As the new year begins, we at Cleveland Inno have assembled a Startups to Watch list: 14 up-and-coming companies that have shown early signs of promise.
Our list features startups across a spectrum of industries, from fintech to baby tech and from medicine to education.
These early-stagers have established solid traction with fresh capital raises, fast revenue growth or innovative solutions to novel problems. Given what they've done to date, we anticipate they’ll leave an outsized mark on Northeast Ohio.
Despite their tender age, many of the companies also are led by serial, regional entrepreneurs — a sign of a healthy innovation ecosystem in Northeast Ohio.
Without further ado, here are our Startups to Watch in 2022.
AgileBlue
Founded in 2020, AgileBlue protects business data from ransomware, phishing and other threats that hit around the world every day, says Tony Pietrocola, the company's co-founder and president.
The Valley View company's subscription product is known as a "security operations center as a service" and is built to detect cyber threats before a breach occurs, using automation and machine learning.
AgileBlue landed $2.25 million in 2021 from a lineup of heavy hitters that includes several former partners of the Blackstone Group, Black Mountain Systems and Carlyle Group.
Axuall
Founded by another serial entrepreneur, 3-year-old Axuall in Cleveland has created a blockchain-based credentialing and verification network that streamlines the digital credentialing process, first applied to physicians.
Axuall's technology and network shortens the physician-credentialing process to as few as 15 minutes from as many as 100 days, said Charlie Lougheed, founder and CEO. Lougheed previously co-founded Explorys, which was sold to IBM Watson in 2015, and Everstream, which was sold to Concurrent Computer Corp. in 2005.
Axuall, which raised $10.4 million in a Series A round in July 2021, according to Crunchbase, reached a deal with another startup, Hyr Medical in Highland Heights, last year in which Hyr Medical integrated Axuall's technology on its platform.
BlendEd
Founded in 2020, BlendEd is a company that grew out of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is a course-creating platform that enables college professors to use templates to build their courses online.
The Cleveland-based company launched its product in December and has received $330,000 in investor support as a pre-seed company to date, according to Crunchbase.
David Boone is co-founder and CEO of BlendEd.
Champ Titles
Champ Titles uses patent-pending technology to digitize the process of issuing automotive vehicle titles.
Co-founded in 2018 by Shane Bigelow, now the downtown Cleveland company's CEO, Champ Titles — stylized as CHAMPtitles in its branding — uses technology such as blockchain to reduce the cost of handling auto titles for government, insurance carriers, financial institutions, vehicle sellers and buyers, according to trade publication Government Technology.
Champs Titles' digital title and registration suite, which is delivered as a subscription service, enables users to pay loss claims and salvage wrecked vehicles faster, "potentially increasing salvage returns," said Josh Thompson, vice president of auto and property claims at State Auto Insurance, in an online testimonial.
The company in August announced the closing of an $8.5 million Series A funding round.
Drips
Akron-based Drips has developed an artificial-intelligence-powered platform that lets brands automate audience engagement through "conversational texting" and scheduled calling.
Drips received an unspecified but what it called "significant" investment from Accel-KKR in July 2021 and another unspecified investment from Blue Venture Fund in October 2021 to accelerate growth of its conversational-texting technology in the health-care market.
In November 2021, Drips was one of three Northeast Ohio companies to be named to the Deloitte North America Technology Fast 500 list of fast-growing companies.
A.C. Evans is Drips' CEO.
Felux
A B2B marketplace and supply chain platform for steel and industrial materials based in Cleveland, Felux was spun off from Majestic Steel USA in Pepper Pike in 2019.
The company aims to transform the $1 trillion steel industry by bringing commerce and inventory online through a digital product that manages supply chains, purchasing, procurement, financing and logistics.
In August, Felix raised $5.1 million in seed funding to continue its growth.
Dallas Hogensen, a serial entrepreneur with experience in sales and leadership at startups including ridesharing platform Lyft, is CEO and co-founder.
OndeCare
Founded in 2016, OndeCare (which stands for "on-demand care") is a software as a service platform that connects pre-vetted care and education professionals with families needing in-home care for children, parents or people with special needs.
OndeCare also provides small and medium-sized businesses with an employee benefit for customizable, pay-as-you-go backup care for family members and workforce backup for home-care agencies.
The Chagrin Falls company raised $680,000 in pre-seed funding from investors including BlueTree Allied Angels in June 2021, according to Crunchbase.
