eLaunchpad Announces First Portfolio Company

B2B Marketplace for Flooring Industry

May 11, 2000, Atlanta,GA - eLaunchpad, Inc. announces its first portfolio company, SurfaceExchange.com, Inc., a business-to-business enterprise exchange for the flooring industry. eLaunchpad, founded and managed by Palaniswamy “Raj” Rajan and Jay Chaudhry, is a business launching service, providing the environment, the expertise and the funding to launch Internet infrastructure companies.

eLaunchpad will provide seed funding, product development support and operational services to SurfaceExchange. SurfaceExchange.com will be an information, goods and services exchange site between floor covering specialty stores and manufacturers. The trade publication Floor Covering Weekly estimates last year’s business-to-business sales in the floor covering industry to be $17.8 billion.

”We chose SurfaceExchange because it addresses a large market with many buyers and sellers and recognized inefficiencies in the distribution channel”, said Jay Chaudhry, co-founder and Chairman of eLaunchpad. “With our experience in the business to-business e-commerce channel, we can guide the positioning to dominate this untapped market.”

SurfaceExchange will address the needs of floor covering manufacturers by providing a marketplace for the full range of flooring goods. Retailers, homebuilders and distributors can search for products based on specifications or access an entire on-line catalogue. SurfaceExchange is working with several major carpet and flooring manufacturers to supply products to the SurfaceExchange marketplace.

“Small to medium retailers, which account for about half of the $20 billion retail market, have limits on the amount of inventory they can carry and display,” said Manish Gupta, founder and CEO of SurfaceExchange. “SurfaceExchange broadens the retailers’ offerings to their customers while also providing an additional sales channel for the manufacturers.”

The SurfaceExchange team is relocating from the Washington D.C. area to Atlanta to launch SurfaceExchange through eLaunchpad. “We have the prototype and the domain knowledge, but require the technical, marketing and operational expertise to build this in Internet time," said Gupta. "We will benefit from eLaunchpad’s expertise in rapid development and deployment of our marketplace.”

About eLaunchpad's founders
Jay Chaudhry serves as co-founder and Chairman of eLaunchpad, providing experience to Internet start-ups in building, growing and managing their business. He is founder or co-founder of SecureIT, an enterprise security services company and now part of Verisign, Air2Web, a wireless infrastructure developer and CoreHarbor, an e-procurement Internet company. In addition, Chaudhry serves on the Boards of numerous technology companies and is an Angel Investor. He is co-founder and current President of TiE Atlanta. Chaudhry also co-founded the Atlanta CEO High Tech Council. Prior to forming SecureIT, Chaudhry served as Senior Vice President of Marketing and Business Development of IQ Software, a provider of data warehousing tools. At Unisys, he was Vice President of Worldwide Software Sales and Marketing. He held a variety of marketing and sales positions with NCR and IBM. Chaudhry holds an MBA with marketing specialization, an MS in Computer Engineering and an MS in Engineering Management from University of Cincinnati.

Palaniswamy “Raj” Rajan is the co-founder of eLaunchpad and serves as President and CEO. He also brings a history of starting and building successful companies in Internet time to the venture. Raj is co-founder of VerticalOne, a content personalization service that is now a division of S1 Corporation, an internet financial services company. He founded and served as Chairman of ResourcIS, a firm providing IT personnel to technology start-ups, and Emerald Systems, a technology consulting firm specializing in object oriented programming. Raj is the co-founder of the Atlanta CEO High Tech Council and TiE, The IndUS Entreprenurs, a national organization mentoring to entrepreneurs. Raj holds a BS in Computer Engineering and an MS in Computer Science from the Florida Institute of Technology.

About eLaunchpad
eLaunchpad implements best practices for ideas, products and technology to compress the stages of development and introduces companies into the market at a much quicker pace than traditional incubators. eLaunchpad focuses on e-frastructure companies in the business-to-business and wireless space and developers of Internet core technologies. Companies accepted into the eLaunchpad center are targeted to generate revenue in one year and become profitable by the second year. The company is located at 1050 Crown Pointe Parkway, Suite 1700, Atlanta, GA 30338 and on the web at elaunchpad.com.

For additional information , contact Stan Samples at 770.481.2107 or at ssamples@elaunchpad.com.