Tonight Tech.Co, along with IBM, .CO, and The Third Wave hosted our 7th annual Startup Night event. This is one of our biggest events of the year and it’s a night where we get to do what we truly love: helping early stage startups gain recognition and find a voice to help them succeed. Twenty five startups came down to Austin, TX to pitch their companies to a roomful of judges. At the annual Tech.Co SXSW Startup of the Year pitch competition, Cultivating Coders of Albuquerque, NM took home the Grand Prize title, and MentorMint of Los Angeles, CA was Runner Up.
MentorMint offers career mentoring from professionals that have the job you want. It provides an online marketplace connecting students to mentors for career coaching. Meanwhile, Cultivating Coders takes the coding bootcamp to rural, Tribal and unserved urban areas.
We also announced that Parihug was the winner of our Readers Choice poll for Tech.Co’s SXSW Startup of the Year. The company offers pairable teddy bears that let you hug someone from anywhere in the world.
All three winners will receive an invitation to Tech.Co’s global startup competition at this year’s Tech.Co Celebrate Conference. They’ll also receive the following prizes:
- AA Business Extra Points from American Airlines;
- Copies of Steve Case’s new book The Third Wave;
- Hosting credits for 12 months from IBM;
- Routers from Belkin; and
- An invitation to join Salesforce’s Salesforce for Startups.