TechSquare Labs has selected another winner for the Atlanta Startup Battle as part of Tech Square Innovation Week and made two additional investments in other startups that participated in the pitch competition.
OSSPolice, a cloud-based service that analyzes mobile apps for open source license violations, took home the gold and a $100,000 investment at last night's event.
In addition, TechSquare Labs leaders said they would also make investments into two other competitors---Eletype and Cove.Tool---for the first time since the competition began in 2016.
Participants in the competition included the following startups:
- AgVoice, a mobile voice-interaction service designed for food and agriculture companies to analyze on-site data to improve food traceability.
- Cove.Tool, a software platform that helps architects, engineers, owners and contractors to optimize building options for cost.
- Eletype, a software which provides ads solutions for marketing teams.
- Trusted Sale, a peer to peer transaction platform that verifies sellers to combat fraud and scams.
- CPG Toolbox, a software analysis of Trade Promotion programs.
Co-founder of OSSPolice Ashish Bijlani, a Ph.D. candidate for computer science at Georgia Tech, said the competition was a great opportunity for his company.
"It’s amazing to see how all the people were equally talented," he said. "It’s awesome that we got this opportunity to try to capitalize on."
What originally started as a research project with his cofounder, Ruian Duan, quickly became a solution to a growing problem among mobile apps, Bijlani said. By identifying app vulnerabilities and license violations, OSSPolice is able to contact OSS developers who can approach violators and turn them into customers.
So far, the company is already in talks with Artifex Software Inc. and identified 34,000 cases of potential violations for the firm. If the company agrees to work with OSSPolice, they could raise close to $8.5 million annually converting violators into customers, Bijlani said.
The founders of OSSPolice are part of Georgia Tech's Create-X program, a faculty-led, student-focused initiative focused on creating entrepreneurial experiences for Georgia Tech students, enabling them to launch their own startups. Bijlani, who transferred to Tech from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, said going from a school with no program for startups to Create-X gave him a great opportunity to work with other students and teachers.
"They are going to help us incorporate and come up with a strategy, talk to more customers, and we are really excited about that," he said.
In the meantime, OSSPolice will continue to search for customers with plans to incorporate while also working on a cloud-base audit technology for app developers, Bijlani said. The service would allow app developers to proactively fix any potential licensing violations.
"We are planning to roll out the first version by the end of the summer," he said.
