MassChallenge, the world’s largest startup competition, named four $100,000 winners at the finals ceremony last evening, and 12 $50,000 winners from among 26 finalists.
Keynote speaker Steve Case, co-founder of America On-Line, started his speech by asking everyone in the large audience to stand and wave, and he took a picture and tweeted it out, exposing the MassChallenge to his 362,000 followers.
In his own keynote, Mayor Thomas Menino said that he thought the crowd of entrepreneurs with beers in their hands was his “kind of people,” but also the future of Boston.
Winning $50,000 was supercomputing software company Symmetric Computing, a resident of the Venture Development Center. Over 446 companies from 26 countries and 24 states entered MassChallenge. Novophage, another Venture Development Center resident, was also a finalist. It has already won several competitions across the country.
The Venture Development Center is Symmetric Computing’s first home. Veterans in the high tech industry, the founders literally moved to our incubator from their dining rooms, and now after testing and validating their prototype with potential customers, and raising investment, are ready to launch. We are very proud of them!
The Venture Development Center is Boston’s leading startup incubator for technology and life science companies.