UCSD StartR Accelerates Small Business Growth with Artificial Intelligence Startup Englue

May 14, 2015 - Englue, a local San Diego startup, has won admission into the new 'StartR' Startup Accelerator Program at UCSD's Rady School of Management. The program provides Englue with unique access to university resources.

Englue is an artificial intelligence company that helps small and medium-sized businesses grow faster. It uses cutting edge technologies originally developed for the national defense industry. Englue's flagship product, LeadCrunch, finds business-to-business customers that are most likely to buy. Since releasing a private alpha version in March, early customers of LeadCrunch are increasing sales by as much as 216%.

StartR is a nonprofit accelerator for Rady School of Management students and alumni. The program is part of the California Institute for Innovation and Development. StartR's mission is to provide mentoring, advice and access to other resources for early stage companies and student teams. Founded in 2013 by a group of UC San Diego Rady students, StartR is a free, six month-long acceleration program held twice a year on the Rady School's campus. The acceleration program is focused on hands-on company development and mentorship. At the conclusion of the program, StartR teams are given an opportunity to pitch to investors and industry experts.

"The StartR program solves one of the vexing problems facing all leading edge startups: Access to talent and resources," says Englue's CEO Olin Hyde, "To my left is a Nobel prize winner in economics, to my right is the San Diego Supercomputer Center. And the best engineering students walk past our office between classes. It's a huge honor for Englue to be a part of StartR. This is the kind of program that keeps companies like Englue in San Diego by giving us competitive advantages that can't be found elsewhere. Especially when it comes to recruiting top-talent."

Hyde founded Englue as a student in the Master of Advanced Studies (MAS) enterprise systems engineering program offered by the Jacobs School of Engineering and Rady School of Management. Jeff Chang joined Englue directly from the Rady MBA program to lead product development after meeting Olin in the lunchroom. Englue also recruited Alex Quintero from the MAS data science and engineering program. "The Rady School's focus on engineering-centric entrepreneurialism makes it one the best places to start a high-tech business," added Hyde.

Englue started in August 2013 and has more than 10,000 small businesses using their FedBizFind product to find Federal contracts. Their largest customer, Lockheed Martin, embeds Englue's DeepFind machine learning platform into systems developed for the US military. It believes StartR is an important step in building capabilities necessary to beat Bay Area competitors. To learn more about Englue, visit www.englue.com. To learn more about Rady StartR visit http://rady.ucsd.edu/ciid/startr/.