IMPACT 2013 Venture Summit in Philly, starting today, features 50 presenting ventures

Tom Paine


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The IMPACT 2013 Venture Summit, presented by The Greater Philadelphia Alliance for Capital and Technologies (PACT), is coming up on October 22 & 23 at the The Ritz-Carlton Philadelphia. This year's summit is hosted by Fox Rothschild LLC.

This marks the 20th year of the Venture Summit. More importantly, it reflects the growing maturity of the Philadelphia tech and life sciences venture communities, in terms of the quality of presenting companies and number and geographic distribution of investors attending, according to Michael S. Harrington, Partner at Fox Rothschild LLC and Conference Host and Chairman, speaking in a phone interview with Philly Tech News. Fifty companies will be presenting this year including 16 early stage companies, 18 technology companies and 16 healthcare companies, six of them in the healthcare information technology space. The early stage companies reflect a significant expansion of a new category that was tested out last year.

Keynoters include co-founder of StubHub and Spreecast, Jeff Fluhr; the former CEO of WebMD and current chairman and CEO of Lumeris Corporation, Michael Long; and professional golfer and sometimes provocative (Augusta National once ordered CBS to take him off Masters coverage) CBS commentator, Gary McCord.

Harrington says that the Venture Summit has become much more than a show & tell, and is now an active marketplace for exchanging ideas, action and investment proposals between entrepreneurs and investors.

PACT's “200 for $200″ Entrepreneur Program returns this year and is still available, Harrington says. Qualified entrepreneurs can register for the entire program for $200, as opposed to the regular registration fee of $1100 for non-members, although there are some different options for partial attendance and out-of-town investors. (Entrepreneur Program admission does not include a presenter slot.)

A VC panel on Tuesday includes First Round Capital co-founder Howard Morgan, and two out of town VCs whose firms have made significant multiple Philadelphia area investments; First Mark Capital Managing Director Amish Jani, and OpenView Venture Partners Senior Managing Director & Founder Scott Maxwell.

Company presentations and more panels are on the docket for Wednesday. Some of the presenting companies you may have heard of and others you may not have, but a lot of the fun is discovering lesser known potential gems. One startup to watch is RackWare, a cloud solutions provider with offices in Santa Clara and Wayne that recently raised $3 million from investors including Osage Venture Partners. Other prominent ventures presenting include Philadelphia-based PeopleLinx (backed by MissionOG) and Horsham-based RightCare Solutions, which provides a software system originally developed at Penn Nursing that attempts to reduce hospital readmissions. RightCare raised $1.75 million last year from Domain Associates and Compass.

A full list of presenting companies can be found here.

As usual, the summit winds up Wednesday evening with a reception at the Crystal Tea Room. Over 1,000 attendees are expected to attend IMPACT 2013.