The 4th annual Techstars Startup Week Dayton will be June 3-7, and we want to know which topics and speakers you want to hear!
Basecamp will once again be at the Steam Plant, located at 617 E. 3rd St. in downtown Dayton.
The former Dayton Power & Light steam generation facility opened in the early 20th century and operated until the mid-1980s. Its new owners have tapped that historic appeal and renovated the building into a full-service event space which first served as Dayton Startup Week base camp in 2018.
Startup Week brings together the thinkers, dreamers, doers, makers, entrepreneurs around cups of coffee, pints of beer, and small stages spaced throughout local establishments. All experiences are welcome — whether you’re a seasoned entrepreneur or new to the community, there is space for you to jump in.
In past years, we’ve heard from tech companies to marketing experts, venture capitalists to local coffee roasters.
This year, we’re planning sessions on business elements like marketing, sales, capital, and branding, as well as targeted sessions for medtech, defense, food, and artist entrepreneurs.
Connect and collaborate during this week of diverse speakers and workshops. Nominate a speaker or topic you want to discuss here!
Dayton’s startup ecosystem continues to grow, and we’re excited to see what’s in store for these companies in the new year!
With intense interest from military officials in Battle Sight’s reusable infrared crayon, founder Nick Ripplinger drove to New York last fall to bring home the workings of a closed candle factory. He’s retrofitting the equipment to ramp up production of the crayons to begin filling significant anticipated spring orders.
Founder Patty Vanderburgh pitched her new, patented athletic outerwear pants at our September edition of Early Risers. Less than three months later, nearly 75 percent of the pants produced in her first run had already sold.
Adyptation, which builds software to read sensor data to help patients manage chronic pain, is the first Dayton company to land a spot in the prestigious OCEAN Accelerator program in neighboring Cincinnati. Ryan Jankord and his cofounder will be part of the program’s fifth cohort, which kicks off this month. They’ll end the program with a guaranteed $50K investment.
Founder Will Foster and head chef Ben Kalis pitched their prepped-meal company at our August Early Risers. Shortly after, they landed an investor, allowing Ben to quit his day job and focus on Picnk full-time. They ended 2018 with record sales, a large new account, and a lead on a larger kitchen.
Mick Hopkins, a trauma nurse with 20+ years of experience, already has dozens of U.S. patents for three different syringes designed to reduce false positive in drawing blood cultures, ease the delivery of powder vaccines, and speed delivery of vital cardiac medicines. He’s pursuing international patents, which will enable him to license and sell the tech across the world.
Founder Arielle Jordan is working to roll out an updated user interface for her social media network in the next few weeks. Curafied enables users to save and store links across the web, and gives content providers the chance to create exclusive content for their followers.
SpinTech makes smart tools to create aerospace parts. It is wrapping up a huge funding round. Stay tuned!
This “sauce for every meal” — a secret recipe passed to veteran founder Charlynda Scales by her veteran grandfather Charlie “Mutt” Ferrell Jr. — will hit shelves in an estimated 60 Kroger stores across Dayton and Cincinnati this spring, as well as shelves across Dayton’s Dorothy Lane Markets just in time for Super Bowl Sunday.
Tangram Flex develops software to provide cyber resilience to systems used in aircraft, missiles, and many other U.S. defense systems. Last month, the Galois, Inc. spinoff announced a $4.5 million investment from Hale Capital Partners.
Former Kroger executives David Curtain and Frans Falize are taking their grocery expertise and launching Food Forest, a mobile app designed to provide affordable access to healthy food to the 24 million people in the U.S. who live in food deserts. They’re looking to pilot the app in a Cincinnati neighborhood this spring.
Dayton-based National Black Business Directory (NBBD) recently announced its acquisition of BLVCK, an app that pulls together top news from 13 prominent media outlets that serve the black community.
The app, created in Texas by self-taught developer and family man Eric Townsend, hit #27 in the Apple App Store’s news category rankings a mere two days after it launched. It now boasts 10K+ users.
The acquisition wraps up a year of exciting new partnerships, and sets the stage for the National Black Business Directory’s 2019 goals, founder and CEO Nate Dillard said.
