Meet the finalists for TiEcon Florida’s pitch competition

Eight Florida-based startups will showcase their companies at a pitch competition at TiEcon Florida next month.

The finalists for the competition are all early-stage, post-revenue companies and represent a wide variety of industries, from health tech to marketing and advertising tech to virtual reality. Five of the companies are based in the Tampa Bay area, with the rest hailing from south Florida and the east coast.

The finalists are:

Expedite: The company’s on-demand platform connects attorneys and paralegals with legal support services. Based in Dunedin, Expedite recently announced expansion plans for more than a dozen additional markets in 2019. CEO Eve Barrett was among the women entrepreneurs recently featured at the Synapse Summit.

Guest Box: The company curates luxury essentials and high-quality extras for Airbnb guests.  Shuchi Vyas founded the company, which is based in Tampa and New York.

Immertec: The Tampa company has a real-time 3D virtual reality training platform and just launched a national pilot with Johnson & Johnson. Immertec also will be one of the presenting companies for the Florida Venture Forum. Erik Maltais is CEO.

iSOCRATES: iSOCRATES is the leading end-to-end provider of programmatic resource planning and execution, servicing publishers, marketers, agencies and their suppliers.  The company recently relocated to St. Petersburg and plans to hire 10 people this year. William “Bill” Lederer is chairman and CEO.

Kugadi: The Miami-based company has technology to manage a mobile workforce, with a focus on contract security guards, their managers and their operations.

Metasense Analytics: The company is an analytics firm for healthcare. Based in Tampa, it was one of the participants in Pitch Madness at the Synapse Summit.

Pizzamico: The Daytona Beach company creates online ordering systems for restaurants.

Sanvis Health: The company’s platform helps senior living operators and caregivers deliver personalized care to residents.

Immertec, iSocrates and Sanvis Health are all part of the Tampa Bay Wave Post-Accelerator cohort, while Guestbox was in Wave’s inaugural TechDiversity Accelerator.  Expedite, Immertec and iSocrates also are on PitchLyst, which features online profiles of young companies.

Judges for the TiEcon Florida pitch competition are: Lakshmi Shenoy, CEO of Embarc Collective; Conrad Szymanski, an active angel investor affiliated with Tech Operators in Atlanta; and Diana LaTour, operating partner for LFE Capital. The moderator is Kathy Chiu, managing partner of Deepwork Capital.

The top three startups will get a chance to pitch for funding at a subsequent TiE Tampa Angel Forum. They also will have their elevator pitch shared with TiE Global Angels, an alliance of more than 3,000 charter members and investors in more than 60 TiE chapters in 17 countries.

TiEcon Florida is the annual conference held by TiE Tampa Bay, a nonprofit that fosters entrepreneurship. This year’s event will be Feb. 16 at the USF Alumni Association. More information and registration is here.