WingXpand

Origin: MO | Grant Awarded: 2022 | Status: Active

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What is WingXpand?

WingXpand is the most simple and powerful drone solution of its size. It combines the small size and simplicity of a quadcopter with the horsepower of airplane wings.
– Wings expand from pack to 7ft wingspan in < 2 min

– Flies 5x longer and carries 10x more pro tools than a small quadcopter

– White glove services for professional drone operations

Company Leadership

Michelle Madaras

Chief Customer Officer & Co-Founder

Michelle spent the first part of her career as a top ranked on-air television news reporter, culminating at Fox 2 News, St. Louis. She is an expert at product marketing and go-to-market strategy derived from her strong analytical and communication skills. She also founded and led a public relations and marketing firm where she gained experience with businesses ranging from startups to 100M+ non-profit where she was the senior executive responsible for all aspects of marketing, communications and campaign strategy.
— University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Bachelor of Science of Journalism, Minors in Informatics and Political Science

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James Barbieri

Co-founder & CEO

James Barbieri (CEO): Aerospace industry expert who spent 10 years at Boeing and the U.S. Intelligence Community in a wide variety of roles spanning engineering, corporate strategy, business development and senior R&D leader responsible for executing a $6M+ portfolio of innovations.
— Washington University in St. Louis, Olin Business School, Master of Business Administration (MBA), Entrepreneurship Focus
— National Intelligence University, Master of Science & Technology Intelligence
— Saint Louis University, Parks College of Engineering, Aviation, and Technology, Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering, Certificate of Asian Studies

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Nutrible

Origin: CA | Grant Awarded: 2022 | Status: Active

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What is Nutrible?

Nutrible is a web app and virtual medical practice that delivers diagnosis-based food directly to patients as soon as they are discharged from hospitals, emergency departments, behavioral health facilities, and other healthcare settings.

More than 3.8 million times per year, patients leave healthcare settings without the resources they need to live independently. With our technology and processes, we partner with healthcare organizations to ensure their most vulnerable patients live full and healthy lives.

Company Leadership

Kwamane Liddell, JD, MHA, BSN

founder & cEO

Kwamane Liddell, JD, MHA, BSN is a health equity visionary and business leader who has saved lives, and believes healthy food should be accessible to every sick person. While Kwamane was an emergency department nurse, he witnessed the devastation that happens to families when they don’t have the right food at home. Those patients inspired him to create Nutrible, where he uses his experiences as a trauma nurse, healthcare lawyer, and entrepreneur to build technology that connects the current healthcare and grocery systems. Nutrible focuses on the most vulnerable patient populations and makes it easy for patients to access food that aligns with their medical, cultural, and financial needs.

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MARSfarm

Origin: MO | Grant Awarded: 2022 | Status: Active

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What is MARSfarm?

There is a technological revolution occurring in the agricultural industry to ensure that humans will be able to sustainably feed our growing population in a changing climate. For over a century, U.S. farmers have learned the technical skills they need from vocational programs in secondary schools. Teachers working in these agriculture programs are desperate to bridge the growing disconnect between the technology being used in the industry and what is accessible to them.

MARSfarm brings ag-tech into the classroom by providing a platform for agricultural educators to give students early exposure to emerging industry practices and problems. Countertop-sized greenhouses designed for the classroom are the enabling hardware of this platform. Our software provides the ability to execute control sequences (called “recipes”) in these greenhouses and remotely monitor them. Consumable kits consisting of seeds, fertilizer, etc. are paired with “recipes” designed in partnership with pioneers of emerging agricultural technologies. This combination of equipment, software, and consumables will ensure that educators are always teaching industry-relevant skills that lead to valuable career education.

Company Leadership

Peter Webb

cEO

Peter Webb began his career working first as a database administrator and then in a business development role at Hussmann Corporation. Peter has also consulted for The Open Agriculture Initiative at the MIT Media Lab and served as the Director of Indoor Farming at The Yield Lab Institute where he mentored several startups in the IN2 program.

