Tennessee’s Master Accelerator, The TENN Wraps Up Statewide Demo Day Roadshow

Accelerator, Launch Tennessee, The Tenn, Startups

(photo: Brandon Dill/ commercialappeal.com)

Every startup accelerator everywhere else wishes they could have participation at demo day from their top industry leaders. While some of their leading companies may have a presence at demo day, the real influencers are often too busy to attend a four hour demo day. With this problem in mind, Tennessee had a great idea for their startups: bring them to those companies.

Ten accelerator graduates from across the state of Tennessee just completed a weeklong statewide roadshow. Each of the ten startups chosen to participate in the statewide master accelerator program were all graduates of one of Tennessee’s nine accelerator programs.

The master accelerator program, called The TENN, was put on by Launch Tennessee, the public/private partnership spearheading the accelerator efforts across Tennessee. Launch Tennessee partnered with the Blackstone Foundation to put the program on, as well as other key state sponsors.

Twenty accelerator graduates that wrapped up their programs by August of this year competed in a final pitch off in Nashville on August 27th. At that event a group of judges from outside of Tennessee had the daunting task of narrowing down those 20 to just 10 for the road show.

In addition to going on the road in a wrapped tour bus, each of the companies received $10,000 for their business and will have access to office space at their accelerator’s office space, or they will receive a subsidy for space they may already occupy.

The ten companies chosen were:

eClinic (Nashville)
Got You In (Nashville)
Gun.io (Nashville)
Hatponics (Knoxville)
Health & Bliss (Memphis)
Mobilizer (Memphis)
Screwpulp (Memphis)
Survature (Knoxville)
Vendor Registry (East Tennessee)
View Medical (Memphis)

Health & Bliss had to drop out of the roadshow due to a scheduling conflict. They were replaced by Chattanooga startup HutGrip.

The roadshow kicked off in the Tri-Cities area with stops at Eastman Chemical and AccelNow. On Tuesday the bus made its way to Knoxville, where they stopped at Scripps Networks and the Knoxville Entrepreneur Center. Wednesday the bus stopped in Chattanooga at Society of Work. Thursday the group traveled to Nashville and the Nashville Entrepreneur Center. The trip wrapped up in Memphis on Friday with stops at First Tennessee Bank and FedEx.

The ten companies will continue working on their businesses and with mentors and corporate leaders across the state.

You can find out more about The TENN at TheTENN.org

Image: CommercialAppeal

Tennessee Prepares For Accelerator Week

Last year August was Demo Day month in Tennessee. During the month of August (on consecutive Thursdays no less), Chattanooga’s GigTank, Memphis’ Zeroto510, and Nashville’s Jumpstart Foundry all held their demo days. The month of August was a true testament to the strong commitment to startups and entrepreneurship that exists across Tennessee.

We were fortunate enough to attend all 3 accelerator demo days and a variety of startup events that went along with those programs.

This year, Tennessee has condensed it all into one week, sans the Jumpstart Foundry demo day which is on August 22nd.

The week kicks off in Chattanooga, Tennessee today with some pre-events surrounding GigTank’s demo day on Tuesday. On Demo Day, the current class of startups who spent their summer in the GigTank will show off their work. The startup accelerator, now in it’s second year, gets it’s name from being the first accelerator on citywide gigabit ethernet.

The gigabit ethernet, and big entrepreneurial ideas, are why Bob Metcalfe, the creator of ethernet, is the keynote speaker for the GigTank’s big day.

Wednesday the festivities move about 150 miles northwest to tiny Spring Hill, TN. Spring Hill is home to a major GM plant and, this year, the Southern Middle Tennessee Entrepreneur Center’s autoXLR8R. autoXLR8R focused on technologies applicable to the automotive industry, and as per usual the companies will graduate with a demo day.

Finally we head to Memphis where ZeroTo510 will hold their second demo day on Thursday. ZeroTo510 is the first cohort-based medical device accelerator.

Stay tuned to Nibletz all week long for coverage of demo day week in Tennessee and then again August 22 for Jumpstart Foundry’s demo day.

Don’t forget everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference is also in Tennessee, in February!

Nashville Accelerator Jumpstart Foundry Announces Early Bird Applications Now Open

Here at nibletz.com we continue to provide superior national coverage of the southeast. With that in mind we love covering Nashville’s startup scene and especially their local accelerator program Jumpstart Foundry.

Jumpstart Foundry is a three month cohort based startup accelerator program. Several alumni have received follow on funding. RentStuff, a Jumpstart Foundry graduate from two years ago was acquired back in November..

