On Tuesday and Wednesday this week (9/17-9/18) the North Carolina Council for Entrepreneurial Development (CED) hosted their 29th annual Tech Venture Conference, in Raleigh, NC. By all accounts, it was a great event. There is much that we will cover in the coming days, but the “Lightning Round” quick pitches were excellent, and a great place to start. It seemed that the majority of these startups pitching we concerned, in one way or another, with either the healthcare or education industries. Below is the winner, and several very promising runners-up:

Physcient – The Winner of The Lighting Round Pitches

Physcient is building new, more advanced precision surgical tools. Here is the winning pitch:

WedPics

WedPics gives Brides and Grooms a single album for all the photos taken by guests at the wedding, and all events leading up to the wedding.

Keona Health

Medical institutions spend billions of dollars a year in labor answering phone triage calls. Keona Health takes this on with by offering technology that can cut the amount of time in half.

Validic

Validic is an API platform that integrates dozens of consumer health apps, wearables and in-home medical devices, and turns it into a single data stream.

LobbyGuard

LobbyGuard builds self service kiosks to replace the need for signing-in when you go into secure buildings. They already have significant traction, handling 300,000+ visitor sign-ins each week at school, corporate, government, medical and many other markets all over the world.

Spreedly

Spreedly is a credit card vault in the cloud that allows you to work with one or multiple payment gateways over time or simultaneously.

Coursefork

Coursefork is a platform that connect educators to find, share, and collaborate their course materials.

And the most unique pitch at the entire conference:

LCMS+

LCMS+ is a curriculum management platform for healthcare education. Check out their creative pitch:

Be on the look out for much more coverage of the CED Tech Venture Conference in the coming days.