The Red Hat-Citrix-HQ Raleigh backed Innovators Program picked 10 early-stage startups with a heavy Triangle presence despite international interest.

The lineup includes Raleigh startup Malartu Funds, which focuses on crowdfunding, plus two Red Hat teams, three from Citrix, and four other firms.

Three are Triangle-based: Nebula, Glance and ShineBig.

Each of the 10 receives a $10,000 grant, mentorship, and possible future investment.

It’s the third year for the program, which is sponsored by Red Hat and Citrix with support from HQ Raleigh.

The partners announced in August that Innovators would return after Citrix had said it would end its own accelerator program, thus threatening the existence of Innovators. Citrix maintains a large operation in Raleigh where its Sharefile business is located.

The three-month program began Thursday.

“This unique grouping combines entrepreneurial thinking with large-scale enterprise expertise and seeks to foster both new startups and corporate innovation,” its sponsors say.

The 10 members of the cohort were selected from more than 60 applications with many from outside the U.S., including Canada, India and Myanmar.

The cohort

Here are summaries of the external team as provided by the sponsors:

  • Nebula is a modular, customizable workstation suite founded by brothers Geoff and Zach Milburn. Calling it “Salesforce meets Squarespace,” the team is building a user-friendly, adaptable, and pay-as-you-go SaaS platform for businesses on the Internet. The team has launched several web and app-based startups and graduated from the inaugural ThinkHouse accelerator in 2014. http://nebulasites.com
  • Geospatial (d/b/a VisionLTC) is a geospatial market analytics platform for the senior housing, medical office, and healthcare industries. The platform provides operators, owners, investors, lenders, developers and other industry stakeholders with critical market analytics to facilitate improved strategic decision-making. The team includes co-founders and serial entrepreneurs Arick Morton and Grant Hamm. www.visionltc.com
  • Malartu is a fully functioning online investment platform created by co-founders Jon Spinney and Sean Steigerwald. The company plans to develop and integrate metric-tracking tools for startups to automatically generate and report KPIs for potential and/or current investors. North Carolina State University’s Entrepreneurship Clinic director Lewis Sheats is a founding advisor. www.malartufunds.us
  • Glance is a text-messaged based job search platform founded by Chris Comrie and Kameron Kales. Students can be notified of part-time jobs via text message, and can send a one-word reply to easily apply for the role. The co-founders are also current Fellows of the ThinkHouse, a living and learning accelerator for young entrepreneurs. Askglance.com
  • ShineBig is creating a multimedia platform that makes it easy for businesses to ask engaging questions and receive engaged responses. Founder Tola Oguntoyinbo is a serial social entrepreneur and former The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s CUBE Entrepreneur in Residence. http://shinebig.com

Two internal Red Hat teams (focused on creating next-generation people programs for internal use):

  • The Red Hat Performance Management and Development team plans to create a performance management process that focuses on associate development and is scalable for Red Hat’s future. The team includes Arrie Brown, Jorge Herrera, Beverly Heustess, and Kim Jokisch, and is supported by Geri Duncan.
  • The Red Hat Ambassadors team aims to create a transparent, efficient, and scalable referral program that can enhance both the associate and candidate experience. This team includes Jonathan Edwards, Jorge Herrera, and Jenna Slawson, and is supported by Rob Trout.

The three internal Citrix teams:

  • MediFlow is an intuitive patient intake solution reducing frustration for patients and medical institutions while resulting in secure, timely and accurate information. The internal innovation team is led by Joseph Saponaro, Domenico Matteo, and Brian Stengaard.
  • RecapIt enables workers who capture audio, video, and images as part of their daily tasks to do so more easily by streamlining that process into a simple capture, save, and share workflow that’s managed from a single mobile device. The team is spearheaded by Citrix employees Ben Robbins, Tarun Goel, and Nicholas Madariaga.
  • The CSP team, located at the Citrix Fort Lauderdale, Florida campus, is changing the way Citrix on-boards service providers. By changing the flow and eliminating lengthy processes, they shorten the on-boarding process from months to days. The team also hopes to reduce churn in the CSP program. CSP will be led by Citrix employee Nizar Tyrewalla.