50 on Fire will bring together D.C.'s best and brightest to recognize the disruptors, luminaries and visionaries that are pushing our city forward. Buy your tickets now and join us on December 4th at Howard Theatre for the celebration and winners reveal.
There are plenty of people and companies to thank for turning Washington D.C. into a major tech hot spot. Picking just a few to honor at this year's 50 on Fire event on December 4 is tough work for the judges. The over 1,500 nominations in nine categories have been narrowed down to just 150 finalists that are really "on fire" this year. The tech scene is so strong in D.C. that there are more finalists in this category than any other, 20 in total. The finalists have created fun apps, organized big data and put up the venture capital that makes the D.C. tech scene so exciting. Check out what these companies and people have done this year that sets them above the rest.
Allen Gannett, TrackMavenCEO
Allen is the founder and CEO at TrackMaven, a competitive intelligence platform for digital marketers and a partner at Acceleprise. Just this year, he led TrackMaven to raising $7.8M in funding from top firms like NEA and Bowery Capital and hosted the TrackMaven Summit in New York City, bringing together top decision makers to discuss the current state of marketing. And he's made sure his dog Maven's face is everywhere.
APX Labs
Initially a company building technology for the military, APX Labs started in 2010 by building enterprise software for smart glasses. APX Labs created Skylight, the world’s most used business software for smart glasses. This year APX Labs launched a partnership with Deloitte to drive enterprise adoption of wearable technology and launched a Skybox Google Glass app with the Washington Capitals, the first-ever professional-sport integrated software of its kind in the world. This success helped drive raising $10M in funding from NEA to develop the second iteration of their software platform.
Brivo Labs
Brivo Labs is an Internet of Things company focused on the emerging Social Access Management market. Using social identities, they develop applications that connect virtual communities with physical spaces. This year Brivo unveiled OKDoor, a Google Glass app that provides the wearer with the ability to allow access to physical doors and created a Brivo Labs API that offers a feature in mobile hotel booking app HotelTonight to allow you to check in and get into your hotel room without stopping at the front desk or needing a key to get into your room.
Dan Berger, Social Tables
Dan Berger founded runs Social Tables, which provides cloud-based software solutions to the hospitality industry. In three years, Dan has led Social Tables from 0 to 52 employees (90% who live in D.C.) and from $10k in the bank to $9.6M in funding. It's had an astonishing 98 percent customer retention and a 40 percent month over month growth (trailing 12 month average). It's numbers like that got Berger named to to Successful Meeting’s 25 Most Influential People in the Meetings Industry List, and to the BizBash Most Innovative Event Professionals list.
DCFemTech
DCFemTech was created in January 2014 as a collective of women-in-tech organizations in the D.C. area to work together to collaborate, support and streamline events in the community. The group now represents over 25 organizations and has 4,000 members. This year the group hosted Tour de Code, a month long program done in collaboration with dozens of organizations to help women advance their technical skills. The opening event drew more than 200 women, with workshops teaching code and design to women in partnership with companies like Google, Yahoo and Capital One.
Digital Management, Inc.
DMI provides mobile enterprise and big data solutions and services. It's signed on hundreds of Fortune 1000 commercial clients and all fifteen U.S. Federal Departments. That's helped fuel an amazing growth rate of 1,500 percent in the last four years and gotten it named to the Inc. 500/5,000 list of the fastest growing private companies in the country for the past eight years.
Harry Weller, New Enterprise Associates
Weller is a general partner at NEA specializing in software, energy and systems investments. He has served on the board of many local D.C. tech companies including Cvent, Appian, Eloqua, Luminal, TrackMaven, SourceFire, and OPower. Under Weller's direction, NEA has boosted its East Coast venture investments, and he founded NEA's China organization. Among other things he made the Forbes “Midas List” and Business Insider’s “Top 5 East Coast VCs.”
HelloWallet
Founded in 2009, HelloWallet offers independent financial guidance for employees of major companies with a data platform for making workforce compensation and rewards decisions. And for every five subscriptions sold, subscription is donated to a family in need. HelloWallet was acquired by Morningstar in May for $52.5M. The management team remains in place and the team of 50 plus continues to work out of revamped office space in Dupont Circle. It worked out great for the three local VC firms, Revolution, Grotech and TD Fund, that backed the company too.
