OCTANe’s Signature Event to feature industry leaders, investors, and innovative companies

ALISO VIEJO, Calif., May 8, 2018 – OCTANe, Orange County’s technology and life sciences accelerator organization, today announced the continued growth of its signature event, Technology Innovation Forum (TIF). This year’s conference, themed Building the SoCal of Tomorrow, is set to take place at the Newport Beach Hotel & Spa from May 31- June 1, 2018.

This conference sets the stage for technological innovation in Southern California and will include executives and experts from among the leading technology companies in the area, such as Microsemi, Masimo, mophie, Experian and Cylance.

“The Orange County ecosystem continues to thrive amid strong growth and performance as a new wave of entrepreneurs take advantage of the unique local resources available to the community,” said Bill Carpou, chief executive of OCTANe. “In fact, LaunchPad continues to perform as one of the nation’s premier accelerators, providing investors with high-quality deal flow and analytics to quickly assess viability.”

OCTANe’s LaunchPad SBDC works with startup technology and life science companies in Southern California. By using a unique predictive analytics process to position the companies and their underlying business models, LaunchPad helps these companies make effective presentations to investors. Since 2011, the LaunchPad SBDC panel process has reviewed over 571 companies, 88 percent are operational and 86 percent have received funding. Since inception, the LaunchPad SBDC companies have successfully raised over $1.7 billion in investment capital, which has gone on to produce over 8,200 jobs. Over the first four months of 2018, 9 LaunchPad SBDC companies have raised $92.2 million – a record versus the previous best of $72.1 million.

“I am proud to lead this important part of OCTANe and our partnership with the Small Business Administration (SBA) and the Small Business Development Centers (SBDC),” added JC Ruffalo, Director of OCTANe’s LaunchPad SBDC accelerator program. “Each year, the quality of companies increases and the diverse types of companies we had in our selection process made this year even more difficult to narrow it down to the presenting eight at TIF.

The eight LaunchPad companies presenting at TIF 2018 include:

• ADWAYprovides a digital on-car advertisement platform using projection devices to display ads on vehicles.
• GigaIOdevelops innovative high performance interconnect memory fabric solutions for computing clusters, with the objective of accelerating large scale workloads on-demand, utilizing industry standard technology.
• Moving Analyticspresents Movn, a digital cardiac rehab and prevention program that is equivalent to center-based care, with 3 times higher adoption at one-fifth of the cost.
• Sapereis a hardware and software data platform utilizing wireless, cloud connected sensors to test and monitor target chemistry and qualities of wine.
• Sitch AIbrings together geolocation and indoor geospatial awareness to monitor, locate, track and manage assets, security risks and awareness, and behavioral analytics.
• Skylift Globalis improving the way firefighters combat wildfires by changing the way they get their supplies to the fire line by using drone technology.
• TallyGoprovides a state-of-the-art, real-time navigation SDK that can be integrated into existing applications – for iOs, Android and web – with virtually no development effort.
• Water Pigeonenables water utilities and companies to collect and analyze timely and accurate usage data by deploying Automated Metering Infrastructure (AMI) capability without replacing water meters or building wireless networks.

Also presenting is NGD Systems– a success case from LaunchPad. NGD Systems incorporates revolutionary “at storage” hardware acceleration by putting computational capability into storage and eliminating the need to move data to main memory prior to processing. This evolutionary step forward enables new paradigms in Big Data Analytics processing.

Upcoming OCTANe events include OCTANe’s Ophthalmology Technology Summit(OTS) which will take place June 29-30 at the Fashion Island Hotel. The Medical Technology Innovation Forum(MTIF) will follow from October 29-30, 2018 at the Newport Beach Marriott.

About OCTANe:

OCTANe is building the SoCal of Tomorrow by connecting people, resources and capital to fuel technology growth in Southern California. Its members represent technology executive leaders, entrepreneurs, investors, venture capitalists, academicians, and strategic advisors, all working together to fuel innovation in the OC. The organization has helped more than 800 companies via the LaunchPad SBDC accelerator. LaunchPad companies have received more than $2.1 billion in investment and equity exits. OCTANe annually welcomes more than 7,000 people to its programs and events. More than 2,000 business leaders throughout the region are OCTANe members. For more information, visit www.octaneoc.org.