Ventech’s PitchFest showcases startup talent from the region
Hundreds of members from the Santa Barbara community — from investors to business owners to curious parties — packed into the Cabrillo Pavilion on April 22 to see four executives duke it out in the third annual PitchFest thrown by Ventech, an emerging technology forum.
After the dust settled, the winner of the whole event was Odin Diagnostics, which is hoping to redefine concussion care and make a significant leap forward in brain health.
The company is technically now based in San Diego after joining another incubator program, ExoNexus, for the next six months, but Founder and CEO Connor Heffler told the Business Times that the company will continue to have a presence on the Central Coast.
“I love coming out to Santa Barbara. I think it’s a fantastic community,” he said. “The whole tech community here seems really tight-knit and willing to help out and introduce you to people, so that’s been fantastic and great to see out here in the Central Coast.”
Odin was actually founded at Cal Poly and went through the university’s entrepreneurship and incubator program, even competing at the 2025 AngelCon. The company is currently developing a VR headset for real-time, objective concussion detection in athletes and is raising money.
“Winning this event is a huge testament to the problem we’re trying to solve, and also to our team, too, a lot of great supporters and partners that have helped us really early on,” he said.
Heffler, who was a middle linebacker at Cal Poly, said he would also advise young founders like himself that “repetitions” are most important when getting good at pitching.
“I learned that early on in football, like getting as many reps as possible, whether that’s mentally or actually doing the pitch. I think for me personally, just the repetitions from pitching constantly have helped with that,” he said.
The other finalists included Ecoplasticity, founded Mayela Fernandez, a sustainable startup developing high-performance, biodegradable, and compostable seaweed-based coatings for paper food packaging; SoundDose, founded by Gregg Peterson, which aims to improve radiation cancer therapy for prostate cancer by verifying the radiation beam location and dose magnitude and MindClay, founded by Marco Pinter, which is dedicated to reshaping the landscape of mental wellness apps through the power of creative arts.
This year’s judges included Burton Tripathi, Kezi Cheng, and Kelly Mooney. Tripathi is the CEO of Beyeonics Vision, Chang is the founder of FLO Materials and Mooney is the founder and CEO of Equipt Women.
Ecoplasticity, which will also compete in this year’s AngelCon, was highlighted as the People’s Choice Award for the event.
Fernandez said during her pitch that the reason for the company is that most takeout containers have a huge plastic lining that works as a barrier from oil and grease.
“This is so you could enjoy your meal, but the problem comes when we dispose of them,” she said.
“Because of this plastic, we cannot compost them or recycle them, and this contributes to 9 million tons of takeout containers in a landfill every year, becoming one of America’s major sources of waste.”
The company aims to fund its IP by the end of 2026, explore a licensing model in 2027, and explore other applications by 2028.
SoundDose, which was founded out of UC Irvine, is developing technology for high precision radiation delivery for our oncology patients.
Peterson said the problem with current radiation treatment is that once it is administered, there is no way of knowing it hit the target doctors were aiming to hit, thereby possibly hitting clean tissue and leaving behind bad tissue.
“We know how to deliver the radiation. We need to get better at making sure it’s on target,” he said.
The laboratory at UC Irvine that developed this technology has received $15 million in grant money from NIH and the American Cancer Society, which has led to five patents that SoundDose holds exclusively, Peterson said. The company is currently raising up to $2 million in a seed round.
Finally, MindClay aims to help people struggling with mental health by offering them an app that gives them access to a therapist who guides them through creative exercises, such as drawing, yoga, and similar activities.
“The next 15 months for MindClay are really about execution and de-risking the company towards a price round of financing, with work on our go-to-market, as well as our AI engine to improve the technology itself,” MindClay Senior Advisor Charlie Huiner said during the pitch.
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