2016-11-23

Many of Austin's biggest successes came out of the enterprise software space. So there's no wonder that the majority of our 50 on Fire nominees follow suit. Counting a total of 52 of our total nominees, the B2B innovation category is stacked. From e-commerce companies to app developers to startup CEOs, Austin's roots shine through in our biggest category.
Here's a look at all of our 50 on Fire B2B tech finalists:

AdAction Interactive

AdAction Interactive is a mobile app media company with more than 52M installs in its three years of existence.
The company has more than an 85% client retention rate and more than doubled its current number of employees over one year with no turnovers during that time.

AgileCraft

AgileCraft is a software development organization platform that was named both “Cool Vendor” by Gartner and “Best Small Workplace” by Fortune.
On track to achieve over 400% YOY revenue growth.
Has experienced over 1100% growth in its employee and contractor base (including Fortune 10 and Fortune 1000 customers), with the majority of growth occurring over the last 18 months.

Amir Husain - Founder and CEO, SparkCognition

Husan is SparkCognition’s founder and CEO, with nearly 40 patents and applications to his name, and he serves as an advisor to the IBM Watson Group and the University of Texas Computer Science Department.
His titles include: “top technology entrepreneur in Austin," a 2016 Austin Under 40 Award Winner for Technology and Science, and a “Top 100 Global AI Influence” by Onalytica.
Husan achieved nine consecutive on-target quarters, grew SparkCognition from three to 70 employees and acquired multiple Fortune 500 clients.

Austin Fraser

Austin Fraser is an IT, engineering and life sciences recruitment firm.
The company was voted Best Small Companies to Work For in its first year by the ABJ; was an International Business Award finalist by Chamber Of Commerce; and is a presidential member of the Austin Chamber of Commerce
Austin Fraser's CEO is listed as one of the top 60 CEO'S in Austin.

BigCommerce

E-commerce software company BigCommerce appointed Brian Dhatt as its first-ever chief technology officer and Tod Klubnik as senior vice president of global sales.

Bloomfire

Bloomfire is an enterprise knowledge-sharing platform.
The company closed a $12.8M Series B funding round in May and released new sales software, Bloomfire SE, in February

CognitiveScale

CognitiveScale is an enterprise cognitive learning intelligence software company.
It recently raised a $21.8M Series B round. It has landed deals with Fortune 100 companies and has more than 60 patents.

Concepture

The company forms strategic alliances with its clients to deliver custom enterprise-scale software using their created BLDR framework, which contains a full set of completely integrated objects, actions, and events.

Convey

Convey is an order fulfillment solution for enterprise customers.
It has seen 500% revenue growth, 250% staff growth and secured a $4.5M Series A funding round led by Silverton Partners.

Dropoff, Inc.

Dropoff is a courier and same-day delivery service for businesses, expanding beyond Texas.
The company has raised over $7M in venture capital and has 46 full-time employees, with 25 at the headquarters in Austin.

Enola Labs

Enola contracts supporting software engineering services for Homeaway, Amazon, Leidos Health, and several Texas-based startups embarking on the development of their new products.
Added on 10 new Austin-based employees in the last six months to help serve our clients.
This May, Enola was included as a 2016 Leader in the Top Texas App Development category by ranking firm Clutch.

Factom

Factom is a blockchain-as-a-service company, and in October it raised a $4.2M Series A led by Tim Draper.
In June, it received $199K from U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in order to advance the security of digital identity for Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
In February, it announced an initiative with Ancun Zhengxin in China to bring together blockchain or distributed ledger technology with electronic data notarization services in the country.

FoVI 3D

FoVI 3D created the world’s first holographic LFD via a $25M DARPA Program with four working Gen1 LFD prototypes.
Secured over $2M in government R&D grants over the last 12 months through SIBR programs and $2.5M in seed capital.
FoVI 3D is the only company in the world that can currently tap into collaborative AR/VR use cases as our light field display is "headgear free" allowing people to naturally experience dynamic 3D content together without the need for additional equipment.

Handsome

Handsome is a human-centered design and strategy firm helping companies grow business by creating impactful experiences with a team of 30-plus researchers, strategists, designers and technologists.

