Every day is a good day at Wrapify, with new clients being signed and new regions being plotted.
But it’s an especially good day when you graduate — ahead of time — from San Diego’s most prestigious startup support organization and are recognized as the best business idea in the class by your peers, who are all pretty impressive themselves.
Wrapify was one of ten startup companies that graduated from the EvoNexus incubator Thursday night — which has now pushed out more than 100 new companies (105 to be exact) since its launch in 2009. All ten companies for 2015 had very strong ideas, so the competition was formidable.
Each company presented their businesses to a capacity crowd of 300 at the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego. Then, using cellphones, the crowd voted Wrapify had the best business idea and strongest story. We proudly walked away with W (just like our logo!).
It’s worth giving a shout-out to the other companies that graduated and competed, because there are good ideas here that should also be more widely heard:
- Loan Hero — Offers technology to make it easier for consumers to get point-of-sale loans.
- Astroprint — Open software platform for the 3D-printer world.
- Qelzal — Object-avoidance technology for commercial drones.
- GoShare — A truck-sharing network for moving heavy items.
- CollectiveSun — Provides solar power installations for nonprofits through a crowd-lending platform.
- Dotstudioz — Revenue-generating tools for online video producers on YouTube and other networks.
So you can see the Wrapify win is all the more impressive considering the level of quality competition! And the marketplace agrees: Wrapify is being embraced so quickly, we are so well positioned and our timing so deft, the integration into the OOH market is happening sooner than we expected — even at our most optimistic.
As winner, we got a seat at the table with all of the venture backers of the startup ecosystem here in San Diego, along with successful entrepreneurs Tom from EcoATM and President/Cofounder of SKLZ, John Sarkisian.
“Startups are not for the faint of heart,” said EvoNexus CEO Rory Moore just before introducing the presentations. “Startups are something you do when you’re totally committed.”
That describes Wrapify perfectly. We believe in the business so much we live it, we can’t wait to get to work to tell everyone about it.
And winning the elite EvoNexus recognition should make more and more people interested in what we have to say: Wrapify is literally going to revolutionize the out of home marketing paradigm, for both brands and good ol’ everyday Americans!
In closing: If you’re a startup, you should be aware that EvoNexus admits a new class of companies twice a year, providing space and mentoring at no charge in downtown San Diego, the University Town Center area and in Irvine.