Seven entrepreneurs went head-to-head during a recent Green Bay pitch competition in hopes of landing a $1 million investment from TitletownTech.
The venture capital firm, an effort of the Green Bay Packers and Microsoft, last week held its Startup Draft Combine to showcase the startups hand-picked to participate in the national competition.
Company leaders pitched their innovations on Thursday, and the winner will be announced April 24 ahead of the NFL Draft, also happening in Green Bay this year. The winner will be invited on stage to be part of the NFL Draft broadcast that weekend, organizers said.
TitletownTech Managing Director Craig Dickman says the competition offers a chance to highlight Green Bay on the national stage.
“What we want to show you is innovation,” he said before last week’s pitches. “What we want to show you is amazing founders solving really important problems that matter to the world.”
- Rajan Kumar, founder and CEO of Indiana’s Ateios Systems, said his team is creating “the fastest, lowest cost and cleanest” manufacturing platform for building batteries. He argued the current approach to making batteries is too slow, expensive and environmentally harmful to meet future demand.
By slimming down production to a smaller operation, the company boasts a 50% cost reduction while improving energy density and cutting out toxic chemicals such as PFAS. It’s first targeting batteries for consumer electronics, which Kumar says will help the business “improve margins, improve yield, put us in a better position to tackle” the electric vehicle market.
- Rachelle Turiello, co-founder and CEO of Virginia-based Avant Genomics, touted the company’s automated platform for preparing tests for blood-based cancer detection in a laboratory setting. It’s focused on the “large and growing” liquid biopsy market, which currently has no automated options for sample preparation, Turiello said.
“It is two times faster than the current alternative, and requires 98% fewer consumables,” she said. “But for our customers, the laboratories, what makes them excited is the 84% reduction in cost.”
Avant Genomics is currently raising a target $3 million in a seed funding round and aims to close by July.
- Meanwhile, CubeNexus founder and CEO Steven Brandt said his company aims to “bring context to spatial data” to make it more comprehensible to AI systems. That includes readings from sensors used across various industries like aviation and energy, such as radio frequencies or laser measurements.
The co-founders, both U.S. Air Force veterans, saw the need for such technology while deployed in Europe and the Middle East, Brandt said last week.
“Can I just have a button to answer simple questions about where and when I can make a decision, should I send a team in here? Should I drop a weapon here? That is why we built CubeNexus,” he said. “And we realized as we explored the industry that the commercial sector faces this problem as well.”
CubeNexus is raising a $650,000 seed round with $400,00 already committed.
- Anthony Molzahn, CEO of North Dakota-based devii, said the company’s technology helps software developers “write better code faster.” He noted the average smartphone app takes about 2,000 hours to develop, with about half of that time dedicated to virtual “piping” for data transmission.
“We have whittled that 1,000 hours down to a single click,” he said, adding “our technology is uniquely positioned to oversee and orchestrate entire data centers.”
- Pat O’Donnell, CEO of Pennsylvania-based Shelfmark, said the company’s AI inspection system aims to help manufacturing businesses become more profitable and effective. He noted many of the middle-market companies the startup is targeting “can’t find labor to save their lives” while still manually inspecting all the products they make.
“These manufacturers want to automate,” he said. “They want to automate things like visual inspection, rote tasks that they don’t want people on their staff to be doing when they come in every day to the shop.”
- SpaceRake, a Massachusetts company with a laser-based communication system, was represented by CEO Weston Marlow and Chief Product Officer Jordan Wachs. The startup’s technology has applications for satellites and drones, they explained, and is unaffected by radio jamming interference.
“The writing’s on the wall that highly connected, small and dynamic systems — whether they’re satellites, or they’re drones or robots, or they’re embedded in your car or they’re embedded in an industrial process somewhere, are going to change the way the world works in the near future,” Wachs said.
He referenced the impact of Ukraine’s drone fleet in the ongoing conflict with Russia, noting its drones are “more than twice as impactful” as the rest of its weapons combined, adding “this is just starting to scratch the surface.”
- Finally, the leaders of a startup called Ubicept highlighted the company’s approach to advanced image data processing, which aims to improve camera performance even in poor lighting. The company has a presence in both Massachusetts and Madison, where several of its engineers are located.
Co-founder Tristan Swedish said AI has led to major improvements in image processing, but if it’s fed poor quality data, there’s only so much it can do.
“The key is not to improve your AI system to be able to handle poor-quality data, it’s actually to improve data at the source,” he said, adding “Ubicept unlocks the full potential of image sensors.”
See an earlier story on the competition and listen to a recent podcast with Dickman.
