This summer, Under30CEO launched a nationwide campaign to discover the most promising young entrepreneurs from all across the United States. The goal of the Under30CEO Awards is to highlight the next big innovators, leaders, and world changers from our Top 10 Cities for Young Entrepreneurs.
In order to qualify, the entrepreneurs had to meet revenue requirements of between $50,000 and $10,000,000 (OR) over 10,000 users, (OR) have between $50,000 and $10,000,000 in funding, under the age of 30.
The following are the 2012 Under30CEO Award Winners from Kansas City. Kansas City’s young entrepreneurs had over $12,000,000 in revenues, $1,200,000 in funding and employed over 60 people. Congratulations to all of the winners!
Blake Miller
Age: 28
Company: Think Big Partners
Description: Think Big Partners is an early-stage business incubator, startup accelerator and mentorship-based collaborative network. Simply put, Think Big Partners build and grow great technology companies.
Jason McAninch
Age: 26
Company: J-TEK
Description: J-TEK provides quality IT support services to businesses that need assistance with day to day operations of their IT environment and consulting services to help businesses get technology to work smarter and more efficiently for them. In addition, we also have a sector of our company that serves residential customers with their basic to advanced technology support needs. We now have two locations in Kansas and serve clients in over 12 states nationally through our remote support service.
Chris Olsen
Age: 28
Company: FINDitKC
Description: FINDitKC.com is a place for those living, visiting or moving to Kansas City to FIND videos on Things to Do, Places to Eat, Shop, Play and Live. We help fellow entrepreneurs/business owners share their story about what they do with what we call social videos. From there we don’t just produce the videos, but also help them optimize it via social media, QR Code use, you name it we help with it. We aim to connect Kansas City using the powerful platform of video, then we plan to expand to the hundreds of other FINDit domains we already own. 😉
Anthony Noll
Age: 28
Company: School Media Group
Description: Dewsly is new platform for journalism students and education environments. We have created a platform that is focused upon student driven content from many topics for the world to view. Dewsly gives the world a perspective on topics from the 18-25 year old’s vantage point. This platform brings the university to life from the students stories!
Jessica Bishop
Age: 29
Company: Klink Mobile, Inc.
Description: KlinkMobile enables the transfer of cellular airtime minutes and currency via a proprietary, cloud-based financial transaction platform. These mobile-to-mobile transfers tare sent o the receiverʼs mobile phone or m-wallet in real-time. The company leverages an, established network of distributors and global mobile network operator (MNO) partners to reach consumers. KlinkMobileʼs technology went live in January and is processing international transactions to Afghanistan from the US.
Ouali Benmeziane
Age: 29
Company: WebCongress
Description: WebCongress is a tech event with a high focus on training, so we offer 2 days of conferences, talks, workshops and networking in several cities around the world, we already organize more than 43 conferences, and more than 10 000 businesses using our services, attending our conferences, or buying our training. Companies such as Google, Twitter, Blackberry, Microsoft, Spotify, Youtube, Facebook, Intel attend as speaker and partner our events. @webcongress
Kyle Claypool
Age: 26
Company: Optima Worldwide
Description: We help companies increase revenue, traffic, and brand equity through creative web marketing channels. We do this primarily through search engine optimization and content marketing, supported by social media and thorough measurement and analysis.
Karthik Ramachandran
Age: 27
Company: Likarda, LLC
Description: Through the use of an innovative platform technology, Likarda streamlines the engineering of multi-cell type, uniform, organotypic 3D cell clusters for a variety of applications including drug screening and regenerative medicine. Likarda’s engineered clusters offer superior performance in targeting species-specific illnesses, allowing for the development of new cell-based therapies for animals and humans alike. The primary product that Likarda has developed are 3D islet clusters, Kanslets(tm), are used for transplants into companion animals as a way to cure diabetes combined with the use of a surgical procedure as routine as spaying/neutering a cat or dog. Likarda has successfully cured rat diabetes by transplanting Kanslet(tm) cell clusters into diabetic rats, and actively conducting studies on cats and dogs.
