Call September the month of Citrix. Besides opening its new downtown Raleigh office, today, it announces the first class of startups to participate in the inaugural Citrix Startup Accelerator Innovators Program, a collaborative effort with HQ Raleigh and Red Hat.
Seven teams start the program on Monday, all local. Of 64 applicants to the inaugural program in Raleigh, two came from outside the state. Interestingly, 15 teams came from within existing corporations. A goal of the accelerator is to mentor corporate product teams alongside aspiring new companies. Two finalists are Citrix teams based in Raleigh.
The Citrix Accelerator is among the first major efforts by local corporations to mentor and advise young companies and aspiring entrepreneurs. It’s part of the Citrix Startup Accelerator program in Silicon Valley, which invests up to $250,000 in seed money, provides office space to companies for up to 18 months and gives access to Citrix products and its customer base. That Silicon Valley office piloted the Innovators Program earlier this year. Raleigh is its first expansion and a third program will soon begin in Bangalore, India.
The local Innovators Program provides $25,000 grants to participating companies and provides three months of office space at Citrix’s new headquarters. Besides a team of local mentors and advisors, educational programming around lean startup and design thinking, they’ll get access to resources throughout the global company.
Here’s the full run-down of this fall’s participants:
*EMPLOYUS is the brainchild of N.C. State grad and nonprofit Pennies 4 Progress founder Ryan O’Donnell. The vision is to let business professionals leverage their networks to serve as recruiters for hiring companies, and earn money when they make a match. O’Donnell’s got a big name in the industry behind him. Backing the startup is Jeff Stocks, CEO and part-owner of Manpower.
*A year-old Chapel Hill startup is trying to make video production more collaborative. Mindset Systems’ first product is CrowdChannel, which allows video editing to happen in the cloud and from any device—from wearable computer to drone to iPhone. It also allows multiple people to contribute content and CrowdChannel makes sense of those contributions and creates productions. The startup is the brainchild of four video professionals.
*Akili Software CEO and co-founder Michelle Harper is building an aggregator of web and mobile applications to serve the healthcare and caregiving industries. In May, the startup acquired its first platform, the EDI Smart Reader, a tool for Medicare-certified providers to view claims and report and correct claim errors and resubmit. Harper acquired the platform from her old company, Home Care Software Solutions Inc. in Cary.
In August, Akili launched the Kili Referral Manager, which helps home health companies collect and track the status of referrals and respond quickly in order to grow sales. Harper has spent her entire career in sales and product marketing at healthcare companies. She blogs about the business here.
*Besides plans to lower the cost of online video delivery, Joosy hasn’t revealed much about its business just yet. Several of its founders are already active in the Raleigh startup community. CEO Juan Benito has spent years in game design and is co-founder of the now-defunct Joystick Labs. He remains creative director of the Triangle Game Initiative. He’s joined by Jason Bradicich, founder and creative director at the digital agency, Adena Studios, Kauffman Fellow and venture capitalist Whitney Rowe and Bill Gibson, a project manager at SAS.
*Yet-to-launch Userlite has a mission to reinvent how businesses use cloud software, helping them launch products faster and spend less time dealing with the software required to do the business. Founder is serial entrepreneur David Ogden, who has built software-as-a-service products for the education, finance, entertainment and healthcare industries. The company is based in Hillsborough.
*The final two teams are made up of employees at Citrix’s Sharefile office in Raleigh. They are building products within the company and are treated as startups.
