It’s Day One For These 5 Startups From Gener8tor’s Summer Session

Gener8tor, accelerator, startup accelerator, Wisconsin startupsWisconsin’s dual city accelerator, Gener8tor, is one of the most successful startup accelerators in the midwest. Just last week we reported that two graduates from the Winter 2013 session held in Madison Wisconsin raised $610,000 in seed rounds.

WeMontage, a company that has new ways for users to have their mobile phone pics printed as wallpaper, and Quietyme, a company that monitors the environmental conditions in normally quiet places like hospitals, hotels and nursing homes, raised $310,000 and $300,000 respectively.

A third startup, Abodo, also raised $325,000, they too were a member of that winter class at Gener8tor. Not bad for a general tech accelerator that typically runs cohorts of 5.

Today is Launch Day for the summer cohort at Gener8tor. The Gener8tor founders alternate between Madison and Milwaukee. The summer 2013 cohort was based in Milwaukee.

While many accelerators call the day at the end of the session demo day, or investor day, and we call it graduation, Troy Vosseller, one of the Gener8tor cofounders tells us that they call it launch day. With the teams working all session long and building their companies, demo day doesn’t signify an ending but more importantly a beginning.

Gener8tor’s summer session yielded five great startups:

Maillift

Take your marketing efforts to a whole new level with hand written letters.

MailLift integrates with your Customer Relationship Management, helpdesk and other tools allowing handwritten letters to be automated. MailLift sends handwritten letters to old-school mailboxes on your behalf, freeing you and your staff’s time. With MailLift you have the ability to send thousands of personalized handwritten letters with just a few mouse clicks. Improve your customer acquisition and retention by sending these letters from your browser, email client, mobile device or CRM.

In this world of electronic everything, a hand written letter helps you reach your prospects in a whole new, old fashioned way.

Optyn

Optyn makes marketing simple for small businesses by providing easy, automated tools to acquire and engage their customers. Optyn’s marketing platform helps business owners decide what message to communicate and then enables them to create, schedule and send an email campaign in less than 2 minutes. Optyn also ensures consumers only get emails from merchants they have chosen.

Catalyze.io

catalyze.io provides health cloud solutions for application developers, enabling rapid application development, enhanced data integration and industry-standard security. Our vision is to offer the hosted core infrastructure required to build modern apps for health and wellness. catalyze.io takes care of the plumbing for app owners and empowers developers inside and outside of enterprises to quickly build, test and deploy health and wellness applications−all without worrying about data sources and models, interoperability or HIPAA technology security.

OpenHomes

OpenHomes provides modern, professional tools for the “for sale by owner” market. With OpenHomes, it is easy, affordable, and secure for people to buy or sell their homes themselves. Openhomes’ simple, elegant technology connects buyers and sellers directly online, enabling everything from scheduling a showing, giving feedback, or asking questions, to making an offer from your tablet or smartphone. OpenHomes’ services enable home owners to sell their homes themselves with confidence – for only 1% commission.

Docalytics

Docalytics is an easy to implement, cross-platform technology that enhances how businesses use their marketing and sales documents to interact with and capture actionable data from their prospective customers. Docalytics enables users to efficiently:

– CAPTURE more leads from their content.
– CONVERT more sales from these leads.
– CREATE better, more engaging content.

You can find out more about Gener8tor here at gener8tor.com

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Wisconsin Governor Signs Investment Capital Bill For Startups

Gov Scott Walker, Wisconsin startups, startup fundingWisconsin startups just had another victory on Thursday as Governor Scott Walker signed an investment capital bill.

The bill, which drew bipartisan support in the state legislature, provides $25 million dollars to startup companies in Wisconsin.  Unlike other states, though, this bill was specifically for tech startups vs biotechnology and life sciences. In most states it’s harder for general tech companies to draw this kind of support from the government.

In the case of the Wisconsin bill, startups in agricultural technology, information technology, engineered products, advanced manufacturing, medical devices, and imaging are all eligible for the new funding.

While biotechnology and life sciences companies can create jobs over a much longer period of time, Wisconsin is looking for companies that can create jobs quicker.

“The $25 million allocated for this program in the state budget will help grow private sector jobs by investing in start-up companies,” Walker said in a statement. “One hundred percent of the funds from this program will go to Wisconsin-based businesses, and there are a number of measures in place to ensure accountability and transparency for the hard-working taxpayers.”

Fox11online.com reports that the $25 million dollars in tax payer money will be matched with $50 million in private donations.

“I hope that once success is shown, it will lead to additional measures to increase the amount of capital for new businesses and more Wisconsin jobs,” Walker said in a statement.

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Milwaukee Startup: The Good Jobs Wins Startup Wisconsin Contest On Kick-Off Day

Startup Wisconsin launched last Thursday as part of the Startup America Partnership. They didn’t waste anytime either, and kicked off their kickoff party with a quick pitch contest with a quick $1750 in prizes.  The prize money was furnished by the law firm of Michael Best & Friedrich.

A new employment website startup called The Good Jobs, was victorious in the quick pitch competition. The woman owned startup from Milwaukee is creating a jobs site that will launch this summer. Their spin though is that they are matching people up to jobs based on lifestyle badges.

For example, companies that are hiring use proprietary badges to identify things like their commitment to the environment and the planet, or flexible scheduling. All of the things that an employment candidate would be looking for as far as “lifestyle” or “quality of life” are concerned in a new job.

Too often you go into a job interview because you really need a job and forget to ask the important questions. That cruise you have scheduled in two months with your 90 year old grandparents could be in jeopardy if you don’t know ahead of time how a company is about prior family appointments. The office closes at 5pm, does that mean you can still make your sons soccer practice at 6:00? Quality employers know these things are important.

More after the break
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