Sponsors

Pivotal's cloud native platform drives software innovation for many of the world's most admired brands. With millions of developers in communities around the world, Pivotal technology touches billions of users every day. After shaping the software development culture of Silicon Valley's most valuable companies for over a decade, today Pivotal leads a global technology movement transforming how the world builds software.

Andreessen Horowitz is a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm with $4.2 billion under management. The firm invests in entrepreneurs building companies at every stage from seed to growth.

Moves the Needle ignites entrepreneurial action within organizations by educating, enabling and empowering people to be closer to the customer, move faster and act bolder. Leveraging design thinking and Lean Startup principles tailored for the enterprise, Moves the Needle's lean innovation bootcamps, accelerator programs and strategic advising create immediate and lasting impact.

Bionic is an army of entrepreneurs igniting growth revolutions inside the world’s largest companies. We believe enterprises can grow like startups again – because that’s where they began. And we believe venture capital and entrepreneurship are the new forms of growth management. We’ve created a unique approach to enterprise growth that we call the Growth OS – a platform that combines the mechanics, tools, and mindsets of entrepreneurship and VC that ultimately grafts a sustainable growth capability inside our Partners.

IBM is a global technology and innovation company headquartered in Armonk, NY. It is the largest technology and consulting employer in the world, with more than 400,000 employees serving clients in 170 countries. IBM offers a wide range of technology and consulting services; a broad portfolio of middleware for collaboration, predictive analytics, software development and systems management; and the world's most advanced servers and supercomputers. Utilizing its business consulting, technology and R&D expertise, IBM helps clients become "smarter" as the planet becomes more digitally interconnected. IBM invests more than $6 billion a year in R&D, just completing its 21st year of patent leadership. IBM Research has received recognition beyond any commercial technology research organization and is home to 5 Nobel Laureates, 9 US National Medals of Technology, 5 US National Medals of Science, 6 Turing Awards, and 10 Inductees in US Inventors Hall of Fame. The company was behind the inventions of the PC; SABRE travel reservation system; UPC codes, Watson, the Jeopardy!-playing computing system, and much more.

Humana Inc. is a leading health and well-being company focused on making it easy for people to achieve their best health with clinical excellence through coordinated care. The company’s strategy integrates care delivery, the member experience, and clinical and consumer insights to encourage engagement, behavior change, proactive clinical outreach and wellness for the millions of people we serve across the country.

GLIDR is the next-generation software platform from launchpad, designed for Lean Innovation and built to empower companies to achieve continuous growth. GLIDR provides businesses with the intelligence to execute on their best ideas their innovation portfolio has to offer. With tools to drive investment decision making as well as innovation project development, organizations of all sizes can benefit from accelerated innovation at lower costs, dramatically increasing the yield from innovation investment. Launchpad was founded in 2012 by Steve Blank and Jim Hornthal and is used by over 200 institutions in 87 countries.

MURAL is a digital whiteboard that allows teams to collaborate in real time. We make remote design work by enabling distributed creative teams to collaborate on researching, brainstorming and designing ideas.

Rainforest QA provides an on-demand, QA-as-a-Service platform for crowdsourced testing. The platform allows teams to write functional and regression tests, execute them via our network of 50K qualified testers, and get results in 30 minutes. The Rainforest QA platform enables teams to maintain ownership of QA while testing faster and more efficiently than with traditional in-house manual QA.

Woo brings together tech professionals and the companies who hire them. Through its namesake platform, tech talent can effortlessly learn what is their market value while remaining completely anonymous. At the same time, employers working with Woo are able to reach top passive candidates who have the skills they need and want what they can offer. The company operates out of San Francisco and Tel Aviv and works with cutting-edge tech brands, including Quora, Uber, WeWork, Moat, Microsoft, among many others.

Accenture is a leading global professional services company, providing a broad range of services and solutions in strategy, consulting, digital, technology and operations. Combining unmatched experience and specialized skills across more than 40 industries and all business functions – underpinned by the world’s largest delivery network – Accenture works at the intersection of business and technology to help clients improve their performance and create sustainable value for their stakeholders. With more than 375,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries, Accenture drives innovation to improve the way the world works and lives. Visit us at www.accenture.com

ING is a global financial institution with a strong European base, offering banking services through its operating company ING Bank. The purpose of ING Bank is empowering people to stay a step ahead in life and in business. ING Bank’s 52,000 employees offer retail and wholesale banking services to customers in over 40 countries. ING Group shares are listed on the exchanges of Amsterdam (INGA NA, ING.AS), Brussels and on the New York Stock Exchange (ADRs: ING US, ING.N). Sustainability forms an integral part of ING’s corporate strategy, which is evidenced by ING Group shares being included in the FTSE4Good index and in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (Europe and World) where ING is among the leaders in the Banks industry group.

Amplitude™ provides product analytics to help mobile and web companies understand user behavior. Product, marketing, and growth teams use Amplitude to discover and share insights about user engagement, retention, and revenue. Founded in 2012 and backed by Battery Ventures, Benchmark, Data Collective, Merus Capital Quest Venture Partners and leading angel investors, Amplitude is the analytics solution of choice for companies who want to understand their users, including Western Union, HubSpot, LogMeIn, Square, POPSUGAR, and more.

Pacific Gas and Electric is here for you and knows as a small business that watching your expenses is a critical part of your job and that saving money is part of your everyday life, especially when you're just getting started. Since we’re focused on your success and helping you achieve your goals we want to encourage you to come visit us during the event so we can tell you ways to save money during the beginnings stages of building and your everyday management of your company.

