Last day for Central Coast TechPitch
Today is the last day for Central Coast entrepreneurs to sign up for the third annual TechPitch in San Luis Obispo.
The event will be held Oct. 23 from 3-8 p.m. At the Madonna Expo Center. To be eligible, entrepreneurs need to have a San Luis Obispo or North Santa Barbara county-based firm in the seed or startup phase, meaning it hasn’t raised more than $2 million in investment and doesn’t have annual revenue of more than $1 million.
Finalists will be selected and will hone their pitch before the event, where they will make their business case to a panel of experts and investors. The winner will secure a spot at a Tech Coast Angels pitch event in Ventura in November.
This year’s competition marks an unprecedented coming together of nearly every technology, business, economic development and higher education organization on the Central Coast. The hosts are the following: the Cal Poly Small Business Development Center for Innovation and Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship, Softec, the Economic Vitality Corp. and the Business & Entrepreneurship Center at Cuesta College.
“We’ve been trying to give birth to it, in a sense, and make it a sustainable annual event. It’s gaining momentum,” said organizer Thea Chase.
This year’s event comes as technology businesses of every size on the Central Coast have thrived. In recent years, two Cal Poly student startups, Punch’d and Grappple, have been acquired by Silicon Valley firms. Meanwhile, the area’s larger players – Mindbody Online, Rosetta and Shopatron – have all received new investments and grown past 100 employees.
“We’ve gotten to this critical mass that is now building on itself,” Chase said. “We weren’t keeping our young people here. That’s been a big push among a number of companies. We have a great workforce that can come out of Cal Poly, and we can have a great startup community come out of Cal Poly.”
To sign up for the event, visit www.techpitch.org.