In November 2021, the company raised $120,000 from the Techstars Future of Longevity Accelerator, Crunchbase reported.
Nicole Paolozzi is founder and CEO of OndeCare.
orthobrain
Dr. Dan German, an orthodontist in Richfield, Ohio, founded orthobrain in 2016 to help dentists integrate orthodontics into their practices.
The company provides a subscription-based platform that uses digital technology, proprietary AI, learning systems and the expertise of orthodontists in a way that German has said can help dentists fulfill an unmet demand for orthodontics.
During the pandemic, orthobrain has benefitted from an acceleration in teledentistry and more patients using teleconferencing to express concern about how their teeth look, German said.
Proformex
Proformex is a policy-management platform in Cleveland that offers data aggregation, analytics and portfolio monitoring to life insurance and annuities professionals.
Company founder Mike Pepe, a life insurance professional, saw that unmonitored costs of insurance, premium and crediting rate fluctuations could erode policy values and result in a premature policy lapse.
He founded Proformex in 2016 to help independent life insurance and advisory firms monitor policy performance, identify at-risk policies and uncover sales opportunities, according to the company's LinkedIn page.
Kris Beck is CEO of Proformex.
Smart Soda
Smartsoda Holdings Inc. makes vitamin-infused, flavored, sparkling, alkaline waters and sodas using organic cane sugar. Smart Soda products also can be infused with cannabidiol, better known as CBD.
Founded in 2019, the company says it is aiming at a "massive market" — the $250 billion fountain and ready-to-drink beverage market, according to Smart Soda's StartEngine crowdfunding site.
Smart Soda provides its products to restaurants, offices, cafes, health clubs and convenience stores and recently launched an on-demand functional beverage system.
CEO and co-founder Lior Shafir was the exclusive U.S. partner and distributor of Soda Stream Professional, which was acquired by PepsiCo in 2018 for $3.2 billion, according to Smartsoda.
The company raised $303,694 in a 2020 StartEngine campaign and $300,000 in seed funding in August 2021, according to Crunchbase.
Sprinly
Ray Lui and Mary McCann, co-founders of Sprinly, the organic, plant-based food subscription service in Garfield Heights, were among eight Northeast Ohio finalists for Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year 2021 East Central Award.
Lui and McCann launched the meal company in 2016 in hopes of creating a healthier society by making it easier for people to eat more vegetables.
Sprinly delivers dishes such as Citris Detox Salad and Mushroom and Lentil Burger to subscribers weekly. So far, the company has accepted no outside funding since the founders' initial investments of $25,000 each.
Thrivable
Thrivable's founder and CEO, David Edelman, and its chief operating officer, Ryan Fuchs, recognized that the market-research process is slow, expensive and frustrating for most health-care companies, so they built Thrivable in 2019.
The Bedford Heights company is a real-time market-research platform that enables companies to quickly do surveys, polls, interviews and usability studies through a database of more than 40,000 patients.
Thrivable raised $1.2 million during a 2021 seed round led by Allos Ventures and that included Northeast Ohio investors JumpStart Inc., North Coast Ventures and Innovation Fund.
smallTalk
SmallTalk (formerly known as Thrive Neuromedical) is a Chagrin Falls consumer technology startup that is developing technology licensed from the Baby Brain Optimization Project Research Lab of Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus.
The smallTalk Egg is the first in the company's line of baby tech products aimed at helping babies develop better brains by enabling them to engage with foreign languages.
The egg-shaped device is designed with patent-pending active-learning concepts and, according to the company, is triggered by a baby's action to play recordings of mothers speaking in their native tongues.
The first users of the technology were premature babies in neonatal intensive-care units who were deprived of consistent access to their mothers' voices, according to Rev1 Ventures, the Columbus-based venture capital firm that invested an undisclosed amount in the company in 2018.
Serial entrepreneur Dean Koch is co-founder and CEO of smallTalk.
Time2Talk
Time2Talk is another language-learning technology.
Founded in Cleveland in 2019 by Marina Jackman, Time2Talk is a mobile app that connects U.S. students who want to practice the Spanish they are learning with native Spanish speakers in Latin America.
These connections are made on-demand. "You can just call whenever you want and use it for as long as you want or as little as you want" to practice your Spanish, Jackman told Ideastream in a January 2021 interview.
The company says high schools, universities, libraries and businesses can partner with Time2Talk to help participants gain confidence, fluency and cultural proficiency in Spanish.