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Drew Thomas

coO

Drew Thomas comes from a background in engineering, manufacturing, and career technical education. After experiencing CTE training firsthand at Ranken Technical College, he spent his career programming CNC machines to serve the aerospace industry. This led to consulting opportunities for Quip and a teaching position at TechShop, a maker-space formerly in Cortex.

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HabiTerre

Origin: IL | Grant Awarded: 2022 | Status: Active

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What is HabiTerre?

HabiTerre is an ag and geospatial technology company specializing in environmental and productivity modeling for food and agriculture.

Through a suite of advanced, patented technologies, we generate insights such as farm management practice history, farmland productivity, in-season crop yield forecasting, and water and nutrient use efficiency, all of which ladder up to a holistic understanding of farm production systems and their environmental impacts. These capabilities form the foundation of our ability to quantify things like GHG emissions and carbon sequestration accurately, scalably, and efficiently.

Our truly unique System-of-Systems approach leverages Model Data Fusion to seamlessly integrate numerous data streams at high geospatial and temporal resolution to calibrate and constrain our models. Backed by industry-leading research and development and published literature from founder Dr. Kaiyu Guan’s lab at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, the underlying technology powering HabiTerre’s quantification capabilities is second to none in terms of ability to scale while providing highly accurate and verifiable data that starts at the field level.

Company Leadership

Dr. Kaiyu Guan

founder & science lead

Dr. Kaiyu Guan is HabiTerre’s lead scientist and a Blue Waters Professor in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Kaiyu’s lab produces research and technology at the forefront of the ecohydrology and remote sensing fields in agriculture, using satellite data, computational models, field work, and machine learning approaches. He founded Habiterre to solve the real-life problems of large-scale crop monitoring and forecasting, water management and sustainability, and global food security.

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Nick Reinke

CeO

Nick brings a lifetime of experience in agriculture, from his family farm in North Dakota to working with farmers and agribusinesses for over a decade in crop insurance and ag finance. From there, he went to work on ag sustainability, earning his MBA from Johns Hopkins University and joining Truterra, where he acted as Soil Health Services Lead and helped the team launch one of the first and largest ag carbon initiatives in the US, working with partners across the entire ag value chain. This work prepared him to lead HabiTerre with a deep understanding of ag and related sustainability metrics.

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Flora

Origin: IL | Grant Awarded: 2022 | Status: Active

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What is Flora?

Flora was born from pains of horticultural hopelessness: Aabesh De, the Founder of Flora, was killing every single plant in his line of sight. The last straw was when his mother gave him a rose bush plant to babysit: The rose bush withered away in a week.

Aabesh was frustrated that there wasn’t an accessible, easier way to learn about houseplants and gardening, while connecting with other plant parents along the way. Surprised that there wasn’t a “heart monitor for your plants” in the market, started tinkering around with numerous moisture and light sensors in late 2020, and invented the Flora Pod.

He eventually developed the Flora iOS app for launch in July, 2021, which has now grown to more than 125,000 users from more than 190 countries! Flora has now grown to a talented, plant-obsessed, rock-star team of 30 individuals committed to one singular mission: To save as many plants as possible and commit to fighting the climate crisis through connecting millions of people with nature.

Company Leadership

Aabesh De

founder & cEO

A first-generation immigrant and globe-trotter, Aabesh is driven by a lifelong sense of curiosity.

He founded Flora from this applied curiosity, inventing the Flora Pod and developing the Flora iOS app from his frustrations with horticultural hopelessness. He taught himself mobile development (primarily in Swift), and found his calling in building useful, mission-driven products for thousands of people. He previously worked at Microsoft and Etsy, and is now dedicated to saving as many plants as possible and committed to fighting the climate crisis through connecting millions of people with nature.

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Mighty Cricket

Origin: MO | Grant Awarded: 2021 | Status: Active

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What is Mighty Cricket?

