20 entrepreneurs took the stage at Raleigh’s Contemporary Art Museum Monday afternoon to pitch their seven startups to a room packed with investors, entrepreneurs and corporate executives. The Demo Day wrapped up the first cohort of the inaugural Citrix Accelerator Innovators Program in Raleigh. More on the significance of the program to North Carolina’s capital city here.

The seven (including two internal Citrix teams) were chosen from a pool of 64 teams from around the nation to receive $25K grants, office space and mentorship from Citrix workers and investors and entrepreneurs in the local startup community. Below, learn more about the teams, technologies and traction built over three months in the program.

  • EMPLOYUS

Founder Ryan O’Donnell had a lot to celebrate yesterday. Earlier in the day, NC IDEA named the NC State senior among five grant winners, providing funds to help him grow the talent recruitment platform he tested and launched during the accelerator. 

EMPLOYUS lets startups and other high-growth businesses promote open jobs and anyone refer friends, colleagues or family members they think are qualified to fill them. The companies provide a reward to the winning referrer, and O’Donnell thinks in return, those companies will get workers who are better qualified, more passionate and longer-lasting than those recruited in traditional ways. 

Find out more at ExitEvent

  • Savii Care

Savii Care is the first product of Raleigh startup Akili Software, founded by former health care executive Michelle Harper and co-founder Jana Barile.

Akili has spent most of this year developing software that replaces the disparate platforms that home health care companies use today to organize their workforce and care. Savii Care is a comprehensive web and mobile application that is HIPAA and Affordable Care Act compliant and includes all client information, scheduling, GPS validation (when a caregiver arrives or leaves the home), task lists and e-signatures. 

Find out more at ExitEvent

  • Re:BAR

A pair of Citrix Sharefile employees spent three months working on a concept they dreamt up at their day jobs, a solution to the email problem.

What problem? The fact that co-founder Grady Slane, a product marketing specialist, found 296 emails in his inbox after Thanksgiving weekend and it took several hours to sift through them. Data shows the average person spend two hours a day sending and responding to email. 

Find out more at ExitEvent

  • Castr

The second set of Citrix intrapreneurs wanted to make it easier to share screens in conference rooms (despite the many sophisticated audio/visual technologies on the market). And 65 customer interviews during the accelerator proved a need. 

They wanted a solution as simple as Apple TV or Chromecast that didn’t require wires or cords. So the Citrix innovators designed a simple hardware device and a software platform that allows screencasting from any device to any display, making it easier for employees to work and collaborate remotely using various technologies and devices.

Find out more at ExitEvent

  • Mindset Systems

Founded by two engineers with decades of experience in digital video, Mindset Systems used three months in the accelerator to talk to potential customers and launch CrowdChannel. It’s a solution for event organizers to aggregate video from various event attendees, with sophisticated technology that knits the videos together factoring time, content, location (or point-of-view) and social clues. The end result is a production that can be shared and distributed after an event. It all happens in real time, without requiring server space. 

Find out more at ExitEvent

  • JoosyCloud

Another digital video concept, JoosyCloud responds to the growing demand for streaming video. A market worth $4B today, it’s expected to triple in the next few years. That could mean slower video speeds and poorer quality using existing content delivery networks. JoosyCloud works as a search engine for bandwidth, looking across all users (or viewers of a video) for available bandwidth to improve the speed and quality of a video.

Find out more at ExitEvent

  • Userlite

This startup gets the award for the biggest pivot. Initial plans were nebulous but involved helping businesses more efficiently develop software. The new Userlite is a consumer and enterprise software that provides users a dashboard to access all of the applications and websites they use each day, accessed with a single password. The dashboard also aggregates all notifications, reminding users of new emails, social media updates, analytics reports and other messages from the sites they use daily.

Founders and serial entrepreneurs David Ogden of Hillsborough and Jacob Seethaler of Salt Lake City recounted the early days of the program, when they talked to customers and realized a need for something totally different than what they were building. So they started over and spent five days (and three cases of Red Bull) building a new MVP, and then sought feedback from potential users. 250 of their ideas led to at least 300 iterations of the product. 

Find out more at ExitEvent

(Note: ExitEvent is a news partner of WRAL TechWire.)