Editor’s note: Six startups from Charlotte are drawing a lot of attention at the Southeast Venture Conference, writes Allan Maurer for WRAL TechWire. Maurer, a co-founder of WTW, is reporting exclusively for our Insiders from the event and the preceding Charlotte Venture Conference. Check out the stories linked with this post for his wide-ranging, in-depth coverage.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Six startups based in Charlotte are pitching their businesses to investors at the Southeast Venture Conference in the Queen City, a robust showing for a city that hasn’t been known as a hub for entrepreneurs.
That compares to 10 from the Triangle and equals the six from Atlanta and six from DC.
Both traditionally more entrepreneur-friendly than Charlotte, which is better known for its big banks and large commercial businesses.
While one of the six, Passport, is in the financial services field, the others span data centers, sophisticated software products, and an aviation communications network.
The Charlotte companies are:
- Passport, a mobile payment platform for municipal parking and transit customers, which raised a $6 million Series A round from Grotech Ventures and REeevance Capital in 2013.
- T1Visions is a software company creating interactive touchscreen experiences. Its InTouch platform transforms public spaces into environments in which people can communicate and interact individually and collectively.
- SmartSky Networks is launching the first airborne 4G LTE-based network to provide 10 times the speed and capacity of networks currently in the market.
- Opmantek sells open source software that helps IT teams detect faults, review current and historical network performance and predict future failures. It raised $800,000 in an oversubscribed seed round and seeks $1 million or $2 million to hire sales staff.
- DC74 operates four data centers specializing in telecommunication related services, infrastructure as a service, disaster recovery and private cloud solutions
