We’re sorry to have kept you waiting. We needed a minute to recover from the awesomeness that has been Silicon Valley Week and Global Demo Day.
By now, most of you are familiar with how our HACKcelerator works (if you’re not, check out the full story here). Last week, all 21 of our HACKcelerator finalists flew in from all around the globe into San Francisco for a week-long immersion into the Bay Area tech scene, participate in intense pitch training, and finally, pitch at Global Demo Day .
They spent much of the week with the AngelHack team and a revolving door of mentors, working on finalizing their landing pages, preparing their pitches (seriously, we spent hours every day on this) and checking out the city. It was intense, and packed with work, but bonds between teams were being built. It was beautiful to see.
GDD took place last Thursday at the Brava Theater in San Francisco. We had over a hundred investors through the door, and to keep with hackathon traditions, an amazing panel of judges which included: Kat Manalac & Michael Siebel from Y Combinator, Erik Moore from Base VC, Joseph Wei from Lab360, Jed Christiansen & Jenny Fielding from TechStars, Sean Hughes from HP, Ed Spiegel from 500 Startups, Ben Parr from Dominate Fund, Jeff Tannenbaum from Blue Run Ventures, and of course Greg McAllister from Capital One.
Our HACKcelerator teams, which we’ve boasted as our best batch YET from the get-go, definitely proved themselves worthy of the title on stage. From the judges to the audience, everyone was ecstatic with how far along these startups have come.
Love it! Stop talking, take my money! :). Well done! https://t.co/8QVAPdKGRU
— dtalach (@dtalach) October 30, 2015
Really enjoyed watching @AngelHack‘s #GDemoDay15. Soooo many awesome startups and great presentations for the future of tech to come — Shelby Williams (@shelbsimone) October 30, 2015
Bug Fix in Real Time & Instant Deploy = Mind Blow! Blam! https://t.co/lPGL6i5IwH
— dtalach (@dtalach) October 30, 2015
As with all of our demo days, at the end of the team pitches, the judges deliberated on which startup would be declared Global Champion based on the following four criteria: product, traction, impact, and team.
This year’s Global Champions were Plain Exchange from Hong Kong. As our most diverse team, Plain Exchange is tackling the inconveniences of currency exchange by introducing the first peer to peer exchange platform.
But Plain Exchange didn’t just walk out with a crown, a trophy, and bragging rights. Nor were they the only ones to walk out with victory. This year, our partners and sponsors had a number of exciting prizes for the teams:
- 500 Startups offered one guaranteed interview spot, which also went to Plain Exchange from Hong Kong.
- TechStars offered a guaranteed interview for their favorite IoT team which was QuantiScience from Montreal.
- Barclays’ FinTech Accelerator powered by TechStars also offered a guaranteed interview for their favorite FinTech team which was Plain Exchange from Hong Kong.
- Y Combinator offered 4 teams office hours which were given to Social Capital from San Francisco, Blink from Austin, Slimspace from DC, and AtumSoft from Cincinnati.
- HP offered a $10,000 no-strings-attached investment to the team who they saw best used their API’s. This team was Wrappup from Dubai.
- Lab360 offered up to $100,000 investment as well as free co-working space in their incubator to their favorite hardware team. Joseph Wei was so impressed with the hardware teams that he ended up picking two teams for the prize: Airquail from Silicon Valley and AtumSoft from Cincinnati.
All in all, everyone walked out with a GREAT time which was evident from the on-stage turn up, and of course, the after party at Startup Bash 😉
Interested in partnerships and investments? Contact milan@angelhack.com
