Vendeve, the Halifax startup that helps women find a market for their skills, has won six months in Silicon Valley to help develop its business.

The company was the winner Wednesday in the Funding Roadshow pitching competition hosted by Fundica at the Innovacorp Enterprise Centre in Halifax. Eleven companies pitched at the event. The winner was Vendeve and its model for encouraging businesswomen to become early adopters for each other.

“The sharing economy is changing everything so the two-sided marketplace is exploding,” Vendeve Founder and CEO Katelyn Bourgoin told the gathered participants yesterday.

Fundica is a for profit corporation that aims to link entrepreneurs with funders. Its Funding Roadshow is holding events in 11 Canadian cities, and one company from each event will be chosen to work in northern California for half a year.

As the winner of the Halifax event, Vendeve will receive six months of office space in Silicon Valley as well as return air fare to San Francisco. It will also be allowed to pitch at an event in the Bay area attended by local venture capital investors.

Formerly called Swapskis, Vendeve offers a marketplace for women in service industries, allowing them to charge money or to swap their services with other people on the site.

The Halifax startup began last year with the mission of helping women barter their skills with one another, so they could build up resumés and networks and eventually charge real cash for their services. Last summer, Bourgoin realized a better way to generate revenue for the business would be to be a cash-based market place for women’s services.

So she and her colleagues changed the business model to allow more cash-based transactions. But the fact that the word “swap” was in the company name confused the business message to potential investors and the broader community. So they changed the name. The bartering of services is still an integral part of the business, but there is a much greater emphasis on cash transactions.

Bourgoin said following the competition that her company now has 1800 signups from 14 countries and that the conversion rate among visitors to the site has risen from 4 percent to 15 percent. It also has commitments of about $300,000 in equity funding.

“We’re seeing faster growth than Esty, TaskRabbit and Elance saw in their first year,” said Bourgoin, referring to comparable companies.