What's Going on in Chattanooga?

Unless you're a native of the region, if you think of Chattanooga, Tennessee at all, you probably picture a sleepy Appalachian city known for its impressive natural scenery and not much else. There's no arguing that the area is a mecca for outdoor enthusiasts, but if you think that's all Tennessee's fourth-largest city has to offer, you're in for a surprise.

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Andrew Bouldin
LogoGarden's Launches New Website and Series B Fundraise

LogoGarden, the Brentwood-based logo design and automated website-creation business, is "in the process of raising" a $2MM Series B capital raise, said Founder and CEO John Williams.

Meanwhile, Williams told VNC he is proud of his "branding dynamo," and hopes larger strategic players view LogoGarden as "a prime acquisition target," given its positioning as a "gateway" to the entrepreneurial sector's growth companies.

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Health Care Becomes Entrepreneurial (Finally)

All of us know that you have to be a little crazy to be an entrepreneur. Launching, let alone sustaining, a new enterprise can be challenging along almost every dimension − mentally, emotionally, and often financially. Historically, this reality has been even more sobering in the health care sector, where the typical hardships experienced by any start-up have been amplified by numerous industry-specific challenges: Extensive regulation, entrenched players with a strong grip on the status quo, confusing paths to entry, and an even more opaque path to payment have made health care a particularly treacherous territory for entrepreneurs.

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Andrew Bouldin
Tennessee is a hotbed for investable companies

Tennessee early-stage companies have secured more than $430 million in capital investment over the past two years. This represents a nice growth curve over prior years and has really been a product of several factors: public funding initiatives such as TNInvestco and INCITE, more activity from in-state venture capital firms, the development of more angel funds throughout the state and, finally, more investment from out-of-state venture capital firms. With the myriad activities supporting entrepreneurship and innovation statewide, our entrepreneurs are gaining an increasingly high profile from investors across the state, region and country.

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Andrew Bouldin
StudioNow Announces Investment Round Led by FCA Venture Partners

StudioNow provides the full spectrum of “Creation to Syndication” empowering companies big and small to create more and do more with their Internet video strategy. They believe that the web will eventually become “one big video” and it is their goal and passion to help their customers obtain and integrate the highest quality resources at the lowest possible cost and time frame. Over the past few years, StudioNow has dramatically increased their revenue and is raising this investment round to capitalize on the opportunity they are seeing in the market.  FCA V’s investment will provide bandwidth to accelerate market growth and hire the key talent needed to scale the company. 

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Clinical Ink Places Electronic Data Capture in the Palms of Researchers' Hands

Ultimately, the hope is that SureSource will become a large suite of software tools that can streamline data collection at any stage of a clinical trial. In the meantime, hundreds of tablets running SureSource have already been distributed around the world, and the platform is making an immediate impact on the cost of research. Combining greater reliability of trial data with measurable savings, and enabling both novel and neglected use cases, Clinical Ink exemplifies best practices in clinical studies.

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