Startup Monday

Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow.com, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups and their founders, plus other local technology happenings. The Ground Floor, Monday’s office space for young companies in Rosslyn, is now open. The Metro-accessible space features a 5,000-square-foot common area that includes a kitchen, lounge area, collaborative meeting spaces, and a stage for formal presentations.

When online dictionary SpanishDict.com hit the web in 1999, its primary audience was English speakers looking to learn Spanish. The idea was simple: to create an easy-to-use resource for students and learners that would serve as the definitive guide for translating Spanish words into English.

Nearly 20 years later, the tables have turned. Today, a good chunk of the site’s 14 million monthly users are native Spanish speakers who want to learn English. And that number is growing, said Chris Cummings, CEO of the Rosslyn-based startup behind SpanishDict, Curiosity Media

“People ask us all the time if we’ve considered going into other languages,” Cummings said. “The answer is that we are going into a new audience, but it’s actually the same language pair.”

Cummings is no stranger to finding new audiences. In 2013, he helped launch Fluencia, a subscription-based Spanish learning program. The software course features an “adaptive pace” and an automated tutoring system to help users become more fluent. Since its launch, Fluencia has grown its monthly user base to around 800,000 learners from across the world.

Though Fluencia continues to expand, Cummings said his company’s dictionary services are growing at an even quicker pace.

“We’re adding thousands and thousands of new Spanish speakers every week,” he said. “We already have millions on the site.”

Cummings added that there could even come a day where there’s just as many native Spanish speakers using SpanishDict as there are native English speakers, if not more.

“For every English speaker that’s interested in communicating in Spanish, there’s about three or four Spanish speakers that are interested in communicating in English,” he said. “It’s a much, much bigger market.”

Part of the reason for such a steep rate of user growth is the sheer number of “bells and whistles” that SpanishDict offers, Cummings said. People who might otherwise use a “quick and dirty” translation service like Google Translate are drawn to SpanishDict’s many features.

“If you want native audio pronunciation of a word, we got that. If you want to know how to conjugate verbs, we got that. If you want to see the word in real life example sentences, we got that,” Cummings said. “For all these reasons, it just becomes a better way to be a first stop for translating a word than maybe what you see on Google Translate.”

He continued, “We’re able to go so deep on this language pair is because there are more than 800 million native English and Spanish speakers in the world. That’s what enables us to go so deep and provide such high value content in this language pair.”

In 2013, Curiosity Media had just a handful of employees. Now, it has 17 in its office in Rosslyn, and it’s still growing.

The company currently is hiring for engineering and product management positions.

Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow.com, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups and their founders, plus other local technology happenings. The Ground Floor, Monday’s office space for young companies in Rosslyn, is now open. The Metro-accessible space features a 5,000-square-foot common area that includes a kitchen, lounge area, collaborative meeting spaces, and a stage for formal presentations.

Imagine you’ve just set up a state-of-the-art home security system with all the bells and whistles. The alarms are set. The motion detectors are on. The cameras are live. But there’s a problem: You don’t know how to use any of that equipment. Are you really any safer than before?

That’s an analogy from Grant Elliott, Founder and CEO of Rosslyn-based Ostendio, a company that focuses on I.T. compliance and security. Ostendio’s main product is My Virtual Compliance Manager (MyVCM), a platform that helps companies manage risk and bring their employees into compliance with standards and policies.

It’s common knowledge that the concept of cybersecurity is more relevant than ever before. Words and phrases like “cybercriminal,” “phishing” and “data breach” are now part of the public lexicon. Companies that handle sensitive information and data are increasingly beefing up their online defenses, and part of that process means getting employees up to speed.

“People are the weakest link,” Elliott said. “You can encrypt data to the highest degree possible … but if your people are being careless, information is going to get out and intruders are going to get in.”

Using MyVCM, organizations can build out workflows that hold their employees accountable for keeping up-to-date with industry standards, training regimens and security regulations. The platform assigns employees individual scores that illustrate how close they are to full compliance, for instance. Those scores can then be checked against other employees or the company as a whole, and employees are given clear instructions on what they can do to improve.

Elliott started Ostendio with two other co-founders in 2014. In the years since they founded the company, Ostendio has grown from a handful of employees in a shared workspace to more than a dozen people in a dedicated office space. The company has also cultivated a list of clients that includes more than 60 companies in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia and Israel.

“We’ve continued to expand,” Elliott said. “We’ve evolved and grown in a number of different dimensions.”

Though the company was founded with the healthcare industry in mind, it now services businesses that operate in a multitude of industries.

“We’re not doing anything that’s specifically healthcare,” Elliott said. “Critical infrastructure, retail, finance, aerospace, all of these industries have a complex ecosystem with a requirement to protect and share sensitive data.”

And it’s not just about cybersecurity and risk management, either. Companies can use MyVCM to make sure employees are compliant in topics like sexual discrimination, company policy and product documents, as well.

With all those different uses for the product, Elliott said there’s plenty of room for more growth.

“Do I see us doubling in size over the next year or so? Sure,” Elliott said. “I think we can get to become a $100 million company.”

Above all else, Elliott said it’s the Ostendio team’s passion for building a great product that drives the company’s expanding operations.

“Regardless of how opportune how the market might be, it still comes from a relentless focus on delivery and execution,” he said. “For me, that relentless, driven execution is what’s helping us grow.”

Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow.com, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups and their founders, plus other local technology happenings. The Ground Floor, Monday’s office space for young companies in Rosslyn, is now open. The Metro-accessible space features a 5,000-square-foot common area that includes a kitchen, lounge area, collaborative meeting spaces, and a stage for formal presentations.

A fast-growing Arlington tech company has moved its operations to a much larger office in Rosslyn.

Snagajob, a company that helps employers find hourly workers and vice versa, announced last week it had moved into a spacious new office in the Waterview building on N. Lynn Street.

The new business hub spans about 32,000 square feet, which is more than four times as big as Snagajob’s old office in Ballston. The office also features such amenities as free beer and popcorn, several game tables and a stunning view of Georgetown.

But all that new space is necessary for the quickly expanding firm. Last year, Snagajob grew its employee base by about 60 percent. Some of that growth came from its acquisition of PeopleMatter, an HR software business that aided employers in hiring, screening and managing employees.

This year, Snagajob is planning to grow its D.C.-area staff by about 50 percent. Many of those new employees will work in sales and sales management, account management, marketing and data science, the company said.

Currently, the tech firm employs about 450 “Snaggers” across its offices in Rosslyn; Richmond; Oakland, California and Charleston, South Carolina.

“Selecting an office location is really about choosing a community to be a part of,” said Viyas Sundaram, Snagajob’s Chief Revenue Officer, in a statement. “Arlington, and the larger D.C. metro area, has a thriving startup and tech community that we are excited to be a part of and support. I am looking forward to aggressively growing our team here to complement our other offices as we expand our footprint nationally.”

Check out some more photos of Snagajob’s new Rosslyn offices below.

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Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow.com, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups and their founders, plus other local technology happenings. The Ground Floor, Monday’s office space for young companies in Rosslyn, is now open. The Metro-accessible space features a 5,000-square-foot common area that includes a kitchen, lounge area, collaborative meeting spaces, and a stage for formal presentations.

Like a lot of college students, Michael Meyers was strapped for cash. Like, really strapped for cash, even gas money. He was not, however, short on ambition, ingeniousness or energy. Put those together — the need for funds plus the determination to earn it — and you get a new business.

In this case, it’s the Arlington-based sharing economy platform called Tradeversity.

“The problem I had wasn’t revolutionary by any means,” Meyers admitted. “As a student covering my college expenses I was just trying to sell items around my apartment.”

At the time, in 2013, Meyers was studying marketing and finance at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. The Northern Virginia native was unfamiliar with neighborhoods off campus so he eschewed posting on Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace which might have him delivering to sketchy or distant neighborhoods, and Marketplace listings tend to get buried quickly. He also learned that shipping costs incurred with a sale on eBay posts were prohibitive.

His inventory at the time included textbooks, furniture and especially backpacks — his father is a rep for Jansport. In short, he needed an efficient way to list his merchandise to a specific market, ideally those nearby with an SC.edu address.

“I discovered there was no simple, effective, safe way to sell my stuff,” he said.

And when you find a niche, what’s an ambitious marketing and finance major to do but to fill it?

Things moved fast for Meyers, who credits a superb support system for innovators and entrepreneurs at his university: Incubators, mentors and others who “helped me embrace the idea of starting a business in school. You have so many resources surrounding you.”

A beta test at USC was a strong indicator that he was onto something. Not only did it catch on with his own cohort, suddenly students at other universities were asking, When is Tradeversity coming to our school?

The timeline: Inception in 2013; developing the concept immediately after graduating in December 2014; launching the platform in 2015.

He is finding similar entrepreneurial support at his new offices at Crystal City’s 1776 startup incubator. In the last month or so since signing on, Meyers said he’s found new mentors “who have been very generous with their time. They have a strong understanding of how to build a technology company.”

The experience has been similar at Crystal City’s WeLive/WeWork innovation hub. Those are the locations, in addition to an office at the USC/Cola Technology Incubator, where the staff of three full-time employees and the various part-time and contract employees work on perfecting the platform.

The Arlington locations, he said, “have been extremely supportive and helpful and opened us up to a vast network of mentors, educational opportunities and talent. We’ve also been working with Tara Silver and her [marketing] group SilverStrategy as well.”

Meyers said he developed the idea on a bootstrap basis. “I put everything I had into the company,” he said. “You can imagine that if I was trying to sell backpacks to cover the cost of college, my [investment] wasn’t very much.”

A huge financial and inspirational windfall arrived when Tradeversity won the Proving Ground 2014 “big pitch” competition at USC, with a $20,000 prize. That and a few grants got them through and recently Meyers closed his first angel round, raising, he said, more than $400,000.

That funding will go into all the elements of the business, from design and coding to marketing and hiring more staff. He hopes to fill five to eight full-time spots in the next 12 months.

The service is live and open at 20 universities — an .edu address is required to open an account — but he said there are clients at “more than 200 additional schools” who have opened accounts. “That’s our roadmap for future launches,” he said. “We launch based on where the orders are coming from anyway.”

Tradeversity avoids the cumbersome paperwork involved in becoming an official school vendor — the school usually wants a cut of sales — but some university officials have expressed branding Tradeversity’s service in their own name, a private label as it were, and Meyers is in talks with representatives about that concept.

Licensing may be a viable revenue stream in the future. Meyers is exploring other monetization opportunities that take advantage of cash sales going down in college residence halls. “It’s very difficult when you have a hyper-localized marketplace unless you control the transaction from start to finish,” he said.

But he’ll figure it out. He did it once, he can do it again.