Two AI-powered startups awarded top prizes at Desjardins Startup Prize Pitch Competition

Ten finalist teams took the stage to speed-pitch their business ideas to a panel of expert judges at last week’s Desjardins Startup Prize Pitch Competition. 

The first-place prizes for early-stage and late-stage categories were awarded to two startups that are harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to revolutionize their industries. 

SilicoLabs, a software startup co-founded by Benjamin Alsbury-Nealy, CEO, and Kyla Alsbury-Nealy, COO, placed first in the early-stage category.

The startup’s ‘no-code’ software enables users to quickly and easily create extended reality (XR) experiences. These experiences capture behavioural and biosensor data to help better understand and predict human and AI behaviour. 

“With the prize money, we will run more hands-on demos, accelerate our marketing campaign, and expand our community of users for greater collaboration,” says Kyla Alsbury-Nealy, COO of SilicoLabs.

In the late-stage category, Deaf AI received both the $40K first-place prize and the Dongjun Wang Family True Blue Prize (People’s Choice Award).

Deaf AI is training machines with artificial intelligence to do sign language to improve the experience of communicating with those who are deaf or have hearing impairments. “Our mission is to serve deaf people to have better experiences in public life through AI-based solutions,” says co-founder Azadeh Bojmehrani.

“Winning these prizes validates our mission to bring accessible and inclusive communication to the deaf community, says Bojmehrani. “The funding will be used to further develop our AI technology through our partnership with SIRT Center at Sheridan College.”

The competition was judged by a panel of experts in the tech and innovation space, including Mehdi Bakhty, managing director of tech and innovation at Desjardins Group, Eva Lau, founder and partner at Two Small Fish Ventures and Mike Murchison, founder and CEO of Ada.

“The real prize is to build something big at the frontier of hard problems and I think that’s what we can all celebrate here today”, shared Murchison in his opening remarks.

The six winning startup teams represent the diverse innovation ecosystem at U of T, with affiliations to campus accelerators including UTEST, Health Innovation Hub (H2i) and ICUBE.

2023 Desjardins Startup Prize Winners