Raleigh startups take center stage at Innovators Program Demo Day

Entrepreneurship was the big winner of the day on Tuesday, Dec. 8, in Raleigh, N.C., as the business community packed into the city's historic Market Hall for the Innovators Program Demo Day.

In a testament to Raleigh’s innovative culture, a dozen of the Research Triangle’s brightest teams showcased their emerging businesses and community leaders touted the importance of nurturing early stage companies as a way to foster continued economic development and job creation in the region.

The Demo Day was a culmination of the 12-week Innovators Program that helps startups validate their ideas with real end-users and using principles of design thinking, lean startup, and modern leadership. This is the second year the Innovators Program took place in Raleigh, backed by a coalition of local organizations including Citrix, Red Hat, Cherokee, HQ Raleigh and the City of Raleigh.  

The 12 teams tackled pain points across a range of industries including enterprise technology, healthcare, and clean-tech. Here is a brief recap of the teams that graduated from the program:

Enterprise Collaboration

• Duvtail is a workflow and document management solution that helps accountants, attorneys, venture capitalists, and government agencies manage the due diligence process.
• Tasktorch brings to light connections between people, work, and context to enhance the collaborative team work environment.  

Healthcare

• MD Benchmark offers an online portal to help physicians and healthcare administrators streamline the commercial insurance process.
• Medicom has created software to enable a collaborative environment for radiologists to share important patient data quickly and securely.
• Remedy has developed a platform for physicians and patients to collaborate on pain management, aiming to minimize inefficiencies in treatment, and enhance the quality of patient care.

Clean Tech

• Rocktron cleans and refines coal ash and turns it into valuable inputs to help plastic manufacturers reduce cost and enhance product performance.
• Seachange has developed a new approach to water purification and desalination as they tackle the problem of creating a sustainable water source for humanity.
• Smartfarm provides real-time pump automation and a farm dashboard to help farmers increase efficiency and reduce water wastage.

Internal Teams

• Addoo (Citrix) helps small to medium B2B software companies increase adoption through customized onboarding that helps users get the most out of their software.
• Coco (Citrix) puts messaging, file sharing, and meeting tools together so teams can connect, get information quickly, and accelerate decision-making.
• Collider (Red Hat) aims to reduce the cost of corporate software development needs by providing contextual information and collaboration to software developers.
• Para (Citrix) helps mobile professionals stay productive and connected on the go through a mobile app with an innovative gesture and voice interface.

Mayor Nancy McFarlane, also an entrepreneur, kicked off the program. Cherokee CEO Tom Darden encouraged attendees to think about "what we do" and "how we do it," speaking about the responsibility to engage with the community when one has the power and resources to make an impact.

Jesse Lipson of Citrix Sharefile highlighted his passion for Raleigh and the creative outcomes that arise with cross-pollination when a diverse mix of startups, intrapreneurs, and corporations come together.
 
Finally, Red Hat’s executive vice president and chief people officer, DeLisa Alexander, closed with a keynote address highlighting the role that companies can play in being a good community citizen. Alexander spoke of the need to help nurture smaller companies in Raleigh for long-term economic growth and to enable the Research Triangle to be a magnet for talent.

For more information on the program or the graduating teams, please see http://www.citrixstartupaccelerator.com/raleigh.