Philadelphia, March 21, 2018 – PACT, the Philadelphia Alliance for Capital and Technologies, today announced the finalists for the popular Demo Pit at Phorum 2018, its annual enterprise technology strategy conference. This year, eleven startup companies will demonstrate their disruptive technologies and compete for the Phorum Phorward “Best in Show” award. Since the inaugural event, past winners have gone on to raise more than $50M in capital, with three of the seven successfully completing exits to strategic acquirers.
Hosted by PACT and sponsored by Fairmount Partners and LiquidHub, Phorum 2018 – Digitizing The Enterprise: Immersive, Cognitive, Trusted will be held Thursday, April 12, 2018 at the SugarHouse Event Center. Nick Carr, a writer and speaker whose work focuses on the intersection of technology and culture will serve as this year’s keynote speaker. To reserve your ticket, please click here.
This year’s Demo Pit finalists include:
Aerial Applications, Philadelphia, PA
Aerial Applications is a web application designed for infrastructure companies that makes storing, viewing, and sharing drone-based data easy and intuitive. It functions as a system of record for inspections and physical asset information and empowers users to interact with their assets in an annotatable, accurately measurable 3D environment. It supports a wide range of file inputs and outputs and can securely store critical operational information for entire asset portfolios – from full networks of energy/communications transmission lines, to tens of thousands of cell towers. Aerial’s interactive mapping environment makes finding information about your assets faster and easier than ever before.
Apprentice.io, Jersey City, NJ
Apprentice.io provides industrial augmented reality solutions designed for operation in complex lab and manufacturing environments that deliver a positive ROI and satisfy industry demand while meeting regulatory compliance standards. The platform utilizes the latest in augmented reality and artificial intelligence to expand human ability, and empower engineers and scientists while providing organizations with the tools to better connect and compete globally. Users gain hands-free access to remote troubleshooting tools, process and workflow aids and intelligent data capture through smart glasses, ushering in a new age of industry efficiency, safety, audit readiness and mobility. Apprentice.io has global product deployments in pharma, biotech, cosmetic, consumer goods and chemical facilities across the U.S., Asia, Europe and South America.
Best Energy Reduction Technologies, King of Prussia, PA
Best Energy Reduction Technologies (Bert) has developed and patented the Bert® Plug Load Management System. Bert® lowers commercial energy expenses up to 65% by automatically and remotely controlling the power consumption of thousands of plug load devices via a standard 802.11 wireless network. By building and patenting the system around industry standard Wi Fi (802.11) network technology, Bert® is the only Plug Load solution that lets its customers utilize their existing networks and control their plug load in mass.
Boost Linguistics, Philadelphia, PA
Boost Linguistics develops artificial intelligence that works alongside marketing teams to help produce content that engages customers. Boost Editor acts like an editing assistant – giving insights into levels of joy, disgust, fear, anger, and sadness elicited in text. It then suggests changes to increase or decrease the presence of any emotion. With Boost enhancing marketing copy, teams seize every micro opportunity – connecting with audiences on an emotional level.
Dash Solutions, Philadelphia, PA
Dash has drastically lowered the compliance burden in healthcare. Dash Compliance Automation Suite transforms the manual and time intensive HIPAA compliance process. As the industry’s first solution to connect administrative controls to technical safeguards in the AWS cloud, Dash empowers healthcare vendors to commercialize faster and market their solutions to health systems. In turn, those very health systems leverage dash to ensure data security and minimize 3rd party risk. A recurring software revenue model ensures high margins, and our leadership team has the hands-on expertise to solve the problems in compliance at both the engineering and business levels.
HeavyWater, Philadelphia, PA
HeavyWater has built a transactional artificial intelligence platform (AIVA), to automate financial document processing. Our first focus is in mortgage, where AIVA has automated loan production processes, from mundane/repetitive tasks to high-cognition conclusions, utilizing AI read, comprehend, and analysis skills.
