Montreal’s Invivo.AI took home the Best of the Fest $100,000 Pitch Prize at Startupfest on Friday.
Invivo.AI is targeting the pharmaceutical industry, which the company said has a 40 percent failure rate in drug development due to the difficulty of identifying compounds with unfavorable toxicity profiles before conducting clinical trials. The platform aggregates data across a combination of public, private, and academic databases to distinguish between toxic and non-toxic small molecule drugs.
“Between FounderFuel Demo Day, the Fundica Roadshow Finale, and Startupfest, last week was pretty incredible for Invivo.AI,” said Daniel Cohen, CEO and co-founder of Invivo.AI. “Winning the $100k prize from Startupfest will unlock a lot for us in terms of next steps – we’ll be able to initiate our research collaboration so that we can validate our models in the lab and publish in peer-reviewed journal, and also begin to onboard new team members. We’re super excited for the future!”
8/ Thanks to @tomwilliams and all participating angels for granting us the $100k prize! Congrats to @ptelio and the @Startupfest crew on an incredible festival. pic.twitter.com/ZqBpEpj66n
— invivo.ai (@invivo_ai) July 16, 2018
While the $100,000 pitch prize is the highlight of the festival, the Startupfest pitch portion has grown with the event. New additions like onstage pitches for Cannabis, AI, and Fintech have put the spotlight on Canada’s growing industries.
The other pitch winners include:
Best Onstage Pitch: Project Sucseed, which is building hydroponic systems to tackle food insecurity.
Best Onstage Pitch – Startupfest Version Francaise: Agorize Canada, an innovation challenge platform.
Best Onstage Pitch – CannabisFest: Blühen Solutions, which is developing and manufacturing a portable dosing device for medicine.
Best Onstage Pitch – AIFest: Motorleaf, which helps greenhouses predict their harvest.
CBC Media Pitch: The Mindful Scholar, a personal assistant for mindfulness.
Next36 Young Entrepreneur Award: Healthbridge, a cultural consulting service to help health practitioners reach non-English speakers.
NextAI: ShoofPing, targets ecommerce eyewear brands to develop virtual try-on services.
Diagram Ventures FinTech Award: Liscena, automates damage recognition, repair estimation, and claims triage for auto insurance companies.
Grandmothers’ Choice Award (Backed by EY): Locketgo, which provides locker rentals at events. This winner takes a package of services from Ernst & Young, and a 14-night stay at Startup Embassy in Silicon Valley.
Startup World Championships: ICM Hub, builds conversational AI for airlines