Tenna in the top four finalists in the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (EDA) Founders & Funders “All Stars” Competition.
At the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (EDA) Founders & Funders “All Stars” pitch competition in December, five startups competed for a $50,000 award from the EDA.
The pitch competition was part of a larger event, which also included a panel discussion on funding, and investor-founder meetings. The EDA Technology & Life Sciences Division had invited companies that had been to earlier Founders & Funders events over the past five years to return to reconnect with possible funding sources.
Timothy Rollender, senior venture officer in the EDA’s Technology & Life Sciences Division, who coordinated the pitch part of the day, said that from among all the companies that had attended the New Jersey Founders & Funders events in the past, outside advisers to the EDA handpicked 20 to participate in the “All Stars” event.
These 20 companies met with investors in one-on-one meetings during the morning. After these meetings, the investors conferred and came up with the top five companies to pitch to the audience.
The five startups, in the order they presented, were Radius8 (Princeton), LugTrack (Hazlet), VectraCor (Totowa), RevChip (Mount Laurel) and Tenna (Edison).
Tenna
The final presenter was Austin Conti, cofounder and CEO of Tenna, an asset tracking and management startup. Conti spent his entire career in construction, working on projects globally. He founded Tenna two years ago to provide a better way to manage all the assets on large projects.
“Tenna is an industrial internet-of-things company that solves the problem of asset management holistically,” Conti told the audience. By “holistically,” he meant that “we scale to all assets, regardless of size and value.” The company can handle large construction machinery and hand tools.
Conti noted that there are solutions for some of the asset-management issues, but no single solution that pulls them all together. “What our solution does is link heavy equipment, mid-sized asset tracking and code scanning into a clean system,” in addition to managing the data on these assets.
The fleet-management space has a set price of about $25 per vehicle per month, he said. Heavy equipment costs about $35 per vehicle per month. Code-scanning systems are priced all over the place. “By bringing them all together, we offer a lower-cost solution for the client.” Conti said that Tenna already has 40 clients.
Source: New Jersey Tech Weekly
