The first Demo Day from ASU Furnace kicked off at SkySong, Wednesday June 5, packed with Arizona investors, incubators, mentors and visionaries ready to learn more about the companies vying for funding and resources. Startup companies covered a wide-range of products-from biotech and software to theft-reducing technologies.
What is Furnace? It’s a first-of-its-kind startup accelerator designed to form, incubate and launch new companies created from technologies and intellectual property licensed out of Arizona’s premier research institutions. It is a public-private partnership among the Arizona Commerce Authority, BioAccel and the technology transfer offices of Arizona State University, Dignity Health Arizona, Northern Arizona University and University of Arizona.
A reception followed the pitch event where attendees had the opportunity to meet the founders and network.
Here are some of the technology companies that evolved out of Furnace.
Dataware Ventures is a software company based out of Tucson, Arizona that helps enterprise application software (EAS) vendors optimize the performance of their applications via its patent-pending micro-specialization techniques.
EAS manages very complex and large quantities of data. The problem is that data loading from transactional systems generally occurs overnight under strict time limitations. This process can be frustrating because of the long response times and the downtime reduces an analyst’s efficiency to make key decisions. Dataware’s software will help large databases’, used by companies such as Oracle and IBM, to process faster and double the EAS performance.
How they do it? According to their website “This technology tightly binds code and data at runtime, thereby eliminating overheads arising from overly general code features that are unnecessary for particular inputs. This results in code that is significantly simpler and faster. We can achieve speedups of a factor of two.
“These improvements allow such applications to quickly ingest transactional data, perform more complex analyses within tight time constraints, and quickly deliver results to human analysts. In this way, those analysts can make faster and better decisions over data-sets of increasing size, directly improving a company’s bottom line.”
Their team has been developing the product for three years and are launching their first prototype later this year. www.datawareventures.com
While more and more children are using tablets as learning tools, parents that are trying to find quality educational apps can become overwhelming. Rarus seeks to create a mobile learning environment by recruiting educators to create age-appropriate apps with a gamification twist. The unique feature of these educational apps is that parents can log in to the app via web or mobile device, choose the educational subject, age range, duration of activity and modify the game by adding new subjects (math, language, etc.) to the game while the child is engaged and expand the learning opportunity.
Rarus will offer a free trial period in order create content and obtain users. Later, they will offer a monthly subscription with a low-barrier to entry.
They will be launching in July 2013 and offer this app for free for six months to hit their goal of 100K downloads. www.rarusinnovations.com
Beer runs—what most people consider an “I buy, you fly” concept— is something completely different in the convenience market world as it’s associated with alcohol theft. According to Traken Technologies, alcohol theft counts for $2B in lost sales nationally, 5,000 underage deaths and costs law enforcement agencies up to $5B.
Currently convenient stores use padlocks and chains to secure their beer coolers – with Traken’s technology, they developed an identification processing customer interface that requires patrons to swipe their ID, and by using a wireless, secure, mobile and cloud-based software, authenticate the ID and allow access to the cooler.
They plan to focus on the larger convenience store chains and provide a range of product installation and services available from $2500-4500, plus a monthly subscription. They have a working prototype and plan to launch in July 2013 with 10 pilot stores. Watch a quick demo on our VINE. www.trakentech.com
Coming next week, we will have video of each of these pitches.
For more about ASU Furnace program click here.