University of Waterloo announced that its VeloCity Venture Fund had awarded US$100,000 in funding across four winners in their annual venture contest. Among the winners were teams that made a music-making application and a wearable health monitor.

Each of the winners: Kite, Blacktree Health, Planleaf and SoundBrush got US$25,000 for their efforts. Kite developed a web application development platform that is cloud-hosted. Planleaf created a project management tool that is email-based. Blacktree Health created wearable health monitor innovation. SoundBrush developed the music-making application.

"We're developers, and we love solving the problems that developers face. But there's a lot more to running a business than that, and VeloCity has a great ecosystem to build great companies. This has been an amazing experience. Today's prize means we can get Kite to our users and become a dominant player in this market so much faster," Kite co-founder, Jeffrey Morgan, said.

The VeloCity Venture Fund awards cash incentives worth up to US$300,000 to University of Waterloo students each year. They also give the winners a chance to establish their startup firms at the VeloCity Garage.

"VeloCity runs an impressive program. When I graduated from Waterloo in 2006, going right into a startup after graduation was not a career option. VeloCity is giving a competitive and hungry group of entrepreneurs the opportunity to do just that and be very successful," said an iNovia Capital venture capitalist, Karamdeep Nijjar.