Pitch Fest Competition (Pitch Labs): Winter 2025-26 Season Closed, Next Cycle Not Announced

Pitch Fest Competition (Pitch Labs): Winter 2025-26 Season Closed, Next Cycle Not Announced

Status: historical reference; the Winter 2025-26 cycle is closed and there is nothing to apply to right now. Pitch Labs ran Pitch Fest 2025 Winter for U.S. high school students. The dedicated competition page lists submissions opening November 1, 2025, closing February 15, 2026 at 11:59 P.M. PST, and winners being announced February 28, 2026. The official page at pitchlabs.org/pitchfest still loads and shows that season — its dates, rules, and results — but Pitch Labs has not posted a later follow-on cycle.

Draw the distinction carefully, because it changes what you should do. This is a completed cycle whose official page remains online, not an open call. The rules and results are still posted, and the organizers described Winter 2025-26 as “our first competition” while saying they may open future events to a wider set of participants. What is missing is a new call for entries. If you are a high school student who found this listing hoping for a current deadline, the honest answer is that no next deadline is published, and nobody outside Pitch Labs can tell you when the next one lands.

What happened in the Winter 2025-26 cycle

The season ran on three published dates:

• Competition opened: November 1, 2025
• Submissions due: February 15, 2026 by 11:59 P.M. PST
• Winners announced: February 28, 2026

Results are posted on the official page. First place went to PaperCoal (A’Ziyah Lloyd), which took the $250 scholarship, a first place certificate, and a Discord community winner role. Second place went to AdheRx (Maximilian Rubenstein, Benjamin Matsa, Avinash Jani) for $150 plus the certificate and Discord role. Third place went to CoreConnect (Anvish Singidi, Suhas Gottipati, Rishi Vijaykrishna, Anudeep Valiveti) for $100 plus the certificate and Discord role. The page also names top finalists including Yard2Yum (Reya Kannan) and Medi-Loc (Ekansh Singh, Ishaan Marwaha, Kenneth Kim, Ammar Siddique).

Those results are worth reading before any future entry. They are the clearest available evidence of what the judges actually rewarded, and they tell you the field size is small enough that a well-built submission has real odds.

At-a-glance summary

Why the page looks active when the cycle is not

Two details make it easy to misread the official page as an open call.

First, the hero text is still written in the present tense: “apply for the Pitch Fest 2025 competition for a chance to win a startup Scholarship.” That copy was never rewritten after the deadline passed. The dedicated competition page puts the submission deadline at February 15, 2026. The Pitch Labs homepage still carries an older January 31, 2026 deadline, so the dedicated Pitch Fest page is the better historical record because it contains the full dates, rules, submission steps, and published results.

Second, the FAQ section has two entries whose answers are still lorem ipsum placeholder text — “How developed should my idea be to qualify for Pitch Fest?” and “How can I stay connected with Pitch Labs after Pitch Fest ends?” Placeholder copy that survived a full competition cycle is a fair sign the page has not been maintained since results went up. Treat everything on it as a record of the Winter 2025-26 season rather than as current instructions.

What the competition asked for

If a new season opens, the format is unlikely to change much, so the published rules are the best available preparation material.

Eligibility: U.S.-based high school students aged 14 to 18, entering solo or in teams of up to four, submitting an original business idea. The concept had to be a product, service, or startup concept, legal under local and state law, and ethical. An existing idea you had been developing was allowed; an established, operating business was not.

Video requirements: upload to YouTube with the hashtag #PitchLabs in both the title and the description. Length between 1 and 5 minutes. Landscape orientation, at least 720p — the rules explicitly note a standard phone camera is sufficient. A supporting infomercial was optional.

AI policy: the only permitted use of AI was “traditional” AI for decision making, research, and data analysis. Generative AI for any part of the submission content — images, video, visual effects, text — was not allowed. Any AI use, including permitted use, had to be disclosed, either on a slide at the end of the video, in the video description, or in an accompanying Google document.

Submission steps: check every deliverable against the requirements, then have one student per team submit through the deliverable submission form while every other team member submits a consent and release form. All forms had to be in by the deadline. After that, the only step was waiting for the results date.

