Vantage Ventures has welcomed Skypunch Technology as one of its newest resident companies. Formed from a meeting in early 2019 within West Virginia University’s John Chambers School of Business and Economics, and with John Chambers, former CEO of Cisco Systems and namesake of the school, in attendance, Vantage Ventures aims to bring talent, mentors, industry partners, and investors together under one roof to help West Virginia-based companies scale up and disrupt the norm. To that end, Skypunch has already seen some initial benefit as it continues to evolve its online voting system and broaden its client base.
In the short term this means the breadth of resources available from a large institution like West Virginia University are now at Skypunch’s fingertips from things as simple as meeting space to offering business development advice and legal counsel. In the long term it is expected that this will kickstart some much larger developments.
Skypunch Technology’s predecessor company ElectionsOnline, had been based in Arlington, Virginia from its founding in 2002 until mid-2018 when it relocated to Charleston, West Virginia. That Vantage Ventures should come into existence only a few months later to support technology startups across the state is serendipity to the extreme. Add to that the fact that other leading global tech companies are establishing a presence in the Mountain State and it clearly signals that West Virginia’s burgeoning technology community is alive, well and positioned to grow.
If the matter of a 20-year old company–which Skypunch is when adding in the 18 years that its predecessor company, ElectionsOnline, was in business–being accepted into a family of startups raises an eyebrow, the explanation is simple. In one key respect, Skypunch is a startup considering that its flagship product, its online voting system, was reinvented in 2021 around some newly-developed technology. (See Ledger Database for Ballot Storage for more about that.) That in turn positions the service to be suitable for use in elections beyond the scope of those where it has historically been used, that being board of director elections, and reaching that totally new market puts the company in the same position as a startup. Just one with a bit of a history.
This is another exciting development with more to come so stay tuned and take a moment to learn more about Vantage Ventures and the exciting work being done by the many other technology entrepreneurs they support across West Virginia by visiting their website.
