November 1, 2016
Dozr wins $100K at Rev Demo Day
Keynote panel left to right, Tony DiGiovanni; Paul Ronan, OPA; Christine Zimmer, Credit Valley Conservation and Janet McKay, LEAF and Green Infrastructure Ontario Coalition.
The Demo Day featured companies from the second and third cohorts of Rev, the accelerator that helps companies increase their sales. Though Dozr is a member of the third cohort and began the program only in February, it captured all the prize money available and topped companies from Cohort 2 that had completed
the program.
“We are truly honoured to have won the Communitech Rev Demo Day,” co-founder Erin Stephenson said in an email. “We are really proud of what we have been able to accomplish at Dozr and this award is validation of that. Of course the $100,000 is a huge bonus!”
Dozr is an online peer-to-peer marketplace in which a contractor needing heavy equipment can rent or buy it directly from another contractor. The two parties agree on the price, which is often 40 per cent less than retail rates. As well as providing the platform, Dozr ensures a safe and secure rental process by verifying users, providing contracts that nail down the length and terms of the rental, and payment processing. There is also a rating system so customers can see evaluations of people on both sides of the transaction.
Co-founders, Erin Stephenson, Kevin Forestell and Tim Forestell understand the pain associated with idle equipment because they faced the same problem in their own contracting business, Forestell Landscape Design. They came up with a marketplace that would solve the pain for themselves and many others in construction and landscape professions by allowing owners of equipment to rent and buy directly from one another.
The company went through the Google for Entrepreneurs Program at Communitech last year and was accepted into Rev earlier this year.
There was no lack of competition at the Demo Day, which was held in conjunction with the annual conference of Canada’s Venture Capital & Private Equity Association. The pitching included presentations by companies like Knowledgehook (which recently won Google’s Game Changer Award at the tech giant’s annual Demo Day in Silicon Valley), BitHound and FunnelCake.