They Made It To The Finish Line: VeloCity Venture Fund Winners!

We’ve been leading up to this for a while: yesterday afternoon at the University of Waterloo’s Student Life Centre, we finally awarded 4 startups $25,000 each!

How did we get here?

We had 66 applications to VVF this term – over double the number of applications from winter term. More importantly, the quality of the applications increased dramatically! We narrowed the list of applications down to 18 startups which were interviewed. From there, 10 finalists were chosen to pitch at VVF yesterday.

We had some high quality pitches – our judges, Tim Ellis, CEO at the Accelerator Centre, Mike Stork, Philanthropist and Karamdeep Nijjar, VC Associate at iNovia Capital, had an even tougher decision to make than we thought. Ultimately, only 4 companies could win VVF.

The four winners of this term’s VeloCity Venture Fund are:

Matinée – founded by Gareth MacLeod and Ross Robinson, a company focused on building an online distribution platform for indie film directors and producers similar to the Shopify model ($30 monthly fee + percentage of movie revenue).

SciGit – founded by Eric Ho, a long time VeloCity resident, and Hanson Wang – a company focused on improving document management and revision control for scientists and academics who write papers based on git. The GitHub for non-technies.

Flockwire – founded by Max Brodie, a company focused on bridging the generational gap between those on Facebook and their grandparents by automatically creating “stories” through pictures on your Facebook account (or other online platforms like Flickr) and printing them out to mail to grandparents.

Weston Expressions – founded by Douglas Lusted, an incredible 19 year old entrepreneur who is building a new advertising platform focused on bringing ads to escalator handrails.

It was a fantastic event. The quality of pitches were incredible, the audience was awesome and our Twitter wall was blowing up. We even got #uwVVF trending on Twitter in Canada!

From those tweets, Tobiasz won our awesome VeloCity bike,

Thank you everyone for coming out, pitching, supporting and tweeting. We love the incredible engagement we keep getting from uWaterloo and the Waterloo startup community!

Keep following along for more updates!

@UWVeloCity

(And as always, the pictures from Spring 2012’s VeloCity Venture Fund are up on Facebook!)