News

Cohort II Graduation | Cohort III Applications Open!

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Last Friday, May 16th at Milestone9 we had the honor of graduating nine companies from our second cohort. This capstone event is a conclusion to an intensive four month-long program focused on mentorship, advising and coaching startup companies. Descriptions of companies at the close of this post.

We're also announcing that applications are now open for our next round, Cohort III. All information on our application process can be found at apply.9milelabs.com. Here are the key dates:

- Monday, 6/2: Early Bird Application Deadline (midnight) - Monday, 6/16: Final Application Deadline (midnight)

Want to connect with us face-to-face, learn about 9ML and applying to our cohort? Here are a handful of opportunities.

Open Coffee: One-on-one conversation with a 9ML partner

- Every Tuesday (5/20 – 6/10), 1PM – 4PM, Tully’s in Bellevue (10812 Main Street; Bellevue, WA 98004) - Every Thursday (5/22 – 6/12), 1PM – 4PM, Tully’s in Seattle (2nd & Marion; Exchange Building, 821 – 2nd Avenue; Seattle, WA 98104)

Entrepreneur Town Halls: Learn more about 9Mile Labs and the application process

- Thursday, 5/29, 4PM – 6PM, Dice Cabana (Exchange Building, 821, 2nd Avenue, 4th Floor, Seattle) - Tuesday, 6/10, 4PM – 6PM, Eastside venue TBD

Questions about applying to 9Mile Labs? Check out our Q&A page at 9MileLabs.com as well as earlier blog posts:

Are you ready for an accelerator? Is my startup too late / too early for an accelerator? How is a B2B startup different from a B2C startup (Part I)?

 Meet our graduated cohort!

- 3D Product Imaging (3dproductimaging.com):3D Product Imaging allows online brands and retailers to create photo-realistic, high-fidelity 3-dimensional images of products thereby helping to improve sales conversion rates and reduce returns. - Angles Media (anglesmedia.co): Angles Media helps businesses close more sales by delivering the right content to the buyer with the highest likelihood of influencing the sale. Learn exactly how your landing pages, white papers, videos, and emails influence prospects during the sales cycle. - Cloudadmin (cloudadmin.mx): Cloudadmin is a cloud-based inventory management and order management system specially designed for SMBs in Latin America. - Connect Consignment (connectedconsignment.com): Cloud e-commerce software, enabling resale and consignment businesses to; Sell anything, to anyone, anywhere. - Engineroom360 (engineroom360.com): Engineroom360 helps small and mid-size online retailers, utilizing hosted platforms, to create online promotions and improve discoverability of products on their websites. - Ghostruck (ghostruck.com): Ghostruck is a ridesharing solution for moving trucks that connects moving trucks with consumers who need a truck for moving bulky items. - GreenKrate (greenkrate.com): GreenKrate delivers grocery items to consumers and small businesses thereby saving them time. - Pawzii (pawzii.com): Pawzii delivers automated software solutions for animal shelters to free up human capital, generate new types of revenue, and bring focus back to what’s most important: saving animal lives. - Theme Dragon (themedragon.com): Theme Dragon helps marketers in SMB’s make smarter video marketing decisions through actionable recommendations and intelligent data. It supports them from planning and production to measuring results.

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Why Did We Partner With PARC...And What Is The Big Deal?

Earlier today (Wed, Apr 2), we shared an announcement about an exciting partnership with PARC. Press releases offer limited room for elaboration, so we thought we'd share our perspective in a blog post. So here goes. If you’re an entrepreneur, you know the odds are stacked against you…1:10 by most anecdotal accounts. If you are working on an idea, chances are, someone else in some other part of the world is working on the same or an adjacent idea. And if you were to assume that the other team is at least as smart and as driven as you are, they’re likely to pivot and iterate until both of you arrive at similar product/market concepts.

Having established the above, your challenge is to execute flawlessly and incredibly fast. How exactly do you do that? We believe that’s where startup accelerators are amazingly efficient. Surrounding entrepreneurs with seasoned mentors, an intense focus on customer development, the ability of the partners themselves to support the companies, providing stage-appropriate resources, and creating urgency with a fixed-length program help startups minimize mistakes and operate efficiently.

Back to PARC

Before we go too far, for the uninitiated, here’s a subset of the pioneering technologies PARC has invented since its founding in 1970 – mouse, Ethernet, laser printing, graphical user interface, object-oriented programming, WYSIYG text editor etc. etc. This short YouTube video contains an interview with Steve Jobs and his reaction at seeing the mouse on his visit to PARC in 1979. The short of it is, PARC is focused on “out there” research in many areas, including ubiquitous computing, big data, content-centric networking, contextual intelligence, design and digital manufacturing and many others. Convinced about the coolness quotient yet?

