With $10,000 up for grabs, these six startups will need to wow the judges of this year's Innov865 Startup Day.
On Tuesday, Knoxville entrepreneurs will pitch their businesses to a panel of judges comprised of venture capitalists, industry leaders and angel investors. A winner will be picked in October.
The event at Mill & Mine is a part of Innov865 Week, which brings together startups throughout East Tennessee.
Let's meet the startups! These Q&As have been edited for length and clarity.
Your company elevator pitch: Primeaux, (pronounced Pree-moh) is a small manufacturer of high-end cutlery and cookware. Our goal is to elevate the culinary experience by creating well-constructed, beautifully designed kitchen cutlery and cookware. Handcrafted in downtown Knoxville, our products are for everyone from the professional chef to the home cook, anyone who truly appreciates the value of a good tool and the experience of using finely crafted objects.
Our mission at Primeaux is to not only make the finest cutlery and cookware in the world but to create memories that make family heirlooms, creating objects that transcend their utility. As makers, artists and designers, we have spent years developing these pieces, seeking out the finest materials available and refining our craft. It is our job to honor the legacy of the work we put into the world. Our aim is to elevate your experience in the kitchen and inspire great memories for years to come.
What’s been your entrepreneurial journey so far? Primeaux was born, like many great startups, in the garage. Founder, John Phillips, dissatisfied with the market offering for fine cutlery and cookware, set out to scratch his own itch, which led to an incredible journey.
Since 2019, John's work has appeared in bestselling cookbooks, and magazines, and he can even be seen winning History's "Forged in Fire." In 2022, John took the leap to brick and mortar, moving out of the garage and with his team, developing proprietary manufacturing technology and processes for a new generation of cookware and cutlery.
How would you describe the current state of your company? We are still a new company. We just released the first two pieces from our growing collection of fine culinary knives in August, and we will be releasing our cookware in 2023.
What’s the next big challenge for your company, and what do you need to overcome it? Continuing to scale production, while meeting cash flow needs, all while sourcing the finest materials and building a new audience. As a new company, there is lot to do.
What’s your vision for what your company will look like in two years? In two years, we hope to have tripled our production capacity and introduced the new cookware line that has been in development since 2018.
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Founder/CEO: Femeika ‘Meik’ Elliott
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Year founded: Meik Meals in 2019 and the Lotus Program in 2021
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Number of employees: 1, in addition to community birth worker partnerships
Your company elevator pitch: The Lotus Program, a post-birth meal service, is an auxiliary of Meik Meals, LLC. Our program aims to nourish mothers post-birth to include those mothers recovering from child loss as we prioritize mental and emotional health while decreasing maternal health disparities and postpartum depression.
What’s been your entrepreneurial journey so far? Meik Meals started as a meal preparation and catering company, but we realized we had other gifts and skillsets to share with the city. Rebranding as a multipurpose food education brand, we educate community on all things food and health - physically, mentally, spiritually, emotionally - by offering holistic alternatives, workshops and speaking engagements.
Catering currently is closed, as we are booked for exclusive community events preserving the exclusivity of our food creations. Pivoting into the maternal health sector has been a blessing as we have pioneered our own lane in the city based off our not only our personal experience but other women as well, birthing the Lotus Program. In all, this journey has been a blast as we love the freedom and flexibility of being in the entrepreneurial world.
How would you describe the current state of your company? We are in the early stages of being a startup as we look to hire two creative chefs by the end of 2023.
What’s the next big challenge for your company, and what do you need to overcome it? Regardless, this is a need that we plan to meet. I also see challenges merely as perspectives. A problem is only a different perspective—if you see problems as problems without solving them and not as perspectives they will never change. Funding to expand our reach can be a challenge while making our service tiers affordable for all women and families who desire to secure the Lotus Program Experience, but we are diligent in serving our community in creative ways as monetary value should not solely be a barrier in doing so.
