Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The hottest enterprise startups will take investment from In-Q-Tel, regardless of whether or not they need the cash.

Today, a well-funded enterprise company called Apigee revealed it has taken a highly-strategic investment from the firm. But the details of the deal have deliberately been kept under wraps. It’s a similar story to Huddle, the cloud collaboration startup that had just closed a sizable funding round when In-Q-Tel offered to invest. For the founders and board of directors, it was a no brainer to take the additional check.

Why is In-Q-Tel treated with such reverence by business software providers? It is the investment arm of the CIA and specializes in funding technology that is secure enough for government agencies. It was founded during the dotcom boom when the agency was drowning in data that it needed a secure technology to manage.

Huddle’s exec team took “purely strategic” investment from In-Q-Tel.

“In-Q-Tel is a great stamp of approval on any company, and opens up a huge market,” said Alistair Mitchell, Huddle’s CEO, in an interview. As a direct result of the In-Q-Tel investment, Huddle gained two large customers: the Department of Homeland Security and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

It’s an ego boost to get a phone call from In-Q-Tel, but more importantly, it’s a direct path to major government customers. In-Q-Tel has had its hands in virtually every enterprise success story, and has invested in a lot of the technology we use in our daily lives.

“Much of the touch-screen technology used now in iPads and other things came out of various companies that In-Q-Tel identified,” said Jeffrey Smith, the former general counsel of the CIA, in a rare interview with NPR. Google Maps is another example of In-Q-Tel-backed tech.

Don’t miss the shortlist of In-Q-Tel’s portfolio investments in the gallery below.

Government customers are also a strong indicator of a company’s commitment to security. According to Mitchell, Huddle won new clients in the health and financial sectors, who viewed the In-Q-Tel investment as proof the product was sufficiently “vetted and accepted by the best.”

In-Q-Tel has invested in cool tech, like this pen that can expedite data entry.

When pressed, Apigee wouldn’t reveal much about its relationship with In-Q-Tel, or the amount of funding it received. The company’s head of marketing Dave Jordan said little more in an interview than they were “thrilled” about the investment and “looked forward to expanding our relationship with In-Q-Tel and its government partners.”

Jordan and the Apigee team view this investment as a sign that it’s core product, an API management platform, will become more of a priority in Washington D.C. Developers can use the platform to build applications that will prove useful to the various government agencies.

Curious about In-Q-Tel’s current portfolio? Here are some of the firm’s most cutting edge investments.

Top image via Adapx

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

New York-based BizSlate is launching its cloud-based resource planning tool to give small business a hand with their supply chain challenges.

Unlike legacy vendors in that sector, including SAP and Netsuite, the technology is specifically designed for departments stores, retail chains, small boutiques, and the like. Chief executive Marc Kalman says BizSlate is ideal for companies that have “outgrown Quickbooks” but don’t have ample resources at their disposal for IT.

IT behemoths like SAP made enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools popular, but they are an expensive and complicated proposition for non-technical types. These tools bring together and manage information about finances, accounting, manufacturing, sales and service, and marketing. Until recently, only large companies could afford the packages and consulting contracts that take a sizable chunk (we’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars) out of an IT budget.

BizSlate claims it can offer its customers a competitive advantage. At a conference or trade show, for example, a manager can view real-time inventory from a tablet, iPhone, or Android device and place orders into a live system that could potentially pick, pack, and ship on same day — traditionally, this process would take up to a week.

BizSlate has enlisted about 20 companies to take part in its beta test; according to Kalman, these first customers have had an “instrumental role in the design and development” of the product. The BizSlate team has grown to just under 10 employees and has raised a small seed round.

New chief technology officer Michael Park was the former vice president of technology for Fresh Direct, the country’s largest online distributor of fresh produce and groceries. Previously, Kalman was cofounder and chief executive of eZCom Software, a software-as-a-service electronic data interchange (EDI) provider focused on helping small and medium-sized businesses streamline supply chain operations.

