Pitch Events
On the Way Up:
Elevator Pitch Events
Connecting Investors with WiV Founders
Sponsored by Co-Headliners
Amazon Alexa Startups and Women 2.0
Thursday, September 30 | 11:00am – 12:30pm PDT
Look up your time zone →
Female-founded companies raised $3.31 billion in 2020, or 2.2% of the year’s total sum, compared to $3.5 billion and 2.6% in 2019. Ouch. Still not over 3%. (Yahoo, 2021). We’d love to support that changing.
Expand your community. Meet the women launching emerging voice tech. Join the conversation.
Meet our Sponsors!
Meet the founders!
Have you ever asked, “Am I ready to pitch?”
These Office Hours are for you!
Format: Like an office hours in college, drop by to talk to us in an informal way virtually.
Connect with other founders, learn about pitching & talk shop. Learn more about our pitch events, receive support, community, inspiration, motivation!
Sponsored By:
NEW! Office Hours for Founders + Investors
Join us for a friendly discussion about your startup, founding story, and pitching for the 75th or 1st time!
Your Hosts:
Dr. Joan Palmiter Bajorek
Award-Winning Leader | CEO & Founder, Women in Voice
Elizabeth Scallon
Award-Winning Startup and Innovation Ecosystem Builder, Advisor & Speaker | Amazon Alexa Startups
Office Hours (Virtual):
#1: Tuesday, August 3rd, 11am PDT:
Office Hours!
#2: Friday, August 13, 10am PDT:
Friday the 13th, get your jitters out!
#3: Thursday, September 16th, 11am PDT:
Fall in Love with Entrepreneurship
#4: Friday October 22nd, 11am PDT:
Pitching – it’s not so spooky [RSVP]
You’re invited – pull up a chair.
RSVP to join us!
Meet the founders pitching LIVE on September 30!
Lisnen Inc.
Featured Founder: Eyra Abraham
Lisnen is for hearing loss individuals who want notifications to sounds requiring their immediate attention. Lisnen app applies sound recognition technology. We are interested in expanding to voice for other use cases in the future.
As a startup founder and CEO of Lisnen, Eyra is driving a new category of adaptive tech for those with a hearing loss. Being an emerging leader contributing to accessible digital products, she’s won the top 100 Black Women to Watch in Canada award and recently, a member of the Accessibility Standards Canada Technical Committee for Plain Language, and was acknowledged as one of the 25 Women to Watch: Succeeding in a COVID World.
Overall, her mission is to change the perception of women, minorities, and those with physical challenges to one of strength. Everyone has talents, skills, and unique experiences that are valuable and necessary for our future. A diverse world is stronger together.
Imanyco
Featured Founder: Saïda Florexil
Imanyco helps deaf people enjoy group conversations without wondering who is saying what.
Imanyco is all about inclusivity and accessibility. Their product supports a community that is often left behind and those who experience a lot of challenges in daily life due to their invisible disability (deafness).
Saïda is passionate about improving communication accessibility for the deaf and hard of hearing community.
Blink Date Inc
Featured Co-Founder: Taly Matiteyahu
Swiped-based dating apps put looks first. Blink uses audio to put personality first.
Dating should be about who we are, not just what we look like. Enough of the endless swiping and empty messaging. Blink allows members to move beyond looks-first, superficial approach to meeting potential partners. We do so using a unique two part matching process that relies on two important factors – chemistry through conversation and physical attraction.
Taly and Laura are both women with intersectional backgrounds on a mission to build a dating space where a person’s personality, values, sense of humor, passions, and quirks are what set them apart — not their looks, name, or fashion choices. They embrace the challenges of figuring out what systemic biases exist in various verticals and challenging them by leveraging technology, machine learning, and relationship and behavioral psychology. By constantly questioning the status quo, we get closer each day to seeing the type of world we wish to see.
Blink Date Inc
Featured Co-Founder: Laura Ciccone
Swiped-based dating apps put looks first. Blink uses audio to put personality first.
Dating should be about who we are, not just what we look like. Enough of the endless swiping and empty messaging. Blink allows members to move beyond looks-first, superficial approach to meeting potential partners. We do so using a unique two part matching process that relies on two important factors – chemistry through conversation and physical attraction.
