Poptronic Named Semi-finalist in Pow Wow Pitch Competition
August 3, 2022
One of the newest downtown businesses, Poptronic Canada, a tech rental company focused on reducing tech waste in landfills, has been named semi-finalist after co-founder Chatnie Hernie presented their business concept at Pow Wow Pitch in Ottawa earlier this summer.
Pow Wow Pitch
Pow Wow Pitch is a grassroots community of Indigenous entrepreneurs across Turtle Island, purpose-built to provide a safe, collaborative, supportive and empowering platform for inspiration, education, mentorship, celebration, and reconciliation through entrepreneurship.
The next steps for Chatnie are to meet with her two assigned pitch mentors, Alex Byrne from Shopify and Tracy Brooks from RBC. The mentoring sessions are meant to polish the Poptronic pitch to ensure the information the judges are looking for is presented.
Poptronic will pitch on August 11th to this year’s six judges.
“I am very excited about the opportunity to pitch Poptronic at the 2022 Pow Wow Pitch. We are extremely grateful to be one of 124 semi-finalists selected out of over 2,500 applicants this year! If Poptronic wins the 25K prize, we would use the money to purchase tech rentals, raise our brand awareness and move into a storefront.”
Next Steps
Chatnie, who has launched this new venture with her business partner, Kelly Bergeron, still has a few steps ahead of her to make it to the final round. The People’s Choice Voting will run from August 22nd to September 19th. Participants can expect results by September 22nd and move on to filming the pitch sessions should they become finalists. The episodes will begin broadcasting by mid-October, when pitch winners will be announced.
The Poptronic duo is ambitious with their new startup currently operating downtown at The Co. Lab Coworking & Marketing Hub. They’ve recently been selected to participate in SheBoot, an accelerator program through Invest Ottawa, which is set to begin this fall with an opportunity to secure $100,000 in funding.
We look forward to seeing their story develop in the months to come!
Learn More
All Pow Wow Pitch semi-finalists can be viewed on their website: https://www.powwowpitch.org/semi-finalists/
You can also see the SheBoot press release announcing the participants of their next cohort:
