Some get their first part- or full-time job in their teens or early 20s. Others opt to build their own businesses.
The third annual Buffalo Inno 5 Under 25 features a group of young entrepreneurs who are striking out on their own to begin and grow startup companies.
They are and will continue to be part of the driving force behind the growing entrepreneurial ecosystem in the Buffalo metro. Not only are they the future of the startup community, but they’re serving as inspiration for generations of entrepreneurs to come.
Meet this year’s Inno 5 Under 25.
Daniel Chan, 19, and Dominic LaVigne, 22
Exergi • exergi.solar
Daniel Chan and Dominic LaVigne come from different backgrounds.
Chan is from Queens and grew up involved in multiple entrepreneurial endeavors from selling bracelets and sneakers to stocks trading. He’s majoring in business administration at the University at Buffalo and plans to switch to accounting.
Meanwhile, LaVigne is from Buffalo and was part of science and math programs. He graduated from UB in May with a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering and is getting his master’s in engineering science with a focus in clean energy.
Where they overlap is in wanting to have an impact.
“Solving those problems is really something I’m passionate about and love doing,” LaVigne said.
The pair co-founded Exergi, which is developing a compact alternative to residential solar panels.
They first met after LaVigne pitched a waste management solution at a UB pitch contest and they stayed in contact, talking about technology, business, personal finance and climate tech.
As LaVigne prepared for his second UB Henry A. Panasci Jr. Technology Entrepreneurship Competition (he’d pitched in 2022 a similar but less fleshed out idea), he knew needed someone like Chan and brought him on as a co-founder.
“I knew that if I wanted to progress, I would need somebody to help me in things I wasn’t as strong in, (like) pitching and the financial parts of running a business,” LaVigne said.
He leads product-related parts of the company and Chan handles the business side. Together, they’ve raised $10,000 as second-place winners in the 2023 Panasci contest and an additional $6,500 in non-diluted funding from other business competitions.
Currently, Exergi is in the research and design phase and is working with local business Tresca Designs to build out prototypes and systems to test efficiencies.
“I think with co-founders, you still have to establish leadership, who does what,” Chan said. “You’ve got to know your strengths,” Chan said.
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Mia D'Amato, 24
Boho Basement • bohobasement.co
Mia D’Amato is still learning what she likes, but she knows it’s not a traditional job.
“I’ve always just been very eager, driven, motivated to find my passion,” she said. “I’ve never really thought the typical 9-5 or just a ‘real’ job my friends were getting, I never thought that was for me.”
She graduated in 2021 from Mercyhurst University in Erie, Pennsylvania, with a degree in business economics, sustainability and fashion merchandising. She and her business, Boho Basement, are based in Erie, but it was the Buffalo native’s time back at home during the pandemic that gave her time to slow down and think about what she really enjoys.
In 2020, D’Amato joined the droves of people reselling clothing on Instagram. From there, she and her mom, Amy, teamed up to create FashInPost, which aimed to develop a live streaming platform for clothing resellers and reworkers.
That’s how D’Amato was introduced to the Buffalo startup community and the pair got into Launch NY’s program working with an entrepreneur in residence.
But for D’Amato, she was acting as creative director and felt a lot of pressure leading the project. She felt the weight of investors’ and mentors’ hopes and expectations, and she ultimately decided to leave the business.
She finished her degree and did odd jobs, trying to figure out how to pursue sustainable fashion in a way that was feasible for her. Through her college advisers, D’Amato discovered she could have space at the Erie Technology Incubator, which has sites at universities including Mercyhurst.
She moved to Erie with only enough money for about two months of apartment rent. She sat in her home with a bed, no other furniture and a whiteboard and laid out a marketing plan to get 10,000 online followers within four weeks.
She began going to the thrift store on Tuesdays when everything was $1, and she’d buy anything with fabric that had potential. She taught herself how to sew and began reworking used clothes and selling them on Instagram live.
Her first week, she repurposed a Pittsburgh Steelers hoodie into patchwork sweatpants. She made a TikTok with the thrifted piece, which got about 6 million views. She’s kept that niche – upcycling pro sportswear and creating custom outfits. Landing notable clients like Taryn Simmons, who’s married to Justin Simmons, safety for the Denver Broncos, has boosted her following.
Boho Basement has sold 1,700 garments in the past 12 months and has 49.8K Instagram followers. Since everything is custom created, there’s a good profit margin and it’s supported D’Amato as her full-time job.
“I never thought this could be me, starting my own thing and making my own money,” she said.
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Mariam Sadawi, 23
Hint Juice & Smoothie • linktr.ee/HINTjuice
Mariam Sadawi always had an entrepreneurial spirit, but she tried to contain it for years.
She won first place in a DECA competition at Williamsville North High School in 2018 and didn’t tell her family. She started creating accessory displays out of resin and sold them online.
Yet, when the time came to choose a college major, she opted for biology. That lasted three years.
“I pivoted and decided to follow my gut and add business as a major,” she said. “I kind of took that (entrepreneurial) spirit and exploded. Bye biology. Hello business.”
Sadawi got a bachelor’s in business administration with a concentration in entrepreneurial and small business operations and marketing from the University at Buffalo. She’s now getting her MBA from UB.
She was born in Iraq, moved to Syria at age 5 and came to the U.S. has a refugee in 2011. She’s lived in the Buffalo area for over 10 years.
