By Claire Jeong, Chief Conference Officer, Vice President of Investor Research, Asia BD, LSN

We have successfully finished off our 3-Day Redefining Early Stage Investments (RESI) March Conference. As with our previous events, we had the pleasure of featuring over 30 innovative startup companies across therapeutics, medical devices, diagnostics, and digital health sectors through the Innovator’s Pitch Challenge (IPC).

I am very excited to announce to Top 3 winners of this IPC. Conference attendees were able to vote for their favorite companies based on the information on their dedicated page on the Digital RESI March Live Agenda, featuring a short pitch video, slide deck, executive summary, and other materials available for conference attendees to view. This Top 3 win is indicative of not only their innovative technology, but also their ability to present this in a cogent manner. The Top 3 winners will receive free tickets to future RESI conferences to help with their fundraising efforts.

The RESI Team would like to thank every IPC company for their hard work in preparing for these virtual presentations. We hope to continue the IPC as a unique platform for innovators and investors to connect, and we look forward to meeting and highlighting other innovative companies at future conferences, like Digital RESI, June 8-10.

Please check out the Top 3 Winners below!

First Place: Thrive Bioscience

Thrive is commercializing a family of instruments and software that provide previously unavailable data, imaging, analytics, and automation for cell culture, stem cell culture, and tissue culture for use in biomedical research and cell therapeutics. Thrive has recently started selling the first two instruments in the family, the CellAssist and the CellAssist 50. Both collect 1,000’s of images of live cells in culture, analyzes them, provides guidance and builds a significant database. The CellAssist 50 enables researchers to automatically and remotely image 50 plates of cells on an ongoing basis, generating large amounts of data for live cell biology. Sites include Harvard Stem Cell Institute, Center for Genomic Medicine (Massachusetts General Hospital), Stanford Stem Cell Core, University of Texas Medical Branch, as well as large and small pharma/biotech companies.

Second Place: modality.ai

Modality addresses the urgent need for objective and accurate biomarkers in the development of therapies for neurological and psychiatric disorders (such as autism, Parkinson’s, depression, etc.) Modality uses multimodal conversational AI extracting speech and facial measures to quantify the progression of such disorders in drug trials remotely – leading to faster completion, lowering failure rates, and increasing the ROI of drug development. In another market, Modality is used for Remote Patient Monitoring providing accurate, repeated metrics about the disease state of a physician’s patient base.

Third Place: SleepSpace

Proactive Life Inc (DBA SleepSpace) is a NYC based company using a universal experience — sleeping — to optimize health and wellness.
A few bullet points below:

• $73B annual spending on sleep aids (1 in 3 American’s have a sleep disorder)
• SleepSpace™ goes beyond tracking to actually help people sleep better
• $3.4M booked revenues from NIH grants | $2.5M awarded in July 2020
• D2C freemium model: 2,000+ paid subscribers (78% at $29.99 annually)
• B2B paid contracts with Google & LIFX to build smart light sleep journeys
• FDA Approval underway to change how doctors do remote patient care
• Barriers to entry include AI algorithms and 4 utility patents (2 granted)
• All-star team of sleep scientists, technologists, and exited entrepreneurs
• $1M prior Angel round with Bascom Ventures, Lightspeed, Quake & UpVentures
• Opening $2M Seed round with 87% allocated to scale proven acquisition funnel