We just received a press release from Invest Nebraska, Inc. on a story we covered in June thanks to it breaking in the Twittersphere: CrowdPicks Secures its First Investment, Receives Funding from Invest Nebraska.

The press release tells why CrowdPicks was chosen as well as what they plan to do with the investment.

Congrats to Jeff, Cassius and the rest of the team! We’re excited to follow your progress.

Invest Nebraska Inc, the Nebraska venture development organization that accelerates the progress of high growth early-stage businesses, announces that Omaha based business, CrowdPicks, is the first Nebraska company to receive an Operational Assistance investment. CrowdPicks, located in the Scott Technology Center in Omaha, has developed an online platform to harness “collective intellect” from large numbers of individuals with specialized interests and form them into an accurate prediction of a future event. The platform utilizes an online community to gather user-generated predictions and leverages powerful algorithms to filter those down to an expert group.

Thanks to our sponsor

Become an SPN sponsor »
Meet our sponsors »

“We are excited about the scientific model used by this business,” said Dan Hoffman, Executive Director of Invest Nebraska. “CrowdPicks is one of many homegrown Nebraska based businesses that has the potential to attract venture capital to this state,” he added.

CrowdPicks intends to use the investment to complete two key milestones. The first is completing programming code for subscriptions to the CrowdPicks.com website, which will result in the site generating revenue. The second is the development of third-party applications that will allow CrowdPicks to link its services to social networks such as Facebook or Myspace. The Operational Assistance investment enables CrowdPicks to hire a technology team led by Jeremy Heeg. Jeremy is a native of Aurora, Nebraska .

“This operational assistance will allow us to achieve the key milestones needed to grow our business and attract growth capital in the future,” said Jeff Murnane, President of CrowdPicks.

The Operational Assistance Program is designed to spark angel and venture capital investment throughout the state of Nebraska. To accomplish this goal, the program is focused on helping companies that have demonstrated potential to attract angel investors (high net worth individuals) or venture capital in order to become truly ready to attract major capital investments. For more information on the Operational Assistance Program, visit www.investnebraska.com.