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Founder/CEO: Alex Weber
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Year founded: December 2020, incorporated May 2022
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Number of employees: 3 full-time employees, 5 sub-contracted employees
Your company elevator pitch: At D3D we develop extended reality software solutions and integrations. In other words, we create virtual, augmented, and mixed reality applications for solving everyday problems in areas like training, quality control and inspection, design and engineering, maintenance and safety, and even marketing. Extended reality technology is rapidly changing, and with over 10 million XR-dependent jobs by 2026, it is important for businesses to empower their employees with the tools of the future today. On top of this, the marketing landscape is rapidly changing, consumers are demanding even more innovative technology implemented into their everyday shopping experiences, from simple Snapchat filters and AR furniture placement, to fully immersive virtual reality shopping experiences, and businesses require new ways to connect with their customers and employees. At D3D, we help guide our clients through our simple three-step process to building their own branded solution.
What’s been your entrepreneurial journey so far? D3D LLC started as D3D VR Studios in December 2020 with just the founder Alex Weber. Initially, the focus was on developing virtual reality applications with a focus on entertainment. In the fall of 2021, Alex started his MBA and the new vision for D3D was formed – focusing on developing tools to help businesses improve their operations through the use of technology.
One application idea, Everlasting – A 360-degree video sharing application on Oculus App Lab, was pitched in the University of Tennessee’s Volcourt pitch competition and was awarded third place out of over one dozen competing business ideas. Building off of this inertia, Alex pitched D3D in the Boyd’s Venture Challenge competition, also at the University of Tennessee, and placed first with a funding of $20,000 in May. The funds from this competition were used in conjunction with several co-founders to incorporate D3D into an LLC.
How would you describe the current state of your company? We have designed, developed, and published over 15 different applications across a wide variety of platforms (Steam, Oculus, and Windows Mixed Reality) for our clients and we continue to research new ideas and projects to bring extended reality solutions to everyone.
What’s the next big challenge for your company, and what do you need to overcome it? The next big challenge is to scale our operations from highly innovative and unique solutions to ready-made solutions any business can leverage for improving their business operations, helping their employees, or driving revenue growth. In order to scale, we are looking for more clients to adopt extended reality into their business operations.
What’s your vision for what your company will look like in two years? In two years, we hope to scale our operations to support over 10 live applications (10 active development projects) and scale our software solutions from less of an individual-based solution to something that serves everyone.
Your company elevator pitch: At ThinkUp, we boost cognitive performance. We all have a brain, but what some of us don't know about our brain is that there are specific cognitive function skills like focus, executive function, and auditory processing to name a few, that are responsible for our work performance.
Due to the way we live life now, with tech, the way we consume media, a plethora of apps, most of us have underdeveloped skills and this affects our ability to think critically and execute at a high level. As a result, this makes it harder for us to excel and prove our value at our job. We work with expert organizations looking to skill up their workforce to take their performance to the next level against their competitors. ThinkUp is committed to equipping professionals with evidence-based techniques that enhance mental strength and agility which develops them into high performers. The more high performers, the more top performing companies.
What’s the next big challenge for your company, and what do you need to overcome it? Traction. Building a sales organization around the service is our current biggest challenge.
What’s your vision for what your company will look like in two years? We would like to work with 50+ organizations over the next two years certifying professionals who have improved their cognitive function.
Your company elevator pitch: Windfall creates value by taking glass fiber reinforced plastics that would normally go to the landfill or incinerator, like wind turbine blades, cars, boats, and building materials, and recycle them back into raw materials directly reusable in the manufacture of new wind blades, cars, boats, and building materials for a profitable, sustainable circular materials economy.
Our process reduces the amount of plastic waste going to landfill, reduces the CO2 impact of using fiberglass composite materials (recycling being significantly less CO2 intensive than virgin raw material production), provides a reliable, domestic source of raw material for US cleantech manufacturing, and delivers profitable recycling services and material sales returns to our stakeholders.
