4th Annual Forward Thinker Award Recap

Looking back on our 4th annual Forward Thinker Award!

It’s been 2 weeks since our 4th annual Forward Thinker Award pitch competition, and we couldn’t be happier with how it went. With a record number of applications this year, the quality was stronger than ever. This year, we were able to offer some exciting prizes on top of the $30K in cash thanks to sponsorships from AWS, HubSpot, and Trend Micro, making it our most competitive pitch-off yet!

Not only did we have a record number of applicants this year, but we were also impressed with the level of quality of each of the applications. This year was truly our most competitive yet. We had companies focused on all sorts of industries, including Health & Wellness, HRTech, EdTech, and Software. These industries have seen an acceleration due to the pandemic, where we saw new technologies that are designed to address a post-COVID world, whatever that ends up looking like.

It was an extremely tough decision to pick only 4 finalists, but each of these finalists demonstrated 3 common themes that made them stand out from the rest of the applicants. Each finalist demonstrated the vision for their company clearly, emphasized the importance of the data they’re gathering, and articulated the why behind what they’re building.

Winners

Because of the quality of the 4 finalists, this was one of the hardest decisions for the judges to choose 2 winners. Each finalist presented their company clearly and answered some extremely tough questions from our panel of judges. The first-place winner was Seshie, an online marketplace for virtual team building activities, who won $20K in cash in addition to the prizes from our sponsors.

The second-place winner was Claira, who is working on rewiring the hiring process for middle-skilled workers, which won $10K in cash in addition to the prizes from our sponsors.

The remaining finalists, SnapShyft and Vidaly, didn’t walk away empty-handed, where both got some prizes from our sponsors.

Thank You!!!

Our Forward Thinker Award is our favorite event of the year because we get to feature some amazing startups, give away some prizes, and bring our community together to have some fun. On behalf of the entire Trend Forward team, we’d like to say thank you to everyone who made this event possible, especially all of the applicants and our sponsors; AWS, HubSpot, and Trend Micro. Thank you to our wonderful host Allia Mohamed, our terrific judges Nancy Wang, Brandon Greer, Raazi Imam, as well as the entire West Peek Productions team. We truly couldn’t have done this event without the support from everyone involved.

If you didn’t get a chance to attend the competition live, you can watch all of the pitches on YouTube using this link!