Forcyte

Origin: MO | Grant Awarded: 2023 | Status: Active

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What is Forcyte?

Forcyte has developed portable nanogrid modular energy systems for sUAS charging for tactical use in austere environments. Forcyte energizes drone operations for mission-critical purposes that provide operators with persistent ISR monitoring of an area or threat for improved situational awareness.

Company Leadership

MiKE SEPER

CO-Founder

Mike Seper is an innovative entrepreneur, educator, and leader in the St. Louis community. He recently received a proclamation from St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones recognizing his contribution to St. Louis startups and his work advancing national security innovation. Mike is a proud alum of two Minority Serving Institutions at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and University of Hawaii Manoa, and currently serves on the Harris-Stowe State University Anheuser-Busch School of Business Entrepreneurship Advisory Board.

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DYLAN BROPHY

Co-founder & CTO

Dylan values control over his life, and achieves this by being an entrepreneur and building technology. He spends a large portion of his time on computers and has experience programming x86 assembly. He has been building circuits for over a decade.

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Midgard Raven

Origin: Ashburn, VA | Grant Awarded: 2023 | Status: Active

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What is Midgard Raven?

Midgard Raven, LLC is at the forefront of geospatial innovation, driven by a resolute vision to enable universal access to satellite imagery. As a leading provider of geospatial solutions, the company is committed to breaking down barriers and democratizing the utilization of satellite imagery across various sectors. By leveraging cutting-edge technology and strategic partnerships, Midgard Raven empowers governments, businesses, researchers, and individuals to harness the power of spatial data, facilitating informed decision-making, fostering environmental stewardship, and stimulating socio-economic development. The company’s unwavering dedication to technological advancement and inclusivity underscores its role as a transformative force, redefining the boundaries of geospatial accessibility and cultivating a future where satellite imagery is a ubiquitous tool for progress.

Company Leadership

ADAM SIMMONS

Founder & ceo

With 20 years of experience, Adam Simmons is currently the Chief Executive Officer at Midgard Raven, LLC. He is currently positioned as a Geospatial Industry Leader driving cutting edge-solutions around satellite and aerial-based imagery analytics, machine learning, and open-source data. Additionally, he is the Executive Director of Project Geospatial, a 501(c)3 media organization committed to collaboration of academia, industry, and government within the geospatial community.

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Seed Matriz

Origin: Rio Cuarto, Argentina |

Grant Awarded: 2023 | Status: Active

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What is Seed Matriz?

Seed Matriz is an agtech startup born in Argentina, looking to solve the main problems farmers and seed companies are facing and boost the plant by plant agronomy. The encapsulation technology developed improve shape and size of seeds, having the possibility to add biostimulants and other products to improve the first stages of the crops growth, enhancing final yields while reducing the agronomic inputs.
The encapsulation also allow seeds to be detected underground during planting process, having in real time the depth and distance of seeds with furrow closed. This information is necessary to have complete control of the planting process and also as an information layer for digital agriculture.
Another feature we are developing is to enhance the natural signs that plants show when they are suffering any kind of stress. With this will be possible to detect plant by plant, with hyperspectral cameras on drones or satellites, the health status of the crop, having early and accurate information. Having this information will be possible to solve any issue using less products and minimizing applications.

Company Leadership

FEDERICO COLA

FOUNDER & CEO

Federico Cola is an Agricultural Engineer, farmer, founder and Director of several companies in the field of bioethanol, biogas, clean energy and others. Former rally motorcycle racer, he participated in the Dakar competition. Federico never give up, he always find the way to solve any obstacle or make a success from any project. A great team builder, inspiring and empowering others to get involved in challenging goals. The word entrepreneur describes him perfectly.

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JUAN COLA

Co-founder & DIRECTOR

Juan is a veterinarian and runs a beef company. He is also a partner in other startups and a Board Director for some companies.

WALTER SANSONE

Co-Founder & MANAGER

ALVARO FERNàNDEZ

Co-founder & COO

9Line Software LLC

Origin: MO | Grant Awarded: 2023 | Status: Active

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What is 9Line?

9Line ensures federal compliance and peace of mind by transmitting precise location data with every 911 call to the appropriate public safety answering point, accelerating emergency response efforts and enabling faster assistance to those in need.

Company Leadership

MARK TURPIN

CO-FOUNDER & CEO

Mark has been immersed in technology since the 1990s, even before high school. In 2003, he shifted his focus to telecommunications when he joined Sprint. Later, in 2008, he achieved the prestigious Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) certification in Voice, showcasing well-rounded expertise in telephony and technology. Mark’s extensive knowledge and experience in the telecommunications sector, leadership, technical proficiency, and over a decade of start-up experience suit him well to guide 9Line to success in the emergency response solutions market.

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colin o’brien

Co-founder & CTO

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.

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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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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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Intramotev Autonomous Rail

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

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What is intramotev Autonomous Rail?

Each year in the US alone, over $690B in goods are moved via a fleet of 1.6 million railcars. On any given day, though, 900,000 of these railcars won’t move. A loaded railcar sits idle for 24.6 hours on each leg of its journey, just waiting to be picked up by a diesel locomotive. For locomotives to move these railcars, it requires 3.5 billion gallons of diesel annually – that’s over 37 million metric tons of greenhouse gases emitted into our atmosphere. Intramotev is building a future where no railcars sit idle, and not a gallon of diesel is consumed to move them. By putting motive power directly into the railcar instead of relying on locomotives, we enable freight to move itself from point-to-point independently and without fossil fuels.

Company Leadership

Timothy Luchini, Ph.D

CEO

PhD Mechanical Engineer with experience leading teams of up to 40 engineers to scale early-stage technologies in the aerospace industry.

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Alex Peiffer

COO

Business development and strategy expert with an MBA from University of Southern California, USAF logistics veteran.

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Corey Vasel

CTO

Expert in battery and motor technologies with experience developing early stage technologies in the aerospace industry.

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InfraLytiks

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

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What is InfraLytiks?

InfraLytiks has the main goal of “Making Data Meaningful”. We specialize in data analytics, Machine Learning and development of custom software & automation platforms for productization. We also own and operate a suite of geospatial and Artificial Intelligence products including Verified Data Analytics, Automated Inspections, InfraVIEU, InfraDrone & LiDAR NOW.

Company Leadership

Akash Vidyadharan

Chief Technology Officer

Akash Vidyadharan leads full stack project and product development at InfraLytiks for 5+ years. He holds a BS & MS in Aerospace Engineering and a M.Eng in Systems Engineering from Iowa State University.

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Kevin Prendergast

President

Kevin Prendergast is the President of InfraLytiks and leads business development, sales and marketing. He also has 35+ years experience in leading insurance, software and healthcare companies as President and CMO roles.

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Tyler Carter

Chief Operations Officer

Tyler Carter leads operations and administration at InfraLytiks and has 5+ years of experience in business development, administration and company operations. He holds a BS Mechanical Engineering and a Master of Business Administration from Iowa State University.

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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.

LEARN ABOUT THE COMPETITION

See How You Can Get Involved →