Pitchfest showcases startup talent from the region
It has been a big couple of years for Santa Barbara-based Cadense. Since 2024, the footwear company has been off to the races, finally getting its product into the hands of some consumers and generating roughly $2.2 million in revenue last year.
Now, the company is even more in the spotlight in the Santa Barbara community — this coming after the company competed in and won the 2025 Pitchfest.
Hosted by Ventech, an emerging technology forum, the event featured four companies from the Central Coast battling it out in a Shark Tank-esque pitch competition. Hosted April 17, hundreds of members from the Santa Barbara community — from investors to business owners to curious parties — packed into the Cabrillo Pavilion.
“PitchFest 2025 was a huge success, with our most pre-event sales since 2017,” said Phil Carpenter, chair of the Ventech board via email.
“The energy level in the room was high, and one venture capitalist exclaimed, ‘Ventech is now the hot ticket!'”
Cadense, who won the judge’s vote, said they are expecting even bigger things this year after the win. The company makes shoes to revolutionize the way that people with walking disabilities experience movement.
“Winning here is a testament to our product. It’s a real solution for a problem that 12 million Americans have and we are very proud to be a part of this community,” Tyler Susko, the company’s CEO, said.
Susko added that the company is on pace to triple last year’s revenue mark and is also in the middle of closing a round, which is set to happen near the end of June.
“We are really excited for what is ahead of us,” Susko said.
Other companies that participated in PitchFest included: San Luis Obispo-based CastleLock Corporation, which actuallywon the audience vote and finished second place in the judge’s vote, Santa Barbara-based Vizualeyes and Santa Barbara-based Umi.
CastleLock Corporation, which will also be taking part in Cal Poly SLO’s annual AngelCon on May 1, is a company that specializes in gun safety, innovating the fastest from safe to ready-to-fire biometric safety device in the world for AR-15s/M4s.
CEO Shaun Tanaka, who delivered the pitch, said that in the United States, there are more firearms than people, and over half of those firearms are not properly secured. This could lead to accidental shootings, which is what happened to his friend, inspiring him to found the company.
“From that point, I have made it my life’s mission to solve it,” he said.
“And I think the solution for this problem is probably somewhere in the middle ground, which is fire safety.”
Umi is a meetup app that aims to reinvent the space. Founder and CEO MJ Morrison noted how when he first moved to the area two years ago, making friends was a very difficult process.
Umi is a market-based platform that helps people connect on the app and then find a business that they can partner with so that their newfound friends can explore their similar interests.
“We want to build a platform that really allows people to connect and build community effortlessly,” he said.
VizualEyes designs, manufactures, and markets stereoscopic 3D vision systems that are high-quality, innovative, easy to use, and affordable.
Founder and CEO Latifa McQuiggan said the company is currently targeting two markers, those being dentistry and industry.
“Our mission is to improve ergonomics and to advance care using digital intelligence,” she said.
“Our camera fits on any microscope, but our focus right now is dentistry.”
McQuiggan, who spent the last 20 years in the medical device space, including Santa Barbara-based TrueVision, added that dentists in the area who have tried it “loved it.”
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