MTL NewTech wants to showcase the city’s up-and-coming tech startups

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To get the year off to a good start, MTL NewTech organized its first demo night of 2017 in early January at Shopify’s Montreal office. “We are very pleased to present five startups tonight,” announced Naoufel Testaouni, executive director of MTL NewTech. Each startup was invited to explain their concept in five minutes in front of a motley crowd of motivated entrepreneurs, engineers, journalists, investors, and supporters of the Montreal tech community.

The first to get started was perfiqt, a startup working with artificial intelligence in order to simplify personal finance. Users create an online profile so the application can draw up a financial portrait, and it’s all secured by a system of the same caliber as the banks use. “We’re moving from a physical branch to this online service,” explains Gene Khalyapin, founder and CEO of perfiqt. “This is the future of banking.” The statistics are then analyzed and in less than a few minutes, it’s possible to create a realistic budget and easily organize your finances. Leave hours of meetings to the financial professionals.

Next, dubdub took the stage in an energetic presentation, explaining how their apps allow users to create and share videos on social media and even buy featured products, all through a smartphone. The application, dubsuite, helps the neophyte director to design and distribute clips while dubcandy redirects consumers to Amazon, simultaneously generating revenue for the author. “Through dubcandy, we are able to achieve more in the percentage of commission, because affiliated revenue is being paid to the generator of the dubcandy video,” said Vincent Hoss-Desmarais at dubdub. Difficulty navigating through all these dubs? DubU demystifies them with a personalized service.

Tribal Buzz, for its part, helps brands communicate through audiovisual content directed at a targeted audience — this form of advertising is supposedly 10 times more engaging than others. “Video today is the profitable choice [in the marketing industry],” said Paul Blanchard of TribalBuzz. The user simply creates the video which is then edited in less than 72 hours, approved, and marketed by TribalBuzz.

After this was GetCastor’s turn to pitch. This application provides the ability to produce dashboards from continuously updated data, such as site visits, user registrations, meeting calendars, income, the stock market, or the weather. You then choose the widgets and the overall design of the dashboard that fits any type of screen.

Shopify had the final word, as the team presented the Plus version of their e-commerce platform. The software promises to reduce the costs of maintaining fast-growing, high-volume businesses in the cutting edge technology. “[Shopify Plus wants to change] how enterprise common software is envisioned, sold, implemented and supported,” said Sheena Brady from the Ottawa office.

The evening continued with networking. “Congratulations to the teams!” concluded Ilias Benjelloun of MTL NewTech. “We try to bring the community together and an evening like this shows us that we’ve succeeded.”

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Gabrielle Drouin

Gabrielle Drouin has completed a master’s degree in Literature specializing in Quebec’s contemporary dramaturgy at the University of Montreal. She worked as a journalist in Toronto, covering the news of its Franco-Ontarian community, and has been reporting on the Montreal startup tech ecosystem since 2016. She is currently the Communications advisor and community relations at HEC Montreal's entrepreneurship hub.

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