Reverse Pitch MKE winners announced

The MKE Tech Hub Coalition announced the winners of its Reverse Pitch MKE event, a unique pitching competition where entrepreneurs work with organizations to solve a known critical industry challenge.

Among the list of winners is Milwaukee’s own Pythonic, a company that focuses the power of state-of-the-art machine learning on documents to automate specific classification, extraction, review and document routing tasks. The company won two of the presenting challenges.

Rockwell Automation selected Pythonic as the winner of the “Identifying In-field Devices” challenge.

West Bend Mutual also selected Pythonic as its challenge winner. Marc Emery, Assistant Vice President of Commercial Lines at West Bend Mutual, cited the startup’s  “potential to bring customers closer to us through a robust product able to simplify communication and increase knowledge for our customers.”  

Added Murali Natarajan, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at West Bend Mutual, “Pythonic demonstrated the capability to accelerate the process of reading unstructured policy contracts to answer customers’ questions pertaining to their policy coverage. We are excited to continue to work with them to further validate the scope and reach of this product.”

The virtual pitch competition drew more than 265 innovators from all around the country to the event, with 21 applications for pitch back. The Reverse Pitch MKE program aims to expand the diversity of the startup community in the region by connecting entrepreneurs with the resources and industry mentors to grow their businesses. The same challenges are leveraged and presented to students with Reverse Pitch High School Edition, which shows students technology and entrepreneur thinking by solving real problems.

Each winner receives a $10,000 cash prize, strategic planning sessions with Aurora WDC, co-working space from Expansive Workspace, Finance, accounting, HR and tax consulting with Trivium, legal services provided by Godfrey & Khan S.C., and access to corporate mentors and networks to help take their emerging businesses to the next stage.Other winners include InOn Health, a digital health solution aimed at improving access to health services and information through adaptive communication, MoSAYcity, an EvidaSolve product that simplifies and accelerates relationship building by removing barriers in hybrid, dispersed, and global workplaces, and Araqev, a software solution for closed-loop, smart control in additive manufacturing and 3D printing based on machine learning.