How judging worked

Pitch Labs published its rubric, and it scored seven categories on a three-point scale — Excellent (3), Satisfactory (2), Needs Improvement (1):

1. Presentation — confident, compelling, well structured, engaged, within the time limit.
2. Visual Presentation — eye contact, minimal reliance on a script, appropriate dress.
3. Product, Service, or Business Creativity — innovative, well defined, feasible, addressing a real market need with room to scale.
4. Marketing Plan — a defined target audience, a strategy, and actionable tactics.
5. Critical Thinking — naming the real challenges, reasoning through them, supporting claims with evidence.
6. Financial Projections — startup costs, revenue forecasts, a break-even point, and one-to-three-year profit and loss projections with stated assumptions.
7. Infomercial (optional) — creative, professional, persuasive.

The content prompts on the page map onto those categories directly. For the product itself: what it is, how it differs from what already exists, what makes it innovative. For value: why anyone would use it and what problem it solves. For target market: where the problem occurs, who the ideal customer is, and how you would enter that market. For financial forecasting: the most important costs, how income is generated, what revenue models you envision, and any basic projections for sales, investment, or funding.

Financial projections are the category most likely to separate entries. Presentation polish is common among motivated students; a defensible break-even estimate with stated assumptions is not.

One contradiction worth knowing about

The rules state the video must run between 1 and 5 minutes. The tips section, on the same page, tells students to build an outline that “fits within the time limit of 3 minutes.” Those do not agree. The rules block is the binding one, and the finalists were judged against a 5-minute ceiling, but the mismatch is a reminder to re-read the requirements at the top of any future season rather than relying on tips copy that may be stale.

What to do now, given there is no open call

If Pitch Fest is a fit for you, the useful move is preparation, not monitoring.

• Join the Pitch Labs Discord. The organizers point to it as a place for Pitch Fest news, participant questions, and connections with the Pitch Labs team.
• Email [email protected] and ask directly whether another season is planned and roughly when. This is a specific, answerable question, and the address is listed for exactly this purpose.
• Watch your age window. If you are 18 and graduating, a future season may fall outside your eligibility. If you are 14 or 15, you likely have multiple cycles ahead.
• Build the pitch anyway. A 1-to-5-minute video explaining a problem, a solution, a target market, and a rough financial model is portable. It fits other high school entrepreneurship competitions, college application supplements, and club presentations. The work does not go stale even if this specific competition never runs again.
• Do the financial homework early. Costs, a revenue model, and a break-even estimate take the longest to make credible and are the hardest to fake in a five-minute video.

The tips section also lists free tools the organizers recommend in place of generative AI: Canva, Pixlr, Figma, Trello, Google Workspace, and Slidesgo. That list tells you something about expectations — they want work you made, using ordinary tools, not output you prompted.

Mistakes that sank entries in the closed cycle

Most of the failure modes here were procedural, not creative:

• Omitting #PitchLabs from either the YouTube title or the description.
• Running under 1 minute or over 5.
• Filming vertically or below 720p.
• Using generative AI for visuals, voiceover, or script text, or using permitted traditional AI without disclosing it.
• Submitting the deliverable form but skipping consent and release forms for teammates.
• Pitching a genuinely interesting idea with no market definition and no numbers.

Judges can reward a rough idea that is clearly reasoned. They cannot reward a submission that breaks a format rule.

Common questions

Is Pitch Fest still running?

The official pages reviewed do not announce that Pitch Fest has been discontinued, but there is no open cycle. The last published season closed February 15, 2026, and no replacement season or deadline is posted.

Was there an entry fee?

No fee was listed. Pitch Labs described the competition as free and virtual.

Could international students enter?

No. Eligibility was limited to U.S.-based high school students aged 14 to 18. Pitch Labs said it dedicated its first competition to high school students for fairness and to match its mission, and suggested it may open future events more broadly depending on how this one went.

Did you need a prototype or an existing company?

Neither. An idea or concept in development was enough. An already established business was explicitly excluded.

Could you enter without an idea at all?

Yes — the FAQ said participants could register without a concrete idea and encouraged looking at everyday problems for inspiration, with the Discord community as a brainstorming resource.

Official links

• Official competition page: https://pitchlabs.org/pitchfest/
• Student, teacher, and school questions: [email protected]
• Partnership and sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Bottom line

Pitch Fest was a low-cost, low-barrier competition with modest scholarship prizes and a rubric detailed enough to be genuinely instructive. The Winter 2025-26 season is over and its winners are published. Nothing indicates the program has ended, and nothing indicates when it returns. Verify status with Pitch Labs directly before spending time on a submission, and in the meantime build the pitch for its own sake — the video, the market analysis, and the financial model hold their value regardless of which competition eventually receives them.