LaunchDal held its annual summer pitch-fest Tuesday night, showcasing 10 teams that graduated from its LaunchPad program.
LaunchDal is the innovation and entrepreneurship hub at Dalhousie University, offering such programs as Starting Lean and overseeing Canada’s Business Model Contest. Headed by Professor Mary Kilfoil, LaunchDal offers LaunchPad as a 10-week summer course, giving 10 teams $10,000 each in development funds.
Here is a brief description of the presenting companies at the LaunchPad Demo Day:
Coloursmith Labs is creating the world’s first contact lenses that mitigate colour blindness. By saturating colours, its lenses allow users to unlock a new level of beauty and utility in vision and to enjoy the experience of sight.
Tranquility Online is a Software-as-a-Service solution that makes getting help for anxiety affordable and accessible anytime and anywhere. Tranquility uses cognitive behavioural therapy, which is considered the gold standard in mental health treatment.
iLokol offers an e-commerce solution for small and medium enterprises, helping them to connect with local residents more efficiently. It aims to empower SMEs to change their marketing, sales and operation methods. In five months, it has booked 80 SMEs in Halifax as clients and aims to be in five cities by the end of the year.
Room Service is an online convenience store that delivers snacks, frozen food, ice cream, toiletries and other products throughout Halifax within 45 minutes. It now makes more than 500 deliveries a month, and aims to launch in Dartmouth this month.
Neuro Amel is building an automated frameless arm brace that will help stroke patients in the recovery of their upper limbs. This device is designed and built to be discreet, functional and elegant.
Kavi Systems works with the mining and drilling industries to uncover knowledge from rocks originating thousands of meters underground. Its data analytics platform saves customers time and money in making decisions.
IObIO is committed to providing cutting-edge tech to empower the research labs of the world. Experts in custom automation solutions, IObIO leverages decades of multidisciplinary experience to produce a portable, flexible, easy to configure, stand-alone data capturing system. It is designed to promote and facilitate novel R&D in hundreds of fields.
DeepSenseData.com works with its clients to provide advanced insights into influencer profiles within social media. It allows clients to understand influencer audiences by extracting key demographic, consumer and behavioural data points.
Podcast Atlantic is both a directory for Atlantic Canadian podcasts and a podcast production company. Through story-telling, Podcast Atlantic will help send this region’s stories to the world.
Aurea is creating human-centric wind energy technology for consumer and commercial markets with Shine and Flare. Shine is a smart, portable and lightweight wind turbine that charges USB devices while showing reduction in carbon footprint. Flare is a wind-energy system for high rise buildings that could make them carbon neutral if also paired with an energy storage system.
(Disclosure: Dal is a client of Entrevestor, and Aurea's Founder is the daughter of Entrevestor's owners.)