who design and build video games for consoles and mobile devices. See additional coverage in the Wisconsin State Journal and Capital Times.
—We profiled BankMyBiz.com, a Milwaukee-based company that works with banks across the country to provide loans to small businesses. Co-founder and CEO Michael Adam worked at two large banks in Wisconsin before helping to launch BankMyBiz in 2013. During that time, Adam observed that many lenders do not often issue loans of less than $100,000 to small businesses; he saw an opportunity for a smaller, upstart organization to work with banks and attempt to fill in this gap. BankMyBiz’s current focus is on partnering with more community banks, Adam said.
—Two companies spun out of research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison signed commercial license agreements with the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the organization that manages patents and licensing of intellectual property for the school. One of them, Lactic Solutions, is seeking to commercialize a method for engineering lactic acid bacteria to produce ethanol, rather than lactic acid, which can be harmful. The other, SimpleMachines, is developing a computer chip designed to increase processing speed and reduce energy use in data centers.
