Registration is now open for Product of the Year Award event on November 19, 2026
Manchester, NH, October 26, 2026 – Five New Hampshire companies have been named finalists for the 2026 NH Tech Alliance’s Product of the Year (POY) Award competition.
Congratulations to:
- Bugcrowd Platform from Bugcrowd
- FlatClaw from Kirk Tech Solutions
- Freedom Metallization Facility from Phoenix Tailings
- Pitch Signal Communication System from Pitch Signal
- Edge Cyber Protection Suite from TigerByte Cyber
A description of their products can be found below.
These five companies were selected by a panel of judges and will compete for the 2026 POY honors at a live event on Thursday, November 19th from 4:45 – 7:30pm at the Bank of New Hampshire Stage in Concord, NH. There will be networking to follow the presentations.
The Product of the Year competition will include a live seven-minute pitch and a real-time audience vote of this year’s top product. POY celebrates the innovative products developed within the past twelve months and provides a platform for entrepreneurs and companies to receive free advice and major product promotion.
Finalists are:
Bugcrowd Platform from Bugcrowd
Bugcrowd is the preemptive security platform that unifies exposure discovery and assessment, offensive security testing, and intelligence shaped by AI and human insight, helping organizations avoid, discover, and validate real-world risk before attackers can strike.
Bugcrowd’s global workforce, which includes a major New Hampshire hub, combines an on-demand, vetted community of hackers and researchers spanning 350+ skill sets with proprietary AI to reduce risk, increase security ROI, and help teams innovate faster by digitizing security workflows across the software development lifecycle.
Its Bug Bounty, Penetration Testing as a Service, Red Team as a Service, Vulnerability Disclosure, and Attack Surface Management solutions serve financial services, healthcare, retail, technology, and government, trusted by companies including OpenAI, Atlassian, and HP. Backed by over a decade of proprietary vulnerability data, Bugcrowd is redefining preemptive security. Ingenuity Unleashed.
The Bugcrowd Platform helps organizations find security vulnerabilities proactively, before attackers do, by matching them with trusted researchers and routing findings through managed triage for fast, consistent validation.
Over the past year, Bugcrowd significantly advanced the platform with Savant, its new AI intelligence layer that unifies autonomous testing, human-led engagements, and attack surface visibility into one picture of exploitable risk.
Building on Savant, Bugcrowd launched Savant Pathseeker, the first in its Agentic Offensive Testing line, delivering continuous agentic pentesting of web applications and APIs with reproducible, audit-ready proof of exploitability and built-in guardrails, including a manual kill switch, so testing stays fully within scope, freeing researchers to focus on complex logic flaws and zero-days. Bugcrowd also added European data residency and integrated Pathseeker into existing PTaaS, Bug Bounty, and Red Team engagements.
FlatClaw from Kirk Tech Solutions
Kirk Tech Solutions is an AI engineering firm and IT enterprise consultancy headquartered in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with an additional office in New Delhi. The company helps organizations across technology, financial services, and healthcare turn AI ambitions into production-ready systems — from AI readiness assessments and cloud modernization to enterprise integration and secure AI deployment. Kirk Tech Solutions is the developer of FlatClaw, an open-source private-cloud AI coworker platform built for data-sovereignty-sensitive enterprises.
The market problem is that companies are consistently violating security and regulatory protocols by uploading large amounts of data to public AI instances, which is extremely dangerous from a security standpoint. In addition, companies are running models on a subsidized token basis, meaning that token tasks are currently artificially cheap.
To combat these issues, we developed “FlatClaw”. FlatClaw is a fully open-source AI substrate where all inference, chat, agent fleets, scheduled automation, and document search are gated by role-based access and designed to be economical at scale.
Every piece of the stack runs inside each customer’s own cloud project, with no data crossing the customer perimeter, ensuring complete privacy and compliance with the regulatory requirements of the company’s industry.
Freedom Metallization Facility from Phoenix Tailings
Backed by the United States Department of War and Department of Energy, Phoenix Tailings is working to restore U.S. industrial independence by building the domestic refining capacity needed to make metals for every major technology. Our mission is to redefine the metals industry by creating the first fully clean mining and metals production company.
The Freedom Metallization Facility in Exeter, NH, produces rare earth metals essential to automotive manufacturing, semiconductors, AI data centers, and national security, at scale and with zero waste and zero direct-process emissions.
Pitch Signal Communication System from Pitch Signal
Pitch Signal is a New Hampshire sports-technology company building the complete pitch communication and data system for softball and baseball. A husband-and-wife team founded the company. It pairs a mobile app with proprietary wireless hardware, so coaches can call pitches silently, capture every pitch as data, and make better decisions in real time. Pitch Signal launched in February 2026 with zero paid advertising. Coach feedback and demand has exceeded our expectations and resulted in a stronger product roadmap for the future. More than 700 teams nationwide now use it, from local travel programs to nationally competitive organizations and colleges.