NBBD is a business development platform that seeks to “improve the economic and social status of the black community” by empowering black businesses, according to its mission statement. The organization offers services ranging from business plan assistance to web development to black founders and business owners.
In its quest to become the “official online networking platform for Black Business Excellence,” the organization also has a media arm — which is where BLVCK comes in, Nate said.
“A media app fits perfectly in our platform,” Nate said. “Our community wants positive news out there.”
This desire to source positive news stories from within the black community is the same motivation that drove Eric to build the app in the first place, he told Launch DFW’s startup blog last year. Main stream coverage of tragedies within the community pushed members to be more informed than ever — but not just about the negatives, he said.
Among the more than a dozen black news outlets that the BLVCK app consolidates for users are BET, Ebony Magazine, The Root and Blavity. Eric also built a discussion platform into the app so users can connect around the stories they’re reading.
Based on the headline clicks and chats generated around particular stories, Eric can see that users are hungry for “intellectual and uplifting content,” Nate said. NBBD will use the app to tell the stories of black professionals, philanthropists and entrepreneurs “doing really positive things,” he added.
This focus for the app helped Nate beat out other offers from entities that saw it as a potential gossip outlet, he said. He initially reached out to Eric to propose a partnership before ultimately pulling together investors, and a few of his own dollars, to make the cash offer. FJS Capital Management, the finance arm of NBBD, managed the acquisition, he said.
“It’s hard to let it go, but I can’t wait to see what’s in the future for BLVCK under new leadership,” Eric said in a press release.
Closing on the deal is a great way to close out 2018, a year that also saw NBBD partner with Tech Stars to help them increase the diversity and inclusion on their programs, Nate said.
In 2019, look for the facelift of BLVCK — Nate is inspired by what Bloomberg has done in merging business news media with business services — as well as news from $GUAP Coin, NBBD’s black women-owned cryptocurrency partner, he said.
For more information on the National Black Business Directory, visit them here.
Want to see your favorite Dayton startup snag the Soin Award for Innovation — & the associated $25K in funding — in 2019?
Encourage the founder you know to apply by 4:30pm, Feb. 8!
The Soin Award is designed to identify, honor and financially assist a Dayton region company demonstrating the community’s historical innovative and entrepreneurial spirit. The award recipient will showcase a new or pending product or service with the ability to sustain longterm growth for the company, increase local employment and help create economic prosperity in the region.
The award’s sponsors include Soin LLC, the Rajesh K. Soin family, the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce, CareWorks and Cox Media. The Soin family and the Chamber have partnered to offer the annual innovation award since 2007.
“The Dayton area has a long history of innovation and discovery. We must continue to encourage our local entrepreneurs to build on this and create new enterprises, jobs and additional opportunities for this region,” Soin International Chariman and CEO Rajesh Soin said in a press release. “On behalf of the Soin Family, I am proud to support this annual award that recognizes the accomplishments of these individuals and businesses.”
The Chamber’s Education and Public Improvement Foundation (EPI Foundation) will present the 2019 award at the organization’s annual meeting in April 2019.
Last year, Dayton startup Battle Sight Technologies won the 2018 Soin Award for Innovation for their chemiluminescent writing tool — essentially an infrared glow stick that writes like a crayon to enable soldiers to communicate on the battlefield via messages only visible through night vision goggles.
“Winning the Soin award opened doors we could have never planned for,” Battle Sight Technologies cofounder Nick Ripplinger said in a press release. “Through the award and the publicity that comes with the Soin Award, we were contacted by countless organizations and individuals offering a variety of assistance to help us grow.”
Other past award winners include Mound Laser and Photonics Center, Inc., IYA Technologies, Composite Advantage, Commuter Advertising, NanoSperse, UDECX, AAA Wastewater, NONA Composites, Redwall Technologies and Obi / DESiN LLC.
Representatives of the region’s business and academic leaders will join EPI Foundation board members on the selection committee.
David Harper began picking locks at age 14.
For his magic show, of course.
