eLab Partners Named to 2018 Detroit Business 500 Most Powerful People in Detroit
Paul Brown and Doug Neal were named to Detroit Business 2018 Most Powerful 500 Business Leaders in Metro Detroit: Read more here Â
Cobalt.io Raises $5M in Series A Funding to Fuel Growth of the Cybersecurity Industry’s First Pen Testing as a Service (PTaaS) Platform
SAN FRANCISCO (PRWEB) MAY 02, 2018 Cobalt.io, a Pen Testing as a Service platform (​PTaaS)​ transforming the traditional pen testing model for SaaS businesses, announced today that it has received $5 million in funding to ​continue its global expansion and for further investment in its ​industry-leading​ PTaaS platform. A major new investor in the round [...]
Rachio 3 Smart Sprinkler hands-on: Intelligent watering controlled by your phone
We love our green grass here in Washington and some HOAs require a minimal level of water to maintain curb appeal and keep lawns from igniting easily. I've been watering my yard for the last couple of months while at home, at the office, on business travel, and while on vacation with the Rachio 3 [...]
Aperia Offers Chrome Wheel Cover Option
Aperia Technologies Inc., a supplier of tire-inflation technologies for commercial vehicle tractors and trailers, announced the release of a new chrome cover for the Halo Tire Inflator. While the chrome adds personality and practicality to accessorize the Halo Tire Inflator, it also plays a role in improving business for fleets, from driver retention to company [...]
MVCA 2018 Up-and-Coming Company Nominees
What excites me most about the startup ecosystem in Michigan right now is the momentum that we are building.  Not only does 2018 represent a significant milestone with Duo Security's $2.35B exit, but we are also seeing an increasing number of exciting new companies that are being built in Michigan focused on disrupting very large and [...]
George Dunbar Joins Akadeum Life Sciences’ Board of Directors
ANN ARBOR, MICH. (PRWEB) SEPTEMBER 06, 2018 Akadeum Life Sciences today announced it has appointed George Dunbar to its Board of Directors. Dunbar has spent his career as an executive and leader of numerous biotech companies. He most recently served as president and CEO of ISTO Biologics, a private cell therapy and biologics company acquired [...]
Blue Medora Secures $10 Million in Growth Investment
Blue Medora announced a $10 million investment from growth equity investor Edison Partners. Proceeds will be used to accelerate development and enterprise market adoption of the company’s innovations including the recently introduced BindPlane service. “There has been awe-striking advancement in monitoring in the past two years thanks to AI, but the industry is still relying [...]
Clinc featured in: Universities and legacy industries are giving rise to the Midwest’s AI startups
Ann Arbor Ann Arbor’s University of Michigan has played an instrumental role in the growth of several AI startups in the state. Trove, which developed a platform that scans users’ emails to provide them with insights about their professional network, has worked with a pair of research teams at the University of Michigan, the company [...]
Clinc is building a voice AI system to replace humans in drive-through restaurants
Clinc is expanding its focus on fintech into new verticals that could take advantage of its conversational artificial intelligence. The Ann Arbor-based company recently took the wraps off its new system that aims to provide quick-service restaurants like McDonald’s and Taco Bell with a voice assistant in the drive-through window. I got a demo of [...]
Akadeum Announces First-of-Their-Kind Microbubble Products Commercially Available
ANN ARBOR, MICH. (PRWEB) AUGUST 28, 2018 Akadeum Life Sciences, Inc. has announced early access to its microbubble-based T cell and B cell isolation kits. A radical simplification over existing technologies, the use of microbubbles enables users to perform the entire cell separation process within a single tube and without a magnet. The company has [...]
Sight Machine’s self-serve offerings to provide new visibility
Sight Machine announced its next generation of self-serve capabilities, enabling customers, integrators and partners to take production data from factory floors and generate browser-based visibility into enterprise operations within minutes. Manufacturing plants vary widely in their digital readiness and project objectives, according to the company. While some are already systematically collecting data and want to [...]
Renowned DevSecOps Pioneers to Unite at DevSecCon Singapore 2018 to Share Latest Insights on Continuously Secure Development
Over twenty pioneers from the field of DevSecOps will come together at the upcoming DevSecCon Singapore 2018 on 22-23 February. Since their inception in 2015, DevSecCon has been hosting conferences and training around the globe with the intention of showcasing the latest developments in the emerging field of DevSecOps. SINGAPORE – Media OutReach – February [...]
Banks Using Clinc Can Chat With Customers Through Mobiles, Alexa or Google Home
“We contacted Clinc in May or June and we decided to make a pilot because their product was 100 percent what Isbank was looking for,” said Burak Arik, CEO of MaxiTech, a bank subsidiary charged with finding and evaluating high tech solutions the bank could use. He is based in San Francisco because the bank [...]
