The underdog took an L this week in Atlanta Inno's Round 2 of Tech Madness.
In Round 1, AGVoice, a mobile voice-interaction service designed for food and agriculture professionals, topped NFANT Labs, a startup that designs medical devices for infants that has raised $2.5 million in funding. But in Round 2, heavy hitter Trackter, which recently won the AgTech Conference of the South pitch competition, prevailed.
The second round of Atlanta Inno’s inaugural Tech Madness competition is officially over. What’s Tech Madness, you ask? It’s our reader-driven bracket competition in the spirit of March Madness highlighting some of the local startup scene’s biggest, brightest and most exciting technology companies.
During the month of March, 32 Atlanta-based startups will go head-to-head in the bracket and readers like you will decide who goes on to the next round.
It seems like the heavy weight champs finally caught up to them, but that's not to say there weren't' some close calls.
Flourish Software barely took with win from MailMosh, with only a 15 vote difference. Flock Safety took home the gold over Bark with just 41 votes. And 18 votes separated 2ULaundry's victory over Culture Greetings.
Our top vote receivers were OnPay, with a total of 259 votes, Crescendo, with 178 votes, and Flock Safety, with 182 votes.
Now, we're down to the Elite 8 of Tech Madness.
Flourish, a startup that provides software for cannabis farms, will face off with OnPay, a software company with a payroll platform for small businesses. Security startup Flock Safety, which monitors neighborhood safety through surveillance cameras and recently raised $10 million, will battle underdog food locator startup FoodFinder, created by a college student. B2C startups Crescendo and 2ULaundry will go head-to-head and PadSplit will challenge Trackter.
When voting, we want you to ask yourself this question: Who would you invest in? Whether you answer that question based on who you think would garner the highest return, the safest investment or which startup really reflects your mission in life is entirely up to you. The startups selected are private, venture-backed or bootstrapped businesses we seeded based on funding and other growth metrics.
Money rules the world, and since funding is our most accessible metric in the startup ecosystem, we used it to determine who would be included in the bracket. The matchups are completely random, with our 32 “teams” divided into four groups that represent Atlanta hip-hop, just for fun: The Migos, OutKast, Boyz N Da Hood and TLC.
The winning company of Tech Madness will win total bragging rights for the rest of the year, and maybe even another little prize to go with it.
The second round of Tech Madness ends Monday, March 25, at 11:59 p.m. Vote for your favorite companies then share with friends and colleagues to help us determine a winner.