Today, David’s first lock picking product, SWICK — The World’s Most Versatile Pick, is 100+ percent funded on Kickstarter, with still nearly two weeks to go.
David’s love for magic began in 1978, at age 10. He performed his first on-stage magic show at age 14, and became interested in escapology. He set off in the footsteps of Harry Houdini and began studying lock mechanisms.
Later the same year, his father took him to visit a pair of locksmithing brothers he knew.
“They were patronizing,” David recalled. “They handed me a master padlock and told me to pick it and come back.”
David had the lock picked before he hit the door.
“It turned out I was better at picking locks than they were,” he said with a laugh.
It worked out for the best — the brothers wanted to focus on car alarm installation, so they set David up with their mother as his driver and sent him out to handle all their lockout service calls.
By 1998, David — known as David Storm in the magic and lock picking communities — had launched Picklocks.com, a company specializing in lock picking tutorials. He sold his first how-to on DVD, but had people call to request it on VHS.
He credits his father for his entrepreneur hustle. A tool and die man by trade, his father quit his day job to launch his own sign-making company, Harper Custom Advertising. His father lettered most of the police cars in the Dayton area at the time, he said, including the car of an area sheriff, who handcuffed David in his cruiser after his father bragged that he could get out of the cuffs. David used the trusty barrette he kept tucked under the Levi Strauss label on his jeans to get out of the cuffs — the defect he exploited to get out of the cruiser has since been fixed, he said with a laugh.
David’s original Picklocks.com audience was locksmiths, but now his larger audience is locksport — men & women who gather to pick locks for sport following set rules and a creed to never pick locks without permission. He also still has a steady audience in the magician community, he said.
Picklocks.com was full-time for awhile. He also had an IT day job for a time, and briefly moved to Zanesville to open and run a wilderness survival school and kayak livery. Family brought him back to Dayton — he’s excited to be near his 2-year-old granddaughter and 6-month-old grandson, a landscaper by day and lock-picking magician by night.
He began dreaming up the folding jackknife-style pick that would become SWICK in 2008. Then a year ago, in 2017, he discovered Proto BuildBar.
He started with TinkerCad, then worked his way toward more sophisticated modeling software, and ultimately began printing prototypes at the public maker space and bar.
“I knew nothing about 3D modeling,” he said. “But Proto became my stomping ground last winter.”
Today, SWICK, patent pending, is the “Swiss army knife” of lock picks, David said.
It features four tension wrenches to the average tool’s one; spaces for 12 blades — you choose from about three dozen designed by an engineer with TOOOL, The Open Organization Of Lockpickers international locksport community — to the average tool’s six; and a spot to keep shims or key extractors.
“I get very intensely into things, learn it and move on,” David said. “But with lock picking, every lock is a puzzle, each is unique and different.”
SWICK does everything he wanted in a tool for the hobby that has held his interest through the years, he said.
Molds are ready to be filled, blades to be cut, pieces to be assembled as soon as the Kickstarter wraps up, he said. He’ll work to market the product to a larger audience — perhaps get sales rep for the lock smithing community — then he’ll get to work on some other ideas he has for the lock picking arena.
“Dayton had the most patents per capita of the US at one time,” David said, “I feel I’m in good company inventing here.”
Dayton entrepreneur Ryan Jankord and his company Adyptation will be representing Dayton in Cincinnati next year as one of 10 members of the fifth cohort of the high-tech, faith-based OCEAN accelerator program.
Adyptation is the first Dayton company accepted for OCEAN’s prestigious program, which runs January through May. When each company graduates the accelerator, it receives $50K in seed money in the form of a convertible note.
“It’s a fantastic opportunity, we’re really excited,” Ryan said.
Adyptation builds software to help individuals and their doctors manage chronic illness by analyzing data collected by various kinds of wearable sensors. They’re targeting holistic health practitioners and direct care providers to use the tech to help individuals understand their overall health in order to identify triggers.
OCEAN is a faith-backed accelerator — an organization “where faith and entrepreneurship intersect,” states its website.
