Successful startups share stories
Tech forum kicks off 3 days of activities
Three prominent local startups shared their successes with a packed audience Tuesday night to kick off this week’s ExperienceIT celebration of technology and innovation in Albuquerque.
The LaunchIT forum offered startup pitches and a panel discussion by top executives from the cybersecurity firm RiskSense, the online branding and social marketing firm boomtime, and CleanSpot Technologies, which created an all-natural hand sanitizer that it launched this month.
CleanSpot, which is marketing its ActiveClean sanitizer through online promotion and sales, unveiled clips from newly filmed, comical commercials to be aired on YouTube. The ads, which feature a woman campaigning for ActiveClean, drew hearty laughter by mimicking today’s presidential race.
“Together, let’s make America clean again — vote ActiveClean!” the woman shouts from a campaign podium in one clip.
In another, she calls for “building a wall on our hands,” not by “building” it, but by “spraying” it.
CleanSpot CEO Chuck Call said the commercials, including one in which the actress dumps her hand in a toilet, aim to tap YouTube’s standing as the premier online consumer search site for products such as hand sanitizers.
“They’re edgy, but younger people like them,” he said.
Mark Fidel, RiskSense cofounder and head of corporate development, coined a new term for cyber hygiene, or “cygiene,” during his pitch. The company offers a comprehensive software platform that provides businesses and institutions with the realtime network awareness they need to rapidly respond to threats and plug vulnerabilities before cybercriminals can take advantage of them.
“Ninety-four percent of data breaches are predictable,” Fidel said. “We employ cyber hygiene and proactive risk management to monitor and fix vulnerabilities.”
RiskSense has drawn broad local attention by raising $7 million in venture funding in August and doubling its workforce to 70 people since 2014. It expects to reach 100 this year.
Boomtime is more under the public radar than CleanSpot and RiskSense, but it’s steadily built a 3,000-strong customer base since its start in 2005, with operations in Albuquerque, El Paso and Dallas. The company custom- builds and manages websites for effective online marketing and branding for small businesses at an affordable price to better compete with large, national companies, CEO Mark Canon said.
“Our average customer spends $6,000 to $8,000 a year, compared with like $150,000 by the bigger guys,” Canon said. “We provide the tools for smaller businesses to manage customer communications. We level the playing field so they can compete.”
The company, which now employs 36 people, has raised $3.5 million from the Verge Fund and angel investors, including a $1.5 million round it closed on in August to further build its sales and operations staff.
“We’re focused now on growing our business,” Canon told the Journal. “Our goal is to bring in another 1,000 customers over the next 12 months.”
The LaunchIT event, hosted by Coronado Ventures Forum, marks the first of a series of ExperienceIT activities this week that will culminate in an all-day conference on Friday focused on technology-based businesses.