Contrary Texas Pitch Competition Recap!
Last Wednesday on March 10th, Luis Clague, Manu Gorrepati, Leah Hamman, and I hosted a statewide startup pitch competition for student builders and investors across all Texas universities. We’re all student Venture Partners at Contrary, a national venture fund focused on early-career talent that’s backed by the founders of Tesla, Reddit, Facebook, and more.
After ~1.5 months of planning, marketing, and sourcing, we were proud to host 8 finalist pitches, selected from an application pool of over 35 different Texas student startups, spanning over 11 universities. All the companies applied, prepared, and performed across major rescheduling, a chaotic COVID spring semester, and a once-in-a-century Texas winter storm.
A huge congratulations to first place winner Koda Health (Rice), second place winner Octoshop (UT Austin), and audience favorite winner EmGenisys (Texas Tech). And, a huge shoutout to our finalists, who are all building something big and made decisions really tough.
More on these startups and each outstanding finalist below.
We are also incredibly grateful to our judges, who are leading investors and founders across Texas,
for spending close to 2 hours with us and giving so much valuable feedback and Q&A to our founders and audience. A very special shoutout to Abby Albright, a Texas native and founding partner at WXRFund, for also sponsoring an additional cash prize!
Marlow Nickell: GroceryTV
Zaz Floreani: Next Coast
JD Weinstein: Oracle
Abby Albright: WXRFund
Will Robbins: Contrary
Organizing this event was a major learning experience, and we had a lot of fun contributing to Texas’ vibrant entrepreneurship ecosystem. There’s a true depth to student builders here, and we’re excited to be a part of it.
Now, here are the companies:
Koda Health (1st Place)
Koda Health uses AI to guide difficult conversations in healthcare, starting with proactive end-of-life care planning. Physician discomfort with end-of-life care conversations has resulted in an epidemic of futile and unwanted care that costs payors and health systems over $100 billion annually in avoidable health costs. Koda’s data-driven, personalized, digital platform ensures patients receive the care that is important to them, while curbing the financial burden in the last years of life.
- Website: www.kodahealthcare.com
- Founders: Tatiana Fofanova and Katelin Cherry
- School: Rice University
Octoshop (2nd Place)
OctoShop is a browser extension that helps users shop better online by fighting price and inventory disparities. Octoshop’s key features include price comparisons, price drop alerts, and back in stock alerts to give access to rich data to make informed decisions.
- Website: www.instok.org/octoshop
- Founders: Rithwik Pattikonda, Darshan Bhatta, and Sriram Hariharan
- School: UT Austin
EmGenisys (Audience Favorite)
EmGenisys improves animal reproduction and promote sustainability and animal welfare through advancements in assisted reproductive technologies (“ARTs”). They’ve developed the world’s most comprehensive embryo evaluation system to improve pregnancy outcomes of ARTs in livestock. EmGenisys has also built a computer vision technique to evaluate real-time cellular activity in bovine embryos as a practical and affordable approach to evaluate embryo health in the lab or chute side.
- Founders: Cara Wessels Wells, PhD
- School: Texas Tech University
Politiq (Finalist)
Politiq is a digital platform connecting individuals, political professionals, and local political campaigns. By matching talented, interested citizens with job opportunities and providing campaigns a platform to scale operations, Politiq hopes to propel the next generation of grassroots civic engagement.
- Website: www.politiq.app
- Founders: Ashish Dave and Aayush Dave
- School: UT Austin
Bookit Sports (Finalist)
Bookit Sports is a sports betting social media platform that connects the global sports betting community on one centralized hub. Bookit Sports is revolutionizing the way sports bettors engage with each other, consume content, and establish a credibility-based community.
- Website: www.bookitsports.app
- Founders: Trent Attyah
- School: Texas Christian University
Clocr (Finalist)
Clocr offers an all-in-one digital legacy planning and disbursement platform, allowing individuals to assign beneficiaries for all of their online accounts, securely store and share important documents, and pass on messages and stories to loved ones. Clocr offers many services on one platform that make it easy for people to manage important information and pass on their digital legacy.
- Website: www.clocr.com
- Founders: Apoorva Chintala
- School: UT Austin
Bonsai (Finalist)
Bonsai is an AI-driven customer service tool that reduces agents’ workload by answering common and repetitive questions. Bonsai offers 3 key features: real time ticket triaging, instant answer generation, and streamlined support. They help customers get answers quicker!
- Website: www.bonsai-support.com
- Founders: Jatin Vinay Kumar
- School: UT Austin
Sweetspot (Finalist)
Sweetspot is an “eat now, pay later” platform that seeks to transform the way people purchase food. By integrating features such as merchant & platform specific rewards and a fun, social way to send food & rewards to friends as gifts, Sweetspot hopes to reinvigorate local businesses and provide consumers with a rewarding and cheap method to order food post COVID.
- Website: www.sweetspot.so
- Founders: Philip Kung, Andrew Arkhipov, William Chao, and Gerardo Salazar
- School: UT Austin
As mentioned, Contrary is an active, early-stage fund that both helps great founders build and helps build ecosystems conducive to great founders. Our teams of Venture Partners consistently put on similar events across the country. Stay in touch at www.twitter.com/contrarycapital.
At the Texas level, we plan to continue meeting and helping founders at UT Austin / Rice AND also budding ecosystems at other great Texas universities. If interested in helping organize something similar, contacting the companies above, or contacting any of the 35+ startups that applied for our competition, don’t hesitate to reach out at anuj@contrarycap.com.
Thank you for reading, and let’s keep building Texas into an entrepreneurship giant. Hook ‘em!
Anuj Jajoo is a student at UT Austin and a Venture Partner at Contrary. He’s also a Venture Partner and Portfolio Management Lead at Genesis, UT Austin’s startup fund.
