Starting in July, SME and startup news and opinion platform SmartCompany began welcoming entries to the Pitch, a new startup competition held in partnership with Amazon Web Services, The Commons and Pin Payments.
Early-stage startups from across Australia sent short, three-slide decks to win $100,000 in AWS credits and a Pin Payments mentorship session.
This week, SmartCompany named ten shortlisted candidates, who will face off next week in Sydney to take home the prize. The shortlist is impressive in its variety, with innovative solutions in the world of medicine, lifestyle management, AI compliance, advertising technology, gift giving, health and well-being, organising, fashion trading, hospitality and travel all making an appearance.
The event is an exciting opportunity for the early-stage startup community to connect and share ideas. Launching a startup from scratch can be a lonely endeavour, so the chance to get together after the isolation of the last couple of years, was one of the program’s additional appeals.
Big names in the VC and startup world will be there to judge and choose one winner on the night. Alex Khor of AfterWork Ventures and Kylie Frazer of Flying Fox Ventures join Adrian Osman, co-founder of food ordering and menu app Mr Yum, John Kearney, head of startups at Amazon Web Services, and Chris Dahl, co-CEO at Pin Payments on the expert panel. The event itself will be hosted by Women Love Tech’s very own Robyn Foyster, no stranger to the startup game herself.
Who will win? All will be revealed next Thursday night. Here are the shortlisted candidates:
Gravy
Here’s a gift giving app with a difference. Instead of purchasing and sending items for one another, Gravy allows users to give their friends and family the gift of their time, through favours, skills and good deeds.
Melo
Melo helps families and households plan and streamline their lives and share the burden of their daily productivity. Current solutions of a similar nature, the Melo team says, “exacerbate the problem, reinforcing the primary carer as project manager.”
Like project management dashboards and apps in the workplace, it consists of a calendar, logs tasks and manages huddles.
Zipr
Zipr wants to redefine fashion resale. Poor search functions, sizing difficulty and item condition stand in the way of a satisfying user experience. According to Forbes, 97 per cent of Gen Z use social media to shop. This presents rich opportunities for the app that gets it right. Zipr aims to ‘unite local fashionistas on a global scale’, lets them post videos to share their style, manage offers in-app and organise exchanges.
KomplyAi
KomplyAi is set up to help governments and enterprises manage their move to AI technologies in a compliant manner. It contains a library of AI use cases, has information on different geographic markets and their unique controls, a risk assessment tool that makes recommendations, and compiles a number of other tools to help with upcoming AI legislations.
LUMOS
With its IoT-enabled LED smart bags, LUMOS lets businesses put the gig economy to work for their marketing and advertising. The bags can serve dynamic ad material and LUMOS also tracks campaign performance and geographic performance through its platform.
Metaboly
Metaboly hopes to reduce the impact of type 2 diabetes by helping pations combine and manage their clinical management tools with their diet and exercise goals, in the same style as a fitness app. Behavioural change is an effective way to live with type 2 diabetes, but experiences high levels of patient dropoff, which has a lot to do with current management plans being carried out on paper.
Grubalo
Grubalo helps bars, clubs and pubs promote their offers and events to patrons. For customers it’s the ‘Uber Eats of finding a pub’, helping to find the right place at the right time based on promotions and events users are interested in.
DeepMeds
This team of radiology, machine learning and business professionals is on a mission to reduce the amount of contrast agent used in medical imaging tests. Contrast agents are injected into the body to improve the quality of MRI images. According to DeepMeds, contrast agents represent the biggest consumable item expense in the radiology department. DeepMeds has found a way reduced the use of these by 80 percent.
Cya on the Road
Cya on the Road turns smartphones into tour guides. With audio guides, directions, maps, transport information, accommodation, dining and attraction options, it is already available in more than 90 countries.
Borlen
Borlen lets people and businesses make money off their unused items by hiring or lending. Users search, find and connect with lenders of the item they hope to hire, all facilitated through the app. According to AFR, the sharing economy is expected to be worth $7.96 billion in Australia and the peer-to-peer rental market is expected to hit $48.8 billion, according to Gumtree.
Get your free ticket: https://events.humanitix.com/the-pitch-smartcompany-aws-pin-payments-and-the-commons
Women Love Tech would like to thank Ben Ice, the Special Features Editor at SmartCompany, for this article.