The accelerator is open to everyone, and the entrepreneurs accepted into the program will have challenging conversations about their core missions, OCEAN CEO Scott Weiss told the Dayton Tech Guide previously. The accelerator curriculum also focuses on investor readiness, value proposition design, and revenue assumptions.
This faith-based component appeals to Ryan.
“”They’re really intentional about developing the leadership of the people they’re working with in cohorts,” he said.
OCEAN’s leaders ask how they can develop the business leaders to have integrity and operate their businesses in a way that is valuable to others, their employees, customers, neighbors, he continued.
“That very much aligns with our values as a company and what we want to accomplish and do,” Ryan said. “We need to know how to operate, build the business, communicate to others, but also we need to be stewards of this company, this opportunity we’re provided.”
On average, between 150 & 200 startups apply each year. Of the 40 companies selected for the last four years of cohorts, about one third have been international, one third have been from the Cincinnati region, and another third have been from elsewhere in the US, including Georgia, New York, California & Washington, D.C.
About two thirds of those companies remain in Cincinnati after the accelerator is finished.
Additionally, about 60 percent of OCEAN accelerator alumni successfully raise money after the program — the average raise is $700K.
Ryan is most excited to be working full-time with his cofounder to move the business forward, and to be part of the cohort experience, surrounded by other founders experiencing similar struggles who can share, encourage and learn from one another, he said.
This acceptance into the OCEAN accelerator is also an important validation of Adyptation’s potential, he said.
“We are where we are because of the support of the Air Force Research Lab and other government and military agencies,” he said. “But this is the first validation outside the military, and we’re very excited.”
6D.ai’s new 3D Reality Platform offers real-time reconstruction of the world using only a smartphone camera.
Dayton Startup Mile Two’s Ontario Britton showcased the cutting-edge abilities of the platform in a short AR game called “Lil’ Dirt Bikers” — via your phone, watch bobbleheads on dirt bikes drive around the objects on your desk or counter until they tip over and explode into fireballs.
A clip of Mile Two’s work appeared in a sizzle reel for 6D.ai that debuted last month at TechCrunch’s AR/VR conference in LA.
6D.ai is “the hottest AR startup in San Francisco right now,” Ontario said.
To showcase their beta — the 6D reality platform enables virtual subjects to go behind and around objects found in the real environment — they asked members of the developer community, including Mile Two, to pitch ideas of ways to demo their software.
Ontario pitched several ideas for apps, including to design and furnish architectural spaces, to interact with museum exhibits in fine details and to virtually flood outdoor spaces (like you’ll see in the AR game they recently developed for the city of Fairborn.)
At the last minute, he threw in the pitch for “Lil’ Dirt Bikers.”
“I put in a chunk of time on a lot of pitches, and they picked the five-minute after thought,” he said with a laugh.
6D.ai awarded small grants to the selected companies to fully develop their app ideas.
A month later, Mile Two’s “Lil’ Dirt Bikers” became one of only three demos from development companies selected for the company’s sizzle reel, which debuted at the 2018 Tech Crunch AR/VR conference.
In doing so, Mile Two was also tapped as a referring partner for 6D.ai — they build the platform, but when people come forward with ideas to build something using that platform, 6D.ai recommends software development companies, including Mile Two, to implement those ideas.
Requests for work have already started, Ontario added.
6D in the software developer world means six degrees of freedom — three degrees of movement, but also three degrees of rotation, he said.
Another idea Ontario pitched for the platform was a slinky that could be virtually scaled up to step down building rooftops along Dayton’s skyline. He’s still hoping that will be accepted for development for a future sizzle reel.
In addition to enabling digital assets to move around and behind objects, the 6D.ai platform also remembers the locations of those objects for weeks, months and years. Apps built on the platform crowdsource three-dimensional data in the background of the user’s device, creating real-time maps that are uploaded to the Cloud. Apps can “automatically expand the map beyond what the user’s camera sees in any location that has been previously visited by any 6D-based app,” the website states.
For more info on the 6D platform, click here. To watch Ontario’s “Lil’ Dirt Bikers” and the other 6D demos, click here.
