Christie Ison of ARFoodJobs.com describes her subscription model at the Venture Center's Pitch Day festivities for the second run of its Pre-Flight program.
The Venture Center’s latest Pre-Flight class includes three startups that identified specific problems in their respective markets and proposed solutions.
The three founders who completed the VC’s second installment of the program pitched their products and services on Tuesday morning as part of Pitch Day festivities from the VC’s space in downtown Little Rock.
Pre-Flight is a 14-week, pre-accelerator program started by the Nashville Entrepreneur Center in 2011 and licensed in central Arkansas by the Venture Center, the first expansion of the program outside Nashville. The program is designed to fast-track ideas and place them on a potential path to market.
In December, the first Pre-Flight run in Little Rock included six startup ventures that met all the requirements of the course and made presentations on Pitch Day.
Pitching on Tuesday were:
- Christie Ison of ARFoodJobs.com, a subscription platform that combines a hyper-local jobs board with a database for high-quality resumes, staffing support and training programs
- Tina McCord of Zuni Learning Tree, a cloud-based platform that curates educational resources for teachers
- Hendrix College student Levi Jabben’s Kari-Cam, which uses a software called computer vision to enable a webcam to focus in on a specific person or object, specifically for athletes
A panel of Venture Center mentors critiqued each pitch: VC chairman and Arkansas tech pioneer James Hendren, VC board member Rod Ford of XCelerate Capital, and Carole Smith, senior vice president with Simmons First National Bank.
In addition to the Pre-Flight graduate pitches, Venture Center-supported startups provided updates on their progress: Pre-Flight alum Merger Match from Bridget Farris and Alese Stroud, a propietary tool to help companies assess the best potential acquisitions; Jeston George’s Apptegy, a platform that simplifies the method by which school districts can share information online and through social media; and Broadband Development Group from serial founder and VC master mentor and entrepreneur-in-residence Lou McAlister, which is building a system to provide multi-family property owners with faster and cheaper Internet service through its HyperLeap product.
“These are real ideas from real ventures that are providing real impact,” Hendren said. “Companies coming out of the Venture Center have created 17 jobs in less than a year. That’s a huge impact for this ecosystem.”
The Venture Center officially launched on May 20 of last year with the announcement of a $500,000 state matching grant. In December, it moved from space provided by the Little Rock Regional Chamber of Commerce to space shared with the Little Rock Tech Park at 107 East Markham in downtown Little Rock.
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