JSF’s 2012 program accelerated the growth of ten startups and built on the overall Jumpstart Foundry track record of success. Like other national accelerators, JSF rates its success in part on the number of graduate companies that are able to raise capital or boot-strap operations without additional capital. Over the first three years of the program, JSF has achieved a very strong 65% success rate. Thirteen JSF alumni have raised follow- on capital and are building operations. These results combined with a rigorous program refined over multiple years, a deep mentor pool and affiliation with the Global Accelerator Network position Jumpstart Foundry as one of the top accelerators in the United States.

“Each year both the number and quality of applicants has grown,” Marcus Whitney, chief technology officer for Moontoast and one of Jumpstart Foundry’s managing directors said in a statement. “Given the program’s established track record of success for our graduates, I’m excited to see the group this year.”

“Year after year we increase the strength of the Jumpstart Program expectations in terms of Mentors, guest speakers and participating company performance. The tradition continues this year as we open up the application process for 2013” Vic Gatto, Partner at Solidus Company and Managing Director at Jumpstart Foundry told nibletz.com.

Startups interested in applying can head over to jumpstartfoundry.com

Meet Marcus Whitney, and Several Jumpstart Foundry startups at the biggest startup conference in the country.

Nashville Featured in CNN’s “Cities Where Startups Are Thriving”

For years Nashville Tennessee has been known as Music City USA. Country music starts in Nashville. This year ABC is even running an hour long drama based on country music and life in Nashville, called “Nashville”. To people from the midsouth it’s no secret that Nashville also has a thriving entrepreneurial, startup and tech scene, but now they’ve been highlighted in a piece on cnn.com called “Cities Where Startups Are Thriving”.

In 2010 the Nashville Chamber of Commerce in conjunction with the Nashville Technology Council opened the Entrepreneur Center. A team of 75 people in an “entrepreneur task force” began researching and discussing the possibility of creating a resource for Nashville entrepreneurs back in 2007, a year after a similar effort was started in Memphis Tennessee by entrepreneur Eric Mathews and Launch Your City.

The center started as an online resource, and eventually became a brick and mortar centralized location that serves as the startup and technology hub in Music City.

In May of 2010 it was announced that successful healthcare entrepreneur Michael Burcham was picked to lead the Nashville Entrepreneur Center after a six month search.

Now the community is thriving. Nashville investors have put $72 million dollars into 21 companies so far in 2012, nearly double the $38 million dollars and 8 companies they invested in in 2009.

Startups like Edo Interactive that originated in Nashville and now has offices in Nashville and Chicago, has raised over $50 million dollars in venture capital. Another startup, RentStuff, which got it’s formidable start in the Jumpstart Foundry accelerator program, housed at the Entrepreneur Center, followed in Edo Interactive’s footsteps, relocating to Chicago and leading to an acquisition first reported here at nibletz.com late last week.

Nashville is just one of 9 entrepreneurial pockets that LaunchTN is supporting with startup accelerators. The nine high growth areas include four major hubs, Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville and Chattanooga and also have five shoulder markets as well. Tennessee was the second state to formalize a Startup America region. That much entrepreneurial and startup activity in the state of over 42,000 square miles means that no Tennessee resident is more than an hour and a half away from an entrepreneurial hub.

Linkage:

CNN’s “Cities Where Startups Thrive”

No one covers high growth tech news for the southeast like nibletz.com

Tennessee is home to the largest startup conference in the world

Startup Demo Day Month In Tennessee The Good, The Bad, The NSFW

August is just about over and “Demo Day Month” in the great state of Tennessee concluded last Thursday at JumpStart Foundry’s Demo Day in Nashville. It was a month that Vice President Gore should be proud of afterall nothing says innovation like inventing the internet.

Overall it was an impressive month for innovators in Tennessee. Tennessee has nine regional accelerators and groups like Launch Tennessee are paramount in keeping the statewide ecosystem flourishing and the accelerator leaders connected with each other.

“Demo Day Month” kicked off in Chattanooga Tennessee with the graduation of the GigTank. The GigTank was in its first year and actually included two simultaneous classes; entrepreneurs and students. The entrepreneurs group accelerated at Colab in downtown Chattanooga while the students accelerated at the Lamp Post Group’s offices. The classes came together on Thursday August 9th to show off their startups.

Out of all three demo days Chattanooga had the most pizzazz. They really did a great job of setting up a bunch of entrepreneurial networking events on Wednesday evening all over town. Thursday’s Demo Day event was one to be reckoned with, professional lighting, big signage, and a simulcast on the local PBS channel all helped set the stage for some great demos.

