Mountain View, CA, May 18, 2019. Silicon Valley Open Doors Technology Investment Conference (SVOD) made it home this week for a variety of ventures in the areas of Machine Learning, BigData, VR, Enterprise Software, SaaS, Consumer Internet, EdTech, FinTech, and Social Impact. 40 startups presented their business ideas in front of over 200 venture capitalists, individual angels, and corporate investing funds. Start-ups represented 20 countries: USA, Israel, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, France, Germany, United Kingdom, India, Peru, Chile, Estonia, Latvia, Kazakhstan, Spain, Philippines, Poland, Finland, Croatia, and Canada.
This year, SVOD turned 15 (years). Here is how Michael Fertik, Partner of Heroic Ventures and the moderator of one of the investor panels, summarized SVOD achievements in one phrase: “Everybody knows now that Silicon Valley is a part of global ecosystem, but not everybody would have said it in the same way 15 years ago. So you, guys, were pioneering even inside the Silicon Valley and what was new is now obvious. And it’s impressive! You were 15 years ahead of the game!”
Our shrewd panel of judges carefully reviewed more than 1000 applications in the areas of VR, Enterprise software, SaaS, Consumer Internet, EdTech, FinTech, Machine Learning, Big Data, and Social Impact only to pick a few most promising. Having sustained a rigorous selection process, the finalists spectacularly stood out demonstrating truly disruptive ideas, perfect product-market fit, passionate teams and utmost readiness to raise funds.
The 26 winning start-ups are coming from all over the World: USA, Europe, South America, Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Asia.
The winner of the pitch competition is OffWorld, AI-Powered industrial robotic workforce.
HD Medical, EKG-enabled Intelligent Stethoscope for Cardiac Care, was the first runner-up.
Abagy, Efficiency of industrial robots in small series production, was the second runner-up.
The social impact award was given to AntiLand, Anonymous Chat Rooms, Talk Therapy.
The Audience Awards went to ArtClever, Online Arts Education Platform.
For the 15th year in a row SVOD brought together famous venture capitalists (Ira Ehrenpreis, DBL Partners, Ursheet Parikh, Mayfield Capital, Christopher Rogers, Lumia Capital, Rim Guleri, Sierra Ventures, Steve Krausz and Jacques Benkoski, US Venture Partners, Ashmeet Sidana, Engineering Capital, Michael Fertik, Heroic Ventures, Edith Yeung, Proof of Capital, and many other terrific investors and angels, successful entrepreneurs (Greg Kidd, Mike Sandler, Alex Furman, David Gorodyansky), extraordinary thought-leaders from Stanford University (Laura Carstensen, Oussama Khatib, Ge Wang, Michal Kosinski), and founders from around the world. Celebrity presenters and keynote speakers passionately shared their wisdom and experience with the audience.
