Startup World Cup of Arizona

Congratulations to our Top 10 Arizona Startups that have been selected to pitch at the first ever Startup World Cup of Arizona! We received a ton of high quality and innovative pitch decks from inspiring founders and teams. We enjoyed learning about each and every company, and were inspired by so many in this process! Trimming down the applicants to get to the Top 10 was incredibly difficult, so if you were not selected we encourage you to keep innovating & apply next year! In addition to the incredible investors, mentors, and experienced entrepreneurs in and outside of our Arizona Entrepreneurial Ecosystem, we are grateful to the Edson Entrepreneurship + Innovation Institute at Arizona State University for collaborating with Startup World Cup of Arizona to deploy a standardized #VentureReadiness criteria selection model to determine each startup's readiness for Venture Capital funding. Without further ado, here are our Top 10 Startups that have been selected to pitch on 9/27/2024 at Galvanize Inc- Phoenix. 1. Lotus Labs Inc 2. BreatheEV 3. EarthEn Energy 4. Morphos AI 5. Rayn Innovations 6. Protocol: Gemini (Waylucid) 7. Koko Ni 8. Legix 9. Beyond Silicon, Inc. 10. Warrior GMR Foundation (Elanah.ai) We will send an email to all with the details, and look forward to seeing you all live at the #FallTechTalentSummit on 9/27/2024 at Galvanize - Phoenix! Don't forget to register to attend! For tickets: https://lnkd.in/dTmifu74 🌵 🚀 Freeway StartupAZ Arizona Commerce Authority Greater Phoenix Economic Council Ghani Consulting Arizona State University Pegasus Tech Ventures CLA (CliftonLarsonAllen) Vensure Employer Solutions Southwest Mission Acceleration Center (MAC) Long Realty Jasper Associates PHX Ventures Next Frontier Capital Venture Madness InvestLink Social Arizona Entrepreneurs Venture Café Phoenix Aaron Bare Center For Entrepreneurial Innovation (CEI) Arizona Venture Development Corporation Journey Ventures Monsoon Venture Fund AZ-VC Grayhawk Capital Thunderbird School of Global Management PHX FWD Phoenix Suns

We’re still riding the excitement of ASU Demo Day! 👏 This celebration of innovation brought together top ASU-affiliated ventures delivering investor-style pitches across a variety of industries. Nearly $200,000 in funding and support was awarded to student founders and their ventures. Congratulations to all the winners, and thank you to the founders, ventures, judges, students, staff and faculty who made this event exceptional. Stay tuned for more highlights! 🚀 #ASUDemoDay #Entrepreneurship #Innovation #ASU

Founders - here is how venture capital works. 🧠 Understanding how a VC firm operates is a great way to increase your chances of getting funded. Let's break it down: → 𝗟𝗶𝗺𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗻𝗲𝗿𝘀 (𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗩𝗖 𝗳𝘂𝗻𝗱) They are the source of capital. Without them, VCs don’t exist, that's why they earn (most of) the fund's returns. They are institutional investor, insurance company, large corporates, pension funds, or family offices. → 𝗚𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗻𝗲𝗿 (𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁𝘂𝗽) They’re the ones you think of when you say “VC". Their job? → allocate capital (i.e. investing in startups like yours) → 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗳𝗲𝗲 GPs take ~2% of the total fund per year to finance salaries and operations. For example: → Fund life: 5-years → Fund size: $100M → Management fee: 2% → Management fee per year: $2M → Investable amount: $100M-($2M*5) = $90M → 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗿𝗿𝘆 𝗮𝘀 𝗮 𝘄𝗮𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗶𝘇𝗲 𝗚𝗣𝘀 Carry (~20%) is a bonus for returns above a certain threshold. LPs expect at least 12% yearly returns. If GPs beat that, they get 20% of the excess. → 𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗶𝘁 𝗺𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀? VCs are betting on you to make the math work. If you can show them how you’ll help them hit those returns, you'll get funding. 📍 For more startup stories, follow me @Hugo Rauch 📩 Subscribe to my newsletter at the link below my name

We're thrilled to announce our new partnership with Archive Intel 🎉 This collaboration allows Archive Intel to monitor and archive financial firms' activity on Stocktwits, ensuring SEC compliance and providing a seamless solution for secure communication oversight. Together, we’re building trust, managing risk, and driving innovation for modern finance 🤝 “Stocktwits has a large audience of professional investors and registered financial advisors. With this partnership with Archive Intel, we’re thrilled to reduce the compliance burden and make it easier for investment professionals to share content on Stocktwits.” - Shiv Sharma, President and COO of Stocktwits.

Day 2 #PHXStartupweek : Thrilled to have Greg Head Sean Lindy Chris Chumley PHX Ventures Monsoon Venture Fund Scaling Point So much information on funding in #Arizona! 🚀 #yesphx

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🚀 Pitch us to win $100,000! 🚀 On November 14th, three great veteran founders will pitch their startups. One will win a $100,000 investment from The Veteran Fund 🇺🇸 I'm honored to judge the competition alongside Tim Hsia and Jason Calacanis, prolific angel investor and host of the All In Podcast. * Applications close tomorrow, November 3rd, so please tag any great veteran-led startups in the comments. * Also be sure to register and join hundreds of VCs, angel investors, and entrepreneurs for the virtual event: http://veteran.fund/pitch CC: Ryan Micheletti Justin Nahama Lisa Sutton Gunderson

New biased/fake news dataset out!! (multi-modal) Excited to be a part of one of the leading AI fairness initiatives, run by the Vector Institute and Shaina Raza, PhD: News Media Bias Plus (docs: https://lnkd.in/eMDyZeCb). We've been benchmarking a bunch of neat models in anticipation for the publication of our NMB+ dataset (dataset: https://lnkd.in/ecKRYMe9, blog post: https://lnkd.in/ebcjYvxh). In our benchmarks, we train/fine-tune models (on NMB+) to classify image + text pairs as biased or fair. Paper and models will be out soon. ----------- Side note: This was a really cool project. We trained multiple small and large VLMs on the NMB+ dataset, but the winner was a fine-tuned Llama 3.2 11B Vision Instruct QLoRA (all benchmarks: https://lnkd.in/eVgxURHe). Learned a lot about data fusion and alignment techniques with NLP and CV models. Here's the notebook if you're thinking about fine-tuning llama 3.2 vision for multi-modality: https://lnkd.in/e3zR2JvN

Excited to announce BreatheEV is a Semifinalist for the Arizona Innovation Challenge, one of the largest startup competitions in the country! Grateful for our team, our investors and advsiors, and our customers that have helped us get here 👊

Honored & grateful to have been one of the founders to represent Arizona at TECH WEEK by a16z yesterday. 🙏 Thank you to the Arizona Commerce Authority & Melissa Lamson for the opportunity and for recognizing the impact Arizona is making in the startup ecosystem. For those building in industries revolving around atoms, not just bits—the other 90% of the economy rooted in traditional industries—AZ is where you want to be. From advanced manufacturing to logistics, real estate, hospitality and beyond, it’s hard to beat a place that offers not only a supportive business environment but also the space and resources to scale real-world change through bottom lines businesses. 💪🌵 CC Tim Wenzel Max Bregman Mark Naufel Ayushi Patel #techweek #foudnerjourney #phoenixaz #siliconvalley