Techstars Startup Weekend Online Canada

Techstars Startup Weekend Online Canada was a virtual event that happened on the weekend of April 24th - 26th 2020. During this weekend, entrepreneurs across Canada came together to take on projects that could support people or companies during COVID-19. The winners of this were the RestAssured in first place, Pharos in second place, and HealthBot in third place. Learn more about what a Techstars Startup Weekend is like, how the virtual event went and was planned, and who were the team leads of the winning teams.

Bruno Morency: Techstars Startup Weekend Online Canada Judge

Since graduation, tech startups have given me amazing ups and dreadful downs and I don't see that changing in the coming years. Up until a late 2016, I was Head of Operations at Poka Inc., a social platform that focuses on efficient training, knowledge retention and real-time troubleshooting in the manufacturing world.

Before that, I started Context.IO, an API that makes it easy and fast for developers to integrate email data in their applications. It was acquired by Return Path in 2012 and I'm proud to say the product is living on despite the pre-acquisition team having moved on to other things.

My background is engineering but I love bringing tech products to market and selling them as much as I love building them. I'm strongly attached to Montreal and believe in its capacity to generate leading tech companies. Putting this into concrete actions as Managing Director of Techstars Montreal AI.

Danielle Torrie: Techstars Startup Weekend Online Canada Organizer

Since discovering her passion for building community through events and digital marketing, she has become the ultimate “do-er” always rolling up her sleeves to find ways to further advance Calgary’s innovation ecosystem and shout Alberta’s success stories from the rooftops.

As the Manager for Startup Calgary, an initiative by Calgary Economic Development, Danielle collaborates with members of the Calgary Innovation Coalition to build programming and provide support for early-stage tech entrepreneurs.

Founded in 2010, Startup Calgary’s events and programs support technology-enabled entrepreneurs with highly scalable business models. Since joining Calgary Economic Development in 2017, Startup Calgary has connected with over 8,000 event attendees through workshops, meetups, and events like Startup Weekend.

Kelsey Muller & Michaela Moore & Omar Mohamed: RestAssured

Kelsey Muller is a senior year Registered Nursing student at Cape Breton University with over 1000 hours of clinical experience. She is driven, dedicated, hardworking and enthusiastic about anything surrounding her passions. Kelsey is skilled in product expertise with Rest Assured, joining team members together alongside her partner, Michaela Moore. Other skills include communication, commitment to advocating for patients and improvement in the healthcare field.‍

Michaela Moore is a senior year Registered Nursing student at Cape Breton University with over 1000 hours of clinical experience. She is driven, dedicated, hardworking and enthusiastic about anything surrounding her passions. Michaela is skilled in product expertise with Rest Assured, joining team members together alongside her partner, Kelsey Muller. Other skills include communication, commitment to advocating for patients and improvement in the healthcare field.

Omar Mohamed, a recent graduate with his B.SC in Computer Science, and has 9 months of industry experience in full stack development using ASP.NETMy technical skillset consists of Languages: HTML, CSS, Javascript, Java, C#, Python, ASP, SQL, and a little bit of C++ Frameworks: ASP.NET, Django, Node Express, and Flask Other: Video editing on Sony Vegas, Photo editing and creative design on Photoshop, Cyber Security practices and awareness Non-technical. Was heavily involved in creating two new ventures both healthcare related and has received different grants and bursaries to validate the Ideas Project Management and Leadership experience.

They worked on RestAssured alongside their team Nicole Korb, Juan Moreno, Kayla MacEachern, and Vibudh Singh.

Sabahat Naureen: Pharos

Sabahat Naureen is a project management consultant, leadership coach and engineer. While browsing through Covid-related news she realized that the domestic abuse situation in Canada was not going away, but rather getting worse. She came up with the idea of Pharos as a way to connect domestic abuse victims to support in their community, so they can get out of dangerous situations quickly and find empowerment. Sabahat has lived in Montreal, Vancouver and Victoria, and can currently be found exploring the startup scene in Calgary.

Nino Melikidze & Sean Huang: HealthBot

Nino Melikidze is the founder and CEO of Plannd – a business trip tracking and travel planning tool. With this tool, Nino wants to help companies tackle and plan for a post-Covid travel reality while putting their employee’s health and safety first.

Prior to her current venture, Nino was working on a different startup - a social app for helping people find friends. She also has over three years of experience working as a Business Analyst and Project Manager in the Software and Telecom industries. Nino is a polyglot and a traveler. Prior to immigrating to Canada, she lived in the US, Colombia, and Georgia. She holds a BSc in Information Systems from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (Worcester, MA, USA).

Sean is a Vancouver based founder with over 8 years of experience in SMB to enterprise-level sales, business development, and sales management. Back in 2014 Sean was awarded as one of the Top Senior Marketing Consultants in his firm working with TELUS on several territory expansion for both business and residential campaigns. During his tenure at the firm, Sean achieved many company sales records while demonstrating strong business acumen in the B2B as well as D2C space.

In late 2015, Sean along with two other co-founders started Morfus, a mobile VR company pioneering a full 3D walkthrough on mobile devices as opposed to the conventional 360 footage. After some initial success from early adopters in the architecture and design field, they were able to take the company from Vancouver to Shanghai after being accepted to one of the top accelerator programs in China (Chinaccelerator Batch 12). After finishing the accelerator program Sean came back to Vancouver and started working on various geospatial AR focused projects with an emphasis on map-based applications.

Currently, Sean is in charge of all business development and sales at Matidor.com, a map-based collaboration platform for environmental and field services to better visualize, manage, and collaborate on location-based projects. In light of recent events, the company has begun to partner with health authorities and other partner companies to support the monitoring and tracking of pandemic response and emergency services.

Techstars Startup Weekend Online Canada