A panel of technology judges picked the final four startups in the Sacramento Kings Capitalize: Technology contest, which allows local innovation companies to compete in a pitching contest for $10,000 in cash.
The contenders range from very early revenue companies to some that have government contracts and one that has already raised $65 million in venture capital.
“The companies keep getting better every year,” said Monique Brown, managing director of the Growth Factory, a Rocklin startup accelerator program that assisted the Kings in the pitch competition.
The four finalists' pitches will be available on videos that go live on April 1 on the Kings Capitalize site.
The final four include (in alphabetical order):
- Birth By Us, a personalized pregnancy and postpartum app for Black women to improve birth outcomes.
- Plum Identity, which uses behavioral analytics to detect fraud in government benefit programs, without the use of personally identifiable information.
- Strived.io, a platform to augment teachers in measuring student aptitude.
- Unstructured, which provides the ability for large language models and artificial intelligence to access multiple formats and files and to sequester specific information. It has raised $65 million.
The Sacramento Kings started with an open call for contender companies earlier this year, and Kings ownership and employees pared that down to 16 contenders in early February. By Feb. 22, it was narrowed down again to eight companies, and those companies made their pitches this week at Golden 1 Center to a live audience of investors and executives.
The final winner, partly determined by fan voting, will be announced during Tech Night on April 11 at the Kings home game against the New Orleans Pelicans. In addition to the cash, and the cache, the winners get three years of access to Dialpad communication services. Dialpad Inc. and the city of Sacramento are sponsors of the contest.
Capitalize launched in 2016, and it has drawn hundreds of applicants from the Sacramento region.
