Startups showcased at Innovation Center accelerator event

From the global to the local, solutions to environmental degradation and climate change highlighted the Tampa Bay Innovation Center’s Accelerator Showcase, with six entrepreneurs from the Spring Accelerator program highlighting their projects and progress before a keynote by ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood. 

The Tuesday morning showcase featured the six startups chosen for TBIC’s Spring Accelerator, and brought dozens of investors and community notables to the second floor of the ARK Innovation Center, a showpiece of the City’s St. Pete Innovation District, for a pitch session.

The featured startups were:

• Agwise, a St. Petersburg startup focused on supply chain analytics for agriculturestartups
• Cupper, a Bradenton-based manufacturer of eco-friendly disposable coffee pods
• Mudder AI, a New Haven, CT disaster resilience analytic start up and the sole entry from outside the region
• Numa Notes, a St. Petersburg-based AI copilot for mental health practitioners
• Virginica, a Tampa firm pursuing carbon capture and offsets through artificial oyster beds
• Zing Drone, a St. Petersburg-based tracking system to promote safe drone operations

Each founder gave a brief presentation on their companies and current growth trajectory since being accepted into the Accelerator. They then received feedback on their product, pitch, and potential markets from a trio of experienced startup figures. 

Mudder co-founder Nadia D. Ahmad discussed the AI-powered disaster management sofware platform. LinkedIn photo.

Nadia D. Ahmad, a Yale doctoral student and co-founder of Mudder AI, took perhaps the most global view of the problems she set out to address. Highlighting that Miami-Dade County’s emergency preparedness plan today is contained entirely within a document of less than 10 pages, Ahmad hopes her analytics tool will be usable for all manner of disasters, especially hurricanes and related flood events.

“We are seeking to democratize disaster data to improve evacuations and coordination of relief, response and recovery,” Ahmad told the Catalyst. 

Discussing the challenge of a short pitch to such a large, diverse, and high-powered group, she added, “The time crunch and condensing process to limit the pitch to 90 seconds was very intense. It’s like the length of time at a stoplight.” 

Cameron Mullinax, CEO of Virginica, agreed. “Although I was nervous, it was an incredible experience that I would absolutely do again,” he said.

“Working with TBIC has greatly benefited Virginica. We’ve identified the most efficient path to growth, focusing on scaling operations and ensuring customer satisfaction, rather than just developing a business plan.”

Mullinax’s start-up, Virginica, is named after the variety of Eastern oyster designed to be grown in a small garden approximately the size of a cardboard box. In the long-term, Mullinax envisions a “thousand-acre reef” of such gardens in the Gulf of Mexico, promoting water cleanliness and carbon capture, whose offsets can be monetized for industries unable to mitigate carbon emissions.

The startups highlighted by the showcase were very much apiece with the investment style of ARK CEO Wood, who attained fame after the stellar performance of ARK funds since its founding in 2014, especially during the stock boom in 2021. Known for her unorthodox trading strategies, staff sourced outside traditional Wall Street channels, and her pursuit of investments with a long time horizon, Wood has established herself as a patron saint of Tampa Bay’s burgeoning tech scene after relocating ARK from New York in 2021.

During the panel discussion, Wood expanded upon ARK’s key investment areas, which she identified as robotics, energy storage, genomics, blockchain and AI. ARK Director of Research Sam Korus expanded upon the topic, highlighting that ARK looked specifically for products or services that realized both “dramatic costs declines” and had the opportunity to “cut across industries,” reducing the risk of copycat technology supplanting it. 

Key to their investment style, Wood and Korus explained, is Wright’s Law, which observes that as production increases goods experience predictable cost declines. The ARK team used the example of lithium ion batteries used to power electric vehicles – while other firms predicted that the production of such vehicles would top out at 200,000 per year due to cost and complexity, today firms across the world, including ARK darling Tesla, churn out more than 10,000,000.

For the start-ups ARK and the TBIC are supporting, such numbers are little more than a dream today. But the accelerator’s support is one step closer to the six founders’ achievement of that reality. In explaining her recent major investments in nuclear power, Wood noted that “the world cannot live without energy.” 

In a few years, it’s possible that we won’t be able to live without the products and services TBIC is supporting, either. Should that prove to be the case, this showcase could prove to be the pivot point for the next tech unicorn – and the future of the entire Tampa Bay area.