Propel Announces Finalists for the Fourth Gerry Pond Sales Award

Atlantic Canada’s Virtual Accelerator, Propel is thrilled to announce the finalists for this year’s Gerry Pond Sales Award. The sales award is presented in recognition of Gerry Pond, who co-founded Propel in 2003 and his contribution to the Atlantic Canadian innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystem. The coveted award includes a $25,000 cash prize.

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The Gerry Pond Sales Award is awarded each year to a Traction and Growth company that excels in creating a repeatable and scalable sales process. The Traction and Growth programming has an intense focus on customer acquisition and sales. “This year’s list of finalists made a clear and resounding commitment to success in sales, particularly in understanding their customer. We celebrate the significance of this event, as it not only gives us the opportunity to honour our founder Gerry Pond but also recognize companies who are bringing smart solutions to market and able to scale, equipped with the knowledge they have gained through the Propel program,” comments Propel CEO, Kathryn Lockhart.

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This year’s event will take place on Monday, April 17th from noon-1:30 pm AST via Zoom and will feature a keynote presentation from Ryan Porter, Head of Product, Career Beacon. The link for registration can be found here.

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The finalists for this year’s award include:  
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Bloxo, Founder and CEO, Mubdu Alali

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Bloxo is disrupting the sports industry with its on-demand recreational games that match users based on their interests and skill levels, all without requiring long-term commitments or rigid schedules. With drop-in sports becoming more favored by people than structured sports and the growing demand for on- demand services, Bloxo has the potential to capture a significant share of the underserved market. With a proven high conversion rate, consistently full games, and a platform that fills a real need in the market, Bloxo presents an exciting investment opportunity for those looking to be a part of a game-changing force in the world of recreational sports. 

Couryah, Co-founder and COO, Omar Soliman and Co-founder and CEO, Mohamed Soliman

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Couryah is building the future of online grocery shopping for urban millennial professionals, a ‘no-frills’ grocery shopping platform. Since 2019, Couryah has set out to be reliable, quick, affordable and flexible. Their platform enables users to shop smarter by aggregating weekly flyer deals from top grocers and local independent stores in their city. Couryah also employs a ‘no-frills’ efficient operational strategy that focuses on batching (One-to-Many) over one-to-one delivery orders by maximizing the shopper earnings in-store while offering affordable baseline service fees to our customers with optional ‘convenience’ add-on fees.

Easy Platter, Founder and CEO, Mandhir (Manny) Singh  

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Easy platter is an on-demand Personal Chef Service that connects local personal chefs to people. Guided by personal preferences, Easy Platter chefs prepare balanced meals to suit client needs in their kitchen or via delivery. Personal chefs eliminate the chore of meal planning, grocery shopping, cooking and cleaning. They use predictive analytics to hyper personalize weekly meals using an AI powered recipe builder.

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Prospre, Co-founders, Colin Hunt and Jonathan Young

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Prospre creates customized meal plans with one click. Prospre’s proprietary algorithms create custom meal plans by taking into account nutrient targets, dietary restrictions, personal preferences, eating patterns, and more. Prospre provides a robust food diary and can compile your grocery list automatically. Prospre is primarily a mobile app, but can provide API for nutrition and meal planning algorithms so that they can be licensed for use for other applications.

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Quick Facts, Co-founder and President, Christy Silvestri and Co-founder, Jeff Barsalou

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QuickFacts is a company dedicated to improving the insurance industry through technological resources. The primary offering is a software solution for insurance brokerages. Based on the brokerage’s agreements with insurance carriers, they organize the insurance carrier’s information and present it on a single search-engine website for brokerages.

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Sandbox Platform, Co-founder and CEO, Robert Chambers

Sandbox ERP is a low code ERP system that helps small businesses realize digital transformation through a custom environment that represents their unique workflows and processes. They review your existing business operations with their clients and create their Sandbox to improve business performance, reduce working capital, and build customer loyalty. They do this through a modern business model, better suited to small business, including no implementation fees, no long-term contracts, and fixed monthly pricing.

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The Farmers’ Truck, Founder and CEO, Fredéric Laforge

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Access to fresh food is limited for 55 million Americans living in USDA-designated Food Deserts nationwide, and this lack of access to healthy foods is one of the main reasons for the high rates of obesity in the US. To address this inequality, NGOs are launching mobile farmers' market programs as a cost-effective way to bring fresh, healthy food to underserved communities.

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In 2015, Farmers’ Truck launched their own mobile produce market. Through the years, they have gained valuable insight and knowledge that we now use to empower others to do the same. They have designed an affordable mobile market vehicle that is the only key-in-hand mobile market vehicle available in North-America. Their vision is for fresh, accessible food in every community. 

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The Gerry Pond Sales Award sponsors are Frank McKenna, UNB SJ, BeersNeal PC, Innovatia
and Mariner Partners.

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About Gerry Pond
Gerry Pond has over 45 years of in-depth experience in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector. As the CEO of NBTel and the President of its successor, Aliant Telecom, he was at the helm during a period of significant deregulation in the Canadian industry. Under his innovative leadership, NBTel emerged as an international ICT leader.

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Pond is currently the Chairman and Co-Founder of Mariner Partners Inc., and has co-founded a number of successful ICT start-ups in Atlantic Canada, including iMagicTV, Q1 Labs, Brovada Technologies, Radian6, Shift Energy and Cirrus9.  He is also the Co-Founder of Propel, a startup accelerator, the Co-Founder of the Pond-Deshpande Centre at the University of New Brunswick, and the Co-Founder of East Valley Ventures, an accelerator for Atlantic Canadian startup companies with a mission of helping passionate entrepreneurs launch meaningful and enduring technology companies.  He is a Director of Upside Foundation, NB Business Council and the National Angel Capital Organization.

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