October 26, 2017

A Decade In the Making: Venture Atlanta 2017 Recap

Earlier this month, over 880 entrepreneurs, investors and companies came together at the College Football Hall of Fame in Atlanta, GA for Venture Atlanta 2017. For the past decade, we've had the pleasure of connecting the southeast’s most innovative technology companies with the capital they need to grow.

Our energetic host, Tripp Crosby, kept the crowd entertained with his colorful commentary and a t-shirt gun...which finally worked after a rocky start. With keynote speakers like Mark Cuban, Ernie Garcia, Scott Dorsey, Brad Feld, and pitches from 35 inspiring presenting companies, our ten year anniversary event was one for the books.

The event was filled with new assets for attendees including a surprise appearance from TI as a new investor in Sudu, a video booth capturing hilarious anecdotes from the crowd and a t-shirt gun that didn’t work the first go around, but had flawless execution on try two!

Though #VA2017 is officially wrapped, we wanted to take the opportunity to relive all the excitement. Rather than tell you, let us show you:

Want a snapshot into each company and the businesses they are growing? Check out the list of all presenting companies right here:

2017 Presenting Companies

Health/IT

Company: Aces Health
Elevator Pitch: Aces is Automated Collection and Engagement Systems for life science and healthcare, that enables real-time interventions and never-before-possible insights.
Raising: $10MM
Fun Fact: Nearly 50% of clinical trials rely on paper and pencil to record data points, requiring expensive and time intensive manual data entry. In addition, 20% of subjects drop out of trials due to non-adherence, resulting in a $12B cost to the industry and 15-year drug to market timeline.

Company: EVO
Elevator Pitch: EVO is a wellness app dedicated to providing a personalized and realistic wellness improvement experience. By using your own biometrics gathered from your phone and wearable device, EVO combines the best data and behavioral science to help improve your health and wellbeing.
Raising: $5MM
Fun Fact: Obesity is an epidemic in the US (33% of adults and 17% of children) and a concern globally. “Inactivity is the new normal” (PublicHealth.org) and humans have become innately curious about their health. The need and interest to address an overweight population has driven the massive growth in the sale of wearable devices & associated services.

Company: Gozio Health
Elevator Pitch: Gozio Health is a growth-stage SAAS company that leverages our patented technology to solve some of the toughest problems hospitals face today. We improve hospital bottom lines by delivering a complete mobile strategy for engaging patients and visitors.
Raising: $3-5MM
Fun Fact: Comprised of innovators in healthcare, mobile technology, engineering, and computing, Gozio’s leadership team offers exceptional technical expertise combined with a user-centered design to deliver a superior indoor positioning platform.

Company: illuma Care Connections
Elevator Pitch: illuma Care Connections is a care coordination company offering technology-enabled services to health plans and eye care providers. We can help you find the right care & ensure your clinical data is distributed to primary care and on record with your health plan.
Raising: $1-2MM
Fun Fact: Illuma Care Connections was founded from an idea originally conceived within the eye care profession. Illuma’s mission is to ensure diabetic patients get the eye care services they need to improve their quality of life, while removing risk of permanent vision loss.

Company: Patientory
Elevator Pitch: Patientory is a global population health management software that regulates and secures patient data providing an easy way to securely store and manage health information in real time.
Raising: $20MM
Fun Fact: The healthcare cyber security market is estimated to be worth $10B by 2020.

Company: Vizzia Technologies
Elevator Pitch: Vizzia is a leading provider of fully managed real-time wireless technology solutions (IoT) for healthcare organizations including Piedmont Healthcare, Grady Hospital and Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Raising: $5MM
Fun Fact: Hospitals waste millions annually in expensive medical equipment due to misplacement or theft. Vizzia helps bridge the gap to save hospitals money on expenses.

