After 25 days of voting, Wisconsin Inno’s 2019 Tech Madness competition has been narrowed down from 32 startups from around the state to the final winner.
Madison-based AkitaBox, which dominated nearly every round throughout the tournament, is this year’s Tech Madness champion. In the finals, the startup beat out Understory with 67 percent of the votes. Voters were choosing startups with one question in mind: Who would you invest in?
Launched in 2015, AkitaBox makes a cloud-based software and data collection service that helps facility operators organize information about buildings they manage. The software allows building managers to keep track of the physical aspects of a building to ensure it is running as efficiently as possible, said AkitaBox Co-founder and CEO Todd Hoffmaster.
AkitaBox’s software gathers information on all mechanical, electrical, plumbing and fire protection elements of a building. Once all the data is collected, the software standardizes it and gives users insights and recommendations for things like preventative maintenance scheduling, floor plan updates and custodial workload balancing.
“Buildings are like people—they constantly change,” Hoffmaster said. “And there’s not a lot of software that is flexible and adaptable to meet those demands.”
AkitaBox has more than 135 clients across 38 states, mainly in the education and healthcare space. The startup currently employs about 70 people and Hoffmaster said AkitaBox has been growing 240 percent year over year.
To date, AkitaBox has raised $1.2 million in venture capital funding, though Hoffmaster said it has raised more in undisclosed rounds.
Because Wisconsin's tech community is tight-knit, Hoffmaster said he knew many of the startups AkitaBox went up against throughout the competition, including Understory.
"We want to root them on as much as they want to root us on," said Hoffmaster, who added that winning Tech Madness is "surreal."
"It's validation that we're building a really good company for the right reasons and we have really talented employees here that care about what they're doing out in the world," he said. "We will definitely celebrate this as a full team because it takes a team to do what we're doing."