Mighty Cricket is a next-generation protein company building a clean protein supply to sustain the world. Discover Mighty Cricket’s high protein oatmeals, protein powder supplements, and chocolate bars all made with sustainable proteins at MightyCricket.com.

Company Leadership

Sarah Schlafly

owner

Sarah Schlafly is a “cereal” entrepreneur—cricket cereal, that is. Her inspiration for Mighty Cricket was born out of a problem that bugged her: the harmful effects of industrialized meat. Before founding the clean protein company, Sarah worked as an accountant, chef, cooking instructor and digital marketer for a national food brand. She was awarded Inc. Magazine’s Military Entrepreneur Special Delegate, Feast Magazine’s Rising Star, and St. Louis Business Journal’s 30 Under 30.

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ATR Thrive

Origin: MO | Grant Awarded: 2020 | Status: Active

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What is ATR Thrive?

The ATR Thrive LLC owners and management team have extensive experience in the dairy industry, farming, calf rearing, animal nutrition, and animal health management, as well as food chemistry and business experience. ATR Thrive’s wider reference team includes respected farmers and calf rearers, researchers, veterinarians, and nutritionists. The ATR team has completed trialing the ATR products on thousands of calves on several commercial dairies. The results are consistent and significant – Improved profit from better digestion, resulting in stronger appetite, better growth, reduced need for treatments, lower mortality, and less stress for staff. Every feed of milk given to an infant animal requires complete digestion. Undigested or partially digested milk results in nutritional scours and compromised nutrition. To resolve this problem, the standard recommendation across the entire dairy farming industry is to limit the amount of milk that is fed to calves, kids, and lambs instead of addressing better digestion. This limits their nutrition, growth, development, and potential. ‍ The patent-pending Get-Go supplements are specially formulated products that enable complete digestion of milk and milk products and support an optimized biome. This can eliminate nutritional scours. Get-Go enhances the absorption of colostrum, which is critical to establish and support a healthy digestive tract. Get-Go is designed for use in every feeding from birth until weaning. It also assists transitions to solid feed such as hay or grain. Complete digestion of fats in milk or milk replacers makes a significant difference to the health and well-being of calves. These unique formulas are specifically designed to give calves, kids, or lambs the most beneficial start to life, and subsequent growth and development.

Company Leadership

NEVILLE MCNAUGHTON

director of technology

Neville McNaughton is a recognized expert in cheese making, dairy foods processing, and dairy system design.  Currently, Neville is the founder/owner of CheezSorce LLC and Sanitary Design Industries (SDI). SDI was founded to provide products that support the innovative ideas promoted by CheezSorce and its equipment and new technologies are helping to re-set the standards in cheese making and Safe Food Processing. Neville is originally from New Zealand.

Quentin Ortega

CSO

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Edison Agrosciences

Origin: NC | Grant Awarded: 2019 | Status: Active

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What is Edison Agrosciences?

Edison Agrosciences uses standard biotechnology to make natural rubber – from sunflower. Natural rubber is used in thousands of products because it has properties that can’t be matched with synthetic materials, but the supply is at risk – 90% comes from one geography and all comes from a single plant species. And just like in Brazil in the early 1900’s, disease is starting to set in. At Edison, we’re increasing the amount of natural rubber already produced by the sunflower plant to provide a more profitable crop for farmers and a reliable domestic supply of a critical resource.

