VentureOhio recently released its list of the Top 50 Startups to Watch for 2019. Three of the startups listed are Innovation Fund companies. The Innovation Fund companies mentioned are Folio Photonics, Heureka Software, and Wisr. Folio Photonics is the developer of an optical data storage solution designed to store large amounts of data. Heureka Software provides technology-based services for litigation and compliance. Wisr connects college campuses through digital communities for networking and mentorship. All 50 companies on the list were selected via a competitive nomination process and selected by a panel of judges consisting of more than 25 venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and technologists.

Hyr Medical was founded in 2017 with a vision to fundamentally transform and modernize the healthcare staffing industry and enable an elastic, responsive and on demand workforce.

There is a massive and growing Practitioner shortage in the healthcare industry. Freelance Practitioners are used to relieve this shortage, but the current staffing supply chain is slow, expensive and stuck in the 1980’s. Medical Practices pay high agency markups and sacrifice an estimated $7500 per day due to onboarding delays. Furthermore, over 50% of Physicians report burnout and patients ultimately suffer.

Hyr Medical’s online marketplace eliminates the agency middle man. We enable direct connections between Practitioners and Medical Practices, automate portions of the credentialing process, and provide upfront transparency into rates and practice locations. This results in improved patient throughput and lower costs for Medical Practices, happier Physicians and healthier patients.

Farm Fare is a supply chain technology company revolutionizing the way we grow and distribute food. Their B to B software and data analytics platform allows regional food hubs to work together to lower costs and increase sales, all driven by real-time market data.

This approach is a new model for regional food supply chains in which family farms and food hubs can capture market share from large-scale farms by working together as a network of collaborators rather than competitors. Together, we can transition our food supply chain from the vertically integrated hub-and-spoke model designed by and for large agribusiness to a more efficient regional system that works for farmers, communities and planet. While the software gives food hubs robust tools to manage their business operations and sales, Farm Fare employs a shared, region-wide sales and distribution strategy that for the first time can meet the needs of institutional-scale buyers. Over time, this transactional platform generates powerful production planning data — information that has allowed the industrial food system to grow for decades but is currently unavailable within our highly fractured regional food systems. When regional foodsheds strategically collaborate to gain efficiencies, we call this “economies of collaboration,” and it can compete with economies of scale.

Farm Fare understands that as a climate threat looms and family farms face increasing pressures to exit the market, technology is the key to a new and lasting future for agriculture: A future driven by data that helps family farms increase efficiency on their own land that they manage responsibility, while helping consumers of all sizes access fresh, traceable products via local supply chains affordability and consistently.

TurningMode is developing Sentinel, a new illumination system that eliminates shadows in the operating room. Sentinel proactively delivers optimal illumination despite light obstructions and inferences. Turningmode has succesfully developed a pre-production prototype, integrating proprietary algorithms and other intellectual property. 

LIFTR was founded by Ted Troxell and Adam Miclot. Since October 2018, they have created two flagship products supported by it's Al engine The first is Liftr, a predictive Al technology that measures images and text to provide engagement statistics like Likes and Comments (for social media) and Open-rate and click-through-rate (for e-mail.) The second is Crowdspect which allows market researchers to rapidly summarize unstructured text data that can come from a variety of different sources like surveys, focus group transcripts, customer service call transcripts, social, and customer reviews. For both products, the underlying Al technology is able to classify data based on several different factors such as age, gender, emotions, topics of conversation, and interests. The Al engine is also able to group statements together by building out a "conversational tree" which is a visual representation of conversation allowing users to quickly understand their customers like never before.

Website: http://www.linearlabs.com/

Cyanicsoft is developing a cloud-based data security and user awareness solution that helps organizations establish a comprehensive data loss prevention (DLP) ecosystem through automated risk assessments, data classification, sensitive data discovery, and creative security awareness campaigns, all through one simple platform. By combining patent pending, future proof technology with proprietary data security framework, the company aims to bring once-unattainable cloud data security directly to SMBs.

Website: https://cyanicsoft.com/

Innovation Fund Northeast Ohio, the region’s most active pre-seed fund for technology-based startups, has awarded a combined $375,000 to six young companies.

Six Northeast Ohio companies will leverage up to $100,0000 awards to reach growth milestones

Banyan Technology, the pioneer and industry leader of live carrier connectivity, was selected as one of the 100 fastest growing companies in Northeast Ohio and was honored at the 30th annual Weatherhead 100 awards ceremony.