Imran Aftab, 10Pearls
Imran Aftab is cofounder and CEO of 10Pearls, an application development company. This year Aftab led 10Pearls to partner with National Geographic to release the GeoBee Challenge Mobile and to acquire local information security assurance provider Gemini. By the end of the year 10Pearls is looking at more than doubling both revenue and number of employees.
Invincea
Invincea is an endpoint cybersecurity company that provides advanced threat detection, breach prevention and forensic intelligence to over 20,000 organizations. This year,the company’s advanced research division secured $8.1M in new contracts for advanced cybersecurity projects for federal government agencies and announced a $21.4M contract with the U.S. Army.
Joel Holland, VideoBlocks
Joel Holland is the founder and CEO of VideoBlocks, a stock video, audio and image startup that aims at being a more affordable kind of Shutterstock. Holland has doubled VideoBlocks’ business year over year since its founding, and the company now serves hundreds of thousands of global customers, with revenue increasing more than 7,000 pecent over the last five years.This year, Holland and his team launched AudioBlocks.com, the first subscription based company of its kind, along with a mobile application allowing consumers to apply stock audio video and images on their mobile devices.
Luminal
Luminal is a venture-backed cybersecurity startup with big plans. It relocated to Frederick, Md. after getting a $600,000 investment from the state as part of the InvestMaryland initiative. It's creation of a cybersecurity tool for cloud computing called Fugue helped it raise a $10 million round of funding in August, just months after completing a $3.8 million round.
Maryland Venture Fund
The Maryland Venture Fund is a seed and early stage investment program created by the state. It invests in companies working in software, communications, cybersecurity and the life sciences. Its work managing the InvestMaryland state funding source earned the four winners of this year's challenge contest $100,000 on top of the 17 local investments MVF made this year in companies like Salsa Labs, Synapsify, Luminal and CoFounders Lab.
Mercaris
Mercaris offers market data service and an online platform for organic agriculture. It's the first electronic venue for buying and selling these kinds of goods and the company raised a $2.3 million Series A round in September. It wants to increase the transparency and data available about organic food.
Middleland Capital
Middleland Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm that's really started to make an impact in D.C. this year. It's invested in a whole host of local startups including Social Tables, Nvite, Mercaris, Synapsify, Hinge, Contactually, Avizia and Power Supply.
Paul Singh, Disruption Corporation
Paul Singh launched Disruption Corporation in 2014 after returning to the DC-area from his role at 500 Startups. His goal to turn Crystal City into a startup hub led to a Vornado and a $10 million in Disruption’s Crystal Tech Fund. In May, Singh launched Disruption Research, a new platform for putting public market research into the private market and soon after became an investment advisor, allowing them to sell advice and services to investors.
Radius Networks
Radius Networks makes mobile proximity technologies used to discover and analyze customer traffic encourage customer engagements. This year, Radius raised $4.5 million to expand its offerings of the hardware, developer platform and engagement analytics to clients. It also partnered with LevelUp to deliver proximity-enabled mobile payments to 1.5 million users and 14,000 business locations.
Ridescout
At its core, RideScout is a mobile app offering real-time information about transportation options around you including basically every kind of vehicle and public transportation. It's had a very good year, culminating in getting acquired by moovel (a Daimler subsidiary) in September for an undisclosed sum. It also won the US Department of Transportation's Data Innovation Challenge in June, giving it the opportunity to present ideas on improving transportation to the DOT and the White House.
Viraj Gandhi, Paradyme Management
Gandhi is the CEO of Paradyme Management, a Greenbelt company providing IT and strategy services that was awarded a $20 million contract by the State Department, an eight year contract by US Census Bureau, and a contract with the D.C. Department of Health Care Finance. You can expect it to have no trouble getting funding for more growth with those kinds of major contracts to its name.
Zvi Band, Contactually
Zvi is the founder and CEO of Contactually, but is well-known in the area as the co-founder of the DC Tech Meetup, one of the biggest and most popular tech meetups in the region. Contactually fits that kind of interest in networking and growth, providing platform helps companies and individuals generate business from their network. This year the company has seen revenue grow 19-fold to $2 million, helping close a $3.5 million round of funding recently that will support growing even more.
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