Strata Oncology Adds Five Healthcare systems to Strata Precision Oncology Network
Ann Arbor, MI, December 13, 2017 – Strata Oncology, a precision oncology company, today announced five leading healthcare systems have joined the Strata Precision Oncology NetworkTM (Network). Launched in February of 2017, and led by Strata Oncology, the Network is advancing precision oncology by providing advanced cancer patients routine tumor profiling and matching to a [...]
Clinc CEO, Prof. Jason Mars is Bringing Smart Banking to Market
As they become more capable, intelligent personal digital assistants are transforming the ways in which we interact with technology. This is true in the financial industry, where many firms are now moving toward artificial intelligence-driven smart banking, a more advanced approach to customer service, to gain valuable information about their clients and to improve customer [...]
New Vital Signs Co-Founder Receives U of M Innovation & Commercialization Award!
Dr. Kevin Ward is receiving the Innovation and Commercialization Award. This is a well-deserved honor acknowledging Dr. Ward’s outstanding contributions to Michigan Medicine as Executive Director of Fast Forward Medical Innovation (FFMI) and his leadership in developing new technologies to improve emergency medicine and critical care as founding Director of the Michigan Center for Integrative [...]
Cobalt VP Caroline Wong To Women Considering Cybersecurity: ‘Do It’
Cybersecurity is crucial for businesses to protect themselves from attackers, and Cobalt is one of the firms that provides help. Cobalt connects SaaS (software as a service) companies with hackers who can help find problems before attackers do. Caroline Wong is VP of Security Strategy at Cobalt and has more than a decade of experience [...]
Tech firm Blue Medora raises $8 million in venture capital
GRAND RAPIDS — Enterprise software developer Blue Medora LLC has raised another $8 million in capital that will support continued growth. Chicago-based venture capital firm First Analysis led the Series B round, which included prior Blue Medora investors Wakestream Venture LLC in Grand Rapids, St. Louis, Mo.-based Lewis and Clark Ventures and eLab Ventures. With the [...]
Clinc Partners with Enacomm to Connect Financial Institutions with its AI Conversational Banking Platform
LAS VEGAS, NV--(Marketwired - Oct 23, 2017) - A simpler, natural way to deal with finances will soon be available more broadly to consumers. At Money20/20, Enacomm, Inc., a leading provider of intelligent interactions and customer authentication technologies for banks, credit unions and credit card companies, today announced that it will bring "Finie", the world's [...]
Ryder System inks partnership with Aperia to modernize its heavy-duty trucks
Amid a push to innovate its fleet management and supply chain services, Ryder System Inc. has launched a partnership with Aperia Technologies, a company that specializes in improving fuel economy through automatic tire pressure adjustment products. The partnership paves the way for all Ryder (NYSE: R) heavy-duty trucks to install and use Halo Tire Inflator, [...]
Jason Mars of Clinc in Top 10 Most Innovative CEOs in Banking 2017
Fintechs are partnering with banks, banks are using blockchain technology, artificial intelligence, and cryptocurrency and financial regulation is still undergoing massive changes... #2 Jason Mars, Clinc At this point, providing an AI-powered banking assistant probably won’t make someone stand out in the industry: but providing a banking assistant powered by artificial intelligence that consumers can [...]
Blue Medora at Tech of VMworld 2017: Monitoring
VMworld 2017 was a reinvigorated ecosystem, as I wrote about previously, and there was plenty of interesting tech about datacenter infrastructure was what you wanted to know about. One of the main categories I spent time to look at was monitoring and telemetry systems. These are software tools used for managing infrastructure in the VMware [...]
Akadeum gets $1.5 million from Silicon Valley investors
Silicon Valley investors have led a funding round of almost $1.5 million in Ann Arbor-based Akadeum Life Sciences Inc., a spinoff from the University of Michigan, to develop its technology for tissue, water and food testing. The lead investor, BioInfleXion Point Partners, specializes in early-stage life-science investments. The round was joined by other Silicon Valley [...]
Rachio Keeps Your Sprinklers From Flooding The Lawn
OUR SPRINKLERS TURN on at six in the morning. We're usually still in bed at that time, so if it's raining when they sputter into action, somebody's getting up and getting wet to turn them off. Either that, or our yard ends up turning into a swamp. The Rachio Smart Sprinkler Controller ($250) helps makes [...]
Sight Machine Introduces Digital Readiness Index for Manufacturing
Sight Machine Inc., the category leader for manufacturing analytics, today introduced the Digital Readiness Index (DRI), a methodology to evaluate a manufacturer’s readiness for digital transformation and identify the projects likely to deliver the most impactful returns. Sight Machine developed DRI based on insights from digital manufacturing projects with some of the world’s largest manufacturers. [...]
