If you’re a startup seeking opportunities to get funded, educated or connected, startup competitions are a great resource.
Vator has been holding its own competitions, using VatorX, to find and filter for the best startups. We’ve had some very successful and notable winners in the past that have gone on to raise big funding rounds including Thumbtack, DogVacay, Pokitdok, Grovo, Udemy and Apartment List, to name a few.
Anyone can list their program as VatorX is one of the most comprehensive listing guides to startup competitions, challenges, accelerators and programs. Click here to list your program!
As part of our weekly series, we’ll look at top competitions with big cash prizes, as well as competitions that have teed up the most promising startups, to finding popular startup competitions you need to know about.
Here are some of the startup competitions that are focused on the healthcare space:
Description: “In response to highly successful events in over the past three years, Insight Product Development and MATTER are co-hosting the fourth annual HealthTECH Summit on October 27th, 2016. This year our team of judges will select ten leading early stage medical device and digital health startup finalists from the Midwest to compete for $35,000 in cash and prizes.”
Prize: A $20,500 first prize, a $10,500 second, and the third place winner earns $4,000. Six months free membership at MATTER.
Previous winners: IntuiTap Medical, Portela Soni Medical, PSYONIC
Description: “OneStart is the world’s largest life sciences and healthcare startup accelerator program – welcoming ideas focused on the improvement of human health including; therapeutics, diagnostics, software, devices, research tools, and more.
Our focus is it to cultivate early-stage entrepreneurship among young and disruptive healthcare innovators and to that end we limit the participation of applicants to 35 years old or younger.”
Prize: The Grand Prize for OneStart Americas is $150,000, and £100,000 for OneStart Europe. Both prizes are non-dilutive and come with free lab space and extensive follow-on mentoring.
Previous winners: Captain T Cell, InBrace, Keregen, Ligadon
Description: “At MedCity INVEST Pitch Perfect Contest, promising startup companies, offering innovative approaches or trying to solve some of the biggest problems in healthcare will pitch to investors LIVE. Participating biopharma, diagnostics, medical device, and digital health startups have been pre-selected by a panel of venture capitalists and other investors. Startups will have four minutes to present after which judging VCs will have five minutes to pepper them with questions about their strategy and business plans during MedCity INVEST.”
Prize: Not specified
Previous winners: First competition May 17-18
Description: “Ahead of Super Bowl LI, the National Football League (NFL), in collaboration with the Texas Medical Center (TMC), is calling on innovators to share their solutions to help advance the game of football and the safety of its players.”
Prize: In addition to the opportunity to pitch in front of NFL team owners and executives and other invitees from the NFL, the Houston Super Bowl Host Committee and the TMC, the winning team from each theme received a $50,000 check from the NFL, two tickets to Super Bowl LI and acceptance into the Texas Medical Center Accelerator (TMCx).
Previous winners: GoRout, Mobile Virtual Player, Windpact
Description: “At GIANT, we believe tomorrow’s solutions to our health problems lie with today’s ideas. This is why we are launching the Beanstalks – a competition for entrepreneurs and companies with innovative and novel ideas related to healthcare.”
Prize: Cash prizes, up to £15,000 worth of legal support and up to £25,000 of clinical advisory support
Previous winners: CortiCare, IDEABATIC, MedEXO Robotics
Description: “Unitus Seed Fund, India’s leading impact venture fund investing in early-stage startups innovating for the masses, today announced the launch of the fourth edition of its StartHealth competition – a nationwide challenge to find, mentor and fund startups that are driving accessible and affordable tech-driven healthcare solutions for India’s low-income population.”
Prize: A cash prize of INR 6 lakhs and potential access of up to 4 crore of additional funding and investmen
Previous winners: UE LifeSciences, Module Innovations, OmiX Labs
Description: “We believe drivers of change come from new ideas and new startups! And we believe today’s startups are driving the digital revolution that will create better health care for the future.
We’re looking for startups building products and services that are helping to make consumers become the CEOs of their own health or assist care providers in caring for their patients remotely, or revamping the way healthcare is being paid for, and generally technology that’s helping to make sense of the massive amounts of data emerging.”
Prize: A Surf Air one month membership for 4; $10k in engineering work, courtesy Stratpoint; complimentary bookkeeping from Scrubbed; a video of your presentation; a bottle of Bread and Butter wine; an Apple iPad Mini, courtesy Health Wildcatters; Plus sit-down meetings with Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, GE Ventures, Maveron, Canaan Partners, McKesson Ventures, Xfund, Vator Investment Club, DFJ, Subtraction Capital, advsr.fund, Maven.
Previous winners: Iris Plans, Blumio, Lighthouse, Bloom Technologies, Luminate Health, Privail
(Image source: live.ft.com)
