Import.io and Placemeter win main Pitch 2013 awards
London company Import.io and New York’s Placemeter were announced as the Later Stage Company and the Early Stage Company award winners respectively at the Pitch 2013 presented by Box competition at the Dublin Web Summit yesterday.
The winners were chosen from a shortlist of 150 finalists after two days of intense pitching in front of thousands of people including the world’s foremost technology leaders and prospective investors.
Import.io employs 16 people in its London headquarters and in its office in San Francisco. The company’s stated mission is to structure the web and make web data available to everyone.
“We are focused on growing our company and it means a lot to us to win an international competition like this,” said co-founder Andrew Fogg. “My co-founders David and Matt and the entire team will be thrilled with this recognition of their efforts.”
Placemeter was founded in New York last year and employs six people. Placemeter works by automatically extracting measurable data from live video streams. The company’s computer vision technology is able to count how many people are walking by, calculate how heavy traffic is and determine what is happening at the location in view.
“This is a great recognition of our project which is very ambitious and validates what we are trying to do, which is to change the way the community interacts,” said co-founder Alexandre Winter.
“The Pitch competition is a fantastic opportunity for start-ups, not only thanks to the significant investment the winner receives but also the chance it gives to all finalists to pitch their idea to some of the most influential people in the global tech sector,” said Dublin Web Summit founder, Paddy Cosgrave. “It’s a win-win situation. The standard of finalists was truly amazing and we can’t wait to see where these guys are in 12 months’ time.”
This year’s Pitch competition saw entries from over 90 countries including Kenya, Bangladesh and Peru. The entries were then shortlisted to just 150 early stage companies and seed companies and then invited to the Dublin Web Summit to pitch their idea live. The United States led the way with 16 competing start-ups while Ireland was well represented with 10.