittsburgh as part of xchangeinnovation week from XchangePgh.
The competition's judges, who included venture capitalists from BlueTree Capital, FarOut Ventures Grouse Ridge Capital and others, determined that ecommerce data platform Orita.ai, ecommerce marketing providers XENA Intelligence and aircraft maintenance and software provider AireExpert had the best pitches out of the 10 startup founders who participated during an event that was held at AlphaLab Gear in East Liberty Thursday night.
Founders had just three minutes to pitch their startup to an audience of about 200 people and a panel of judges, the latter of which had two additional minutes per startup to ask questions about the startup's business model. Winners received positive and critical feedback on their pitches from the judges as well.
"It was just a really great valuation for what we've been building," Daniel Brady, CEO of Orita.ai, said. "It's really great to get all this feedback from a lot of really smart people."
The free event served as one of the signature offerings put on over the past week by XchangePgh, an organization that's looking to champion all of the tech and nontech innovation occurring in Pittsburgh and in a manner that is more inclusive to all residents. It also built on a growing desire of XchangePgh's organizers to spread the type of synergy that has taken place locally over the past few days to other regions like Buffalo and Rochester, New York or Cincinnati and Columbus, Ohio.
"Today was a really cool punctuation point for xchangeinnovation," Adam Paulisick, one of the co-founders and co-organizers of XchangePgh, said. "The goal of today was simple: Make sure everyone realizes that there's active and available capital for great ideas all the time, that we as a region are stronger together and we're not in direct competition with each other. In fact, this 'rising tide floats all boats' is the whole spirit of xchangeinnovation week we're trying to have."
