Social Venture Partners will hold its fifth annual Fast Pitch competition for social innovators next Tuesday, Oct. 27, at McCaw Hall. This is the largest program dedicated to training social entrepreneurs, both non-profits and for-profits, in the Pacific Northwest. This year, over $300,000 will be awarded and 14 finalists will compete on stage at McCaw Hall in front of an audience of more than thousand community leaders, philanthropists, investors, and entrepreneurs.

Want to know how much impact SVP Fast Pitch has on growing social innovation among tech startups? Here are three stories about  past SVP Fast Pitch finalists from 2013:

OkCoPay:

Finding affordable health care can be challenging. Insurance coverage may be an issue. People are unaware of pricing variations and sometimes, finding a good doctor suited to your needs is just hard. Touré McCluskey, founder of OkCopay, was a finalist in the 2013 SVP Fast Pitch. They presented how they are going to solve this problem. By having a platform where people will have access to prices and other relevant information, they can make better decisions with their healthcare options.

OkCopay is an online platform that helps people find great and affordable health care services. It was founded in 2011 and is based in Bellevue, Washington. They have over 150,000 prices from over 40,000 providers. The company believes that “Americans have a right to know the price of their basic medical options prior to receiving treatment.”

Touré shared that SVP Fast Pitch was a great experience because he “met a ton of great entrepreneurs and shared ideas with them.”  As of this year, the company has served about 300,000 people and that has been growing steadily for the past year and a half. The company is in 16 cities and by the end of the year, they aim to be in over 40 cities. Currently, the company is raising seed money to grow their team, to get nationwide coverage and to provide people with access to better healthcare options.

Actively Learn:

It’s been almost 2 years since Jay Goyal, CEO and Co-Founder of Actively Learn, went on stage, made a pitch and won $142,500 for the 1st place Investment Fund Award for a For-Profit and $10,000 for the Microsoft Award at the 2013 SVP Fast Pitch at McCaw Hall. Since then, a lot of things have happened.

Actively Learn is an online e-reading platform that empowers teachers to increase students’ comprehension and retention. Since then, the company has been making an impact to education by helping students engage in reading. The company’s engagement framework is based on the premise that reading engagement depends on 3 factors: prior knowledge (including vocabulary), skills, and motivation.

At present, Actively Learn has been able to engage almost half a million users across the country. Right now, “Things are good” says Jay. Students and teachers use the platform either through “Freemium”, “PRO Teacher”, or “PRO School/District” subscriptions. The company has been growing by expanding into different school districts nationwide and they are forging partnerships with publishers to make more resources available on the Actively Learn platform.

 

Community Sourced Capital:

Sourcing traditional capital is a struggle for most small companies and yet, they employ half of the American population. In 2013, Casey Dilloway, COO and co-Founder of Community Sourced Capital (CSC), presented how they intend to solve this problem. By involving communities where a business operates, they have created an innovative financial system that help small companies access local capital.

To date, CSC has been able to provide $1.5 million in loans for businesses mostly in Washington and Oregon. Overall, they have reached 10 states with about 5,500 community lenders and a number of local financial institutions. For the past two years, the company continued to grow. Casey mentioned that SVP Fast Pitch “helped us put out more feelers to potential partners.” And now, CSC has established partnerships with local banks, credit unions, community development financial institutions, microlenders, for profit lenders, non-profit lenders, local city economic development offices and local business groups among others.

 

The tech startups that will compete this year include: Play Works Studio, SafeWheel, VetStartups, Vitruvian Energy, and IntelliH20. For a full list of the finalists who will compete this year, see here.  You can register to attend here. Ticket proceed fund grants for non-profit winners.

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