The Pitch Signal System replaces hand signs and code cards with silent, encrypted pitch calling, and turns every call into data. The coach calls a pitch in the Pitch Signal app (iOS and Android). The Pitch Signal Base relays it instantly over encrypted, one-way RF to Pitch Signal Watches worn by players.
Every call is clear, private, and keeps the game moving. Each call is logged with its result, building batter history, opponent tendencies, and pitcher reports.
Coaches use them mid-game or share them with a pitching coach between sessions. Communication and analytics live in one system.
We built proprietary hardware because consumer smartwatches rely on Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, which degrade at crowded tournaments. Our dedicated one-way RF stays reliable in exactly those conditions.
Coaches come for the data. The biggest win is on the field: athletes who trust the call, play with confidence, and learn the game pitch by pitch.
Edge Cyber Protection Suite from TigerByte Cyber
TigerByte Cyber develops advanced cybersecurity and resilient edge-computing technologies for space, defense, and other mission-critical systems. Our solutions protect spacecraft, satellite communications, autonomous platforms, and distributed networks operating in contested and disconnected environments. TigerByte Cyber combines high-speed hardware-based cybersecurity, encryption, protocol validation, anomaly detection, and resilient AI/edge processing in low-SWaP platforms. Our Black Bastion cybersecurity platform provides inline protection for mission data and communications, while SpaceCortex enables deterministic, resilient computing and AI at the space edge. TigerByte Cyber works with the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Space Force, NASA, and commercial partners to enable secure, resilient operations from the ground to orbit.
TigerByte Cyber’s Cyber Protection Suite (CPS), now known as Black Bastion, is a low-SWaP, high-performance hardware cybersecurity platform designed to protect spacecraft, aircraft, autonomous systems, and other mission-critical edge platforms. Black Bastion provides inline encryption, protocol validation, anomaly detection, and policy enforcement at line rate, enabling secure communications without relying on cloud connectivity or centralized infrastructure. Its FPGA-based architecture supports deterministic processing, ultra-low latency, and deployment in contested, disconnected, and bandwidth-constrained environments. Designed for integration into existing platforms and networks, Black Bastion helps protect mission data, isolate untrusted devices and links, and maintain resilient operations against cyber threats at the tactical and space edge.
“The Product of the Year competition continues to highlight the incredible innovation and talent being developed right here in New Hampshire,” said Julie Demers, executive director of the NH Tech Alliance. “Each finalist reflects the remarkable things that are built when vision and technology align, and we are thrilled to showcase their achievements to a broader audience.”
Past award winners include the BioAssembly™ Platform with BAB Intelligence™ from Advanced Solutions Life Sciences (ASLS), Auto Injector from Pirouette Medical, Flex NX from Geophysical Survey Systems (GSSI), TU3 from Mikros, Breast Cancer Locator from Cairn Surgical, SpotOn Virtual Smart Fence by OnPoint Systems, Measured Air Performance, iCAD, Inc., Wilcox Industries, Plexxi, Prosenex, Single Digits, Nanocomp Technologies, UltraVision, InsightTech Gear, Holase Incorporated, Sky-Skan, Foss Manufacturing and Therma-HEXX.
Major sponsors of this year’s POY event are:
Sheehan Phinney, Wipfli, Cross Insurance, M&T Bank, Pivot Creative, ARMI, Hypertherm, BerryDunn, TruNorth Bank, Primary Bank, Geophysical Survey Systems (GSSI), YULLR, SEE Science Center, and our media partner is NH Business Review.
Included is a photo of our judges and committee. From left to right, Logan Johnson, NeighborWorks Southern New Hampshire; Matt Harris, Geophysical Survey Systems Inc. (GSSI); Eric Soederberg, Suntra MedTech Solutions; Lisa King, Cross Insurance; Mike Cote, NH Business Review; Amanda Andrews, NH Business Review; Tom Daly, Contrivian; Jeremy Stanizzi, NH Business Finance Authority
About the New Hampshire Tech Alliance
The New Hampshire Tech Alliance is a statewide technology association committed to supporting companies at every stage of growth. Through programs that focus on workforce development, innovation, advocacy, and entrepreneurship, the Alliance helps ensure New Hampshire remains a leader in the evolving global tech landscape.
For more information, or to learn about sponsorship opportunities, please visit nhtechalliance.org, email [email protected] or connect via X, Facebook or LinkedIn.