Florida Venture Forum has selected nineteen presenting companies to present at its 15th annual Florida Early Stage Capital Conference and eight of them are from Southeast Florida.
All three counties – Miami, Broward and Palm Beach – are all represented!
Giovanni Punzo
Giovanni Punzo, Founder & CEO of Streann Media, a Miami-based streaming platform disrupting the media economy won third place and $20,000 back in 2016.
“We were looking for introduction to the top early stage investors in South Florida and the Early Stage Capital Conference did exactly that. It put us on the map and from the conference we met New World Angels, Deep Work Capital that then became our investors into the journey,” said Gio. “The rest is history we have millions of people touching our technologies in 141 counties.”
The selected presenting companies for October 11 – 12, 2022 from Southeast Florida are:
- CERA Software, Inc., Davie (https://www.ceraapp.com), CERA-Critical Event Response Applications is a visual response platform for Public Safety to move quickly in crisis, command personnel from multiple agencies, and apply rapid reporting to meet objectives to save lives. They are solving the chaos. CERA is designed by First Responders for the boots on the ground.
- EVQLV, Surfside (https://evqlv.com/), the company uses machine learning to replicate how the immune system generates antibodies and they digitally transform the failure-prone process of converting an antibody into a drug. The result is an incredibly scalable technology that produces high quality antibodies at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional methods. In the lab, their AI-designed antibodies have already shown a success rate more than 10,000 times better than conventional antibody discovery.
- Flo Ops, Boca Raton (https://www.flo-ops.com), the company features a student assistant app that merges the academic and nonacademic community to improve student engagement and outcome.
- Intelligent Observation, Inc., Miami (https://www.intelobserve.com), the company helps healthcare facilities reduce Healthcare Acquired Infections (HAI’s) and their associated costs. Their patented, hand hygiene monitoring system provides facilities with an accurate and cost effective way to monitor and improve hand hygiene compliance and reduce infections and associated costs.
- Modern Trials Inc., Miami (https://www.moderntrials.com/), the company partners with healthcare organizations and leverages electronic healthcare data to identify patients in need of advanced treatment options, and match them with appropriate clinical trial opportunities in a patient-first and HIPAA-compliant manner. Warm handoffs are used to refer qualifying patients to contract research organizations for trial enrollment on a subscription + fee-for-service basis and ongoing support is provided to patients through trial participation. In doing so, Modern Trials extends the ability of healthcare organizations and physicians to offer the most cutting-edge treatments available, they bring potentially lifesaving therapeutics to patients in need and they help their customers, life science organizations, save $billions by filling their clinical trials with more representative samples faster and cheaper than they can do it themselves, reducing time-to-market for new therapeutics
- MRGN, Pembroke Pines (https://www.mrgn.ai/), the company is the business intelligence platform for small businesses, serving as a crystal ball into their finances and operations, and helping them mitigate future risks by leveraging big data and Machine Learning
- Nebulai, Miami (https://www.nebulai.com/), the company is the first Decentralized Solutions & Talent Marketplace in the world allowing companies to simplify and disintermediate the technology contracting of solutions and talent.
The conference will be conducted concurrently with the 13th annual 2022 Statewide Collegiate Startup Competition, attracting the “best of the best” in collegiate competitors from 11 of Florida’s leading innovation-focused colleges and universities.
Ben Patz
“We received incredible applications from throughout the country and were able to select a truly diverse set of interesting early stage companies. Attendees will be intrigued by companies with offerings that range from state of the art molecular diagnostic systems to innovative AML/KYC technology,” said Ben Patz, managing partner of DeepWork Capital and chair of the Early Stage Conference selection committee.
In addition to the opportunity to present to Florida’s leading venture investors, eligible companies will be considered for cash awards totaling $100,000, distributed between early stage and collegiate startup stage companies, provided by Space Florida. To date, past Early Stage Conference presenters have attracted over $600 million in equity funding.
Rhys Williams
Pre-registered conference attendees are also invited to register for a workshop covering “Key Attributes of Successful Entrepreneurs: Resources, Strategies, & Behaviors,” led by instructor/speaker/angel investor, Rhys L. Williams JD MBA.
Rhys has been involved in every aspect of new company formation and development, and is a co-founder of New World Angels, one of Florida’s most active angel groups, former Managing Director and Associate Vice President – Research at Florida Atlantic University’s Tech Runway . The workshop is from 2:00 P.M. – 5:00 P.M. on October 11th followed by an opening reception and a pizza party.
The Florida Venture Forum is Florida’s largest statewide support organization for investors and entrepreneurs, helping companies with headquarters, operations or supply chain in Florida connect with sources of capital from across the country. Since 1984 over 1600 companies have presented at Forum events and have gone on to raise upwards of $16B in equity capital and contribute well over that amount in total economic value to Florida. Visit http://www.flventure.org