Compose, an IBM company, offers auto-scaling, production-ready databases to help software development teams deploy data services quickly and easily. Compose currently supports many popular open source databases including MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL RethinkDB, RabbitMQ and etcd. Each database is provisioned in minutes and includes high availability (HA), failover, and daily backups. In addition, Compose offers Transporter for moving and syncing data continuously between data stores —available as a free open source application. More than 4,600 companies rely on Compose-hosted databases for keeping their apps in production 24/7. For more information, please visit www.compose.io.

LeanCog provides strategy and software development services to help Product and IT organizations create better solutions by taking a hypothesis based, user feedback driven approach. From startups to Fortune 100 companies, LeanCog has helped companies take their ideas from "Canvas to Customer".

Aemass is absolute experience reality capture for virtual reality, augmented reality and deep media. Assembling patented scalable volumetric video and immersive spatial environment technology, we engage scalable social VR/AR with premier artists, athletes, entertainment leaders and interactive media experts to explore, re-live and re-view the real moment from any and every perspective imaginable. As a service offering, Aemass provides advanced 3D sensing and graphic machine learning for authentic human capture, solving the most important stop gap in virtual reality technology and successfully bringing real and everyday people directly into VR for both everyday social VR and professional broadcast video solutions.

Grow empowers businesses to become truly data-driven and accelerate growth by aligning team objectives and inspiring strategic decisions. We offer the simplest way to aggregate, automate, and visualize your data in beautiful, custom, real-time dashboards. Our data specialists get in the trenches with you to implement your dashboard and solve your unique data challenges. With Grow, enterprise-quality data insights are attainable for any business.

Clevertech is a digital product innovation studio that has been partnering with visionary founders, serial entrepreneurs, sophisticated investors, and C-level executives to help create new businesses and drive product innovation for over fifteen years. With a team of over 150 savvy technologists and designers, Clevertech has helped launch products on the web and mobile that have received over $1.5B in venture funding, been featured on Shark Tank, and has digitized entire businesses to embrace our new mobile world. Based in New York City and with a distributed team across North America and Western Europe, Clevertech works with founders and executives across the globe.

Andela extends engineering teams with world-class software developers. We recruit the most talented developers on the African continent, shape them into technical leaders, and place them as full-time distributed team members with companies that range from Microsoft and IBM to dozens of high-growth startups. Backed by Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, GV (Google Ventures) and Spark Capital, Andela is building the next generation of global technology leaders.

Econic connects startups & enterprises to accelerate innovation. Our collaborative Innovation Outpost is the Midwest's first corporate accelerator lab designed to help new innovators learn, interact and connect with experts and peers in the world of startup-driven innovation, while our Inside Outside Innovation podcast explores the ins and outs of innovation with raw stories, real insights, and tactical advice from the best and brightest in the world of startups & innovation. Contact us to learn how to think, move, and execute at startup speed.

No one understands startups like SVB. From Stripe to Pinterest and Jive to Cloudera, we’re the platform that powers the world’s most disruptive technologies. And unlike a typical bank, we were founded in Silicon Valley, so our products have been designed alongside founders just like you and are honed for the unique needs of rapidly growing technology startups. So take the guesswork out of banking — we have everything you need to get set-up, get running, and most importantly - get back to building.

Breather is a network of beautiful, private, professional spaces that can be reserved on-demand, by the hour or by the day, whenever you need them. Breather offers an inexpensive, flexible alternative to the ordinary office space—whether you need a place to impress clients, a quiet space to enable creativity, extra conference room space for your team, or are just looking for a change of scenery, Breather can accommodate.

WeWork is the community for creators. We transform buildings into beautiful, collaborative workspaces and provide infrastructure, services, events and technology so our members can focus on doing what they love.

Orrick is a leading global law firm with a particular focus on serving companies in the technology, energy and financial sectors. We are recognized worldwide for delivering the highest-quality, commercially-oriented legal advice and for our culture of innovation and collaboration. Orrick practices in five core areas: Corporate, Energy & Infrastructure, Finance, Intellectual Property and Litigation. Known for our work in the technology sector, we act for many of the world's top public companies as well as more than 1,200 start-ups.

Mamava designs solutions for nursing mamas on the go. Mama founded, women owned, and B Certified, Mamava is the leading expert in lactation spaces, integrating the biological, physical, and emotional needs of nursing mamas into both our Mamava lactation suites and our mobile app. Mamava combines beautiful design with smart lock technology to serve the needs of the twenty-first century mama on the go, revolutionizing the breastfeeding experience for traveling and working mamas, making it more optimistic, realistic, and accessible. A category creator, Mamava is working to ensure breastfeeding is a right, not a privilege.

Bizzabo is an all-in-one event software that helps organizers create successful events by empowering them to build amazing websites, sell tickets, grow communities, go mobile and maximize event experiences. The Bizzabo Event Success Platform includes all the tools event organizers need to manage their event from start to finish. The platform is used by thousands of conferences from around the globe which are attended by millions of professionals.

Slido is an audience interaction platform for events and meetings. It allows event organizers to crowdsource the best audience questions, get instant feedback via live polls and share presentations with audiences in real-time. Since its foundation in 2012, Slido has helped to transform over 20.000 events in more than 100 countries by engaging tens of thousands of participants. Slido has been adopted by a number of renowned conferences such as SXSWedu, LeWeb, WOBI or Pioneers Festival and has worked with high-profile clients including KPMG, Livestream, Eventbrite, Uber or Cisco.

Sundar Films produces outstanding videos for businesses that want to make their stories “stick”. We make cinematic videos that help achieve your business goals, whether that’s communicating your brand image, converting visitors into paying customers, attracting the best talent or anything in between. We learn about your story and your business needs and translate that into a beautiful video that doesn’t just engage viewers, but stays in their memory. We’ve produced videos for companies like 500 Startups, Feeding America, Semester at Sea, and many more. If you need a video for your business, we’d love to chat.