A Charlotte-based company has racked up multiple celebrity commitments on the latest season of the “Unicorn Hunters” show.
Margik Inc., a sustainable lighting startup, landed funding from all seven judges — known as The Circle of Money — who heard about the product on an episode of the series that aired Aug. 18. “Unicorn Hunters” is an internet reality series that connects entrepreneurs seeking funding to millions of potential investors globally.
Margik founder Margaret Kocherga, a Ukrainian immigrant, made her pitch in front of panelists including former NFL player Cris Carter and former U.S. Treasurer Rosie Rios. During her presentation, Kocherga explained to the celebrity investors the purpose of her company, which is creating an alternative to LEDs for electronics and other applications that are not environmentally friendly.
Founded in 2019, the startup is on a mission to make LEDs more sustainable and bring organic lighting into the mainstream. Kocherga could not disclose details of the judges’ commitments but said support from the show will push Margik closer to its goals. The company received 10 million in Unicoins, an asset-backed cryptocurrency founded by the show.
“Originally, I started the company based off of research I did at my graduate school,” Kocherga said. “The goal for the company is really making organic lighting as accessible as possible for all sorts of angles of life. If you look around, there are a lot of light-up objects nowadays. But the technologies that are still used in them are things that are not good for neither humans nor the environment.”
Kocherga’s unanimous support came after two panelists — Silvina Moschini, president of Unicoin, and Jason Felts, former CEO of Virgin Fest — initially decided not to invest due to challenges Margik might face. After longer deliberation, the judges changed their decision to “yes.”
“The one yes was kind of enough for me,” Kocherga said. “For some reason, in my brain, (the others) didn't register as a bad thing. But then when they said yes, I was like, ‘What? Did I just get all seven? Like, what is going on? What is happening right now?’”
She plans to use the funding to move into a laboratory space to store the company’s production and chemistry equipment. The other portion will go to obtaining the appropriate licenses to ship electronic devices. She also plans to hire an engineer with a rare set of expertise, which can be challenging, the founder said.
Margik currently creates small, single-color, organic devices. The company has pre-ordering available for its light-up stickers that can be enabled by touch, motion sensor or temperature. The startup also invented organic-LED-based flexible business cards that have logos that illuminates by touch. These were the products demonstrated on the show.
“The most requested thing for us was light-up stickers so people can put them on whatever objects they need to put be put on,” Kocherga said. “That would enable us to prove the engineering portion enough to then do large-scale panels for things like indoor lighting, aircraft emergency lighting… So that's our ultimate goal — big giant rolls of light devices that are fully recyclable.”
Kocherga, 28, immigrated from Ukraine at 15 years old, not knowing how to speak English. She grew an interest in science after her professional ballet career ended as a result of injury. She earned a Ph.D. in nanoscale science from UNC Charlotte at age 25.
“Losing something to me is just another chance,” she said on the show. “That is the one thing immigrants really share. Coming with nothing and starting all over. One thing I don’t do is give up.”