To top that off, unlike the other two demo days, Chattanooga’s GigTank featured a $100,000 cash prize for the top voted startup in the entrepreneur class (Banyan) and a $50,000 prize for the top student startup (Babel Sushi).

Chattanooga merged traditional southern hospitality with blazing fast internet. The blazing fast internet was the reason it was called “GigTank”. Chattanooga was the first city in the United States to offer 1 GB ethernet to the home and office within a 600 square mile area.

The bad: We found out late Wednesday night that the startups would actually pitch in front of the judges first thing Thursday morning and again on Thursday afternoon in front of the people. We went around in circles about it and I even spent some time with Colab Director Shelddon Grizzle, who had come up with the idea for the double pitching. Regardless of the reasoning I didn’t like it and once I knew it was happening it detracted from my view of the actual presentations.

The other downside to GigTank is that we saw a lot of slides, a lot of presentations and a lot of business plans. Unfortunately we didn’t see nearly enough working demo products. Also most of the startups said they would build scale organically and virally over the next year and make money in year two. This isn’t a practical path to scale in a market outside Silicon Valley or New York. I felt that go to market strategies needed improvement.

The NSFW: Check out this story about the first startup that presented at GigTank.

The following week we moved on to Memphis Tennessee and the Zeroto510 accelerator Demo Day. Zeroto510 is a cohort based accelerator based on medical devices. It’s a joint venture between Memphis Bioworks and Seed Hatchery.

The ZeroTo510 Demo Day was very academic in nature and top-notch professional. You could tell that all of the startups had worked extremely hard on their presentations. One of the biggest challenges that ZeroTo510 startups overcame was actually “dumbing” their presentations down so that the public and investors without medical backgrounds could understand. Luckily all of the startups were able to do that.

The startups that we really liked at ZeroTo510 Demo Day were Bionanovations and Restore Medical.

Restore Medical offers a new system for cleaning and sterilizing surgical instruments. Their system is vital as we head into Obama Care in 2014 because it helps reduce cost, but more importantly it’s more effective in the sterilization process which will drive down hospital born infection numbers. This couldn’t come at a better time. In 2014 hospitals will need to publicize and keep down their hospital born infection numbers in order to get reimbursement on the millions of extra patients that will be seeking hospital care.

One of the biggest moments at ZeroTo510’s Demo Day was when onstage Restore Medical co-founder Shawn Flynn revealed on stage that they already had a $3.75 million dollar purchase order pending their 510k approval from the FDA.

BioNanovations is the first pre-culture bacterial infection diagnosis platform. There were some shocking facts about hospitals in co-founder and CEO Charleson Bell’s presentation that echo why we like this startup so much and why it will also be crucial going into 2014.

There was no NSFW in the Zeroto510 Demo Day however the bad was definitely Urova Medical. This wet behind the ears team of entrepreneurs had great technology and did a fair job of presenting they just didn’t have the same vigor that the rest of the startups had. They immediately left Memphis to go back home and it appeared that the young student founders of Urova simply participated in the program to get $50,000 for “summer camp”. Just calling it like I see it.

Nashville’s Jumpstart Foundry has had some practice at this. They’re definitely the veteran accelerator out of the bunch and it shows. Co-Founder and Managing Director Marcus Whitney is a serial entrepreneur himself. In addition to overseeing the day-to-day at JumpStart Foundry he is also a co-founder and the CTO of startup MoonToast a social media/network management platform with a top shelf list of clients.

The theme about Whitney was echoed over and over again throughout Jumpstart’s Demo Day, and that is he’s a pull no punches take no crap kind of guy. In fact, together with Solidus Partner and Jumpstart Foundry co-founder Vic Gatto, they ran such a tight program that three startups called it quits before demo day.

The venue for the Jumpstart Foundry demo day was great, it was open, and they did a great job with lighting and ambience. The presentations showed that the startups had been working hard on refining their message for the public and potential investors. All of the presenters did a great job of talking more and relying on slides less. When slides went up on the screen they were very graphic and very easy to understand.

The entire class had great presentations. Whitney and Baker Donelson Emerging Technologies Lead Chris Sloan (also a mentor at JSF) both agreed that the most improved startup was PhotoRankr. Sloan and Whitney both commented that if any startup in this years JSF class showed what an accelerator does it was PhotoRankr.

PhotoRankr definitely topped our list of favorites at the JumpStart Foundry Demo Day. We also really liked The Skillery and their off-line workshops platform that empowers small business owners to teach classes on subjects they actually know and love.

