Venture Atlanta had a great event today showcasing a number of promising startups in the area. Here are my notes on the companies:
- Avg F500 spends $500M/yr on legal expenses
- Document decisioning suite
- Categorize, search, and cluster data
- Predictive coding of documents using machine learning
- Predictive analytics of unstructured data
- Raising $5M for sales, marketing, and additional development
- Changing the landscape of retail
- Drive revenue for retailers by allowing consumers to bring their closets into every purchase decision
- 150,000 US retailers with $200B in revenue
- $60B to be purchased online in the next few years
- Less than 3% of visitors to an ecommerce site results in a sale
- FashionAde.com – live lab launched 9/2010
- Three customers are embedding the product this quarter
- Raising $1M to build out sales team
- Platform for change and learning in education and corporate training environments
- 44M students will move to online classes by 2015
- Education is $853.6B market
- Corporate training is $72.7B market
- Virtual classroom solution
- Raising $900k
- Safeguards data regardless of where it resides
- Features: At-rest encryption and behavioral monitoring
- Enterprises are more reliant on cloud services and mobile devices
- Raising money to scale sales, operations, and engineering
- Raised money from ISS founder
- Mobile proximity-based advertising
- Example walking into a casino and getting a text message offering a coupon
- Raised $2.25M in mid-2011
- Small device that plugs in and then talks to SaaS app via 3g for campaign rules
- Future integration with third parties like FourSquare and Facebook
- No app to download — based on phone WiFi or Bluetooth connection plus text messaging
- Raising $3M
- Laser Fit Hearing
- In-ear scanning for hearing aids
- 60,000 clinicians with 15M impressions/year
- Capture a digital 3d representation of ear
- Much better patient experience
- Raised $1.25M
- Raising $1M for productization
- Build meters that give real-time feedback on water usage
- Measure water footprint like carbon footprint
- 22 million unmetered apartments
- Device that clamps around existing pipes
- Full solution including consumer and enterprise monitoring solution
- Focus on multi-family residential real estate market
- Product enabled service company
- Raising $650k
- Social media marketing for local business
- 70% of revenue for restaurants come from returning customers
- 86% of SMB have a website
- Single place for local businesses to manage content and push it to places like Yelp, OpenTable, FourSquare, Facebook, etc
- Raised $460k
- Raising $500k
- Harness the thinking power of groups and help companies manage, socialize, and evaluate that information
- Average F1000 company spends over $100M/yr capturing ideas
- SaaS product for idea generation with enterprise tools to facilitate break-through thinking
- Raising money for sales and marketing as well as product development
- Aggregate corporate purchases to get cash back for customers and deliver more business to restaurants, airlines, and hotels
- Negotiates discount with restaurants and get’s a piece of the discount as business model
- Goal is to get as many of corporate customers to use the partner restaurants
- Opportunities: data mining, proprietary market analytics, mobile apps, social media integration
- Raised $2.9M
- Raising $3M
- Better, cheaper, faster, and less power
- Force sensitive instead of capacitive sensitive
- Provisional patent
- Raised $250k
- Launched 1st product using the technology
- Raising $1M
- Web-based app that generates iPhone app
- Live apps on the AppStore from the app
- $4500/year per customer
- Connects many of the smart phone functions
- Raising $500k
- Breakthrough caller ID solution that gives each call a fingerprint
- Core product is anti-fraud call analyzer deployed via cloud or appliance
- Stop phone fraud
- Focused on big banks
- Raising seed round
- Data explosion from electrical meters – checked 12 times/year to 35,000/year
- Data visualization, analytics, and applications platform for utilities
- Huge explosion of data that needs to be analyzed
- Raised $800k from ATA
- Raising $2M
- Foreign language learning is a $1B market
- Trends in cultural travel and smartphone penetration
- Increase in laziness in travelers
- Customized phrase list for travelers
- Slang slider shows different ways to say something
- Currently offer 12 languages
- $10 per language per country
- 36,000 downloads already
- Vision of a personalized retail experience
- Live on 120 check-out counters
- Has recommended 800k items with 40k upsells
- 3% increase in same store sales
- Loyalty programs on check-out
- Approx $300/mo per store
- Raising $1M
- 82% struggle to make mental jump from instructions to physical object in front of them
- Augmented reality to help with learning and instructions (think yellow overlays during football games)
- Targeting chief learning and information officers as well as elearning companies
- Raising $1M
- Website backup service for small businesses
- Time machine for the site
- Alerts whenever your site changes
- Shared hosting market growing from $4.2B to $5.8B
The startups today set the bar high and I’m looking forward to the event tomorrow.
Read about Day 2 of the event.
David Cummings on Startups 
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