Financial Technology

Company: Fattmerchant
Elevator Pitch: Fattmerchant offers a simple and affordable payment processing solution for businesses saving an average of 40% per month.
Raising: $5MM
Fun Fact: In 2015 Fattmerchant saw a 2,000% increase in transactional volume and is on pace to transact over a $1 Billion by the end of 2017.

Company: Freeing Returns
Elevator Pitch: The Freeing Returns platform exposes Micro-services which allow retailers, their merchandise vendors and 3rd party applications access to fraud detection/prevention services, cross retailer returns data and mobile-based returns.
Raising: $750K
Fun Fact: Merchandise Returns Fraud is a 16 Billion+ issue for Retailers, that combined with Organized Retail Crime(ORC), costs Retailers close to 30 Billion dollars a year in
annual Total Retail Loss/Shrink.

Company: UnBrokerage
Elevator Pitch: UnBrokerage provides small businesses with easy and affordable access
to the insurance products they're legally required to have while automating the processes of selling, on-boarding, collecting payment, and servicing.
Raising: $2MM
Fun Fact: Legal issues cost small businesses in the U.S. over $100 billion annually. UnBrokerage partners with the largest insurance carriers in the country to make insurance more easily available to the 25+ million small and medium sized businesses.

Consumer Products

Company: FIXD
Elevator Pitch: FIXED is a consumer application offering users a mobile mechanic that helps drivers better understand and maintain their vehicles connecting them with the needed parts and services.
Raising: $7MM
Fun Fact: The FIXD App allows you to see the health and status of every car in the family from your app giving parents peace of mind while their children are on the road. You can even schedule a service for others when they are approaching maintenance intervals or need repair.

Company: MMJ Labs Pain Relief
Elevator Pitch: MMJ Labs is a medical device company whose primary pain relief product lines are Buzzy® & Vibra-Cool®. Our products are patent protected, FDA 510K cleared and clinically proven physiologic pain relievers for drug-free control of procedural, rehabilitation, chronic, and postoperative pain.
Raising: $2-4MM
Fun Fact: Chronic pain costs $600B US annually and MMJ Labs is out to provide you with unique alternative pain relief options.

Company: Saige
Elevator Pitch: Saige is a modern-day personal chef service. Once you fill out our online dietary profile – preferences, allergens, special diets - we recommend meals that satisfy your dietary needs exactly. The meals are cooked from our commercial kitchen and delivered to your door ready-to-heat. It’s like having your own personal chef without someone in your kitchen cooking exorbitantly expensive meals.
Raising: $2.5MM
Fun Fact: Saige offers an affordable alternative to cooking. Parents will be thrilled to know that kids meals are always half-priced.

Data and Information Management and Analytics

Company: Brytecore
Elevator Pitch: Brytecore can help you track consumer behavior on real estate websites and apps, and process these behaviors with our proprietary machine learning platform. We predict when home buyers will make their purchase decision, then connect agents and buyers at the perfect time.
Raising: $3MM
Fun Fact: After spending up to $150 per lead, real estate companies close an average of 1% of generated internet leads. Our product lifts conversion to 5-8%, generating up to $200K per month in new revenue for our customers.

Company: Global Safety Management
Elevator Pitch: GSM is a SaaS based compliance company that provides web-based, mobile enabled tools for companies to easily provide mandatory product safety information and labeling to customers and employees.
Raising: $8-10MM
Fun Fact: OSHA can hit a company’s bottom line with fines as much as $12,675 per incident per day. GSM can help you keep your employees and your company safe.

Company: GoProcure
Elevator Pitch: The GoProcure app is a smart B2B SaaS-based procurement platform that makes it easy for anyone in any enterprise to buy any product or service on a mobile device or desktop.
Raising: $1-2MM
Fun Fact: GoProcure offers a B2B digital marketplace allowing you to search over 1 billion products and services.

Company: Izenda
Elevator Pitch: Izenda is the only self-service analytics solution in the BI industry that is purpose-built for embedding into business applications to meet the needs of end users, business analysts and software development teams.
Raising: >$10MM
Fun Fact: Izenda was recently recognized as Other Vendors to Consider for Modern BI and Analytics by Gartner.

