ASB Winners: Charu Thomas and Sarthak Srinivas of Oculogx
If you missed the Atlanta Startup Battle in Georgia’s capitol city, you missed a five round survival of the fittest entrepreneurial battle. The grand prize? $100,000 seed money to grow their early stage startup and up-close-and-personal mentorship to further develop their offerings.
Founded by serial entrepreneurs and angel investors Allen Nance and Dr. Paul Judge, the third installment of the epic battle was the best place to be on a Thursday night. It was humorous with Allen hosting with pizzazz and charisma, entertaining as each judge an contestant made a grand entrance to their favorite rap song and most of all, groundbreaking with the level of intelligence brought forth by the city’s leading entrepreneurs.
ASB co-founder, Allen Nance
Held at the 15,000 square foot co-working space juggernaut, TechSquare Labs—hundreds of venture capitalists and techies turned out for a stage-side view of the carefully crafted, live products and services demos.
How Atlanta Startup Battle works:
Atlanta Startup Battle is the freshest and most unique pitch competition in Atlanta. With 100+ ideas and 2 days of competition, the top participants develop their ideas with seasoned mentors and present to investor judges, real VCs from Atlanta and Silicon Valley, all in an effort to help Atlanta build, scale, and fund the next generation of outstanding tech companies. Courtesy: www.atlantastartupbattle.com
After the rigorous applicant selection process, ten companies were selected to move forward with an all-day boot-camp style business training camp to strengthen their pitches in the hopes of moving to the final round. Those ten pitched again and were filtered down to five—and on to the main event.
The finalists were: Employtoy, OmniSpeech, Grubbly Farms, Oculogx and Helix AI. This year's judges and decision makers were: Sean Banks of TTV Capital, Dave Gould of TechOperators, David Hall of Revolution, Katie Schwartz of Crosslink Capital and Alan Taetle of Noro-Moseley.
Judges
Judges
Oculogx was triumphant with Sarthak Srinivas and Charu Thomas as their pitch team. From their website, “Oculogx is a tech startup located in the emerging city of Atlanta. We employ a B2B model, working in conjunction with other businesses to improve already existing networks. Through augmented reality, we create customized software solutions for clients in order to optimize the efficiency of their operations.”
Like in most other long-term competitions, camaraderie was formed among the 5 finalists—and when the winners were announced, the other entrepreneurs congratulated them and bowed out gracefully.
Winners being crowned and congratulated by other contestants.
A rooftop celebration kicked off immediately afterwards. Guests, investors, contestants and the winners alike enjoyed the Atlanta skyline, food, drinks and great music to close out the evening.
ASB co-founder, Dr. Paul Judge
The 2 previous competition winners (Fraudscope and Cinchapi) were on-site to welcome the new ASB alum to the family.
A quarterly event, the next installment is set for 3 months from now. For more information on this round’s winner or to apply for the next round, visit: www.atlantastartupbattle.com