When we kicked off the Global Challenge a couple of months ago we knew this would be a great challenge not only for the entrepreneurs applying but for us in the Startup Accelerator.   Meeting all these fantastic new companies and identifying the best startups that align with our key investment themes is tough because we have to say “no” to a lot of very good entrepreneurs.  We also took the challenge to build the Startup Accelerator into an international program so we reached out globally and we had a tremendous response with 2/3 of the applications coming from Europe, India, and Asia-Pacific.  The remaining 1/3 came from across North America.

Citrix is a very broad and deep technology company so to clarify our investment thesis we’ve divided our focus into five areas: Empower IT, Cloud.next, Desktop.next, Mobile Madness and Collaboration².  These themes capture a world where companies struggle to manage their digital assets as the wave of consumer driven devices and services has overtaken their ability to maintain even a facade of information management.  On the flip side we consumers enjoy the bounty of thousands of applications available at our fingertips for nearly free. The software and data associated with all those apps are developed and stored anywhere while we interact through multiple channels that run the spectrum from real time chat to high definition interaction.  The future of collaboration will be squared with the added factor of social networks running in parallel to more efficiently connect us.  So, where will this lead us?

Follow these startups to find out. Below we have selected the dozen finalists that will compete for an investment from the Citrix Startup Accelerator for $100k-$400k.  While the investment enables a startup to focus on customer and solution development the bigger value is the close support we’ll give each of the companies in our program.  Regardless of where the companies call home or where their target market is, we’ll support them with mentoring, access to our technology, channel, and customer base.

Good luck to finalists and stay tuned as we announce the companies that win investment by mid-July.

Citrix Startup Accelerator Finalists

Empower IT

Nukona-

• Nukona provides an easy-to-use, cloud-based service that enables enterprises to secure, deploy and manage mobile applications and data on both corporate and employee-owned devices.  With unique app wrapping technology for automatically providing app policy management, Nukona is the only mobile management solution that addresses mobile security the way that Global 2000 IT organizations are entitled to expect.

Cloud.next

SimpleWorker-

• Every modern web application needs to run jobs in the background – whether it’s to speed up web responses, handle scheduled jobs, or run large sets of concurrent asynchronous tasks. SimpleWorker provides a simple, scalable, and massively parallel way to schedule and run background processes in the cloud.

Torbit-

• Making web sites faster

expanz-

• expanz is a next generation Line of Business rapid application development framework and runtime for .NET.  A 2010 Gartner cool vendor, expanz accelerates and de-risks the development of Windows Azure apps and enables huge reach, to any device, via native thin client deployment.

Desktop.next

Drumbi-

• Drumbi is a better way to contact your friends and businesses. It’s the first app to tie voice-calls with your social graph, and allows you to add context to your calls.

Handy Elephant-

• Handy Elephant is building a mobile and web app that helps salespeople and recruiters stay on stack with their relationships across multiple social media channels. It is like a Personal Networking Assistant which plugs into CRMs and tells users who they need to follow up with, when these contacts are most likely to be available and which channel will be most effective.

ZeroMail-

• ZeroMail is a best practice email client integrating a virtual assistant, task management and social media. It’s designed to reduce stress and to boost productivity.

AgiVox-

• AgiVox provides a speak-and-listen interface for access to online news and information on smart phones.  We are pleased to be finalists in the program, and look forward to a long working partnership with Citrix.

Mobile Madness

WebMynd-

• Cross platform add-on development made simple

ionGrid-

• ionGrid is developing software to enable people to be as productive on a tablet as they can be on their PC.  Their first product, which will be launching this summer, enables enterprise-grade secure access to Microsoft Office documents and PDF files which reside on corporate file servers and in document management systems such as SharePoint.  For more info, please visit http://iongrid.com

Collaboration²

GrexIT-

• GrexIt helps programmers, managers, support and operations teams rescue important information and knowledge from dieing in email in-boxes by helping them create a knowledge base right out of their email communication. It provides organizations using Google Apps tap their email in-boxes for knowledge and make it available to the right people in the organization in an automated and access controlled manner.

RoohIT-

• If you have ever used copy/paste to share a web-page, then RoohIt is a simple & free service that comes as a breath of fresh air. It allows you to highlight the important parts of a page and easily share the Highlighted page with ANYONE – no signup, no special software needed! RoohIt does all kinds of interesting things with the highlights such as automatically saving them for each user, auto-creating a tinyURL to highlights, 1-click sharing to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn.

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