Flashpoint at Georgia Tech, a management and education program that works closely with founders to create companies, is now accepting applications for its Fall 2014 Batch.

The program welcomes all students or faculty as potential founders and is designed to help them build startups with authentic demand, reduced risks, lower costs, and a better chance of success.

"You emerge from Flashpoint with a new set of skills,” said Joe Reger, a Tech alumnus and chief technology officer of Springbot who has participated in Flashpoint. “No matter what startup you do in the future, you're going to be able to apply this new way of working with the world to the way you solve problems."

Since it began in 2012, Flashpoint has developed a reputation for producing successful startups. Its companies have attracted nearly $65 million in commitments from angels and investors including ff Venture Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Andreesen Horowitz, Sigma Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, and New World Ventures. 

One recent graduate, an enterprise security platform called Ionic Security, completed a $25.5 million round of investment in February, including investments from Google Ventures and Jafco Ventures.

Such investments are just one benefit of Flashpoint participation. 

“Flashpoint saved me a year of time and millions of dollars in development costs,” said Fred Blumer, founder and chief executive officer of Vehcon.

Flashpoint uses an approach it calls “startup engineering,” a concept developed by Merrick Furst, Flashpoint founder and a professor in the School of Computer Science.

“Startup Engineering is a framework that identifies authentic demand and builds scalable companies to satisfy it,” Furst said.

Startup engineers take a “problem first” approach to identifying an issue in a prospective customer’s life. They generate and test theories about customer improvement goals and explore constraints that prevent existing solutions from meeting them.

“The result of this work is better startups that move faster,” Furst said. 

Flashpoint’s Fall 2014 Batch will begin in October and last about four months. Applications submitted by Friday, Aug. 15, will be considered for the first interview round in late August. For more information, visit www.flashpointgt.com/apply.