We can’t report on JSF Demo Day without mentioning EverMind either. EverMind is a consumer monitoring system for the elderly. It works as easily as installing a “Clapper” you simply take the plug-in modules to your elderly loved ones home and hook them up to the coffee maker, television, lamp, toaster or other small electronics and it monitors their daily routine. When your loved one deviates from the routine you’re notified and you can check on them. The system gives them independence and piece of mind. It helps that it was also founded by a group of folks from Griffin Technologies, a Nashville company that makes some of the most widely known iPhone, iPad and Android accessories.

As for the NSFW, it wasn’t really NSFW it was more just ugly. The startup we liked the least at JSF was by a landslide KiWi, first off there are hundreds of other short form video services out there, can anyone say SocialCam. But the thing that drove us to even point this out was that at the end of the micromachine-man-esque presentation the founder of Kiwi actually said he would look for term sheets in Nashville for 30 days and then go somewhere else. Seemed like an F-U to the hard work that Whitney, Gatto and the entire crew at Jumpstart Foundry Demo Day put on.

It was also great that folks from Memphis like Biowork’s Allan Daisley and a>m ventures Patrick Woods were right there with us at all three demo days to support Chattanooga, Memphis and Nashville as parts of a whole “Tennessee”, the Nashville guys.. not so much.

Linkage:

More Demo Day Coverage Here

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Two Down One To Go: Nashville’s JumpStart Foundry Prepares For Demo Day

Last week we were in Chattanooga Tennessee for GigTank. GigTank was the first ever accelerator focused on startups building around 1 GB ethernet. Chattanooga was the first city in the United States with one gigabit fiber optic internet to every home and business in a 600 square mile radius. They beat Kansas City, who’s 1 GB fiber project with Google debuted last month.

We saw some great startups present great ideas. Banyan, a collaborative research tool, that is both up and running,and demonstrated first hand the effects of super fast 1 GB ethernet, was the winner. GigTank broke the mold of the traditional accelerator demo day by offering a $100,000 cash prize to the startup that won their pitch contest in the entrepreneur category.

GigTank broke the mold yet again when they ran a student track along the entrepreneur track. The students received free room and board and incubated at the LampPost Group’s offices in downtown Chattanooga. The student track had a $50,000 cash prize won by two girls whose startup Babel Sushi, is an on the go translating platform. The entrepreneurs incubated at Colab a few blocks down the road from LampPost. The entrepreneurs however, received a $15,000 seed investment.

This Thursday was Demo Day for the ZeroTo510 accelerator in Memphis Tennessee. The ZeroTo510 accelerator was a joint project of the Memphis Bioworks Foundation and Seed Hatchery. It was also the first cohort based medical device accelerator.

Zeroto510’s demo day was more traditional in that there wasn’t a cash prize but rather a showing of what the six teams were working on and what they had accomplished in the 90 day period. All six teams did a great job presenting. They all had viable go to market strategies as well as thoroughly researched projects. Some actually had products to show off, which is a break from the traditional web based accelerators.

Patrick Woods, Director at archer>malmo’s a>m ventures group said “there was actually physical products you could touch” making reference to the several accelerator demo days he’s seen where everything was either on the web, in the cloud or still in pre-release formative stages.

You can see a quick background on the six teams at ZeroTo510 here.

Some of the presenters had already secured physical trials, others, like Restore Medical had great news, like the fact that they already had a purchase order for $3.75 million.

Next week marks the end of the current session of Nashville’s Jumpstart Foundry. Now in it’s third year, the JumpStart Foundry has a great class of startups that will be pitching next week.

Life in an accelerator is tough. Tennessee Venture Capitalist and Partner at Solidus, Vic Gatto, told nibletz last week that there were originally ten teams in JumpStart Foundry and three have since dropped out. The best of the best for next week are ready present and include:

Contigo Financial, an online consumer lender offering a suite of responsible loan products through the workplace.

Jamplify (formerly OKDJ), a social media marketing platform which turns fans into active promoters of online content.

The Skillery, a marketplace for classes and workshops led by experts in the community.

Evermind, the first consumer-friendly senior monitoring system. If you can plug-in a surge protector and use a smartphone, Evermind is easy.

Kiwi (formerly Wax), the best way to capture any exciting moment on video.

PhotoRankr, the first online photography marketplace to leverage the power of social media.

OurVinyl, allows users to discover new music through video. The modern day MTV minus the re-runs.

Nibletz is the voice of startups everywhere else and the national voice of startups in Tennessee we can’t wait to see what these great startups have to offer.

Linkage:

There are still a limited number of tickets available for JumpStart Foundry’s Demo Day get them here

Nibletz is the national voice of startups in Tennessee and everywhere else, check out our southern coverage here