Do you know a motivated Millennial entrepreneur running a business or organization with a community-minded mission?
Nominate them for the new 2019 Spark Award from the Better Business Bureau Serving Dayton and the Miami Valley.
The Spark Award began in Columbus two years ago, BBB Dayton president & CEO John North said. The Dayton chapter is excited to roll it out locally in 2019.
“There is no better place than the land of innovation to be recognizing young entrepreneurs for what they’re doing to keep Dayton relevant as we move into a new decade,” he said.
A volunteer panel composed of entrepreneurs and community leaders will select the 2019 class of three Spark Award winners. They are looking for “highly ethical business men and women who are giving back to their community and employees and making a difference for their customers,” John said.
Judges will consider character, culture & community — leaders must be open to new ideas, cultivate an honest and transparent atmosphere, and reinvest or volunteer in their communities.
“We’re looking for transformative leadership, individuals who unite teams while steering performance toward the mission — a traditional style of Miami Valley entrepreneurs over the years who have enthusiastically given back to the community,” he said.
Entrepreneurs are eligible to apply for any of the BBB’s Eclipse Integrity awards. The new Spark Award will specifically recognize Millennials.
“Millennials are coming of age,” John said. “They have the entrepreneurial spirit like no other generation before them, and they’re doing a lot of great work in our community specifically. This is a chance to showcase their work and offer them support and publicity.”
Nominations must be submitted by March 1. Nominated companies will then have until April 1 to complete their entries. Organizations may self-nominate.
For more information, visit https://www.bbb.org/dayton/programs-services/spark-award-2018.
Want to get your startup in front of Silicon Valley VCs?
Apply to exhibit at Startup Grind’s Global Conference, Feb. 12-13, 2019.
Startups selected to exhibit at the Startup Grind Global conference gain exposure to the conference’s 8K+ attendees & Startup Grind’s 1M+ social media followers.
The conference offers two startup categories: Grind, for startups who have raised less than $3M in seed funding, and Growth, for startups who have raised $3M+ in seed funding.
Growth startups & the top 50 Grind startups are also tapped for Startup Grind’s Accelerate program, in which Startup Grind facilitates investor meetings, a mainstage pitch opportunity, and special access to the Startup Grind partner network.
Startup Grind Dayton director, and Startup Grind Community Manager of the Americas, Candace Dalmagne-Rouge wants to see Dayton companies play on this global stage.
“We’ve got to connect Dayton to these national and international opportunities,” she said. “I want to get Dayton out of Dayton, we shouldn’t be scared.”
To date, 850 startups from 42 countries have been selected to exhibit at the Startup Grind Global Conference.
This year’s conference will feature six stages with sessions featuring leaders of and investors in today’s hottest startups including LinkedIn, AirBnB, Brandless, Airtable, Lyft, Y Combinator, Zip Recruiter, Pinterest & Square.
For more information, visit https://www.startupgrind.com/conference/.
Four University of Dayton Engineering students were named University Innovation Fellows last week by The Stanford University Hasso Plattner Institute of Design.
The global fellows program empowers student leaders to engage peers in innovative, creative & entrepreneurial endeavors in order to develop the design-centered mindset required to solve 21st century challenges, according to the program website.
Jennifer Winn, Sydney Szafarski, Ian Sikora and Evan Krimpenfort are among 358 students from 96 higher education institutions in 16 countries named to the latest class of Innovation Fellows, and the fourth group of UD students tapped for the program.
The cohort wants to create a UD course in innovation, entrepreneurship and design, and an annual “design-a-thon,” both of which will be open to students across all majors. They also want to bring an innovative- and entrepreneurship-focused TedX event to campus, according to UD’s website.
Prior Fellows cohorts have worked to better coordinate collaboration in the UD School of Engineering’s Kettering Labs, develop a student-run project incubator, curate a database of innovators students can tap for mentorship, develop an entrepreneurship course for freshmen, establish and engineering & innovation learning living community, and incorporate art into engineering programs.
For more information on UD’s work to instill an entrepreneurial mindset in its students, click here.
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