Wayfarer

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

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What is Wayfarer?

Our Knowledge-as-a-Service interactive platform helps libraries prevent resources from collecting digital dust.

Patrons don’t think about the “resource” they need. They think about the problem they need to solve. The Wayfarer helps libraries translate resources into problem-based, patron-centric micro-tasks that are then compiled into curated paths on discrete topics (“Find a Job” or “Start a Business,” e.g.). The patron selects the Wayfarer path that solves her problems and follows the steps along the path.

The Wayfarer uses AI, smart questions, customized UX, and micro-action tracking to provide a personalized experience and connect patrons to resources like never before. And the discovery element helps connect the dots between resource topics. The platform is available in multiple languages and helps to bridge the digital divide.

Wayfarer is currently in 13 library systems nationwide reaching a service-population area of 4.6 million patrons, including Missouri patrons in Kansas City, St. Charles County, and Joplin, as well as Houston. It also recently won SBA’s veteran-owned business of the year award.

Company Leadership

Chris Daming

Co-Founder & CEO

Chris is the co-founder and CEO of Wayfarer. Prior to Wayfarer, Chris spent 4 years in the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division. Afterwards, he got his J.D. and LL.M. at Washington University, and practiced law serving entrepreneurs.

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Jorik Ittmann

Co-founder

Jorik is the co-founder and COO of Wayfarer. Originally from the Netherlands, Jorik has founded one medical tech company, and he helped lead another in a successful exit to a publicly traded firm.

Queritel

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

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What is Queritel?

Committed to helping independent business owners compete and win, Queritel’s cutting-edge omnichannel retail point-of-sale (POS) solution—Figozo —equips SMBs with the ability to reach more customers both in-store and online while maintaining the level of personalization that makes them stand out.

So, how does it work? Figozo helps retailers set up cloud-based catalogs that are updated in real-time so they can have an accurate view of the products they have available, whether they are selling in-store, online, at a flea market, farmers market, or all of the above. With Figozo, merchants can build their online store, configure a slick POS device for in-store and on-the-go transactions, plus offer multiple payment methods, including Venmo, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and gift cards, to provide a seamless customer experience. The platform can also keep track of inventory and send updates to team members or key stakeholders (like brands) about items that might soon be out of stock, helping retail merchants efficiently track and manage supplies.

Company Leadership

Shani Bennett

cEO

Shani Bennett is the co-founder and CEO of Queritel, a data analytics engine for independent retailers. Prior to Queritel, Shani was a senior analyst for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), a United Nations agency tasked with helping countries eliminate poverty and achieve sustainable economic growth and human development. Shani Bennett is passionate about human and community development. Shani loves to watch cooking shows and designing logos for imaginary companies.

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JAKAPA

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

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What is JAKAPA?

JAKAPA measures, trains, and tracks soft skills. Bad soft skills are the #1 reason someone will be fired, and bad manager soft skills are a top reason why great employees quit. JAKAPA helps businesses improve their productivity and decrease turnover by providing data-driven answers to 3 of our client’s critical questions about training and engagement:
1. Are my company’s employee development initiatives actually working?
2. How can I help my employees improve their soft skills outside of training and feedback sessions?
3. How do I catch employee development disengagement early so I can intervene before it becomes permanent?
We achieve this using reliable and validated assessment technology, daily soft skill challenges, and an actionable dashboard. JAKAPA gives management and individual employees data clarity around their real-time strengths, weaknesses, and engagement metrics.

Company Leadership

Gavin Pringle

cEO

Gavin Pringle got his entrepreneurial start when he noticed a lack of focus on soft skills in traditional education. This alarmed him due to his experience managing successful teams as a Navy Submariner. Gavin was inspired to found JAKAPA when he learned that bad soft skills are a top reason for employee turnover. He wants to help every business focus on improving their employees’ soft skills by providing frequent measurement, training, and tracking.

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Lisa Riegel

coO

Dr. Lisa Riegel is the chief designer for the Skill Builder Challenge Platform in JAKAPA. She is an internationally sought-after thought leader for program improvement and leadership development. She feels her life experiences as a recruiter, educator, administrator, state-level education policy maker, workforce development consultant, and leadership coach have all led to the development of the JAKAPA platform.

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Keara Pringle

ctO

Keara Pringle is an engineer and project manager. She is an agile project management enthusiast that has taken numerous engineering projects from ideation to full commercial release. Keara is passionate about JAKAPA due to her experience working in Corporate America and seeing what poor soft skills can do to team performance. She wants to help businesses develop stronger corporate cultures through better soft skill training and hiring practices.

