5 finalists announced for Make It in Brooklyn pitch competition

Who will be the next big startup out of Brooklyn? On the night of Wednesday, March 21, the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership will host its own Shark Tank–style pitch competition featuring five Brooklyn startups.

Each quarter the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership organizes one of these competitions, judged by leaders in the Brooklyn tech and VC world. Startups have two minutes to pitch their startups and then five minutes to answer questions from the judges. The winning startup receives a $5,000 prize and the attention of the judges.

Previous winners have a pretty dang good track record. Sightworthy, which won in 2016, is a platform where brands can shop for video content creators and editors for marketing and branding videos. Last year it was accepted into the Snap Inc. and R/GA venture accelerator for startups focusing on video content. We listed the Sightworthy as one of the top 20 Brooklyn startups in our 2017 realLIST.

Another 2016 winner was Propel, which makes an app called FreshEBT. FreshEBT allows users to check the balance of their monthly food stamp allocation, a function which had been hard to do priorly. The company raised $4 million in 2017, from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and the rapper Nas. We named it as our No. 5 startup in Brooklyn for 2018 earlier this year.

This month’s competition’s theme is Smart Cities. The judges are:

• Jeremy Goldberg, Deputy CTO, NYCx, City of New York, Mayor’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer
• Shaina Horowitz, ‎Urban Tech Hub Director, New Lab
• Miriam Roure, Program Director, URBAN-X
• Craig Wilson, General Manager, Digital Future Lab, NYU Tandon School of Engineering
• Jacob Yormak, Partner, Story Ventures

The startups competing are:

• Bixby, a property management app
• CARMERA, a 3D-mapping startup for autonomous vehicles
• GoKid, an app to organize carpools
• Hylas, a kitchen appliance to turn food waste to energy
• NGEMS, a location device for use in emergency situations

And finally, and perhaps actually most excitingly, the host of the pitch competition will be yours truly, Technical.ly Brooklyn’s very own lead reporter, Tyler Woods. If you come, say hi!

Tickets are $5 and include beer from Sixpoint Brewery and noodles from Yaso Tangbao.