We at Cleveland Inno have assembled a Startups to Watch list for the coming year: 10 up-and-coming companies that show signs of promise or already have taken their first few steps.
Our list features startups across several industries, ranging from technology and manufacturing to workforce intelligence and agriculture.
These young companies are getting traction from fresh ideas, capital raises, and innovative solutions to pressing problems. Given what they've done to date, we anticipate they’ll leave an outsized mark on Northeast Ohio.
Without further ado, here are our Startups to Watch in 2023.
Aura Beauty
Denise O’Neil had been a fingernail technician for 20 years when business shutdowns caused by Covid put her out of work.
While on hiatus, O’Neil noticed that the press-on nail industry had no reliable way to size its nails, so it shipped several sets of nails to customers in hopes that one of the sizes would fit.
O’Neil and her brother, Michael Yaksich, a startup veteran and business consultant, founded Aura Beauty at Youngstown Business Incubator in 2020 to use artificial intelligence to solve this problem.
Aura Beauty uses AI and smart-phone cameras to “live-size” customers' fingernails so the company can ship custom-fit nails, Yaksich said. The two plan to launch Aura Beauty this spring.
Fello
Ryan Young, who is CEO of the Young Team — Keller Williams Greater Cleveland realty — co-founded Fello in mid-2019 to buy houses from clients who needed to make quick or convenient sales.
Then known as FlashHouse, the Pepper Pike-based online service, which uses information from home sellers and algorithms to quickly calculate fair market prices for houses, has grown into a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that created an agent-led instant buyer (iBuyer) platform.
Fello has created an offering used by top real estate agents nationwide to expand their businesses, drive leads and create better relationships with their network of homeowners.
Fello raised $25 million in debt and equity in June 2022 to scale its operations nationwide. One of the company’s new investors, Ben Rubenstein, founder of OpCity and former chief revenue officer for Realtor.com, calls Fello “a brand new category” in property technology.
Harmoni Solutions Inc.
Serial entrepreneur Adam Ellis has worked as a software development consultant for machine shops all over the world for more than 20 years.
In 2021, Ellis co-founde Harmoni Solutions Inc. in Akron's Bounce Innovation Hub to help machine shops survive and manage the expected retirements of their most experienced computerized numerical control (CNC) machinists.
Their Harmoni enterprise resource planning (ERP) system “revolutionizes the way CNC machine shops track time and performance,” helping the shops improve their profitability, capacity and performance, Ellis and Caputo said.
Harmoni raised $250,000 in December 2021 and is beginning its next round of fundraising in January, Ellis said. The co-founders sold out their initial production run of devices in 2022 and “are building five times the number of devices for our second production run,” he said.
Hyr Medical
Hyr Medical co-founders Manoj Jhaveri, a former product development and innovation consultant, and Dr. Faris El-Khider, a Cleveland gastroenterologist, met during a startup competition at Cleveland State University in 2016. The entrepreneurs pitched a business idea for improving the scheduling of residents at hospitals. They won first place and launched Hyr Medical a year later, Jhaveri wrote in a blog item.
Foreseeing a massive staffing shortage in the health care industry (which worsened during the pandemic), Jhaveri and El-Khider developed a software-as-a-service (SaaS) technology platform and marketplace for employing temporary nurses, doctors and other medical workers.
Hyr Medical’s technology empowers employers to streamline their recruiting and speed their credentialing processes while they reduce staffing costs and increase revenue.
Based in Highland Heights, Hyr Medical has raised $648,000 so far in pre-seed and seed funding, according to Crunchbase.
Intract
Ryan Isbell combined his experience in the film industry with a lifelong love of gaming and a newfound passion for mixed reality to start Intract in 2021.
Intract enables users to create lifelike digital avatars and other 3-D digital assets for use in video games, solving the complexity and time-suck of creating these assets with easy-to-use digital tools, Isbell said.
Isbell, who is officed in the Youngstown Business Incubator, also has done a lot of work to make the assets produced by Intract interoperable among existing games, he said.
Isbell’s goals for 2023 are to increase sales to gamers and partnerships with both metaverse and traditional gaming companies while raising at least $500,000 to continue technology development.
My Home Park
Five years ago, David Levine’s LED lighting company, Wireless Environment LLC, was acquired by Ring, the home security system company.
“I am a career product person, and my instinct was to find another hole in the market and create a widget and build a market and sell it,” Levine wrote in a blog post.
But Levine had an epiphany. Rather than start another technology company, he started a social enterprise — My Home Park — that assembles and sells kits of native plants to sustain the bees.
Levine and co-founder Wyatt Shell raised money from the same people who invested in Wireless Environment. They planted 10,000 plants in Ohio in 2022 and hope to add five Great Lakes states in 2023.
Octet Scientific
Onas Bolton started Octet Scientific in 2017 after the German company he worked for in a small research group embedded at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland was acquired, according to Cleveland Tech Newsletter.
A chemical and materials science engineer, Bolton set out to develop new molecules that could help make rechargeable batteries from zinc — which is safe, cheap, plentiful and recyclable but doesn't take well to being recharged.
Octet Scientific received its first private-sector investment of $200K in March 2022 and is near to closing that funding round at about $1 million, Bolton said. The company also landed a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Small Business Innovation Research program in August 2022.
Octet is scaling up for producing large volumes of its first chemical product, which will be used by a U.S. manufacturer to make batteries that store renewable energy from solar and wind farms, Bolton said.
The company also is developing a chemical for a different type of battery that is expected to go into production in 2024, he said.
Petra Power
Petra Power co-founders Aaron Goodman and Phillip Clift are adapting a NASA technology developed to provide auxiliary power and clean drinking water on manned space missions to reduce the fuel costs and carbon emissions associated with generating electricity from fossil fuels, Goodman said.
NASA’s solid oxide fuel cells are electrochemical devices that oxidize (rather than burn) fuel to produce electricity, according to the agency’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, which in 2017 awarded Petra Power a startup license to commercialize the technology.
One application for this technology is providing auxiliary power to large vehicles such as trucks so they can run heaters, air conditioners and televisions without idling their engines.
Petra Power is using laboratory space at BRITE Energy Innovators in Warren to complete its research and plans to expand into its own facility in Northeast Ohio in the coming months as it hires more employees, Goodman said.
UnifyWork
Serial tech entrepreneur Steve McHale and his colleagues at UnifyWork in Cleveland have ditched the traditional resumes and job boards, and developed a patented, skills-based algorithm to match employers to candidates who want to do the job.
The first spinout from Cleveland social enterprise UnifyLabs raised $4.5. million in seed money in June 2022 and launched its workforce intelligence platform in the Cleveland market in late November 2022.
Although it's a for-profit enterprise, UnifyWork mirrors a bit of its nonprofit parent by wanting to connect more than 27 million "hidden workers" in the United States with employers who don’t know how to find them.
Vitalxchange
Charu Ramanathan, a serial med-tech entrepreneur, co-founded Vitalxchange in 2018 to help parents confidently raise kids who have disabilities or developmental challenges.
Ramanathan, the startup’s CEO, and co-founder Ketal Patel, its chief technology officer, saw the opportunity to provide parents with personalized and reliable guidance for informed decision-making while addressing their own children’s learning and behavioral issues.
Described by its users as an “Uber for special needs,” Vitalxchange's team of “VitalGuides” — experienced parent mentors and special needs providers — are matched with parents via proprietary technology.
Vitalxchange raised $2.3 million in pre-seed funding completed in January 2022 and launched its online service in the third quarter of 2022.
The company plans to launch an expanded Parent and Play platform for all parents raising children of up to 5 years old in January.
