Over 100 people attended the inaugural InSITE DC CONNECT event on Monday, January 27, at 1776. InSITE provides early-stage companies with consulting services. InSITE CONNECT is a private pitch event hosted semi-annually in New York, Boston, and for the first time last week in Washington DC. The event was designed to showcase top local startups to an audience of professionals focused on venture capital, private equity, and angel investments.
The Mid-Atlantic’s most prominent investment funds, law firms, and wealth managers were in attendance, including power hitters from Revolution, Grotech, Core Capital, JP Morgan, Skadden Arps, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati, Cooley, NextGen Angels, and more.
InSITE CONNECT featured some of Washington’s most promising startups:
BicycleFinancial, Encore, MGNFY.it, MilitaryJobsNetworks.com, TrendPo, and Conatix
Each company pitched to an esteemed panel of judges. The judges included: Bobby Ocampo, Director of Revolution Ventures; Dan Mindus, Director at CIT GAP Funds; Rich Nespola, Managing Director, Brand New Matter; Rick Toren, Investor & Chief Strategy Officer, QPID; and Veeral Majmudar, Founder & CEO, Savan Group LLC.
The judges selected Encore as the InSITE CONNECT Pitch Day winner! Encore is a social media analytics company that provides brands with real-time insights to identify key conversations of their users’ social engagement.
The event also included presentations from INSITE fellows discussing their consulting projects. Fellows who worked with Hinge and Main Street Genome presented a synopsis of their work. Hinge is a mobile dating solution that quickly and easily discovers matches based on your personal network. Hinge raised $4M during its time as an InSITE partner company! Main Street Genome is the brainchild of Scott Case, co-founder and CTO of Priceline, and Eric Koester, co-founder and COO of Zaarly.
Mauhan Zonoozy, President of INSITE DC, concluded the event by sharing his enthusiasm about InSITE DC. “This event was a big success for InSITE and, more importantly, for DC’s entrepreneurship scene. We are excited to continue to bring the startup and investor community together to develop our ecosystem,” said Zonoozy.
Submitted by Aamer Shah – InSITE Fellow | MBA Candidate 2014 | Georgetown University