Humm

Humm is an on-location feedback system used by restaurants and healthcare providers.
Humm and MedSpring Urgent Care announced a partnership in February aimed at improving the patient experience through the use of Humm-powered feedback tablets in 33 locations across the country.

IdealSpot

IdealSpot provides a variety of industries all necessary information and tools to successfully find and evaluate locations and uses about 15,000 data sources in their analysis.

Interplay Learning

Interplay Learning develops technical and career skills education programs.
It has $2.25M of capital committed by CTAN and US Department of Energy to advance Interplay’s training solution.

Jackrabbit Mobile

Jackrabbit mobile is a development shop, featuring Jackrabbit Labs which launched in February of this year and released cutting edge technology.
Nominated in Austin as best company to work for, top 50 startup, best iPad developer, and it has hired eight new full-time employees since the beginning of this year.
The company also launched a hackathon to prevent opioid-related deaths.

James Lafferty - US Business Manager, Austin Fraser

Participates in the Austin Chamber of Commerce, grew Austin Fraser to 17 employees and earned “Best Small Company to Work for” by the ABJ.
$1M billed in its first 10 months.

Jeff Erramouspe - GM and VP, Spanning by Dell EMC

Transformed a startup with 30 employees to a company that doubled in size.
Grew Spanning’s revenue 50% over the past year.
Tripled its sales team since Q2 and expanded internationally with employees, data centers and customers.

Katina Kenyon - VP of Sales & Marketing, Applaudo Studios

Doubled engineering capacity in less than 6 months.

Khorus

Khorus is an enterprise platform dedicated to leadership strategy.
Named a finalist for the 2016 SIIA CODiE Awards in the Best Business Intelligence Tools & Platforms category. Finalists represent the information industry’s best products, technologies, and services in the software, content and business technology.

Lindsey O'Niell - Product Manager, TrendKite

First employee at Trendkite, transitioned into product management.
Built the first iteration of the PR software that Trendkite sells.
Took the company from a <$100K a per year, to $10M-plus per year company.

Nexd.io

Nexd is a sales performance analytics company.
Raised $750K seed round in October and launched v1 of its product.
Nexd allows sales teams to measure, understand and take action on their sales process, using data not available in CRM's.

Noah Zandan - CEO & Co-Founder, Quantified Communications

Zandan has created over 200% YOY growth in client base including 40% of Fortune 10 companies.

NSS Labs

NSS Labs is a network testing and security product testing and monitoring company that has raised $27M to date.

Ojo Labs

Ojo labs is still in stealth mode, and in January 2016 completed a $5.8M Series A financing to spend on product development.
Named one of The Austin Chamber’s 12 A List Winners in May.

OnRamp

OnRamp is a data center operations company that specializes in assisting customers that interact with sensitive data by ensuring adherence to rigorous compliance standards.
Founded in 1994 as one of the first Internet Operations companies in Texas.

Opcity

A real estate broker’s primary partner in driving growth with technology.

Phunware

The company builds apps and platforms to capture audience, build interaction and log data.
Starting at $110K in revenue in 2009 to $24M in 2014, on track to reach $55M in 2016. Had first month of over $5M.
Launched Phunware Data with access to more than 650M devices touching the Phunware platform.
It has recently been funded with a $19.3M Series F round.

Pingboard

Pingboard is an employee directory and shared organizational chart for companies.
35K people at 250 companies use Pingboard.

Planview

In August, Planview bought San Francisco software company Innotas Inc. in a deal that’s expected to expand Planview’s business with small- and mid-size customers.
This spring, Planview moved into 51,000 square feet office space. The new space has a 300 worker capacity to make room for the teams of two acquisitions in the past two years.

Real Massive

Real Massive is the first open and connected commercial real estate marketplace that operates in over 35 US markets.
Provides a powerful yet easy way to help commercial real estate professionals collaborate and streamline listings.

Reza Piri - CEO, Gennovacap

Piri also founded Team Austin where he moved this meetup to a nonprofit in which membership provides scholarships for students.

Rick Orr - CEO, RealSavvy

RealSavvy is an all-in-one real estate CRM, client interaction and branded app that has closed $1.6M, with Founders Fund.

Rivet Works

Rivet-generated content can be repurposed in any channel to influence behavior and drive large increases in conversion, traffic, and reach.
Brands see causal conversion rate lifts an average is 65% and up to an 88% causal lift in AOV.

