Monday, April 28, 2008
Snikiddy Snacks
Mary Schulman left the world of investment banking three years ago to found Snikiddy Snacks with her mother, Janet Owings. The Bethesda company makes snacks for children using organic and natural ingredients such as unrefined sugar, oats and whole wheat flour. Its six product lines, including Chocolate Chippers and Pizza Pie Puffs, are carried in grocers including Whole Foods, Wegmans and Giant.
Inspiration came during Schulman's first pregnancy, when she noticed that there were few organic snacks for children. Having grown up eating food that was organic and locally grown, she and her siblings developed a reputation in school for being "persnickety" or, in kid-speak, "snikiddy."
The $15 million worth of capital from New York-based D.E. Shaw Group the company received last quarter will be used in part to try to build its brand, said Schulman, 33. The organic food snack segment is a fast-growing market, and the company sees itself competing against other organic snacks such as Annie's Homegrown and Robert's American Gourmet, as well as big, traditional snack companies such as Kellogg's, which recently bought the Bear Naked granola company.
Fishbowl MarketingFishbowl Marketing, an Alexandria company that creates and manages e-mail marketing campaigns for the restaurant industry, last month received an $11.9 million investment from Valhalla Partners and Edison Venture Fund.
The company manages databases of customer e-mails for restaurants -- chains and smaller eateries -- and helps design advertisements for promotions, sweepstakes, and customers' anniversaries and birthdays. Fishbowl Marketing will use the money to develop services, such as marketing to mobile phones and a service that will allow restaurants to offer online ordering and reservations, said Chief Financial Officer Mike Skoff.
Founded in 2000 by Scott Shaw, who was a founder of the local Austin Grill restaurant chain, Fishbowl Marketing is named after the glass containers restaurants put out for patrons to leave their business cards.
The company manages the accounts of more than 800 restaurants, with 28,000 locations and 26 million e-mail addresses. Fishbowl competes against both Massachusetts-based Constant Contact and Indianapolis-based ExactTarget, which offer e-mail marketing to a variety of businesses, including restaurants. With consumers increasingly watching their spending, it is a difficult time for the restaurant industry, Skoff said.
"The industry is under pressure, and we believe that it is in times like this that the restaurant industry needs services like ours more than ever," Skoff said.
SnagAJob.comSnagAJob.com, based just outside Richmond, specializes in helping people find pizza delivery jobs, retail jobs, summer jobs, seasonal jobs and more.
Shawn Boyer, a former transaction lawyer (and former lawn mower and retail employee), founded the company in 1999 after he had trouble finding useful resources online when searching for an internship for a friend. The company lists openings for part-time and hourly jobs, charging a fee to employers and allowing job-hunters to search for free. SnagAJob says only 18 percent of the traffic on its site overlaps with that on major career sites such as Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com.
The firm started with two employees in a 1,000-square-foot office space in a medical office park. It now employs 110 full-time workers in what the company describes as a "funky 35,000-square-foot Silicon Valley-like complex overlooking a lake in Richmond."
The company received a $5 million investment toward expansion last quarter from Adams Street Partners, Baird Venture Partners and C&B Capital.
Last week, the Small Business Administration named Boyer national small-business person of the year.
IntelliworksRockville-based Intelliworks makes software that universities and university departments can use to manage the rollout of new courses or track interaction with prospective students.
The company has grown from 20 customers to 75 -- including Harvard Business School, John Hopkins University and Northern Virginia Community College -- since July, when it launched the Web-only software version of its product. Software services are a fast-growing market, and companies such as Hobsons EMT and TargetX also cater to the higher-education market.
Daniel Obregon, senior marketing manager for Intelliworks, said the changeover to a Web-only format means more efficiency for customers, as on-site servers are not needed and updates to the program are installed automatically.
Intelliworks has focused on smaller undergraduate departments, graduate programs and the continuing-education arms of higher-education institutions.
The company received $4 million in venture funding from Columbia Capital, Novak Biddle and RedShift Ventures, which have invested previously.
Akonni BiosystemsFrederick-based Akonni Biosystems is developing technology that it hopes will diagnose diseases such as upper respiratory infections and multidrug-resistant tuberculosis in a matter of hours.
The company's core product is the TruDiagnosis system, which uses a chip with an array of tiny gel drops made of proteins, antibodies and nucleic acids. These drops work like mini test tubes, identifying the presence of certain diseases in a patient's blood or other body sample when it passes through a machine.
The company was founded in 2003 by Charles Daitch, a biologist who has done research at the National Institutes of Health, Federal Drug Administration and Sandia National Labs, among others. The company has partnered with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and an undisclosed large pharmaceutical company.
"Given the rapidly rising cost of health care and the need to rein in costs, we don't see the economic downturn having an impact on our company," Kevin Banks, a spokesman for Akonni, said in an e-mail. "Our primary competition still comes from home-brewed systems and the traditional methods that we're trying to replace."
The company received $6 million from individual investors and plans to use the money to build up its manufacturing capabilities, develop new products and refine current ones.
MBeat MediaUrbmob.com allows artists and models to upload their own music and photographs. Fans then download those songs and pictures as ringtones and backgrounds for their mobile phones.
The social-networking site is run by Reston-based mBeat Media. The company hopes to be another "disruptive force," like MySpace or iTunes, and is betting that mobile phones will become a principal device through which fans listen to and share music, said co-founder Robert F. Delamar. The site, which launched last month, "is our attempt to take on the music industry and shake things up," he said.
The company uses a subscription model, charging those who want to download images and ringtones onto their phones a $3.99-a-month fee. Fans can download music and images onto their computers and vote for their favorite artists free by signing up.
The site shares its revenue with artists and models. MBeat has received $1.5 million worth of early-stage funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Grosvenor Funds and New Atlantic Ventures.
Ultimately a successful networking site needs hundreds of thousands of customers, said Tor Soevik, chief executive. The company declined to say how many customers it has now.
-- Alejandro Lazo
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