A record 461 entries were received from startups around the world, nearly twice as many as last year. The field has been narrowed to 30 finalists across 6 categories, each vying for cash, expert feedback and investor connections. Finalists include startups from the United States, Canada, Ireland, Singapore, Hong Kong and South Africa. The finalists will make their final pitches at the Inventures 2023 Startup Pitch event. Each finalist will have two minutes to pitch, followed by five minutes to field questions from the panel of expert judges. The winners in each category will receive a $10,000 cash prize. The categories and finalists for the 2023 Inventures Startup Pitch event are: Metaverse Delphi Technology Corp. Unleashing your enterprise potential with conversational and action-based Smart Avatar training solutions in an immersive environment with your own content and process. Luxsonic Technologies Luxsonic is on a mission is to improve access to healthcare around the world using immersive technologies, like virtual reality. We empower the healthcare industry with immersive solutions that enhance medical education, clinical training, and healthcare delivery. Moveahead The world's first motion tracking and movement analytics engine built specifically for children. Smobler Smobler Studios is metaverse architecture and Web3 design agency with offices in Canada, USA, Singapore Bhutan and we are fast expanding into Japan, Indonesia , Latin America and Africa. We are also the first The Sandbox investee studio in Singapore and its official and certified metaverse agency. We are minority owned and women led. vrCAVE vrCAVE enables entertainment operators around the world to provide unique group-based VR experiences to their patrons. Future of Work BillionMinds In a world increasingly dominated by AI, robotics and automation, employees will only remain relevant through highly honed soft skills, or human skills as we prefer to call them. BillionMinds uses experiential learning to embed these skills as habits, reskilling humanity for the future of work. Cya Live Cya Live is an experiential platform for collaborating, engaging, and transacting. HourlyRate.ai HourlyRate.ai is a web3, future of work start-up, creating a decentralized ecosystem for knowledge-workers. Founded by career freelancers, HourlyRate.ai solves real problems faced by knowledge workers, helping them optimize their hourly rate, stay competitive, plan their financial futures, build community and connect with international opportunities. Kello Inclusive Kello Inclusive is a talent agency exclusively representing disabled and visibly different talent; because the beauty of disabilities, diversities, and differences deserves to be represented fairly and fully. KindWorks.ai KindWorks.ai's mission is to encourage and enable Kindness habits for billions. We have built an enterprise platform with a Kindness AI agent ('Beni') who connects through communication tools like Slack, WhatsApp, and Teams to enhance and enable high-performing teams. Beni's nudges are grounded in science to strengthen company cultures and increase employee connectivity, motivation, and purpose. Ag/Food Tech CarbonGraph CarbonGraph is a digital platform that measures the carbon footprint of food products from farm to table. By automating the traditional life cycle assessment process, CarbonGraph is unlocking new value from sustainability for companies across the food value chain. Cultivatd Cultivatd is a premium AgTech brokerage company that maximizes the profitability of controlled environment agriculture (CEA) projects - improving the technology selection, production yield, product quality, and operational efficiency of client ventures. IXON We make meat and seafood greener by enabling their storage and shipment at room temperature. By extending shelf life, reducing wastage and circumventing cold chain, our solution can help cut 20% of food-related carbon emissions. Peko Peko is building Canada's #1 online grocery marketplace that delivers "peculiar" or surplus groceries at up to 40% off retail prices. We're on a mission to fight food waste and promote access to affordable, healthy food. TeOra PTE Ltd. At TeOra, we are on a mission to revolutionize food production by eliminating harmful chemicals like pesticides, antibiotics, used to prevent losses in food production caused by pests and diseases, using cutting edge advances in biotechnology, material science and human pharmaceuticals. Our first products are clinically validated oral vaccines for aquaculture to prevent viral diseases. Health Innovation nSight Surgical nSight Surgical is a Stanford BioDesign spinout building a computer vision AI system to decode the fundamental language of surgery. nSight Surgical's data helps reduce infection rates, increases efficiency, makes surgery safer, and reduces costs. We are operative intelligence. Sonaro Sonaro has developed an AI software for ultrasound that utilizes a 3D approach to vascular diagnosis, with a mission to reduce misdiagnosis for atherosclerosis patients. Tusi, LLC Tusi is a technology venture with a mission to address individuals' mental faculties, from dementia among the aging community to neurodevelopmental challenges in early childhood. Tusi's patent-pending Ezzle is a Hardware-as-a-Service, non-invasive biomarker platform that empowers primary care providers to administer specialist-level early dementia screening. Vistim Labs Inc. Neurotechnology helping clinicians identify and treat dementia patients better than current methods, thanks to our proprietary brain collection protocols and artificial intelligence. VoxCell BioInnovation VoxCell is creating human-like vascularized cancer tissue models as a drug screening tool for the drug development process. Our tissue models will help accelerate the development of life-saving therapies, allowing those therapies to get in the hands of those who need them more quickly. Clean Tech Mi Terro Mi Terro is a venture-backed synthetic biology and advanced material company that engineers low-value biomass waste into high-value hydrophilic and hydrophobic biopolymers to end microplastic and hunger at price parity as conventional plastic yet up to 80% lesser CO2 emissions - this is a first-of-its-kind approach. Microplastic is a global public health problem that needs urgent solutions. We are excited to see such a significant leap forward in our ability to manipulate nature's most diverse and abundant building blocks. Tangible Tangible is a software platform to track, manage, and report on embodied carbon from building materials. Urban Machine Urban Machine is a robotics company on a mission to reclaim the millions of tons of wood waste from construction and demolition for reuse as high-volume, locally sourced, premium lumber products. Urban Machine was founded by Eric Law, Andrew Gillies, and Alex Thiele. Based in Oakland, California, Urban Machine is innovating sustainable practices for construction with the help of technology. UM is salvaging the past to build the future. VALIS VALIS is a B2B software startup that leverages unique expertise in material science and machine learning to support the creation of a circular economy. Our AI-powered software tool integrates with equipment at scrap metal processing facilities to provide plant managers with the real time process insights and optimization they need to maximize material recovery and profitability. Wildfire Robotics Inc. Solving scalable wildfire separation through novel robotics. We improve capacity for wildfire agencies, private asset owners, and the general public so that we may coexist with wildfires. Computing Infinity FLUIX Inc. FLUIX automates cooling with the power of AI. Enabling building & data center owners to save 35% in energy costs by running their HVAC on autopilot. Glxkind Technologies Glxkind uses AI to reinvent pedestrian mobility, one stroll at a time. Kunye Financial Inc. Kunye helps geographically dispersed families manage household finances across borders through a shared mobile wallet where families can chat, plan, track, and make payments together. Metabob Metabob is a generative AI tool that helps developers cut debugging time in half by detecting and automatically resolving critical bugs in their code VerdeCode VerdeCode offers SaaS tools to developers and executives to quantify and reduce cloud costs and CO2 emissions by improving software efficiency. When given to developers, VerdeCode's tools have shown over a 50% cost and CO2 reduction. Click here to learn more about the Startup Pitch competition, its finalists, and its alternates.