Company: Orderly
Elevator Pitch: Orderly provides independent restaurant owner/operators and chains with the simplest solution to help them manage their food spend and inventory. Our customers replace manual, time-consuming processes with a streamlined mobile app solution, resulting in paperless invoices, automated accounting, painless inventory and food spending dashboards.
Raising: $3-5MM
Fun Fact: Orderly was founded to automate common processes for the $200B market of smaller restaurant operators. Now processing half a million food purchases per month, Orderly maintains a proprietary Restaurant Food Index, uniquely giving its customers market-based benchmarks.

Company: Predikto
Elevator Pitch: Successfully predict failures in heavy transportation equipment using auto generated machine learning algorithms developed by our platform. We have customers in Rail, Aviation, and Ports.
Raising: $15MM
Fun Fact: Predikto software ingests data from equipment sensors, maintenance, and weather to predict when certain components will fail over the next 30 days with an average accuracy of about 78%.

Company: Sideqik
Elevator Pitch: Need help identifying influencers for your marketing approach? Sideqik's influencer intelligence platform helps brands discover the best influencers and tell amazing stories that resonate with you target audience.
Raising: $3MM
Fun Fact: The influencer market will be a $5-10 billion market within 5 years.

Company: ThingTech
Elevator Pitch: ThingTech offers a single platform from which customers can track and collect field data (people, devices, assets) and data from existing business systems (ERP, CRM). By leveraging this data, we can help you generate insights that enable customers to take actions that will improve operational efficiency and propel business growth.
Raising: $2MM
Fun Fact: The ThingX platform is the first IoT technology that connects real-time data to your devices, assets and people.

Company: VITAL4DATA
Elevator Pitch: VITAL4DATA is an Atlanta-based enterprise cloud software (SaaS) company with a globally accessible data search solution that supports due diligence, KYC/AML, FCRA, FCPA and UK Bribery Act compliant global screening.
Raising: $1MM
Fun Fact: VITAL4DATA serves over 240 countries and territories across the globe offering over 3,000 specialty products and services.

Communication Technology

Company: MacStadium
Elevator Pitch: The world’s largest hosting provider of dedicated Apple Mac computers with dedicated server rentals, colocation, and Hosted Mac Private Cloud solutions.
Raising: >$10MM
Fun Fact: MacStadium has nearly 14,000 dedicated Apple servers for remote macOS desktop environments and iOS app build servers.

Company: Raw Shorts
Elevator Pitch: Raw Shorts empowers business users to automate and scale video creation through an A.I. assisted video making platform.
Raising: $5MM
Fun Fact: To date over 750K business users have started using Raw Shorts to make videos in house.

Logistics

Company: Deposco
Elevator Pitch: Trying to sell on Amazon? Deposco offers a unique blend of next-generation order management, fulfillment, sourcing, and store applications tailored for the Amazon era of unified commerce.
Raising: $8-10MM
Fun Fact: Deposco was recently recognized with the “SSA Standout: Supply Chain Logistics” award from the Southeastern Software Association and TAG.

Company: Sudu Logistics
Elevator Pitch: We are a marketplace connecting long haul freight shippers with diversity spending targets with a large, network of qualified minority, veteran, women-owned trucking
companies (aka carriers).
Raising: $1MM
Fun Fact: Rapper Clifford Joseph Harris Jr. (AKA ‘TI’) invested in Sudu and event made an appearance on the Venture Atlanta 2017 stage to show his support.

Information Security

Company: Zenedge
Elevator Pitch: Keep your company safe with Zenedge, a global provider of cloud-based, artificial intelligence-driven cybersecurity solutions. We use adaptive machine learning and automation to proactively combat cyber-attacks for organizations.
Raising: $20MM
Fun Fact: Zenedge recently announced the launch of a Global Partner Program to help partners promote, market, sell and support the Zenedge Cybersecurity Suite to their end customers.

Mobile

Company: ScientiaMobile
Elevator Pitch: ScientiaMobile provides accurate mobile device intelligence and image optimization solutions that improve the mobile experience and make web pages load faster.
Raising: $15MM
Fun Fact: With customers such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Akamai, ScientiaMobile’s device detection drives over 83% of the internet’s device analytics.

Other

Company: FSLogix
Elevator Pitch: FSLogix solves all your problems of easily and cost effectively deploying cloud based virtual desktop technologies.
Raising: $3-5MM
Fun Fact: This year, FSLogix successfully closed a $1 million debt facility from Silicon Valley Bank to reinforce their leadership position in virtual desktop innovation.

Company: ImagineAir
Elevator Pitch: Travel on the fly! ImagineAir is an established and growing private air travel service utilizing its proprietary software technology to disrupt the on-demand air travel industry.
Raising: $3-5MM
Fun Fact: Flying private typically costs $7,500 per flight. By introducing technology, ImagineAir has democratized private air travel with mobile real-time booking, scheduling and payments systems for less than $1,200 per flight.

Company: Intradiem
Elevator Pitch: Intradiem helps large contact centers reduce costs and improve employee performance by automating a broad range of operating process.
Raising: N/A
Fun Fact: Over 40 enterprise customers use Intradiem, including Citi, UnitedHealthcare, British Gas and Sprint.

Company: LiveSource
Elevator Pitch: LiveSource is a supply chain collaboration portal that delivers actionable data, allowing unprecedented strategic vision for the complexities of the manufacturing industry.
Raising: $1-3MM
Fun Fact: LiveSource has local support offices in Atlanta, Paris and Shanghai that provide support to customers and their suppliers in six languages across all time zones.

Company: Preparis
Elevator Pitch: Preparis provides award-winning emergency notification software and expert business continuity services to help companies easily move through a disruptive incident and get back to business as usual.
Raising: $2MM
Fun Fact: A company that brings in more than $1 billion in annual revenue could lose around $686,000 in revenue per minute of downtime (source: IDC).

Company: Surefire Local
Elevator Pitch: Surefire Local multiplies the marketing effectiveness of local businesses by helping them see & strengthen all their online activities – from digital marketing assets, local data to online ads & social media – from a single platform.
Raising: $7MM
Fun Fact: Today, Surefire Local has emerged to be a top local marketing technology company and Google Premier Partner, earning accolades including the 2017 Inc. 5000 List of America’s Fastest Growing Companies (4th consecutive year).

Company: Trust Stamp
Elevator Pitch: Trust Stamp provides enterprises and consumers with artificial intelligence powered Identity and Trust as a Service focused on facial biometrics. Applications may be as limited as user authentication and login or the provision of comprehensive stand-alone solutions such as biometrically signed and encrypted e-mail and risk-based KYC/AML/Onboarding solutions.
Raising: $10MM
Fun Fact: This year, Trust Stamp earned a spot in Coca Cola’s 2017 Atlanta BridgeCommunity.

Company: Volantio
Elevator Pitch: Volantio’s web-based platform focuses on optimizing revenue and automating marketing for travel suppliers, particularly airlines.
Raising: $1M
Fun Fact: Prior to founding Volantio, CEO Azim Barodawala served as Group Head of Strategy for the Jetstar Group based in Melbourne, Australia.

Company: Freeing Returns
Elevator Pitch: A SaaS/PaaS Merchandise Returns Management Platform (RMP) that reduces Store and Supply Chain loses for malicious internal/external theft, consumer fraud and missed returns by reusing Retailers exposure to Returns Fraud and ORC.
Raising: <$1MM
Fun Fact: Merchandise returns fraud is a $16 billion+ issue for Retailers. That combined with Organized Retail Crime (ORC) costs Retailers close to $30 billion per year in annual Total Retail Loss/Shrink.