Back in August, we decided to try something different here at Startup50. We invited partners to help us create new challenges that would help startups hone the skills they’ll need to hurdle over the real-world obstacles they’ll face as they scale up. We wanted to develop the kind of challenges startups will need to ace – over and over again – if they hope to carve out a viable market niche.
Sierra Ventures is the first partner to step up to the plate and host a challenge. 53 startups entered the fray, completing an in-depth questionnaire that grilled them on their market positioning, go-to-market plans, and their ability to scale up high enough to pose a legitimate threat to incumbents.
From there, we whittled the field down to 25 finalists, who were invited to work with our technology partner, AirDeck to create 3-minute pitches. AirDeck provides a presentation platform that makes it easy to add voice, video, and viewer tracking to your presentations.
The winners of this challenge had to navigate a difficult path, but the prize is what every startup is working towards: the chance to pitch their products or services to actual enterprise buyers. Sierra Ventures will put the two winners in front of enterprise buyers from their CXO advisory board.
Congratulations to Ermetic and PlanetScale! Their 3-minute pitch videos vaulted them to the top of the Startup50’s first guest challenge, the Startup50-Sierra Ventures Customer Challenge.
We featured five runners-up this past Friday, a batch of startups that just as easily could have reached the final podium, the competition was that close. Be sure to check out the runners-up.
Now, let’s take a look at our two winners: Ermetic and PlanetScale.
Ermetic
Year founded: 2019
Funding: $27.3M
CEO: Shai Morag, who previously invested in several technology startups, including Zero Networks (a runner up in this challenge), NextSilicon, and Vulcan Cyber
What they do: Provide a platform that protects identities and data in the cloud
Why they’re a winner: “As the shift to cloud has accelerated, managing identity and access is a problem that sits in the critical path. Ermetic offers a well-architected and differentiated component of cloud security in a competitive space,” Mark Fernandes, Managing Partner, Sierra Ventures.
3-minute pitch: Introducing Ermetic
PlanetScale
Year founded: 2018
Funding: $25M
CEO: Jiten Vaidya, who formerly served as a software engineer for Dropbox and as an SRE-SEW Manager II at Google
What they do: Build database-as-a-service offerings on Vitess, an open-source sharding middleware system for MySQL
Why they’re a winner: “With the explosion in data, new paradigms are needed to drive scale in applications. The team has good domain experience having built the Vitess open-source product and has been able to help companies like Slack manage their scale. The simplicity of their powerful product stands out,” Mark Fernandes, Managing Partner, Sierra Ventures.
3-minute pitch: PlanetScale overview
Congratulations to Ermetic and PlanetScale! They worked hard to fight their way to the finish line!
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