After five rounds of close calls, landslides and upsets, we've got a winner for Tampa Bay Inno's second annual Tech Madness.
ReliaQuest, a cybersecurity firm based in Tampa, took the championship with more than 79% of the votes.
Much like the final, ReliaQuest dominated through the entire competition. In Round 2, it sped past Spirion by 4x the amount of votes. In Round 3, it garnered the most votes in the entire round and beat out Washlava by 108 votes. And it inched out Peerfit in the semifinals before taking the W.
Tech Madness' runner up was Spectrio, a Tampa-based tech-enabled end-to-end marketing company.
And just like throughout Tech Madness, ReliaQuest is a powerhouse in the region as well. Brian Murphy founded the company in 2007 and has grown to five offices across the world, most recently opening an office in London. The company also has a long history of giving back, including partnering with Junior Achievement, Embarc Collective and University of South Florida.
It's a big departure from its performance at Tampa Bay Inno's inaugural bracket, which cut ReliaQuest in the first round.
As a reminder, Tech Madness, is a friendly annual competition designed to shine a spotlight on 32 of the Tampa Bay's most interesting and exciting startups. The companies in the bracket were nominated by the community, and readers voted to advance the winner by picking the startups they’d most want to invest in.
Here's a look back at the second annual Tech Madness matchups:
