TAMPA & ORLANDO, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Florida Venture Forum (http://www.floridaventureforum.org) has selected 17 Florida based companies to present at its Early Stage Venture Capital Conference, to be held at the Reunion Resort in Orlando on May 10, 2012.
Seventeen of Florida’s best early-stage prospects for equity financing will make 10-minute presentations to an audience of venture capitalists, private equity investors, angel investors, investment bankers, financial intermediaries and entrepreneurs.
Presenting companies are listed by region below:
Central/East Central Florida
BungoBox, (www.BungoBox.com), Casselberry, rents recycled and recyclable industrial strength plastic moving boxes to commercial and residential customers as an alternative to traditional cardboard boxes. They have a strong direct presence in Central Florida, and have established franchises in Tampa, South Florida, Jacksonville, Gainesville, Tallahassee, Phoenix, Atlanta, Charlotte, Denver, and two locations in Canada. The company recently won the Shark Tank competition for the “Most Investible Company” at the 2011 Orlando Chamber’s “Big Summit”.
Contineo Wireless, Inc., (www.contineowifi.com), Sanford, provides smart connection solutions to carriers, device OEM’s, commercial enterprises, and national brands to maximize data speed to mobile users and increase the capacity of wireless networks. Contineo’s technology seamlessly moves smartphones between 3G/4G networks and WiFi while leveraging network connections to deliver valuable services such as data rate and device dependent content and pinpoint location based services.
Feathr, (www.feathrapp.com), Gainesville, is a smartphone application that replaces business cards with a seamless digital experience, making it easy to share your personal and professional information in a touch-optimized format to anyone. The Feathr app for iPhone and Android makes the entire networking experience much smoother: automating the data entry, providing greater context, and making it as easy as one click to follow up. Your contacts are auto-updating, so if you change jobs or phones you can automatically push that change out to anyone you've shared your Feathr card with in the past. You can also easily search, sort, tag, filter, and annotate your contacts.
Fracture LLC, (www.fractureme.com), Gainesville, is a cloud-based digital printing company that transforms digital images from both online sites and static memory devices into tangible memories. Fracture combines photo printing and framing into a highly visual expression of digital images via a cost-effective, premium photo décor product portfolio.
Korrelate, (www.korrelate.com), Orlando, allows a marketer to connect all of their digital media activities to offline purchases to understand their digital ROI. For the first time marketers will know if their digital investment is driving real sales.
Inhibikase Therapeutics, Inc., (www.inhibikase.com), Atlanta (relocating to Gainesville), is a biopharmaceutical company that has created the first small molecule therapeutics capable of treating bacterial AND viral infectious disease through a common mechanism of action. Inhibikase Therapeutics’ products inhibit human pathways used by multiple bacteria and viruses for reproduction in the patient, blocking viral and bacterial reproduction without stimulating resistance. The Company’s treatment solutions include respiratory, kidney, brain and topical antivirals as well as an entirely new type of vaccine technology, the Virus-Similar Particle (VSP) vaccines. These approaches provide a full gamut of treatment and prevention options for existing and emerging infectious diseases. With a Phase 2a trial approved in just 23 months, Inhibikase is a rapidly growing company with a transformative technology.
Meet.com, (www.meet.com), Orlando, they are in the midst of two significant changes that are altering traditional internet behavior: the proliferation of mobile smartphone technology and the pervasive use of social media. These changes are now disrupting the online dating industry. meet.com seeks to exploit these dramatic technology and behavior shifts with a smartphone mobile social meeting app that enables their users to find people nearby interested in meeting now.
PlumReward, (www.facebook.com/plumreward), Windermere, is a branded touch panel (or kiosk), which acts as a reporting system that enables you to send timely coupons and promotions as text messages to your customers on their cell phone while being able to track their visits and coupon redemptions at your business. Essentially, they turn your customers' cell phone number into their loyalty card that is nearly impossible to use fraudulently. They build powerful and engaging mobile rewards solutions that are simple for businesses to implement, and that their customers want to use.
Via Response Technologies, LLC, (www.viaresponse.com), Orlando, is a software platform that automates student participation and assessment for instructors in large, distributed classroom environments that are becoming the norm in higher education. Class sizes of hundreds are common for popular classes, and often require students to participate remotely. Via Response enables students in large, distributed learning environments to respond live to attendance, polling, quizzes and an in class discussion board. Homework, self paced testing, blogs, alerts and notifications extend the platform beyond the classroom walls. Students use their own smart phones and laptops for participation and response through any available wireless connection.
Southeast Florida
BioAxone BioSciences Inc., (www.bioaxonebio.com), Dania Beach, specializes in the development and commercialization of proprietary technologies that target Rho signaling. Rho signaling is involved in a number of medical indications that include central nervous system (CNS) injuries and degenerative diseases, ophthalmology and cancer. BioAxone’s lead product, Cethrin™, is in clinical Phase II development for the treatment of acute spinal cord injury (SCI). BioAxone’s second product, BA-1049, is in late-stage pre-clinical development for treatment of glaucoma. The company has pipeline programs in other ocular diseases. The Company has a history of successful product development progress and fiscal management.
GridGlo, LLC (www.gridglo.com), Delray Beach, is a cleantech company that leverages smart meter data to provide utilities with customer intelligence tools. GridGlo performs Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) data analytics to help electric utility companies benefit from their smart meter data. GridGlo improves the way utilities understand their consumers by fusing AMI data with thousands of consumer attributes, such as weather, demographics, mobile (location/presence), financial records, satellite imagery, and more.
ReGen Nautic USA Inc., (www.regennautic.com), Dania Beach, is a privately owned company specializing in electric and hybrid electric propulsion technologies for boats and yachts. Boat building is a $6.3 B industry and 300,000 new boats are sold annually in the USA. Over 10% of new boats could be powered with hybrid propulsion systems developed by ReGen, and their systems address the needs of the large yacht market and the market of power boats requiring 200 HP of power or more. They are the first company to adopt car industry high voltage standard (400V) for the design of marine propulsion systems. They combine state-of-the-art components with proprietary automation software and safety systems to provide integrated hybrid solutions with the power to drive marine vessels at sea.
SRG Technology, LLC, (www.srgtech.com), Ft. Lauderdale, created a unique portal framework -- called Blender -- that efficiently gathers and analyzes data to personalize a user’s e-learning experience. Blender’s cloud-based suite of software includes a recommendation engine which creates meaningful results and professional networking tools that allow groups to collaborate, educate and communicate. Blender’s modularity gives us superb economies of scale in the education, health care and public safety markets.
Southwest Florida
KeriCure Inc., (www.kericure.com), Wesley Chapel, specializes in novel, cost effective topical wound care products for the benefit of patients, consumers, military personnel and society. KeriCure was formed to commercialize an advanced platform polymer technology, KeriCure Quick Seal Liquid Bandage, exclusively licensed by USF to KeriCure, with an initial focus in OTC natural product market, a $6 billion retail US market.
PicksLeague.com, (www.picksleague.com), Bonita Springs, over $3 billion exchanges hands through sports related office pools each year, with administrators commanding 5-10% in fees for league management ($150 million to $300 million). Unlike their fantasy sports counterparts, 80% to 90% of the custom sports league market remains offline due to the absence of a completely customizable solution capable of running each league admin's unique rule set, presenting an untapped market with significant potential. PicksLeague.com powers a SaaS (Software as a Service) that provides the online creation and management of custom sports leagues, saving league administrators 10 to 15 hours of work each week and offering league participants the tools and transparency needed to keep up with their progress and results. By asking detailed questions during league setup to cover nearly every possible league scenario, they currently have more than 20,000 possible rule combinations across nine different league types.
Tampa Medical Innovations, (www.tami-inc.com), Bonita Springs, is a medical device company. The company has licensed a unique technology from the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center that eliminates the most common cross contamination hazard in the practice of IV therapy. We have a fast secure closure system for IV access catheters that eliminates blood loss, cross contamination and reduces nursing labor. There are over 360 million IV procedures performed globally each year. The IV Market is worth over 5 Billion in the US alone. Our initial product offering is a unique IV closure system designed to eliminate blood loss during IV insertion. This reduces blood borne pathogen exposure; the hazards of cross contamination as well as biohazard clean-up costs. The needs are well documented; Hospitals are no longer reimbursed by Medicare for hospital acquired IV based infections. The device is simple in both concept and execution, and the FDA Path to approval is straightforward
North Florida
Meta Analytix LLC, (www.metaanalytix.com), Jacksonville, changes the paradigm of data warehousing and business intelligence (BI) using a provisional PATENTED data model. With $10.5B being spent in business intelligence at a failure rate of almost 80%, Meta Analytix’s Flex Dimensional model allows businesses to acquire and report quality information cost effectively. Their technology has been proven to reduce the cost and the implementation life cycle of a BI implementation of up to 90%. Their proprietary technology allows businesses to integrate all of your business data in a Single Source of Truth. They will license their technology to existing Business Intelligence companies including the Fortune 500 technology companies to create a viable exit strategy for their investors.
About The Florida Venture Forum
The Florida Venture Forum is Florida’s oldest, largest and most prestigious statewide support group for venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, helping emerging growth companies come together with sources of capital from across the country. Throughout the year, the Florida Venture Forum provides monthly programs on a statewide basis. For additional information, please visit the web site at http://www.floridaventureforum.org.