The Arizona Commerce Authority (ACA) selected 20 recipients for its AZ Fast Grant program, a highly competitive grant providing qualified Arizona-based, early stage technology companies with intensive training and technical assistance to commercialize their innovations, grow their business, and most importantly, create jobs for Arizona.
According to the ACA, companies may use AZ Fast Grants funding for professional consulting services, a commercialization feasibility study, or other commercialization assistance such as training to compete for federal funding.
Of those awarded, seven had a focus in Bio/Life Science, four in Clean Tech, four in Advanced Materials, three in IT-Software and two in Aerospace/Defense.
The IT-Software companies included Traklight, Rarus Innovations and Stat Coordinations.
Traklight, founded by Mary Juetten, is a local company designed to protect Intellectual Property (IP) for entrepreneurs. She began her company at the Center for Entrepreneurial Innovation and has been on the “fast trak” ever since-AZ Tech Beat has followed her success along the way. Her company has placed second in the Grow America’s women-led business competition, they were the winner of the Start Big Win Big Challenge, and recently announced as a finalist in the AZ Tech Council 2013 Governor Celebration of Innovation. Juetten comments on the grant, “We are excited to have this grant to do important market research for our new enterprise tools that help businesses discover, manage, and leverage innovation. This research will help us work with existing beta customers to develop the best technology.” Read more coverage from AZTB here.
Rarus Innovation, founded by Vinay Voorakarnam, came out of the Arizona State University Furnace Accelerator Program. Rarus is an EdTech company that 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 into 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. Voorakarnam comments on the grant, “Rarus Innovations is very thankful to ACA for giving us the Fast Grant. The Grant is very useful to us, especially as we plan to release a free-beta version of our learning platform in October 2013. The commercialization assistance grant will be used to analyze the demographics and psychographics of our target market, and help us in getting our product to the people who need it the most.”
They will offer their app for free for six months to hit their goal of 100K download. Read more coverage on Rarus from AZTB here.
Stat Coordinations, founded by Ryan Heck, a flight nurse, saw a need to redefine the current system of transferring hospital patients. His company is a Resident Client of NACET in Flagstaff and according to NACET site states that Heck’s “goal is to create a single process to screen any hospital in the country for capacity and capability, provide access to transport companies at the time the transfer decision is made, provide time-stamped circular communications, provide access to a concise electronic primary care report, to minimize transfer delays, and to help rural hospitals realize that patients are a number one commodity.” Read more about the company here.
To read the full list of recipients click here.
CEO of Rarus comment was added after original post