HiveIO, Inc., Hoboken, NJ
HiveIO is an infrastructure innovation company that delivers the power, value and agility of the public cloud with all the security, control and governance of the private cloud. Its secure cloud software infrastructure platform and all-inclusive ground up solution delivers full cloud service out of the box. The HiveIO solution is in use in some of the largest virtual infrastructure implementations across the world.
indico, Boston, MA
indico is an enterprise AI solution for unstructured content. Their focus is on helping to automate tedious back-office tasks, improving the efficiency of labor-intensive document-based workflows, and extracting valuable insights from unstructured content, including text and images. Their breakthrough in solving these challenges is an approach known as transfer learning, which allows them to train machine learning models with orders of magnitude less data than required by traditional content analysis techniques. With indico, enterprises are now able to benefit from the dramatic advantages of machine learning at a fraction of the time.
Slyce, Philadelphia, PA
Slyce is the market-leader in image recognition for retail, powering visual product search for retailers such as Macy’s, Home Depot, Best Buy, JCPenney, Neiman Marcus, and Tommy Hilfiger. Its service can identify virtually any product from an image, and enable customers to snap a photo to buy something, add it to a wish list, find it in store, or create another retail moment.
Translator, New York, NY
Translator is on a mission to spread empathy and equality at scale. Translator empowers corporate America, schools, and non-profits with the first and only 360° platform for Diversity & Inclusion (D&I), so that people can work and learn in an inclusive environment while organizations can protect their brand. Its software suite and services give employees anonymous, real-time access to tools and language while providing management with actionable data and cultural insights that can act as an early warning system for future interorganizational challenges.
Vognition, Oakland, NJ
Vognition, at a high level, provides the voice control virtual plumbing to manufacturers for IoT products. But what they really provide is patented technology and software tools delivered through a SaaS operating environment with voice user interface middleware for IoT manufacturers seeking to capitalize on the exploding voice driven IoT market (home and industrial).
“The Demo Pit has served as a launching pad for a number of startups through the years, including RedOwl, SocialLadder and PeopleLinx” said Sean Dowling, Vice President of Osage Partners and a member of the Demo Pit selection committee. “It is never easy to select ten finalists when the quality, and quantity, of the applications improves annually. We have a tremendous group of finalists representing the Mid-Atlantic region and are anxious to see who the judges deem Best in Show for 2018.”
The Demo Pit was created to allow startups to connect with C-level enterprise decision makers attending Phorum. In addition to showcasing their technology in the Demo Pit, each Demo Pit participant will present their company on the Demo Pit stage to a panel of judges and the Phorum audience.
Phorum 2018 Demo Pit judges include Fielding Kidd, Director of Business Partnerships, Entrepreneurial Engagement, Comcast NBCUniversal, Jayson Tischler, Principal, Rittenhouse Ventures and Bob Moore, Co-Founder and Chairman, Stich. The Demo Pit is sponsored by Osage Partners.
For the latest information pertaining to speakers and conference agenda, or to reserve your ticket for Phorum 2018, please visit https://philadelphiapact.com/phorum-philly/.
About Phorum
Phorum is an annual technology strategy conference that gathers the Nation’s leading minds and most innovative solutions around a single, trending topic. Hosted in Philadelphia, this intensive, one-day event includes insights from the Nation’s most authoritative experts; up-close interaction with relevant technological solutions and learnings from business leaders with first-hand experience capitalizing on what is new. For more on Phorum or to purchase tickets for Phorum 2018, visit https://philadelphiapact.com/phorum-philly/
About Philadelphia Alliance for Capital and Technologies (PACT)
PACT’s vision is to be the go-to resource for fast growing companies, and a driver of entrepreneurship and innovation in the Philadelphia region. PACT provides its members with valuable content and connections to capital, coaching, and customers that will accelerate their growth and success, and to collaborate with other organizations to drive innovation and entrepreneurship in the region. www.philadelphiapact.com
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