Fast, which offers a secure one-click checkout for online buyers, won the Grand Prize and first place in the Emerging Tech category at Synapse Summit’s Innovation Awards ceremony in Tampa.
The
San-Francisco-based fintech company in a growth mode has opened a Tampa office.
And Tampa’s
Glazer Children’s Museum, an interactive learning laboratory where children play, placed first in the Community Impact category.
At the fifth summit, which drew more than 5,600 to downtown Tampa on February 17, two other Tampa Bay companies also made the finalists in their categories. They were:
- Brick Street Farms, a St. Petersburg company tackling the food insecurity problem through container farming in a parking lot, which made the finalists in clean tech; and
- accelEQ Inc., a Tampa healthcare company that seeks to increase efficiency, boost the quality of care, and reduce cost through a virtual platform for medical providers.
“Brick Street Farms was honored to be a part of the Synapse Summit Innovation Awards,” says Shannon O’Malley, who owns the firm with Brad Doyle. “We look forward to competing again next year as Brick Street Farms continues our Series A Raise. Events like Synapse give us the opportunity to share our funding raise with the investment community.”
Hotter technologies were the focus of this year’s Summit program, which included information on the decentralization of Internet data, the metaverse virtual world that will change how people live, and non-fungible tokens for digital collectibles.
“Tampa Bay did phenomenally. As a whole I don’t say this about much. Yesterday [Feb. 17] moved the needle for our entire innovation community,” says Brian Kornfeld, CEO and co-Founder of Synapse, the nonprofit that organized the event. “It will help put us on amazing trajectory going forward.”
People seemed ready to collaborate. And the atmosphere, he reports, was celebratory.
“It seemed as those everybody left [Synapse] wanting to run through a brick wall, not only to help themselves but to help the community as a whole,” Kornfeld says. “It was almost like a big reunion of sorts.”
What’s next?
Synapse is set up to propel a movement, he points out, so what matters more is the next 364 days. Companies collaborating and moving forward, opening more doors for opportunities.
“Now we get to hear the stories,” he says.
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