TEDCO announces $1.1M in recent funding for 16 MD startups

The Maryland Technology Development Corporation (TEDCO), based in Columbia, announced Monday that 16 startups had received a combined total of $1,170,885 in funding, according to a TEDCO press release.
“As the first place entrepreneurs in Maryland often look for support, TEDCO is in a unique position to help companies make their businesses a commercial reality. Each of these companies show great promise and marketability and we look forward to tracking their growth,” said Rob Rosenbaum, president and executive director of TEDCO, in the release.
Funds are distributed through TEDCO’s Maryland Technology Transfer and Commercialization Fund, which carries a number of stipulations for startups seeking money.

[TEDCO] provides funding to companies that want to develop technology-based products or services in collaboration with the universities and/or federal labs in the State. To be eligible for an award, companies must be collaborating with a federal lab or university, be located in an affiliate incubator company in the State, be involved in either the ACTiVATE® or INNoVATE programs, or participate in TEDCO’s Rural Business Initiative (RBI²). In addition, companies must have fewer than 16 employees, be a university spin-off less than five-years-old or have venture investments under $500,000. All companies must have more than 50 percent of their employees present in the State. [more]

Among the 16 companies receiving funding are Foodem, ViiNetwork and Woofound. The full list, along with descriptions of each company, is below, and comes directly from the TEDCO press release.

• Assay Biomarker, Inc., located in Baltimore, is a biotech company developing disease-specific biomarker antibodies and related products.

• Circulomics, Inc., located in Baltimore, is a biotech startup developing innovative assay platforms for multiplexed biomarker and molecular analysis.

• Curiosityville LLC, located in Cockeysville, Md., is an online-offline learning world for three-to-eight year-old children and their families that uses innovative technology to help parents become great teachers and children to meet their full potential in school.

• Emerald Sky Technologies LLC, located in Columbia, Md., develops and commercializes avionics technologies to enhance safety of flight in both general aviation and other segments of navigation.

• Foodem.com, located in Baltimore, is an online marketplace that connects food distributors, farms and specialty food manufacturers with wholesale food buyers, such as restaurants, schools and hospitals.

• GlycoPure, Inc., located in Cambridge, Md., successfully negotiated an exclusive license to fully commercialize a patent-pending technology that centers on a genetically-modified bacterium found in waste material from processing shellfish.

• KYDES Phamaceuticals LLC, located in Baltimore, develops and commercializes target therapeutic drugs designed to optimize therapy by increasing efficacy with minimal side effects.

• Nexercise, Inc., located in Silver Spring, Md., is a free mobile application that encourages people to exercise more by making the experience fun, social and rewarding.

• OTraces, Inc., located in Rockville, Md., has developed a breakthrough blood test-based breast cancer screening and detection product, which can be tailored to detect many other cancers including prostate, lung and ovarian.

• rel-MD, Inc., located in Baltimore, develops small molecule drugs to inhibit the rel proteins, which offers new opportunities as novel treatment for cancer, inflammation and other diseases where over-activation of NF-kB pathways has been implicated.

• Smart Imaging Systems, Inc., located in Beltsville, Md., has built a model of the world’s smallest autonomous mobile x-ray scanner to be used for scanning suspicious bags and objects to check for explosives and objects of threat.

• Subject7 LLC, located in Potomac, Md., is the creator of Proof, a SaaS cloud-based scalable automated web testing framework that provides an end-to-end solution to web testing automation without requiring any coding by testers.

• Tocreo Labs LLC, located in Annapolis, has developed a unique technology that can be used to store and protect user data and applications in value cards, mobile phones and reusable transit cards.

• Unbound Concepts LLC, located in Columbia, Md., is building a proprietary natural language processing algorithm that can understand authored content in a deep ontological fashion, bringing value to publishers, educators and scientists.

• ViiNetwork, Inc., located in Columbia, Md., developed and brought to market VidStructor.com, which enables sports, fitness and wellness training businesses and organizations to make a profit through its innovative approach to two-way video training.

• Woofound, Inc., located in Middle River, Md., creates web and mobile products that help users discover music, movies, books and things to do by targeting suggestions that best suit individual personalities and preferences.