Company Leadership

Thomas Hohn

co-founder & Scientific Advisor

Tom has 30 years of leadership experience in the development and commercialization of agricultural biotechnology products. He is a recognized expert in the biosynthesis of plant/fungal isoprenoid products with 65 publications and patents. Prior to co-founding Edison Agrosciences, he was responsible for R&D portfolio development in the Agricultural Biotechnology Division of Intrexon Corporation, a major synthetic biology company. Before joining Intrexon, he founded Dorsan Biofuels, Inc. and participated in its sale to Novozymes. At Dorsan Biofuels, he helped raise seed funding and led a metabolic engineering project for the development of a fungal isoprenoid production platform. In the 11 years prior, Tom was at Syngenta and one of its legacy companies where he held various technical, regulatory, and business development roles. While Director of Disease Control Traits, he led the development of crop disease traits based on the genetic engineering of plant immunity to pathogen-produced toxins. Before joining Syngenta, as a Research Scientist at the USDA – Agricultural Research Service, National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research, Tom authored the first published report for a cloned terpene synthase gene from any source. He also cloned and characterized the key genetic and metabolic regulatory factors responsible for a fungal isoprenoid toxin pathway. He holds a B.S. in Biology/Chemistry from Central Michigan University and Ph.D. in Microbiology from Washington State University.

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David Woodburn

ceo

David founded bio-Growth, LLC, to help life science companies and their investors with corporate development, new market assessment, and business planning, which is what he did as CEO of Blue Prairie Brands and Vice President of Finance & Development at Chromatin, Inc. Prior to this, David was a sell-side research analyst for 10 years, most recently publishing investment research on companies in the areas of alternative fuels and water technology for boutique investment bank ThinkEquity. Earlier, David provided research coverage of Specialty/Generic Pharma and Global Pharma for Prudential’s institutional equity business, being named in the Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Street survey and frequently being quoted by Barrons, Reuters, Dow Jones, The New York Times, the Boston Globe, and others. David’s eleven years of healthcare industry experience include corporate strategy and merger integration at Searle Pharmaceuticals, and product design, global marketing, and business development within various divisions of Baxter Healthcare. David remains a co-owner of a Midwestern grain farm, Maplewood Farm, LLC. David is a graduate of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, and holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Good Life Growing

Origin: MO | Grant Awarded: 2018 | Status: Active

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What is Good Life Growing?

Good Life Growing believes that an incredible transition to revitalizing blighted property is possible through urban agriculture. Due to the availability of space otherwise deemed vacant or undesirable there are an abundance of hidden resources in Urban Cities across the country. Our plan is to uncover those resources and utilize them in benefit of society as a whole. We propose to put into motion the necessary means of creating sustainable agriculture and learning hubs. Through growing food, job creation, education, exposure to agriculture, extensive hands on training, and providing healthy food to the community it is possible to create a functioning economy that satisfies the triple bottom line. With a blend of traditional Organic Farming, Aquaponic, Hydroponic, and Aeroponic techniques we will grow as much food as efficiently possible while using minimal resources. With a lot of hard work, a little luck, and some help from our friends we believe it is possible.

Company Leadership

James Forbes

Founder & Chief Executive Officer

I’m a lot of things: a risk taker, an adventurer, an opportunist; but most importantly I’m a “people person” in the sense that I love helping out in any way that I can.

I am the Co-Founder and CEO of Good Life Growing. We are a St. Louis based Urban Farming company with a conscious minded agenda to spread the Good Food Movement across the planet. Our goal is to blend diverse urban farming techniques with other methods of traditional farming. We have hopes of transitioning vacant property in to vibrant food sources and jobs. With a little luck, a lot of hard work, and the help of our friends we believe we can save the world one seed at a time.

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James E. Hillis, MS

Co-Founder & COO

Entrepreneur, advocate, and researcher with multi-industry experience in community development, stakeholder engagement, business development, university-community partnerships, grants, GIS mapping, urban agriculture, higher education, and the social sciences. A strong multidisciplinary background with a Master of Science (M.S.) from Creighton University and a current doctoral student in the Public & Social Policy Ph.D. program at Saint Louis University focusing on geospatial and policy analysis.

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Bobby Forbes

Co-Founder, Chief Product Management

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Matt Stoyanov

Co-Founder, Chief of Horticulture

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We champion extraordinary entrepreneurs to create positive change – for St. Louis and for the world. Join us by applying to our Global Startup Competition, becoming a financial supporter, volunteering your time or amplifying our message.