Stanford hospital and university recently awarded a $3.6M grant ($1.2M annually for 3 years) to StartX to support new companies through a new Stanford-StartX Fund. The first two companies funded are Knotch and Cytobank.
Knotch connects people with similar interests, ?Knotches?, and allows them to rate their sentiments on a colored 11-point scale. For example, Knotch?s blog shows how people, using their iPhone app, view the golden iPhone 5s. Men tend to be polarized, either really liking it or really disliking it. Women tend to spread their opinions between liking it, being neutral and disliking it.
StartX has created a StartX Med program for biotech and medical entrepreneurs. Mountain View?s Cytobank provides a system for storing flow cytometry data, which biologists and medical professionals use to analyze cells. It can help doctors understand what stimulates leukemia and lymphoma cells. It enables researchers to analyze masses of data with graphics and statistics.
OpsViz, located at StartX, gives data center managers mobile access to information on phones, tablets and Google Glass. In the data center, a technician can know what?s wrong with a specific server and review its maintenance history online without having to read masses of documentation or search for old reports.
DataFox takes information from a host of public and private data sources to provide an overview of recent company information. I created a list of Mountain View companies on their site. Interestingly, I recently took the free online Stanford Startup Engineering Coursera course where we had to create a funding site for an app idea. My proposed app was similar to DataFox, although not as extensive, and I created a demo page for Google.
MedWhat provides an easy way for consumers to see answers to medical questions. It uses Wikipedia and information from the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, among other sources to answer questions. Currently it?s quite primitive and some of the answers are off the mark. You can rate answers with a thumbs up or thumbs down. Hopefully, it will become more accurate over time. MedWhat also shows the source of answers at the bottom of the page.
StartX has groomed 136 startups to date. There are 27 companies currently in the program. Companies that have finished the program have raised over $200M in financing. Ten companies have been acquired, 7 in 2013, for an estimated $130M to $150M in total.
Stanford students, graduates and professors can apply to one of StartX?s triannual programs online. There is an 8-10% acceptance rate and participation is free.