Strata – Promising New Cancer Drugs Won’t Go Far Unless Everyone Gets Genetic Testing
Dan Rhodes, CEO at Strata Oncology, a tumor sequencing company, says genetic sequencing is “absolutely the bottleneck” in finding patients who will benefit from targeted cancer drugs. His company is giving away free testing to cancer patients to help match them to experimental treatments being studied in clinical trials (see “Should We Sequence the DNA [...]
Akadeum Life Sciences, Inc. Recognized for Best New Technology at CYTO Innovation
ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN (PRWEB) AUGUST 08, 2017 Each year, the top minds in cytometry—which refers to the methodology used to extract quantitative information from individual cells—join together at ISAC’s CYTO Innovation to present the industry’s new technologies in the technology showcase. This year, Ann Arbor-based Akadeum Life Science, Inc.’s microbubble technology rose to the top [...]
Cobalt – Crowdsourcing application security closes the automated assessment gap
You could say Kris Lahiri, VP operations and chief security officer at enterprise file sharing platform provider Egnyte, was a bit of a skeptic when he first considered adding crowd-sourced penetration testing to the firm’s application security regimen. Indeed, the idea of giving permission for a bunch of unknown eyes to scour over their systems [...]
How Clinc Developed The Most Advanced A.I. For The Banking Industry
Imagine opening your bank app and asking questions about your checking account or making requests in a totally natural, conversational way. “When was the last time I was paid and can you transfer five-hundred bucks into savings?” That is an idea that Ann Arbor-based A.I. startup Clinc has implemented with its first product launch, Finie, a [...]
Jacqueline Esch of Blue Medora Recognized as One of CRN’s 2017 Women of the Channel
GRAND RAPIDS, MI–(Marketwired – May 17, 2017) – Blue Medora, an IT enterprise cloud and datacenter management company, announced today that CRN®, a brand of The Channel Company, has named Jacqueline Esch, Blue Medora regional sales director, to its prestigious 2017 Women of the Channel list. The executives who comprise this annual list span the [...]
Automatic – SiriusXM acquires connected car company Automatic for over $100M
SiriusXM has acquired Automatic, the maker of the Automatic Pro and Automatic Lite connected car OBD-II port accessories. The deal is acknowledged by SiriusXM CFO David Frear to be worth a little north of $100 million, and SiriusXM and Automatic both note in releases announcing the news that the brand will remain separate, and Automatic’s [...]
Aperia Partners with Brown Integrated Logistics to maximize tire life, improve fuel economy
Burlingame, CA - Aperia Technologies Inc. maker of the only tire inflation device for tractors and trailers, today announced that Brown Integrated Logistics has made its Halo Tire Inflator a standard specification on all new and existing power units. “Proper tire inflation is extremely important when running wide-base single tires,” said Brian Kinsey, president and [...]
Akadeum CEO on Sirius XM with Steve Blank
Featured in The Huffington Post on 03/01/2016: Read full article Akadeum Life Sciences’ CEO (Brandon McNaughton) recently sat down for a discussion on Sirius XM with Steve Blank. Steve interviewed Brandon as part of Entrepreneurs are Everywhere. They discussed topics ranging from cell separation with microbubbles to figuring out how to move an idea from an idea to sales. See below [...]
Navya driverless shuttles to begin ferrying University of Michigan students this fall
Navya will deploy two of its driverless multi-passenger shuttles this fall at the University of Michigan, moving students autonomously between Michigan’s North Campus Research Complex and its Lurie Engineering Center across a two-mile route. The 15-passenger vehicles are being deployed in conjunction with Mcity, the University of Michigan-led partnership with autonomous private industry players that’s [...]
StrataOncology – In landmark move, FDA approves cancer drug for a biomarker not a tissue
Colon, pancreatic, stomach, or ovarian cancer; it increasingly shouldn’t matter. In an era of precision medicine, the treatment approach should reflect the genetic makeup of the person’s tumor and the presence or absence of key biomarkers. That ethos was set in stone on Tuesday, with the landmark FDA approval of Merck’s checkpoint inhibitor, Keytruda (pembrolizumab), [...]
SightMachine – Transforming the plant floor with digital data
"Old digital Neanderthals like me talk about digital transformation on the manufacturing floor, but young digital natives talk about digital transformation of the plant floor," said Dennis Hodges, CIO of Inteva Products, a large, global automotive supplier, mostly serving vehicle manufacturers. "To us, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is connected stuff—machines talking to machines, [...]
