Provided
Elyse Stoltz Dickerson, front, with winners in 2024.
The eosera® Foundation is opening applications for its fourth annual eosera® Foundation Pitch Competition this week, and this year’s event will be offered to a much wider audience and with a larger cash prize available for the first-place winner.
That makes it bigger and better.
The foundation is expanding the competition to women across the U.S. who have been in business for three years or less, rather than entrepreneurs just in Texas.
Applications will open Tuesday — July 8 — and close Sept. 9 — or once the maximum number of entries has been received.
“Our goal was always to eventually have a larger reach and invite more women to apply for this exciting opportunity,” said eosera® co-founder and CEO Elyse Stoltz Dickerson in a statement.
The overall earnings available this year are $42,500, with $30,000 offered for the first-place award, $5,000 for the second-place award, $2,500 for the third-place award, and $5,000 for the people's choice award.
The eosera® Foundation Pitch Competition will culminate with a live finale on Nov. 13 at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. Three finalists will deliver their business pitches to a distinguished panel of judges and live audience, competing for funding that has the potential to revolutionize their ventures.
Sponsors for the event include iHeart Impact and Simmons Bank, as well as a host of other generous contributors.
Stoltz Dickerson co-founded ear care company eosera® in 2015 and was able to use seed money from a pitch competition she won to help get the company off the ground. Ten years later, the company has grown into an ear care empire, with ear drops and sprays sold in more than 28,000 stores nationwide.
Dickerson credits her success to having financial support and mentorship during the early stages of eosera®.
"The fact of the matter is that we would not have been able to be so successful in the beginning had it not been for us winning a pitch competition," Dickerson said.
Before Dickerson and business partner Joe Griffin got eosera® products onto retail shelves, they had spent months in a laboratory on the campus of the UNT Health Science Center, where they had leased space. During that time, they had worked repeatedly with all kinds of earwax and had finally found one formula they had developed that worked consistently on the various kinds of earwax.
Having collected “robust test tube data,” it was time to run a human clinical trial, but the principals of this self-funded project winced just a little when they were told the price tag of this part of research and development: $50,000.
As fate would have it, the Dallas Entrepreneur Center and Comerica Bank were hosting a pitch competition.
Dickerson entered and nailed it. The top prize: $50,000.