What’s been your entrepreneurial journey so far? Wildly rewarding. To see my idea grow from a few milligrams processed in basically a thimble to now processing metric tons of wind blades and other materials that would normally being going to the dump and see them instead become new boats, snowboards, drones, and even rockets has been incredibly exciting. Scaling so fast has been no small challenge. Many days it feels as if I’m drinking from multiple firehoses at once, but the impact we’re already having and our current trajectory towards fundamentally changing the composites industry’s supply chain to a truly circular economy makes it incredibly worthwhile.
How would you describe the current state of your company? We are in a stage of aggressive scale-up and growth. To avoid any sort of significant green premium on our products that could slow market adoption, we need to reach production scales comparable to virgin fiberglass/composites production and so have been working diligently to get the infrastructure, resources, and contracts in place to launch our first commercial-scale plant next year.
What’s the next big challenge for your company, and what do you need to overcome it? Our current challenge is focused on the engineering and deployment of our first commercial scale recycling line, which will give a 20-times boost in recycling capacity and allow us to begin supplying recycled materials to larger markets.
What’s your vision for what your company will look like in two years? With our first commercial facility in place in East Tennessee, we will have the recycling capability to process on the order of 500 composite wind blades a year, with much of the reclaimed material likely being sold right back to the wind industry for making new turbine blades and other wind farm components. I also anticipate we will have completed the groundwork to begin launching our second commercial site.
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Founder/CEO: Don DeRosa
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Year founded: 2014
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Number of employees: 3
Your company elevator pitch: Lithium-ion batteries will dominate every facet of our lives in the next decade. From the cell phones in our pockets to the electric vehicles we will soon drive to work in, and even to the renewably powered grid. The performance and cost of lithium-ion batteries will determine if we can text, drive, or turn on the AC.
But even though each of these markets uses lithium-ion batteries, they have vastly different energy storage needs. The same lithium-ion battery in your iPhone that stinks after six months shouldn’t be in your $40,000 electric vehicle you plan to own for 10 years. So not only do we need better batteries, we need differentiated ones. Unfortunately designing new batteries is extraordinarily difficult.
To drastically reduce the time and cost to design new materials for lithium-ion batteries, Eonix has created the first rapid energy storage materials R&D platform, ATLAS-system and partnered with the leader in computational chemistry. This breakthrough ATLAS-system, paired with physics based simulations and machine learning models, is the first end-to-end automated materials design system for batteries in the world, shrinking the typical product development cycles from years to months.
What’s been your entrepreneurial journey so far? Eonix was originally founded in New York to design ultracapacitor electrolytes. After being accepted into the Department of Energy Innovation Crossroads program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and relocating to Knoxville, we soon discovered that the same technology we developed to explore materials for ultracapacitors could be applied to lithium ion batteries, a significantly larger and more impactful market.
Our Innovation Crossroads program concluded at the beginning of the pandemic, which presented some significant challenges in opening a lab, but we were fortunate the Spark Incubator formed to provide laboratory space to companies in the region. The opening of the Spark Incubator and the growing entrepreneurial community here in Knoxville convinced us to stay after Innovation Crossroads. We are excited to continue to grow in the region over the next few years.
How would you describe the current state of your company? Eonix is at an extremely exciting stage, we have developed our first product with funding from the Department of Defense using our ATLAS-platform, a non-flammable lithium ion battery, and recently engaged in a three-year, $15 million partnership with a multi-billion dollar computational chemistry company to further accelerate our materials design ATLAS-platform. In the next year, we will have non-flammable lithium ion battery demo cells in the hands of our customers for evaluation, while also starting on the development of new chemistries for fast charging consumer electronics and low cost batteries for electric vehicles. Remarkably, this has all been accomplished without a single private dollar of investment.
What’s your vision for what your company will look like in two years? In two years, we aim to have our non-flammable lithium-ion batteries in commercial production, preferably in East Tennessee or New York, with sales in the grid storage and defense markets.
This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Knoxville Startup Day: Innov865 hosts pitch competition downtown
