Monday, November 10, 2008

Trio of Bay State startups named finalists in Amazon challenge

By Mass High Tech Staff

Amazon.com Inc. has named three Massachusetts companies among seven finalists in its Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge.

Like other entrants to the competition, the three companies, all inside Route 128, use the Amazon unit’s for-hire cloud computing services. They are: Sonian Inc., a Dedham-based e-mail archiving service; Waltham-based Pixily Inc., an online file-sharing service for paper and electronic documents; and MedCommons Inc., a Watertown company that makes online applications for patients and doctors.

First prize is $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in credits toward Amazon’s pay-as-you-go service, and a potential investment offer from Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN), according to the company. All seven finalist companies will fly to Amazon headquarters in Seattle to make a pitch before the contest judges, as well as audiences of venture capitalists, industry leaders and Amazon executives. The winner will be announced at an event Nov. 20.

Sonian was founded in 2007 by Greg Arnette, who also founded software-maker IntelliReach Corp. Serial entrepreneur Prasad Thammineni is the co-founder of Pixily, along with Vikram Kumar and Anand Rajaram. MedCommons’ chief officers are Adrian Gropper and Sean Doyle, who also founded medical imaging company AMICAS (NYSE: AMCS), and Bill Donner, formerly of New York private equity firm Fenway Partners.

In an interview with Mass High Tech in August, Pixily’s Thammineni said, “Cloud computing has done to hardware what open source has done to software.”