Tech Startup of the Month

INITIAL LIGHT BULB:
In the wake of selling his second startup, Golden-based Senware, to a Florida software and services firm, Matt McAdams was consulting from his home in the Sunshine State.

"I was looking for an excuse to come back to Colorado," he said. "And my wife was tired of me not having a job."

In 2005, an old contact in Denver approached McAdams with a project to make a Web-based database to keep track of public comments for RTD’s FastTracks initiative. That project soon snowballed into a brand-new startup. By 2006, McAdams and the Trackvia team were taking its eponymous flagship database to the broader market.

Another software entrepreneur, President and Chief Operations Officer Chris Basham, came aboard last year, with McAdams serving as chief technical officer of the four-person company.

"Growth is rapid," said McAdams, noting that the company has hundreds of paid users.

IN A NUTSHELL:
For many of its users, Trackvia’s scalable online database replaces the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, which McAdams labeled "the de facto database" for recording and sharing information in corporate America. "That leaves a lot to be desired," he noted: Excel spreadsheets are not searchable or flexible.

Trackvia’s technology allows administrators to upload their spreadsheets to be converted into customizable "Google-ized" databases that are easy to search and much more flexible and efficient than the original spreadsheets.

Companies can give any number of users various levels of permission to enter, edit or search data. Other features allow users to create e-mail lists, pinpoint entries on a map, and otherwise utilize their databases.

"This is actually a huge deal for companies that are used to using Excel for these purposes," Basham said. "All of a sudden life has changed. It’s a true innovation." McAdams described Trackvia as "priced to move" at $9.95 per user per month after a 14-day free trial, with additional fees for various special features.

"We have a real down-to-earth, nuts-and-bolts business model," he added. Customer acquisitions require an up-front investment that is gradually paid back by monthly fees.

RTD remains a key customer, along with Aurora-based Circulation Service America, a publications distributor. Other clients run the gamut from nonprofits to performance troupes. DataPush, an Oklahoma City-based provider of document services to the oil and gas industry, uses Trackvia for its databases of various projects and their statuses. As DataPush has eight offices and 65 users, the Web-based architecture is a key Trackvia feature, said DataPush CEO Richard Hensley.

"It’s considerably better (than Microsoft Access)," he said, noting that DataPush uses it for everything from billing to project management. "It’s accessible to everybody. It’s what we anticipated, and we’ve got pretty complicated databases."

John Gibson, a volunteer with another Trackvia customer, the nonprofit Friends of the Florida Panther in Naples, Fla., also gave the database — and the company — high marks.

"The product is outstanding," Gibson said. "It does everything we want it to. And the guys were very amenable to our needs. They’ve bent over backwards."

THE MARKET:
Basham said the market is targeting investment, real-estate and public-relations firms, as well as recruiting human resources departments, to use Trackvia databases to manage opportunities, listings, press clippings and candidates, respectively.

FINANCING:
In June, Trackvia closed on an undisclosed Series A round from Albuquerque-based Flywheel Ventures. McAdams described it as a "typical significant Series A round" that will allow the company to make a few new hires by year’s end and further its marketing efforts.

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