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DenScore

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

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What is DenScore?

DenScore is a data-driven digital health company that helps consumers make smarter decisions about their oral health care so they receive higher quality, more personalized and affordable dental treatment. DenScore provides dental claims insights to Medicare Advantage plans, insurance carriers and health systems so they can steer members to the most desirable dentists in their network to reduce dental plan costs and member disenrollment. DenScore also offers a web-based application that helps enrollees, employees and uninsured Americans understand their dental symptoms so they’re better equipped to navigate their dental care needs. DenScore’s application benefits users by helping them manage their symptoms, avoid unnecessary dental care, reduce out-of-pocket costs, minimize non-urgent dental-related ER visits and much more.

Company Leadership

Kyle Gernhofer

Co-founder & cEO

Dr. Kyle Gernhofer is DenScore’s co-founder and chief executive officer. After graduating from the University of Michigan School of Dentistry, Kyle treated thousands of patients in the Navy and private practice. While on active duty, he received the Navy & Marine Corps Commendation Medal for leading a humanitarian exercise that provided medical care to communities throughout Southeast Asia. In private practice, Kyle was consistently recognized by his patients and peers as being one of San Diego’s top dentists. Kyle started DenScore to help people make smarter decisions about their oral health so they can live healthier and happier lives.

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Charlie Hubbard

Co-founder & cdO

Charlie Hubbard is DenScores’s co-founder and chief data officer. He graduated from Iowa State University with an MS in Computer Engineering and has been practicing data science for over 8 years. Charlie uses his passion for machine learning and big data analytics to ensure that DenScore’s performance-based metrics enable clients to gain deeper insights about their dental provider network. Charlie is inspired by DenScore’s unique approach for harnessing the power of big data to improve oral health outcomes for millions of Americans.

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Dataplant

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

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What is Dataplant?

Dataplant is a sentient customer analytics platform built on procedural generation technology that arms customer success professionals with the tools they need to drive business objectives and customer outcomes.

Founded by two data scientists who traveled the world building data science programs for customer success organizations; DataPlant is on mission to democratize customer analytics for the untapped market of B2C and small to mid-size businesses. DataPlant’s empowers companies to execute like never before by combining human and machine learning intelligence in a truly novel way. Customer analytics as we know it will never be the same!

Company Leadership

Samuel J Cummings III

Co-founder & cEO

Proven data science executive and team lead with 10+ years of predictive analytics experience at B2B SaaS companies. Won the CS Inspire award as an Enterprise CSM at LinkedIn in 2021. Also served for 2 years as Director of Implementations at Indeed Inc.

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Mithelesh Kumar

Co-founder & ctO

Mithelesh has close to 10yrs of experience in product development, SaaS ecosystem, Machine Learning, programming, Statistics, natural language processing,, conversational analytics and sentiment analysis.
He has delivered multiple revenue generating successful SaaS product features and tons of machine learning solutions, managed team of data scientists, mentored 100s of data science learners via liv classes.

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Mavity

Origin: N.Y. | Grant Awarded: 2021 | Status: Active

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What is Mavity?

Mavity is the end-to-end marketplace and collaboration tool that connects businesses with 11K+ creative professionals through a skill-quantification method and grouping them in highly effective, on-demand teams. We help businesses source and build teams, while helping creators with features to optimize their productivity including tax compliance, cross-border payouts, and project management tools. Mavity’s investors include Capital Innovators, Pharrell Williams’ Black Ambition Fund, and MassChallenge.

Company Leadership

Tomas Uribe

co-Founder & CEO

Tomas Uribe is an entrepreneur and musician, co-founder and CEO of Mavity, the end-to-end marketplace and collaboration tool for on-demand creative teams. Tomas has been featured in Entrepreneur, Forbes and INC, and an invited speaker at SXSW, MusicBiz, Music Entrepreneur Conference at Harvard University, and Colombia 4.0. Prior to Mavity, he worked as a touring musician and composer, as well as with global brands including Radeberger Gruppe, Leica Camera, and at the United Nations.

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Juan Soto

VP, Sales and Marketing

Juan Soto is VP, Sales and Marketing at Mavity, and Director at AIR Artists in Residence Accelerator and has over 7 years of experience. At Universal Music Colombia, he was involved in the positioning of all Digster playlists on digital platforms to position international artists in the Andean region market. At Kuack Media Group, he directed the creation of applications such as Lola Music, Viva Bolivia, and D Music. He holds a BS in Economics and a masters’ in Digital Marketing.