PARC is now very focused on bringing its groundbreaking innovations to the startup community. After a long and intense due diligence process with startup-focused organizations across the world, PARC made a decision that 9Mile Labs would be one of the organizations they would partner with. The PARC team liked the 9Mile Labs focus on B2B companies, they enjoyed the continuity of deep mentor engagement during the program and they liked how the 9Mile Labs team is committed to a community-focused approach to supporting entrepreneurs. Finally, the PARC team felt that the structured curriculum and engagement built upon a strong foundation of the 9Mile Success Framework (more on that in another blog post) offered a great mechanism for programmatic engagement with the startups.

In fact, the interaction between PARC and 9Mile Labs was so positive early on that despite no formal agreement, PARC visited 9Mile Labs during the first program in 2013, spoke to a subset of the companies here and decided to support Comr.se, one of the very promising Cohort I companies. Over the past few months, PARC has dramatically accelerated development of Comr.se’s data analytics infrastructure with PARC’s outsourced data foundry services.  The engagement compresses Comr.se’s development and go-to-market timeframes by 12-18 months at a fraction of the traditional cost, thereby providing them with an amazing competitive advantage.

And This Is Why It’s a Big Deal!

The collaboration between PARC and 9Mile Labs creates unique combinations of disruptive technologies and startups that has not occurred at scale previously. PARC serves to accelerate startups in 3 distinct ways. First, PARC can efficiently offer the broad and deep base of technical expertise with PARC researchers and technologists to help startups in the form of technical mentoring. Second, PARC can draw upon its vast stable of existing technologies and IP that can provide startups a great head-start, as in the case of Comr.se. Third, PARC provides a world-class infrastructure for rapid prototyping - specifically their foundry services for software and cloud technology startups - that obviates the need for startups to expend their scarce time and resources building this infrastructure.

Now let’s combine all of the above with the fact that the focus of PARC’s research and client interactions is innately and historically enterprise and B2B. Hopefully, it begins to become apparent why the collaboration between PARC and 9Mile Labs ought to be great news for budding B2B entrepreneurs.

To be sure, not all startups will be either ready, able or suitable to engage with PARC. But for many startups, this support could spell the difference between success and failure. And that, quite simply, is what we’re trying to do at 9Mile Labs. We want to systematically reduce risks and improve the odds that startups face as they build their businesses.

And Then There Were Nine...

It’s been an eventful 2013 thus far at 9Mile Labs. A little over 3 months after announcing the 9Mile Labs accelerator (Jan 2, to be precise), we’re at the point where we have nine great teams who are ready to start the program April 8. We’ve been pleasantly surprised by the number and quality of B2B-focused applications we received. While this has made our task of selecting our cohort only harder over the last few weeks, we’re also pleased by the final set of companies we have in the program. We have also been gratified by the support we have received from mentors, investors, executives and other organizations in the Pacific Northwest startup ecosystem thus far. Now we’re ready to leverage that support to help the entrepreneurs.

Here are the nine companies in the first 9Mile Labs cohort. As you read through the (really short) descriptions, what is clear to see is the diversity of the problems that these companies are trying to address in the B2B space. Two of the startups focus on wireless markets, three on enterprise social, one on healthcare, one on enterprise infrastructure, and two on streamlining sales and marketing processes. What is also really exciting is that 3 of the 9 companies are led by female CEOs.

So, without further ado, here we go...

Company Name Founders Short Description
1. AiroMetric Wireless
  • Annie George
  • Mathew Samuel
Wireless analytics from over the air down to the application
2. AMP Tablet Solutions
  • Patrick Henley
  • Denis Altudov
Streamlining sales by connecting mobile sales reps to their supply chain
3. Appuri
  • Damon Danieli
  • Dmitri Boulanov
Enabling agile businesses through Software Defined Operations
4. CadenceMD
  • Bonnie Cech
  • Bruce Leban
Helping physicians improve efficiency and patient satisfaction
5. Comr.se
  • John Wantz
  • Kyle Schei
Crunching sales and social data to power agile commerce
6. GIVINGtrax
  • Karrie Hungerford
  • Courtney Titus
  • Kai Sounthala
Enabling organizations to manage and promote their giving efforts
7. MeritShare
  • Kevin Nakao
  • Travis Pearl
Helping companies motivate their employees with online recognition
8. Ombitron
  • Paul Hammann
  • Ian Johnson
Machine-to-Machine Platform-as-a-Service.  Easy. Open. Wireless
9. SpinRiot
  • David Richards
Build multimedia content once, display seamlessly across multiple devices