When unprepared Peter Lalonde pitched the idea for his start-up Openera at the Canadian Digital Media Network’s Canada 3.0 conference last April, he never thought his idea would win. The quality of his idea prevailed however, as the entrepreneur ended up winning even though he was a last minute entry. He has since been the talk of the town with his first place spot at Road to Banff Venture Forum Pitch-Off proving the first victory was no fluke. All of this is thanks to Lalonde’s remarkable new mobile app that allows users to locate any attachment or file in just two taps. The app also saves email attachments automatically to various cloud services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Salesforce and Box.
Like all good stories, the current spot Openera finds itself in had an unexpected beginning. When Lalonde decided to attend the conference he had no plans to pitch his technology at the forum because he felt that it was a “contest for kids”. However, when BDC investor Matt Roberts and contest organisers pushed him to the stage in the last minute without any preparation, he realised that this contest was definitely for serious developers and entrepreneurs given the serious competition he faced. Unexpectedly, Openera won first prize and Lalonde was also awarded with a plane ticket to Banff. This coup not only surprised participants and the audience in attendance, but Lalonde too.
Since then Lalonde has been travelling nonstop and his success at Canada’ 3.0 is taking him to various world-renowned pitch contests, where Peter and his team have won more awards. This list of awards include top honours at C100’s 48 Hours in Silicon Valley, then two prizes at FounderFuel and the Startup Stage Pitch in the International Startup Festival in Montreal, Quebec. In addition to this, the Openera team was also the finalist for the $50,000 investment prize.
Consistent wins not only made Openera “Canada’s hottest early stage startup”, but they have also helped Lalonde in building his team while simultaneously getting prepared for upcoming investment rounds. Moreover, due to these efforts today Openera is in the middle of the highly acclaimed FounderFuel accelerator program. During this fall, the firm is ready to unwrap a Series A round of endowing while more and more investors are calling on Lalonde to travel and pitch. Given all that has happened since that serendipitous day at the 3.0 Conference, the decision to attend was well worth it as it put the potential rich start-up on the map.
Source: cdmn.ca
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