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Kristian Diaz

co-Founder & CTO

Kristian Diaz has 15 years of technology experience, with a Master’s in Computer Science, and specialized in machine learning and artificial intelligence. He has built products at Royal Caribbean and Newsela, as well as CTO at an ad-tech startup in Miami, FL.

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Pilotbird

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

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What is Pilotbird?

Pilotbird leverages lifestyle analytics to empower life and health carriers to deliver better insurance outcomes for millions of Americans via group ancillary products. Pilotbird offers out-of-box predictive analytics solutions on social data points for risk scoring and fraud detection in group and worksite products. In group underwriting, it enriches traditional actuarial risk factors with social data points (e.g., smoking habits, lifestyle choices, high risk hobbies) to segment cases while staying compliant with regulatory expectations. To reduce claims fraud, Pilotbird surfaces inconsistencies in claimant’s behavior (e.g., claimant of disability policy enjoying an afternoon game of golf).

Company Leadership

Evgeny aleksandrov

ceo

Evgeny Aleksandrov founded Pilotbird with his team in late 2020 to improve insurance experience through power of lifestyle analytics. Prior to Pilotbird, he held multiple roles within financial services industry including at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and management consulting firm McKinsey. Evgeny has been fortunate to pursue his passions from birthplace in Russia to metropolitan New York City with pit stops in Vancouver and London. He holds degrees from Cornell University, Columbia Universities and London School of Economics.

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Athlytic Inc.

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

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What is Athlytic?

Athlytic is a fully integrated marketplace that connects student athletes with potential endorsement partners so that they can take advantage of monetizing their likeness without taking away from their ability to perform at a high level in their prospective sport.

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Company Leadership

Ashton Keys

co-Founder

Ashton Keys is a Detroit-native and an alum of Michigan State University. He is an established professional in technology with experiences working in UX Design, Engineering, Product Management, and Growth Marketing. He has a background in building marketplaces, where he worked as a Product Manager at Rocket Homes helping launch their mobile app experience. Ashton has a passion for sports and technology, and looks to build Athlytic as one of the leading sports technology companies in the industry.

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Jared Eummer

co-Founder

Jared Eummer is a young entrepreneur who has a demonstrated history of delivering high-level partnerships across several different platforms and industries. As a graduate of coveted HBCU FAMU; Jared got his start in sports working on partnerships at Roc Nation, and currently works in corporate partnerships for the Cleveland Cavaliers. Jared has been able to take his love of sports and combine that with his entrepreneurial genius to build Athlytic, which he envisions to revolutionize the sports industry.

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Enterprise Software

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Another Reality Studio

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

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What is Another Reality Studio?

Another Reality Studio (ARS) is a St. Louis technology startup that creates immersive and interactive extended reality (XR) applications for a variety of industries. Their mission is to be on the cutting edge of AR/VR and 3D application technology to work with a wide range of startups to Fortune 100 companies. ARS is driven by this growth to create a fun work environment that interesting clients and talented employees are attracted to. They develop custom XR applications utilizing the powerful Unreal Engine and Unity development platforms.

The Looking Glass platform is a custom 3D web application that makes design review easier to understand and always accessible to build trust for architecture end clients. It was uniquely developed by ARS to transform complex architectural drawings into a simple to use virtual walkthrough 3D space. Anyone can explore what future environments will become for use with any device, at any time, without direction.

Company Leadership

bradly martin

ceo

Brad Martin is CEO/ Founder of ARS and one of the top-rated AR/VR developers on Upwork. He leads a local developer meetup, been involved with an XR grant at Mizzou, & is AR/VR technology advisor for T- Rex & DisruptED. He specializes in new technology, project management and ideation for clients and industries. Brad is the creator of Looking Glass & has worked as associate architect at a leading St. Louis Architecture firm. Brad’s skillsets includes: Unreal Engine, Unity, AutoCAD, Autodesk 3DS Max, Google SketchUp, Revit, and HTML.

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mauricio espin

CtO

Mauricio Espin del Rio is the CTO & Co-Founder of ARS and leads the R&D/ development team. He is a senior programmer with over 15 years of IT, 3D Modeling, Animation, UI and Unreal Engine developer experience.

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Involved Industries

Be a Part of the Movement

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.

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See How You Can Get Involved →