Venture Atlanta 2012 Day One Recap

Today I had the honor of attending the first day of Venture Atlanta. The keynote kicked off with Steve Case, the founder of America Online, who did a good job extolling the benefits of entrepreneurs and the goals around Startup America. After the mayor of Atlanta talked for a few minutes it was time to hear the entrepreneurs give their six minute pitches.

SynkUp

• 17 minutes spent to plan an activity
• Scheduling to facilitate mobile commerce
• Group scheduling
• Rank friends in priority list
• No new social network
• Value from data, advertising, and context

Aptidata

• Ask simple, natural language questions of data
• SMBs are drowning in data
• Example: what were sales of wings last month at windward store vs last year?
• Gartner: Analytics is #1 issue for retailers

CollectorDash

• $2.3 million spent on a single postage stamp
• Collectors are great fans
• Hundreds of collector categories
• Software platform that takes holistic approach to what collectors do
• Revenue: advertising, consumer data, and platform licensing
• Raised $600k

SwiftPay MD

• Mobile payment capture for physicians
• $6 billion problem due to lost billing cards
• Up to 30 days to get the info from the paper insurance card to the back-end then 60 days to get paid
• Mobile solution where info is spoken into an app and transferred to the back-end

eCommHub

• Automates the commerce supply chain for SMB companies
• Movement to drop shipping by etailers
• Virtual fulfillment where inventory isn’t actually held
• 1,500,000 online retailers
• Raising $750k

LiquidText

• Touch interface to interact with text
• Make text more flexible and interactive
• Problem with comprehending and understanding long documents
• Visualization, awareness, relationships, aggregation
• Raising $800k

ThundrLizard

• Go from cold lead to qualified prospect
• Cold calling effective rate is 2-6%
• 99% of cold leads suck
• Help know more about your cold leads
• Raising $500k

Mobilewalla

• Big data co in the mobile app analytics
• Compute analytics and sell to ad publishers and ad networks
• Like the Nielsen/Comscore for mobile apps
• Audience measurement

Lumense

• Biological and chemical sensors
• The 21st century will be the sensor century
• Useful in gases or liquids
• Competition from large lab manufacturers
• Raised $1m
• Raising $2m

Badgy

• Mark Cuban invested $600k
• SEO for social
• Dallas Mavericks and Landmark Theatres are customers
• Helps fan promote things socially to increase traffic
• Raising $1.5m Series A in 2013

Mowgli

• Mobile and web games to make songs
• People love music
• 72% of people play video games
• Enables creation of music through games
• Songster is the first game
• Raising $3m Series A

Clearleap

• Content licensing has been resolved but the technology isn’t ready yet
• Software platform that manages complexity around delivering content to consumer
• Transforms video on the fly based on the receiving device
• HBO GO powered by Clearleap
• Raised $9m Series A
• Raising Series B

Half Off Depot

• $2m angel round in 2010
• $7m Series A in 2011
• Daily deals platform
• Industry growing 20% CAGR with expected $4.8B market in 2014
• Market consolidator

HireIQ

• Predictive analytics and hiring software for call centers
• 2.2 million hired per year in call centers via screening 20 million
• Virtual interviews, tests, and assessments
• Raised $1.5m series A

Bridgevine

• Focused on life events, like moving
• Lead generation platform for the home services space
• Match online contextual audiences with inventory (lead gen)
• Six time Inc. 500 winner
• Cost per action marketing
• $50m+ revenue

Acculynk

• Platform for debit card transactions
• Two sided market
• Huge growth opportunity in India
• Powers debit card transactions during the shopping cart checkout process

Cirracore

• Wholesale enterprise infrastructure as a service
• Floor at 56 Marietta St
• Whitelabel IaaS for other hosting providers to resell
• Double digit revenue growth since 2009
• Major reseller providers

QGenda

• Automated physician scheduling for all specialties
• Putting the right physician in the right place at the right time
• Sometime hundreds, if not thousands, of business rules
• Productivity, utilization, and other types of reports
• 800 customers today
• Doctors and hospitals pay for the web application
• Under 7% market adoption of this type of technology
• Activation fees, recurring revenue, professional services fees

Springbot

• Ecommerce marketing for SMBs
• $1M in seed funding
• Part of Flashpoint program at GA Tech
• Ecommerce is huge with 10 companies representing half of all online sales
• 500k+ ecommerce SMBs in the U.S.
• Integrate data from disparate tools
• Automatically recommended marketing actions via predictive analytics
• Focused on the Magento community

Pindrop Security

• Phone identification technology
• Unique fingerprint for each type of phone
• Caller ID is easily spoofed
• Phone fraud is faster growing than internet fraud
• 30% of bank fraud involves a phone
• $10 billion wasted per year asking phone questions
• $3.2 billion addressable market

Endgame Systems

• Repositioning the company to target commercial markets
• Government primary customer over the past few years
• Nation states sponsored cyber attacks against U.S. financial institutions
• Endgame provides a cyber warfare security and attack system
• Raised $29M Series A from Kleiner Perkins two years ago
• Raising a Series B round

Day one was a big success and I’m looking forward to day two tomorrow.