No Coast finalists: Trio of startup heavyweights among KC Tech Council award contenders

Updated: Click here for No Coast winners.

KC Tech Council released finalists Wednesday for its No Coast awards — a March 8 celebration of trailblazing innovators across the tech industry in Kansas City — which features a handful of startup founders and companies.

“These are the folks who went above and beyond in tech,” KC Tech Council said in announcement of the finalists. “They are leaders who have been champions of the industry and inspired the future of tech in Kansas City.”

Click here for a full list of the award finalists.

Click here to register for the March 8 No Coast awards event.

Contenders for the Tech Connector of the Year award all notably have startup ties, including:

• Greg Kratofil, attorney and shareholder, Polsinelli — Kratofil is chair of Polsinelli’s Technology Transactions and Data Privacy practice group, with a focus on technology and intellectual property transactions involving today’s cutting-edge solutions and services. He leads a group of attorneys that are recognized leaders in the FinTech, Health Care Technology and Innovation and Privacy and Cybersecurity industries. (Click here to read Kratofil’s recent commentary on Polsinelli’s reaction to cyber threats.)
• Davyeon Ross, co-founder and COO, ShotTracker — ShotTracker is a sensors-based technology that provides statistics and analytics in practice and games. Investors include Magic Johnson, David Stern, GreyCroft, Elysian Park Ventures and Ward Ventures. (Click here to read about why Startland selected ShotTracker as one of its Kansas City Startups to Watch in 2019.)
• Matt Watson, founder, Stackify — Before Stackify, Watson was the co-founder and CTO of VinSolutions. He bootstrapped the entire way and sold to AutoTrader.com in May 2011 for $150 million. (Click here to read about Watson’s new venture, and its plan to invest $1 million in Full Scale resources into Kansas City startups.

No Coast also is expected to honor companies making contributions to tech in Kansas City. Finalists represent organizations that developed, or partnered in developing, a product or service that significantly advances the tech industry in their respective field. They include:

• Alphapointe — Empowering people with vision loss to achieve their goals and aspirations since its founding in 1911. Alphapointe, the third largest employer of people who are blind in the U.S., with manufacturing operations in both the States of Missouri and New York, has nearly 400 employees, of which 230 are blind or visually impaired.
• Fishtech Group — A cybersecurity solutions provider for any computing platform. Started in 2015 by Gary Fish, Fishtech was built to address a gap in cybersecurity between traditional on-premise solutions and the cloud. Focused on advisory, technology, and operations, we are Cloud-era security experts.
• Stackify — Founded with the goal to create an easy to use set of tools for developers to improve their applications. Now more than 1,000 organizations in nearly 50 countries rely on Stackify’s tools to provide critical application performance and code insights so they can deploy better applications. (Click here to read about Stackify’s recent $2.74 million funding raise.)

Other awards at No Coast include Tech Champion of the Year and Tech Educator of the Year. Click here to learn more about finalists in those categories.