After Scoring All 26 "Investors Choice" Startups, Here is the List of my Top 5 Most Investable Startups ... As of Today.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

✅ Twenty-six startups each delivered investor pitches that were ~three minutes each yesterday at Kinect Capital’s 43rd annual "Investors Choice Conference," and I scored all 26 companies.

✅ Using a 40-point framework I call the “Politis Score,”

▪️ 13 of the 26 firms scored 30 or higher;

▪️ But 20 are companies I consider investable today; and

▪️ Six others intrigued me, but (in my opinion), each is simply too early for investment consideration today.

✅ (As shown in alphabetical order), I feel that five companies separated themselves at the top of the 26-firm cohort, namely Anziva Pharmaceuticals, Esslyo, Noro, Pollen Sense, and Verso AI.

4 Sept 2026 — MIDVALE, Utah — Twenty-six companies walked onto the Investors Choice Conference stage yesterday with approximately three minutes apiece to convince investors they deserved a conversation.

After the presentations and visiting separately with many of the 26 firms, I gave each a Politis Score.

Not on valuation, and certainly not on whether three minutes of stage time somehow constitutes investment due diligence.

Instead, I wanted a consistent way to answer a simpler question:

Based on the information I gathered, which are the Top Five presenting companies at the 2026 Investors Choice Conference that I believe to be the most investable today?

That was my question, and my answers are found below.

The "Politis Score"

For that purpose, I created what I define as the “Politis Score.”

In simplest terms, the Politis Score is a maximum 40-point assessment built around four equally weighted categories, each scored from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest possible score.

Those four categories are:

🔷 Market Need {How large/serious is the problem(s) addressed by each firm?}

🔷 Uniqueness {Is the product/service offered by the firm truly a category-defining product/service, one targeting what is often defined in entrepreneurial circles as a "Blue Ocean"}

🔷 Ready-for-Market {What development stage is said product/service —

1. {Idea,
2. {Prototype,
3. {Pilot / Proof-of-Concept, or
4. {Revenue-Generating}; and

🔷 Presentation {How complete, and polished, was the information shared via the "Slide Deck" and how prepared / polished was the firm's presenter}.

Additionally, I answered one more question for each presenting firm:

Would I consider making a personal investment in the firm today?

Yes or No?

The results were encouraging.

🔶 Thirteen of the 26 presenters earned Politis Scores of 30 or higher.

🔶 Twenty received a “Yes” from me on current investability.

🔶 Additionally, I felt that the six remaining companies were intriguing, but (in my opinion), I thought they were simply too early for investment consideration today.

Additionally, the lowest Politis Score I awarded was one firm that garnered a score of 20.

To be clear, I am deliberately not identifying which companies landed in which of these broader classifications.

Instead, this exercise is about highlighting opportunity, not publishing a report card on every startup that participated in Investors Choice 2026.

But I do identify the five firms that rose highest via the Politis Score.

So ... in reverse order ... here is my list of the Top 5 Most Investable Startup Awards.

No. 5: Esslyo, Politis Score — 36/40

St. George, Utah-based Esslyo is bringing a sharing-economy concept to high-end private outdoor recreation.

Instead of building and maintaining a luxury pool, hot tub, outdoor kitchen, lawn, television(s), fire pit(s) and potentially more, in one's own backyard, customers can instead rent access to a private “oasis” from Esslyo by the hour or through a membership.

The company's first such "oasis" is in St. George, but it has begun work on a location in Bountiful, Utah, with an initial vision of a hundred or more such venues across the United States.

The proposition is easy to grasp:

Gain temporary access to a premium backyard experience without paying to own the backyard.

To me, it's somewhat akin to a mashup of high-end, short-term rentals with luxury timeshares, but without the hassles of timeshares.

Politis Score: 36 out of 40.

No. 3 (tied): Anziva Pharmaceuticals ... AND ... Noro, both with Politis Scores of 37/40

A. Noro, No. 3 (tied), Politis Score — 37/40

New York City, New York-based Noro is trying to solve a problem Zoom and Microsoft Teams never fully solved:

Making people in different places actually feel as though they are working together.

From my perspective, Noro is comparable to conducting a digital meeting via a room-sized golf simulator morphed with high-quality, two-way, audiovisual equipment deployed across the country or around the globe.

In this regard, Noro connects offices through purpose-built spaces featuring life-sized, full-body, eye-to-eye video / audio interaction, plus white-boarding, screen sharing, and AI-generated meeting intelligence.

{NOTE: As explained on the Noro website, Google Meet does not work with Noro today as "... Google Meet does not offer open APIs."}

In some regards, Noro is less a replacement for videoconferencing than a physical infrastructure layer beneath it.

