Startup Spotlight

Startup Spotlight

Better Walk Wins MIT Enterprise Forum’s Audience Choice Award

Better Walk CEO Partha Unnava shown here with Kent Antley of Miller and Martin PLLC.  Kent served as moderator for Run It By The Pros during which Better Walk won the Audience Choice Award.

Better Walk - Our Story

After Partha Unnava broke his ankle playing basketball and spent six weeks on crutches, he immediately experienced the problem with crutches, the underarm pain. Along with fellow Georgia Tech biomedical engineers Andrew Varghese and Frankie Swindell, he founded Better Walk to create a crutch that allowed users to rest in a manner that didn't put pressure in the armpits.

The company was built on the principle that even age old technologies require innovation, and that mindset has proven to be one of the main pillars of our culture as we've grown. Better Walk was accepted into the second class of the Zero To 510 accelerator in Memphis, TN where it raised its early venture funding.

In late 2014, the company moved its headquarters to Atlanta, GA, and focused on developing the Better Walk crutch and is currently preparing for production and a product launch that will begin in early 2015.

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Partha Unnava, CEO

Run It By The Pros Winner Featured in Newsweek

Congratulations to Darnisha HarrisonPresident and CEOof Ennaid Therapeutics, who was recently featured in Newsweek Magazine's Disruptive Women issue and named one of 13 Women in Business to Bet On. Ennaid Therapeutics is a Run It By the Pros Audience Choice Award Winner and owns exclusive, worldwide rights to develop and commercialize what Harrison is confident will be the first cure for dengue fever. Ennaid Therapeutics licenses a flavivirus inhibitor technology that Harrison says has been shown to inhibit more than 99 percent of mosquito-borne viruses, including West Nile and dengue. Harrison has raised seed capital, and her five-person team is now raising $20 million more to complete testing and bring the potential cure to market.

Run It By the Pros is held twice yearly by MIT Enterprise Forum of Atlanta and features four startups who pitch their business plan to a panel of experts. Each company is then given actionable feedback and advice from the panel and the audience. At the end of the evening, an Audience Choice Award winner is chosen.

 If you have a startup, please consider applying to become a presenter at our next Run It By the Pros event. (The next one will likely be held in the Fall 2014). Whether you end up recognized in an international magazine or not, it could very well be your springboard to success!

Predikto

Predikto solutions harness the power of M2M and Predictive Analytics to address operational challenges in asset intensive industries like Manufacturing & Transportation. They use any data, including machine sensor and asset maintenance history, and turn it into actionable insights to reduce asset failures, predict production yields, and improve operational performance. Utilizing a SaaS solution business model, extremely short implementation time, and insanely accurate prediction models, Predikto customers are able to achieve an ROI previously unheard of. They own 100% of the patent pending predictive analytics solution with monthly recurring revenue from global customers in Steel Manufacturing, Mining, and Railroad industries.  Visit them at www.predikto.com.

Safely Stay

CEO Andrew Bate admits SafelyStay has been on a roller coaster ride since presenting at "Run It By the Pros" in June 2013. During the event, they were asked why they hadn't yet processed any reservations. A few days later, the reservations began, and are continuing to increase weekly.  In November 2013, SafelyStay announced they were powering Travelport's entry into the vacation rental space, allowing 68,000 travel agencies to provide commissionable vacation rentals with the same safety and assurances of a branded hotel.  Also since that time they have built an inventory of 67,000 vacation homes for their distribution partners. Most notably, SafelyStay won the General Catalyst Innovation Award and were runner-up for the Best Startup Travel Innovation of the Year at the 2013 PhoCusWright Conference, which included $250,000 and backing by General Catalyst. Congratulations SafelyStay!  To learn more or book your next vacation please visit: http://www.safelystay.com/