BizSlate will set a company back anywhere from $10,000 to $18,000 for implementation and remote training (depending on whether the customer already uses Quickbooks), although it offers discounts for the first six months post-launch.

BizSlate unveiled its beta in April at DEMO Spring in Santa Clara.

Supply chain image via Dusit // Shutterstock 

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This is a guest post by investor Robert Abbott

In a field where handwriting notes on paper charts and managing large rooms filled with filing cabinets have been the accepted practices for decades, healthcare providers are being deluged by a perfect storm.

Not only do they have to grapple with implementing new technology and converting paper files to digital format, they are simultaneously dealing with how to secure this growing cache of electronic data while complying with complex corporate governance policies and federal mandates.

Despite these challenges, healthcare providers are finding a silver lining in secure cloud services that help them address the key technology, regulatory and privacy issues they face.

The market and legislated demands created by 900,000 healthcare providers migrating to electronic records has resulted in a $25 billion healthcare IT market, which is expected to grow more than 24 during 2012-2014, according to global market research company RNCOS.

But because healthcare is about a decade behind other industries in the adoption of IT technologies, this perfect storm is giving healthcare companies a chance to leapfrog into cloud-based solutions designed to solve their unique needs.

Cloud adoption is still in its infancy in healthcare with early adopters representing only about four percent of the market. However, there is great potential for cloud technology. According to a report from research firm Markets and Markets, the cloud computing market in healthcare is estimated to grow at 20.5 percent from 2012 to 2017. [At VentureBeat's CloudBeat conference, which begins tomorrow, healthcare is going to be a major theme; providers will discuss how they're adopting the cloud, and healthcare companies will explain how it's also helping them use novel "big data" strategies.]

Given these growth prospects, there is a sweet spot in this market for cloud service providers that can effectively combine IT expertise and experience dealing with the unique privacy, security and compliance demands of the healthcare market.

Of particular interest are cloud providers that offer automated solutions to replace traditional paper-based processes, enable better connectivity and communications between patients and their providers, and that support the entire healthcare supply chain.

Some of the leading cloud providers in healthcare today include CareCloud, ClearDATA Networks Inc., athenahealth, ADP AdvancedMD, PracticeFusion, RemitDATA, and TeraMedica Inc. For example, Baptist Health South Florida, the largest not-for-profit healthcare organization in the region, recently announced it is subsidizing CareCloud’s integrated electronic health record and practice management solution to more than 2,500 community-based physicians to improve patient care. While ClearDATA, for example, is providing its HealthDATA Cloud Platform to Dignity Health, the fifth largest hospital provider in the nation and the largest hospital system in California.

“By moving various healthcare infrastructure and applications to ClearDATA’s cloud platform, Dignity Health has been able to reduce its IT costs while increasing security and efficiency and greatly decreasing the time it takes to deploy a solution,” said Darin Brannan, ClearDATA’s president and CEO. “We also improve reliability – in terms of uptime and redundancy – and our state-of-the-art cloud systems provide greater performance over legacy hardware and networking architectures, which is typically not well-suited for the hospital’s growing data requirements.”

During CloudBeat 2012, on Nov. 28 at 10:15 a.m., Brannan and Scott Whyte, Dignity Health’s vice president of IT Connectivity, will join VentureBeat Executive Editor Dylan Tweney to talk in more depth about the challenges that healthcare companies face in their transition to electronic medical records and new IT solutions, and what they need to consider when adopting a cloud solution. During the session, they’ll also share more details about how Dignity Health has employed ClearDATA’s innovative solutions to strategically upgrade select components of its IT infrastructure, prepare for personalized care models, comply with mandates and ensure the security and privacy of patients’ electronic records. 

Robert Abbott is a general partner at Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), where he focuses on a wide variety of investment categories including mobile, cloud and IT infrastructure. NVP is an investor in ClearDATA and CareCloud. 

Navigating the storm image // Shutterstock