Here’s a look at innovation news from around Michigan:
—Inforum, a professional women’s organization, is now accepting applications for an upcoming master class aimed at second-stage entrepreneurs. Led by Patti Glaza and Paula Sorrell, the class provides a confidential forum where emerging startup founders will meet monthly to evaluate their company’s operations and identify new opportunities. Click here to apply.
—Detroit’s Techstars Mobility startup accelerator program is seeking applicants for its next cohort, which will begin in June. Up to 12 startups will receive $120,000 in funding and three months of training to develop ideas and products aligned with Ford’s mobility plan. Interested startups have until March 22 to apply, and they should be working on innovations in customer experience, IT and data analytics, multimodal trip integration, or flexible transportation ownership and use. The 2015 Techstars Mobility class included 10 startups that raised more than $3 million after completing the program; seven of the companies have decided to permanently locate in metro Detroit.
—LevelEleven, the Detroit-based startup making sales gamification software, released a year-end report this week that highlighted the company’s growth in 2015. It raised $2.6 million in venture backing, won a Game Changer award at Google’s national demo day event, appointed new executives, and introduced a new feature to its Scorecard product called Pacing, which helps salespeople and sales managers track their sales pipeline data in real time.
“Leading enterprises including American Express, HubSpot, and Pandora have embraced our platform because it allows their salespeople to get deeply engaged in key sales metrics, and enables their managers to be modern, data-driven coaches,” LevelEleven CEO Bob Marsh said in a press release.
—Occipital, the San Francisco-based mobile 3D sensor maker whose co-founders are from Michigan, was on hand at CES in Las Vegas this week to announce the release of new products: Structure Core and Bridge Engine for spatial computing. The company said the new stack makes it easy to add spatial capture, understanding, and augmentation to any device.
Structure Core is an embeddable 3D sensor for tablets, smartphones, robots, drones, and virtual reality/augmented reality headsets, and Bridge Engine is designed to work seamlessly with depth-sensing hardware like Structure Core to offer 3D mapping with a seamless continuum between augmented reality and virtual reality. If you happen to be in the area, Occipital is displaying Structure Core and an alpha version of Bridge Engine at Booth 26224 in the Las Vegas Convention Center.
