Lab4 and Xena Intelligence claim top pitch competition prizes at SAAS NORTH

An important tradition continued at the tenth-annual SAAS NORTH conference last week as founders pitched their hearts out in front of judges and an audience for a chance at thousands of dollars in prize money. 

“[This] was a celebration of these entrepreneurs who are driving innovation and powering our economy.”

SAAS NORTH featured thousands of people from Canada’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) and artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem taking in two days of keynotes, panels, and networking in downtown Ottawa’s Rogers Centre. In between Vidyard founder Michael Litt declaring SaaS to be “dead” and a Hot Tub Time Machine, this year’s conference handed out $310,000 in funding through its pitch competition. 

SheBoot, a national program for women-led, early-stage tech and tech-enabled companies, handed out $300,000 when it announced the winning investments of its sixth annual cohort on the BetaKit Keynote Stage.

The top prize of $150,000 went to Nifemi Oguntuase, the founder and CEO of Dartmouth-based Lab 4 Inc. The startup has developed an advanced mineral recovery technology that can extract the minerals from mining waste that would be traditionally considered too expensive to process. 

Mariia Zhuldybina, the CEO and co-founder of Montréal-based Traqc, received the second place, $100,000 investment. Traqc provides a quality control mechanism for electronics manufacturing. Finally, Ania Geerts, CEO and co-founder of event planning software Paloma, received the remaining $50,000.

“The SheBoot Grand Finale was a celebration of these entrepreneurs who are driving innovation and powering our economy, and of the SheBoot champions who continue to stand behind them, supporting their work, their vision, and their success,” the organization said in a LinkedIn post. 

Additionally, SAAS NORTH’s PitchFest returned this year featuring 23 finalists battling in front of an audience of SaaS investors and entrepreneurs, as well as a panel of judges that included NAventures principal James Povitz, BKR Capital general partner Isaac Olowolafe, Kanata Ventures investing partner Jennifer Renda, Graphite Ventures managing director Lance Laking, Sandpiper Ventures’ Andrea King, and Solink’s director of corporate programs Patrick White. 

After whittling down the finalists over a series of qualifying rounds, founders from companies like Construction Clock, Resiliocs, Serenity Vet, and Xena Intelligence participated in a final throwdown on the BetaKit Keynote stage. The competition concluded with a live audience poll and, based on the voting data displayed behind the stage, Xena Intelligence ran away with the $10,000 grand prize. SAAS NORTH emcee Manuela Bárcenas called Xena’s performance “one of the best pitches I’ve seen.”

Based in Louisville, Kentucky, Xena provides a unified sales intelligence platform to e-commerce merchants, combining sales tracking, ad optimization, and operations data from multiple platforms such as Walmart, Shopify, TikTok, and more. It also provides AI-powered analytics and marketing tools.

Xena founder and CEO Akhil Suresh Nair appears to be quite adept at pitch competitions, claiming on LinkedIn to have won over $1.6 million at pitch competitions like the Startup World Cup and Techstars. He can add another $10,000 to that. 

All images courtesy SaaS North.