The spark that lit her entrepreneurial fire was getting diagnosed in 2016 with ulcerative colitis, a chronic inflammatory disease.
“I researched specific ways to let me reclaim my health,” she said. “I started juicing every day. … I perfected my recipes and held on to them for four years.”
Taking an entrepreneurship class at UB led Sadawi to Blackstone LaunchPad, which recently rebranded to UB Startup and Innovation CoLab, an on-campus hub for entrepreneurship.
She officially started her organic juice company, called Hint Juice & Smoothie, in January of this year. Already, she’s won a Blackstone pitch contest, earning a $1,200 prize, and joined the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus’ IC Success program, which is a free, yearlong program aimed at connecting historically marginalized entrepreneurs with supports and resources. She’s received $1,000 through that program for her business.
Hint Juice & Smoothie pivoted this past spring from focusing on online sales to also doing events and catering. Sadawi estimated she’s done over 12 events from March through September and 75% of what she makes now is net profit.
Her goal is to grow into a physical location. She sees juicing as a way to not only improve her own health, but to help others reclaim their health. She wanted a solution that was so simple and healthy that even kids could drink it.
“When I was in the hospital, I saw really young kids (there), like 9 years old,” she said. “For me, that grew passion to help it or solve it. … When I saw the opportunity to unleash it, that’s when I let it go.”
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Nathan Weitzman, 21
Renova Space Inc. • linkedin.com/company/renova-space/
Growing up in Israel where it’s common for folks to work at startups, Natan Weitzman had plenty of business role models.
And he didn’t have to look far to find them. Just within his family, his dad, Dan, was among the first employees of startup Radwin, which has grown to over 200 employees. His mom, Raquel, had her own interior design firm.
“I always aspired to be an entrepreneur like them,” Weitzman said.
After moving around a bit, his family came to New Jersey when he was in high school. It was there that he met the team that would become Renova Space Inc.’s co-founders.
But before starting the company, which is a cloud-based platform that aims to make remodeling and designing spaces more accessible, he opted to go to the University at Buffalo to get his bachelor’s in engineering physics. He’s currently a junior.
Weitzman said he’s always been interesting in learning about the business side of companies as well to bring his technical knowledge to real-world applications like developing products and writing code. That interest brought him to then Blackstone LaunchPad, a UB hub for entrepreneurship.
“When I came (to Buffalo), I was really impressed by the entrepreneurship culture here,” he said. “I was like, ‘Wow, how haven’t I heard of this ecosystem before?’”
He and his co-founders, who are based outside the Buffalo area, founded Renova in March 2022. Weitzman noticed through his mom how time intensive it is to build a 3D model of a space for design purposes.
The Renova team developed a way to use an iPhone to scan an environment and create a 3D model of it to rearrange items and see how they look. They’ve also expanded to market the application to small businesses who want 3D models of their product catalogs as well.
Currently, Renova is in the prototype phase with a handful of individual users and partners giving the team feedback. They hope to do a wider product launch in February 2024.
“I really like the interconnection between tech and business,” he said. “I feel like in my current role at Renova, I’m doing just that.”
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Jonathan Wess, 24
TimeCapsule Family Connections LLC • timecapsulefamilyconnections.com
While other kids saw toys as items to play with, young Jonathan Wess saw a business.
He was always making up companies and playing pretend, he said. He had a toy factory for a while and sold it to a man named Jeff to the tune of a $7 million (faux) check.
A lot of his entrepreneurial drive comes from his mom, Kathy, who worked as director of operations for Harlequin Romance, a publishing company.
“My mother showed me that no matter how many trials and tribulations she went through, it was so cool to fix problems,” he said.
In 2021, he graduated from Canisius University with a bachelor’s in political sciences and a minor in entrepreneurship/entrepreneurial studies and human resources. It was during his college years that Wess discovered the challenge that would lead to his business.
Wess' father died when he was 4 and it took 15 years of looking through his dad’s office and reading journals to get a deeper understanding of the man. But as he talked with friends who had lost or were estranged from a parent, they said they couldn’t do or didn’t have the time to do what Wess had done.
“It was that moment I realized I had a business of trying to find that story and have people learn the lessons they learned to make it easier on future generations,” he said.
In October 2018, he started TimeCapsule Family Connections LLC, a guided video journal for innovators to record for their future selves or help to record a loved one’s story.
Like any entrepreneur, he’s pivoted along the way. The concept started out as a 360 video and virtual reality experience to have coffee with someone who had already passed away. But thanks to mentor Peter Burakowski, Wess realized the audio part of his business proposition was most important.
Wess talked with social workers, psychologists, journalists, authors and others who had lost a parent to become a better interviewer and have a solid base of questions for the video journals.
By November 2022, TimeCapsule pivoted again to focus on entrepreneurs and executive leaders recording video journals to see their growth over time. The startup continues to do the legacy journaling for those recording messages for loved ones as well.
As of late September, the business had conducted 142 interviews.
As a bisexual man who lost his dad at a young age, Wess said he’s thankful to have found the local startup community, which accepted him and wants him to succeed.
“I’d give anything when I came out to see entrepreneurs who also lost somebody, who were told they weren’t going to get anywhere,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Okay, try me.’ That’s one of the things that drives me.”
