Emerging A-List Winner: Everfest

The festival industry is showing massive growth but is largely disaggregated. There is no great, central place for festival attendees to learn details of events, even if the event is taking place in their own backyard. Everfest wants to improve discovery, connection and sharing of festival experiences before and after. Traditional social and travel sites aren't the right place for festivals – Everfest is going to be their home.

Everfest is building the world's largest festival community, spanning genre and geography to connect the full festival ecosystem of revelers, festival organizers and brands. Everfest starts with discovery and extends to a day-of mobile app that will be the last festival app attendees and organizers will ever need.

Leadership Insights

• Founder Jay Manickam is one of the original co-founders of uShip, the world's largest shipping marketplace, which has been a fixture of the Austin tech startup scene since 2004.
• The company has seen small festivals grow up right in front of them. Manickam wants to perpetuate that here and all over the world, and is excited to work with local festivals to build something that can truly elevate them, and collectively Austin, to new levels.

Emerging A-List Winner: Bitfusion.io

The speed of doing business is only as fast as a company’s computer systems. Many key industries and tech functions like data processing, analytics, machine learning, financial services and pharmaceuticals require complex computations with faster turn-around time to speed time-to-market and boost profits, even as data volumes continue to mount. Currently, the recourse for data centers and cloud configurations is to keep scaling by adding CPU-based server nodes, which means adding costs and inefficiencies. The real need is to enable organizations to use seamless hardware acceleration without code rewrite.

Bitfusion offers unique software to transparently and automatically accelerate existing applications by orders of magnitude. Bitfusion unlocks hardware acceleration without requiring application rewrite.

Leadership Insights

• CEO Subbu Rama has held engineering and leadership roles in hardware and software divisions while building CPUs, micro-servers, SoCs and cloud infrastructures, at companies like Intel and Dell. As a founding member, he built Dell’s first Cloud Infrastructure Marketplace.
• All three founders: Subbu Rama, CEO; Mazhar Memon, CTO; and Maciej Bajkowski, COO, have at least 10 years in the semiconductor and tech industry each spanning multiple disciplines.

Emerging A-List Winner: Green & Grow Inc.

There is a global need to "grow more, with less". The world needs to increase food production to meet the demands of a growing and increasingly wealthy population but to do so in a more sustainable way. Green & Grow Inc.'s naturally derived Agriplier Technology addresses this need. Agriplier can be efficiently and rapidly integrated into today's modern farming methods and has already been successfully tested in independently run field trials across the USA and internationally.

Green & Grow Inc. develops and commercializes new agricultural products. Our Agriplier Technology is naturally derived and increases crop yields above and beyond the current products in use today. Agriplier has been a top performer in independent field trials for the last two years in a row.

Leadership Insights

• CRO Gary Nijak Jr. has worked on the Agriplier Technology since its discovery and manages lab based R&D and agriculture field trials. COO/CFO Gregg Spivey manages operations, go-to market strategy, industry relationships and finances. CEO Alan Sobba was one of the first investors into GGI and has years of experience in public policy and family farming.
• With degrees in Chemical Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Natural Sciences and Business this diverse team can apply research and technology to agriculture in new, meaningful ways.

Emerging A-List Winner: ENTvantage DX

It is difficult for physicians to accurately diagnose the cause of sinusitis as either bacterial or viral. Since no definitive in-office diagnostic product exists, physicians routinely prescribe antibiotics while most patients aren’t experiencing bacterial infections. These antibiotics can make their condition worse and lead to antibiotic resistant infections. The over prescription of antibiotics has led to a worldwide crisis that is costly and deadly.

ENTvantage Dx provides physicians with timely information on the cause of ENT-related illnesses with rapid, in-office diagnostic tests. This $2.8B worldwide market opportunity and the device ENTvantage Dx is developing will allow doctors to reduce prescriptions and therefore reduce antibiotic resistant infections.

Leadership Insights

• Joe Skraba, President and CEO, has 30 years of experience in commercialization and sales of a broad range of medical devices, in-vitro diagnostic devices and biotech products. He has engineered products, managed development teams on complex medical device projects and led large multinational R&D teams.
• Chairman of the Board Rick Hawkins has been a life-science entrepreneur in Austin for over 30 years and founded multiple companies, including Pharmaco. Don Gonzales joins Hawkins on the Board a successful ENT physician turned entrepreneur who founded ENTrigue Surgical, Inc.