San Antonio company Allosense was among 40-plus emerging high-technology startups took part in the South by Southwest Pitch, a juried competition featuring quick pitches of unique ideas and products, on March 11 and 12 in Austin.
Roman Sandoval, CEO of Allosense, based at Geekdom in downtown San Antonio, made a three-minute pitch March 12 at the Hilton Austin for his venture in enterprise and smart data, one of eight pitch categories.
Allosense is developing what Sandoval called Dash, a sensor that connects various disconnected instrumentation networks to improve data documentation.
This, Sandoval said, can help a range of commercial customers to make better decisions about the electric vehicle parts, such as batteries, that they are developing.
Sandoval said electric vehicles are gradually increasing their presence in the total automobile market, but methods involved in manufacturing of electric vehicles and their components are mostly slow and outdated.
“We’re doing this to make cleaner and more affordable way of transportation,” Sandoval said.
Answering a variety of questions from a panel of judges, Sandoval said there is much to learn about electric vehicles since the technology is still developing, including the ability to produce a reliable, safe and efficient power source for such vehicles.
“We’re going to see more innovation in the manufacture of car batteries,” Sandoval said.
Four other finalist startups made their pitches alongside Allosense in the enterprise and smart data category, including German venture Climatiq, which pitched a developing open dataset and application programming interface that allow one’s organization to collect emissions data, calculate carbon emissions and decide on sustainable actions based purely on data.
The other finalists in the enterprise and smart data category included CreditRich, an app founded in 2020 by startup CEO Angel Rich as a means of helping users increase their credit scores by rounding up their spare change to pay their bills.
According to Rich, users who download the CreditRich app input their bill information, and the program’s algorithm intelligently prioritizes bill payments from the money collected within the app.
Fast Forward CEO Dusty Birge pitched his company, which offers assistance to electric utilities to lower inspection costs by automating thermal inspections of power lines using proprietary data collection software.
Inspectors install a roof-mounted thermal camera on a vehicle to speed the inspection process by 10 times, Birge said.
“Our tech is creative and a little novel; it works at scale,” Birge said.
Lawrence Gentilello, founder and CEO of Optery, pitched his company, which developed an automated opt-out software that instantly removes a user from hundreds of data brokers posting and selling their personal information online.
“We’re dictating to companies what they can and cannot do with our data,” Gentilello said.
The judges evaluated each finalist on factors such as uniqueness and viability of their respective pitched product. In the end, judges choose Climatiq as the enterprise and smart data category winner.
The German venture claimed a $4,000 cash prize and a trophy. Co-founder and CEO Hessam Lavi said his company is doing what it can to address climate change as a global problem.