Robert Reeves - CTO and co-founder, Datical

Datical has seen 130% year-to-date rise in subscription revenue as of August.
Raised an $8M Series B in January.

ROIKOI

ROIKOI is an employee referral platform that collects an average of 35 recommended personal contacts per employee in 7 minutes.
Their sourcing platform assists companies improve diversity, hire faster, and build stronger teams through employee connections.

ShippingEasy

Acquired by Stamps.com for $55M.
Revenue increased 275% in 2015 and will increase over 175% in 2016. This is even more impressive given the base revenue is significant.
Monthly revenue doubled from January to September.

SoftServe

SoftServe is a digital services company that has enabled over 45 businesses in the Austin area to accelerate growth and completed more than 500 projects for companies like Cloudera, Zilliant, and more.
Won CEE Shared Services and Outsourcing Awards as IT Services Firm of the Year, Connected Mobility Solution of the Year at the European IT and Software Excellence Awards. Recognized as a Leader by IAOP in the 2016 Global Outsourcing 100, receiving the highest possible score for its customer references and special recognition for innovation programs.

SparkCognition

SparkCognition is a cognitive security analytics company.
Acquired over 40 major clients, including multiple Fortune 500 and Fortune 1,000 organizations.
Highly awarded including IBM's InnovateApp 2014, 2015 Hottest Start Up in Austin , the only US-based company to win Nokia’s 2015 Open Innovation Challenge. In 2015 as a Gartner Cool Vendor, SparkCognition garnered the Frost and Sullivan’s Technology Convergence Award. Recently, the Edison Awards recognized the company's achievements with two separate awards for cybersecurity.
Closed a $6M oversubscribed Series B funding round.

Spiceworks

Provides software for network asset inventory for free.
25% female Dev Organization.

Square Root, Inc.

Square Root is a relationship management software provider and has won Great Places to Work for the 3rd year in a row, working out of a series of bungalows on west 6th.
Over the last 18 months, Square Root has seen their CoEFFICIENT user base grow by more than 20%.

Steve Elliott - CEO, AgileCraft

The company has seen revenue increase over 400% and hiring over the past 18 months has grown over 1100%.
AgileCraft was named the #1 Small Best to Work by Fortune Magazine.
Rewards employees with financial incentives, trips, gift cards, awards and more.

Vast

Vast provides customers data insights for purchasing home and automobiles.
Closed a $14M Investment from Capital One Growth Ventures this year.
Considered a data-as-a-service platform for auto and real estate.

Volusion

An e-commerce store builder that includes 100-plus features, website templates, secure hosting and no transaction fees.
Over $21B in merchant sales worldwide to date.

Vyze

Vyze is a consumer financing company that has raised $13M.
In the course of six months we made several new key hires including our CEO, CFO, VP of Product and VP of sales.
Have helped over 59K customers gain access to credit in 2016, over 162K in total since 2012.

WigWag

Securely connects your favorite smart devices together to work as an ecosystem.

Worksmith

Worksmith connects businesses with local service providers.
Grown revenue 18% month over month in 2016
Signed new clients including Christian Louboutin, John Varvatos, Orvis, Timbuk2, St. John, Proenza Schouler, Indochino, Elaine Turner, Saturdays and Margaret O'Leary

XOR Data Exchange

XOR Data Exchange helps companies monetize the data they collect through their business.
XOR's Small Business Risk Exchange is able to effectively produce fraud and credit scores for 100% of businesses.
Able to implement identity theft and fraud protection for 100% of consumers affected by a data breach and prevent a wider variety of fraud types.

You Earned It

You Earned It helps companies build better relationships with their employees by providing more reasons to engage.
Have had clients including Anheuser-Busch, NBC Universal, Santander, Conde Nast, J. Walter Thompson and others.

Zenoss

Zenoss is an IT monitoring platform, one of the Best Enterprise Software Startup to Work For according to Forbes.
More than 5.6K enterprise companies are customers.
Expanding headquarters ~ 9K square feet to accommodate employee growth. And brought a trailer to F1.

Come join us on December 7th to see which of these companies our judges voted on as the ones who are on fire!
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