And personally, this is a brilliant concept made real. Bravo!

Politis Score: 37 out of 40.

B. Anziva Pharmaceuticals, No. 3 (Tied), Politis Score — 37/40

Salt Lake City-based Anziva Pharmaceuticals is pursuing a pragmatic pharmaceutical strategy:

Rather than inventing entirely new drugs, why not instead create new technology to improve the formulation and delivery of known therapeutic agents?

For Anziva, its lead program, J’Neura, is a knee-specific transdermal patch being developed for chronic knee pain, including osteoarthritis-related pain.

{AUTHOR'S NOTE: Many moons ago I consulted with a Salt Lake City-based firm providing similar benefits of drug-delivery through a transdermal skin patch that utilized iontophoresis (tiny electrical pulses) to help medications cross the skin/blood barriers.}

Anziva says J’Neura was designed around the anatomy and movement of the knee while using known pharmacology and established regulatory pathways.

Contextually, Anziva CEO and Founder Simerdeep Singh Gupta, Ph.D., has previously developed more than 35 pharmaceutical products.

Politis Score: 37 out of 40.

No. 2: Pollen Sense, Politis Score — 38/40

Provo, Utah-based Pollen Sense is using optics, artificial intelligence and environmental science to identify airborne particles in real time.

Its Airevo platform is designed to detect and classify

🔸 Pollen,

🔸 Mold,

🔸 Dust,

🔸 Smoke, and

🔸 Other airborne particulate matter,

turning traditionally delayed, manual air sampling into continuously updated environmental intelligence.

The technology has broad potential applications beyond allergy sufferers, including

🔺 Public health,

🔺 Research,

🔺 Agriculture,

🔺 Industrial facilities,

🔺 Manufacturing sites, and

🔺 Environmental monitoring.

Pollen Sense says its technology has already analyzed more than 100 million image frames and tagged more than 7 billion particles.

It's also in the early stages of Pilot and Proof-of-Concept deployments with some very large organizations.

Politis Score: 38 out of 40.

Only one company scored higher than these four firms: Verso.

No. 1: Verso, Politis Score — 39/40

Lehi, Utah-based Verso earned my highest score Thursday.

Its proposition is remarkably simple:

Let people listen to the music they want without forcing them to hear language they do not want.

In simplest terms, Verso is a parental controls app that "sits" on-top-of a user’s music-streaming service(s) across a single or multiple devices and allows users to silence / bleep-over unwanted language in real time rather than requiring listeners to block an entire song or hunt for a separate “clean” version.

For me, however, what pushed Verso beyond merely having an interesting product was the early traction its CEO presented during Investors Choice 2026.

Verso CEO and Co-Founder Jonathan Bernal, explained that the app launched in July, with demo videos generating 100 million social-media views during August alone.

Before starting Verso, Bernal spent over three years with Google, most recently as the Product Lead on the Chrome, Gemini team.

As he explained to me, Verso has reached $100,000 in annual recurring revenue in its first full month of operation and raised $1 million from four investors in one week (three in Silicon Valley and one from Utah).

That combination, along with

🟣 A significantly large audience of over 1 billion prospective users,

🟣 Users who face a clear problem with unsatisfying solutions today, with

🟣 An easy-to-use and differentiated solution delivered by the Verso app, along with

🟣 Initial market penetration underway, plus

🟣 Early evidence that consumers and investors are paying attention,

these factors (in combination) landed Verso at the top of my list of the Most Investable Startups that presented at Investors Choice 2026.

Politis Score: 39 out of 40.

The Top Five, But Not the Only Five

To be clear, these are not the only companies I found immediately investable yesterday.

In fact, 20 of the 26 cleared that bar for me.

Nor does a high Politis Score eliminate the need to examine

🟢  Valuation,

🟢  Cap tables,

🟢  Burn rate,

🟢  Intellectual property,

🟢  Customer-acquisition economics,

🟢  Regulatory risk (if any), or

🟢  Possible investment terms.

It simply answers the question a three-minute pitch is supposed to answer:

Do I, "Poppa P," want the next conversation?

For 20 companies Thursday, my answer was yes.

For these five firms — Esslyo, Noro, Anziva, Pollen Sense, and Verso — it was an especially strong yes, for me, at least.

And among them, Verso earned the top spot.

So ... to the entire Kinect Capital team, all of the volunteer mentors, all speakers, panelist participants, and each presenting company, a solid BRAVO for an excellent 2026 Investors Choice Conference!!!

I'm already looking forward to next year's Investors Choice Conference.

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