Five Local Tech Startups Debut Their Innovations

firedUP Startup Accelerator Presents Demo Day

COLUMBIA, SC – firedUP Startup Accelerator hosts Demo Day featuring its’ Spring 2015 class of startups on April 16th in collaboration with ConvergeSE at Edventure Children’s Museum from 6:00 p.m.- 9:00 p.m. including the musical works of the Ruby Brunettes.Demo Day is a celebration of the teams and the community’s response to help them build their businesses. Over the past four months, these teams have worked closely with the program’s mentor network to create solutions, validate their business models, test their ideas, gain customer feedback and practice their pitches. The Spring 2015 Cohort includes:

• Tradeversity: An exclusive, hyper-localized marketplace for university campuses that allows members to safely buy and sell items within their college community.
• White Coat Ventures: Develops technology solutions and tools for healthcare professionals that connect users with critical medical content for optimized patient interactions.
• Rchivos: Designing applications to help service providers manage client projects for a better overall experience and higher customer retention.
• SmartPhone Records: The only solution that empowers musicians to sell music straight to you from smartphones or tablets worldwide. No middle man required.
• Koios: Makes it easy to get the things you want from the library, for free.

RSVP:  Be a part of the first group to hear these teams publicly present.

“We learned from Steve Blank’s Lean Startup model that startups are not small versions of big companies..they are experiments.  In firedUP, we saw this knowledge come to life with 5 companies completing over 300 customer discovery interviews to validate their value proposition before embarking on the next phase of raising investment funding  That is where these companies are and this is what we are doing,” said Chad Hardaway, Director, firedUP.firedUP is a six-month high intensity program designed to quickly propel promising startups into the market. Qualifying companies receive up to $25,000 in seed capital, top-shelf mentoring and support along with a wealth of resources to fuel new technology ventures. Mentors include individuals with a variety of backgrounds including: business, financial, investor, marketing, legal, and technical experts. firedUP is a public/private venture with USC’s Office of Economic Engagement, USC/Columbia Technology Incubator and AccelerateSC, the early stage venture arm of the SC Jobs-Economic Development Authority (JEDA), to provide the seed capital for each of the teams.

“This program is an ideal way to bring together private and public expertise and resources. We’re enjoyed building on the success of the first class as more technology innovators and entrepreneurs step forward to help set the stage for South Carolina’s future,” said Harry A. Huntley, CPA, Executive Director of JEDA.

The USC/Columbia Technology Incubator houses firedUP.  Home to more than 40 companies, the incubator is listed in the June 2013 issue of INC. MAGAZINE as one of three college-town incubators to watch, and recently award $1.91M from the Economic Development Administration for the construction of a new facility.