Pawly @ Global Startup Battle

Pawly is back! And we’re excited as ever to compete in our second startup event.

After placing second at the Startup Weekend, Pawly entered the Global Startup Battle – A global event that takes competitors from local Startup Weekends to compete against each other. GSB was a weeklong event occurring as part of the Global Entrepreneurship Week from November 14 – November 21.

The event was powered by Google for Entrepreneurs. Some other sponsors included: Coca-Cola, Amazon Web Services, Bigcommerce, and .CO.

Pawly was able to compete in the Champion’s Circle since we came in second place at Toronto’s Startup Weekend, and to qualify, only the top 2 teams from each city around the world were eligible. Bring it on!

In order to advance to the next round of the event, each team needed to create a short video about their product/service, and gain the most amounts of votes from people to succeed. With the power of the paw, we were able to obtain around 2000 votes to advance to the top 15 teams!

Check out our GSB video here.

Now, as part of the top 15, we had to face a judging panel that analyzed our business in order to determine which startup had the best business plan and the most chance of success in the real world.

After much deliberation the judging panel declared a winner. *Drumroll please* It was Pawly! We didn’t believe it at first, we thought it was a prank, but yeah we won and this song came to our heads :)

Runner up was iTravey of Portugal – a platform allowing users to submit trip ideas, and travel agencies will come to you to make it a reality. Third place was Morshid of Lebanon – a device providing unassisted mobility to the visually impaired.

The grand prize included $20,000 USD in match funding for an Indiegogo campaign, another $20,000 in Google Cloud Services, flight and lodging for 3 team members to San Francisco, visit to Google HQ, LAUNCH Conference Builder passes, Google+ hangout with an entrepreneur celebrity, and many more prizes from the other sponsors. Finally, the most important prize of them all was the Championship belt!

Catch us next time flaunting with the belt and representing Toronto in San Francisco!