Taly and Laura are both women with intersectional backgrounds on a mission to build a dating space where a person’s personality, values, sense of humor, passions, and quirks are what set them apart — not their looks, name, or fashion choices. They embrace the challenges of figuring out what systemic biases exist in various verticals and challenging them by leveraging technology, machine learning, and relationship and behavioral psychology. By constantly questioning the status quo, we get closer each day to seeing the type of world we wish to see.
Learning Matters
Featured Founder: Gowri Mahesh
Problem: Poor learning outcomes for students in India.
Solution: Use autonomous voice technology/AI!
Voice-assisted education with artificial intelligence is the new way of learning. Join thousands of educators and education leaders who are making this choice.
From communicative English to educational pedagogy, Learn anything, anytime, anywhere.
Voice-assisted technology is an effective teacher for many reasons:
1. Learning by listening is natural. Voice-assisted technology uses this fundamental learning
ability.
2. Voice-assisted technology can repeat lessons, converse, provide feedback and correct mistakes repeatedly.
3. Learners can speak freely and boldly without fear of being judged for mistakes.
4. All that the learner needs is the voice-assisted device containing the learning modules.
Learning Matters is one of the front runners using autonomous voice technology and AI in *education in India*. Efficacy of the product and efficient implementation makes our product stand out. The problem that we are solving has been existing for the last few decades. We are passionate about solving it, and our team has capability to solve it. Funding now to scale is the biggest enabler that we need.
Toucan App Inc
Featured Founder: Jane Buescher
Peer support is well established, yet lacking in innovation. Toucan is 1:1 digital peer support.
Toucan was created to help us feel more connected, understood, and heard. The benefits of speaking to another person are well documented, but existing social and professional support options are leaving many people unfulfilled. In a world where we are all constantly buried in our social media and text messages, we want to revitalize the audio call and give you a meaningful way to open up to someone facing a similar life stage or event. We want to give you a chance to reciprocate and lend an ear to someone in need of an outlet.
Our product is very focused on the whole person – while most of traditional peer support is siloed by use case (you go one place for support as a parent, another place for addiction, a third resource for career support), Toucan brings all categories into one platform. Users choose 3 categories that they identify with so they can bring this intersectionality to their Huddle conversations.
As a team, the CEO and Co-founder is female and we aim to bring diversity and inclusion into our future hiring processes.
At Toucan it is all about the person and the categories they relate to in this moment. Current Huddle categories include Parent to Young Children, Startup Founder, and COVID-19.
We’re delighted to host elevator pitch events for Women in Voice Founders to connect with investors and the public at large.
These events build community, connection, and networking opportunities to get feedback, implicit and explicit mentorship, and shape a supportive ecosystem of funding mechanisms for founders with diverse perspectives.
These events serve the WiV Mission by Celebrating, Amplifying, Connecting, and Empowering women in voice tech.
Female-founded companies raised $3.31 billion in 2020, or 2.2% of the year’s total sum, compared to $3.5 billion and 2.6% in 2019. Ouch. Still not over 3%. (Yahoo, 2021). We’d love to support that changing.
Each event in this 4-part series will have WiV Founders pitch, a short Q&A, and then a larger discussion and feedback round.
Keywords: investor, founder, funding, startup, VC, angel, money, pitch, deck, scaling, money, team, build, venture capital, equity
More about this event
Who is invited? You! These events are open to the public and educational. Venture Capitalists and Angel Investors will be in attendance, but we there is no expectation of investment at these events.
Emcee: Dr. Joan Palmiter Bajorek, Founder of WiV will be our emcee of the June 17th event.
Our goal: facilitate relationships, community, and mentorship between investors and underestimated founders!
Event Flow: VCs, Angel Investors, and Founders will gather to hear a few pre-selected pitches. After each pitch, you’ll have the chance to ask the Founder questions, and offer feedback verbally. We will also have a feedback form for you to submit digitally.
Benefits of attending:
- Support diverse founders
- Build relationships across industries
- Stay on the cutting edge of voice and voice-adjacent technology startups
- Learn more about Women in Voice community members
This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice.
How to Participate
- Grab a FREE ticket to attend! You’ll receive the virtual meeting link from us later.
- If you are a Founder, apply to Pitch live at a future event in 2021! Applications are FREE!
Note: Submissions for our September event are open!
Please apply to be considered for the rest of the series!
Women in Voice Event Sponsor
Special thanks to Amazon Alexa Startups for sponsoring this event series!
Women in Voice Event Sponsor
Special thanks to Women 2.0 for sponsoring our September event!!
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