Rachio – The Best Smart Sprinkler Controller
After spending two months with six smart irrigation controllers in a sunny South Carolina yard, we’re confident the Rachio Smart Sprinkler Controller (Generation 2) is the best choice for most people with an in-ground sprinkler system. Any smart controller will save you water and money compared with a simple timer, but the Rachio is the [...]
New Vital Signs Co-Founder’s Fast Forwarding Medical Innovation Blog
Fracking for Innovation While a politically sensitive topic, few can argue that hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” has moved the United States significantly toward energy independence. Many of us can remember sitting in long lines at the gas pump in the 1970s during the energy crisis and claims that the world’s oil and gas supply would [...]
MobileForce – Introducing A Single Pane of Glass for Service Productivity
MobileForce Software is headed to ServiceNow's Knowledge 2017on May 8-11 in Orlando, Florida! At K17, we are excited to introduce our new ServiceVelocity Field Service Mobility Solution for ServiceNow’s vast customer base of IT and field service delivery organizations. ServiceVelocity delivers a “Single Pane of Glass” productivity dashboard for field service users that automatically integrates [...]
Clinc – An AI Startup That Lets You Converse With Your Bank Account
Clinc, a fledgling fintech startup that enables banks to bring artificial intelligence (AI) to their products, has raised a $6.3 million funding round led by Drive Capital, with participation from Hyde Park Venture Partners, Cahoots Holding, and Stuart Porter. Founded out of Ann Arbor, Michigan in 2015, Clinc is the brainchild of Jason Mars (CEO) [...]
Aperia and Michelin to offer revolutionary truck tire inflation system
Road gators could soon be on the endangered list. And that’s a good thing. They’re not animals, of course. They’re those bits of truck tires strewn across America’s highways. They're often the tragic result of tires that weren’t operating at optimal air pressure, which is hard to maintain on a tractor trailer carrying various loads [...]
Akadeum CTO Featured in Science Magazine
“Clinician-scientist John Younger went one step further than a leave of absence. After partially sidelining his 21-year career in emergency medicine at the University of Michigan (UM), Ann Arbor, in 2014 to develop a micro-bubble cell-capturing technology, he ended up leaving academia completely. ” … “The initial idea was to use tiny spheres tagged with [...]
Crowdsourced Application Security: The Human Power
Caroline Wong, CISSP and VP of Security Strategy at Cobalt, which “makes bug bounty programs and pen tests painless,” headed this engaging and fast-paced session at OWASP AppSec on crowdsourced security. It was her interest in diversity that led her to crowdsourced security, and in this session she went through the risks and benefits of [...]
Rachio leads smart home industry as first to earn B Corp certification.
This Earth Day, Rachio is proud to strengthen our commitment to the environment by announcing our new B Corp certification. We are thrilled to break ground as the first smart home company to earn this distinction, leading the way for others in the smart watering and smart home technology industries. To celebrate, we’re offering $30 [...]
How can tech startups succeed in Michigan? Look to Blue Medora
How can tech startups grow in Michigan? Look to Grand Rapids-based Blue Medora LLC. Its founders and investors say it is a textbook example of how Michigan's high-tech startup ecosystem can work. Blue Medora makes software that monitors the performance of large IT companies' cloud-based applications. Customers include IBM, Oracle and VMware. Blue Medora made [...]
For the U.S. to stay on top, we can’t just keep funding innovation in Silicon Valley and New York
The digital boom has helped the United States maintain its status — for now — as the world’s political and economic leader. But it has also increasingly created a divide within the U.S. — one of the themes that led to Donald Trump’s election as president. “This issue of people feeling left behind — it’s [...]
Message to self-driving auto makers: You can’t do it alone, says VC
Some self-driving car makers are incorporating more and more extras like face-recognition and augmented reality displays. Bob Stefanski, managing director of eLab Ventures, said that this may be a winning approach for manufactures looking for an edge in the market. But, Stefanski told John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, that one lone company [...]
Another approach to autonomous vehicles – slow and steady
MOUNTAIN VIEW — The Audi SUV crept through city streets, obeying speed limits, stopping short at signals and keeping neatly between lane markers during morning rush hour. The driver’s hands hovered above the steering wheel. The real driver was a system of sensors, processors and software made by auto supplier Delphi and tech company Mobileye. [...]
Driverless shuttle introduced at Mcity
This is the first of NAVYA's ARMA vehicles to operate in North America. The shuttles are already on the road in countries all over the world. They're designed for use at a broad range of sites that need efficient, convenient and safe first and last mile transportation—places such as theme parks and large campus-like environments. [...]
Snyder signs laws aimed at self-driving car leadership
Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder picked the Automotive Hall of Fame in Dearborn as the backdrop to sign a group of bills today designed to position Michigan as a future leader in development and testing of self-driving cars. The location was picked to reinforce the state's historic role in the emergence of the global automotive industry as [...]