Syzl Triumphs in Collision 2023 PITCH Final
● Toronto-based hospitality startup takes top prize at Collision’s PITCH competition
● Founder Azrah Manji-Savin expanded Syzl’s team at Collision 2022 before returning to win top prize this year
● Syzl is one of the 466 startups at Collision with women founders on their teams
Syzl – a Toronto-based b2b hospitality marketplace – has been named the winner of Collision’s 2023 PITCH competition, seeing off 500 rival businesses in the process.
Syzl and its founder Azrah Manji-Savin were declared the winners of the 2023 edition of PITCH in front of a full Centre Stage crowd today.
Azrah attended last year’s Collision in the very early days of the business, before it had a minimum viable product. It was here that Azrah met a developer who would go on to become a key member of the Syzl team.
“I’m living my dream job,” beamed Azrah, whose own personal history – together with her love for food – brought her into the hospitality industry.
“I am a second-generation immigrant. My parents came to this country. My co-founder’s parents are immigrants too. And the easiest and quickest way for immigrant communities to make money is to sell food. The problem is that they’re stuck because they cannot scale, and because they’re all working from home. We were so passionate about finding something to support these communities so that they're able to scale and grow, because this is the economy’s backbone – especially for women and people of colour.”
Syzl prevailed over two other Canadian startups: fractional property investment platform Fractionum and AI-powered patent search platform NLPatent.
Approximately 500 startups applied for the group rounds of the PITCH competition. 10 startups were selected for the semi-finals, with the three finalists revealed on Wednesday (June 28). The finalists pitched on Collision’s Centre Stage in front of expert judges in the VC and entrepreneurship space.
Although Syzl is based in Toronto – one of the food capitals of the world – Azrah is based in Calgary, Alberta, and proudly represents Western Canada. The company currently caters to more than 1,000 users, and has 70 kitchens in the platform, allowing users to find suitable kitchens that suit their preferences and needs.
“Airbnb allows you to filter by location,” said Azrah. “We focus on the equipment that chefs really need and that’s important to them. You can filter and search based on those preferences. So you need this kind of oven, and you need a gluten-free kitchen, and you have two staff, so we crunch that in the back-end and say, ‘this kitchen is an 85-percent match; this one is a 57-percent match,’ and so you’re able to find what suits your business needs.”
About Collision:
Collision is considered the single most important tech deal-making event in the world, gathering the next generation of leaders reshaping the world. Web Summit events have gathered half a million people across Web Summit in Lisbon, Web Summit Rio in South America, Collision in North America and RISE in Asia since the company’s beginnings as a 150-person conference in Dublin in 2009. Our mission has been to create software that improves conferences and enables meaningful connections between the CEOs, founders, investors, politicians, cultural figureheads and members of the media who are reshaping the world. Collision recently announced that it would return to Toronto in 2024 for a sixth year.