5 finalists announced for Make It in Brooklyn Pitch Contest

Brooklyn boasts several huge, successful startups: Kickstarter, Etsy, Vice. But who will be the next to join their ranks?
On Sept. 28, the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership will host the 2016 Make It in Brooklyn Innovation Summit, a day of talks, panels and networking, capped off by a pitch competition for $5,000, and perhaps more importantly, the respect and advice of some of Brooklyn’s tech elite.
The finalists for the pitch competition were announced yesterday and they are:

• Smallhold – A subscription-based commercial grow unit for your restaurants and grocery stores.
• Brooklyn Delhi – Maker of small-batch achaar (pronounced uh-char), aka “Indian pickle,” a relish made from vegetables and fruits, chilies, spices and oil.
• Svrround – A startup that offers cloud-based solutions to build and deploy social live 360 experiences. Svrround offers scalable content solutions for media companies looking for interactive brand experiences, streamed performances, or regular live 360 shows.
• KaChing – A financial learning tool for kids that helps kids set and meet savings goals and invest their own money into the stock market.
• JustFix – An online record of building violation and resources to address housing issues.

The panel judges will be Charlie O’Donnell, founder and principal of Brooklyn’s largest venture capital firm, Brooklyn Bridge Ventures; Jay Reno, who won a previous Make It in BK pitch competition with his company, Happy, which was recently acquired; Joana Vicente, the director of the Made in NY Media Center; Steve Kuyan of NYU Tandon School of Engineering; and DK Smith, a marketing and branding consultant.
Technical.ly’s own EIC, Zack Seward, will emcee the event.
We don’t know much about most of these startups, except for JustFix, which is no stranger to winning competitions. Last December, JustFix won NYC BigApps in the Affordable Housing category. We had a chance to speak with the founders, Dan Kass and Georges Clement.
“Basically it’s a tool to empower tenants to get resolution in complaints with their landlords,” Clement explained at BigApps. “It gives them an opportunity to gather evidence which includes documenting and taking photos, and we have an algorithm which spits out a plan of action for them. This helps so that when they actually go to housing court.”
Sounds good. We’ll see what the other startups have in store come Sept. 28.