Building a successful startup is grueling work, with the odds stacked against you. The vast majority of startups fail, so leading an upstart tech company to a successful exit is no small feat.
When those founders turn their attention to their next project, it's sure to pique the interest of investors, business leaders and others looking to connect and partner with a repeat founder.
That makes repeat startup founders and serial entrepreneurs some of the most closely watched executives in tech.
There are serial founders that most everyone knows, like Elon Musk, Resy founder Gary Vaynerchuk and Sam Altman, whose firm OpenAI is currently in talks to receive a $10 billion investment from Microsoft Corp.
But there are also a host of successful repeat founders in innovation ecosystems around the nation who are working on their next big idea. As 2023 kicks off, American Inno is putting the spotlight on 16 serial entrepreneurs to watch across the nation this year.
Here they are:
Paul English
English co-founded Boston travel search engine Kayak in 2004, building the popular site until it was acquired by Priceline for $1.8 billion in 2012. Today, English is leading a new app called Deets, which launched last year as a source for restaurant reviews and recommendations. The app allows users to get suggestions on the best eateries in specific places from their network of friends. Eventually, the app hopes to expand to reviewing coffee shops, museums, tourist attractions, hotels and even products like computers and cars.
Andy Dunn
Dunn co-founded online clothing company Bonobos and led it through a $310 million acquisition by Walmart. Despite Dunn's professional success, the Chicago-based entrepreneur struggled with bipolar disorder, which he describes in book launched last year called "Burn Rate." Today, he's behind a new startup working to tackle mental health called Pumpkin Pie, a Tinder-for-friendships-type app that helps people combat loneliness and meet people in real life. The app is currently in beta.
Matt Scantland
Scantland built Columbus, Ohio-based software startup CoverMyMeds, which automates part of the prescription filling process to make it easier for patients to get their medication. As the firm's CEO, he helped grow the businesses into a unicorn that was ultimately acquired in 2017 for $1.44 billion by McKesson Corp. Today, Scantland is behind AndHealth, which emerged from stealth last year with its tech platform designed to reverse chronic disease by coaching behavior changes. The startup, which is made up of former CoverMyMeds employees, raised $57 million in 2022.
Shegun Otulana
Otulana, a Birmingham serial entrepreneur, has scaled several businesses, including Therapy Brands, a practice management software company that led to a significant exit for Otulana. In 2021, he founded Harmony Venture Labs, which focuses on helping B2B software startup founders build companies. Harmony Venture Labs said last year it's launching a new advisory program to help startup founders scale, which plans to launch later this year.
Helen Anderson
Anderson sold her first startup Milkies, a breast milk saver product, to Fairhaven Health in 2013. Today, she leads HelloCare, an in-home care service for those who need extra help or medical care but want to remain in their homes. The startup, which is profitable, Portland Inno reports, has grown to 85 employees.
Austin Allison
Cincinnati native Austin Allison built real estate tech startup Dotloop, an online platform that helps facilitate real estate transactions. Allison sold Dotloop to Zillow in 2015 for $108 million. His next act took shape in the form of Pacaso, a tech startup that helps buyers own a second home. It reached unicorn status in 2021, just five months after its launch. The financing made Pacaso the fastest startup in U.S. history to reach the benchmark $1 billion valuation.
John Mackey, Walter Robb, Betsy Foster
Mackey, the co-founder of Whole Foods, along with Robb and Foster, two former executives of the healthy grocery chain, last year launched Austin startup Healthy America. The company, which launched with $31 million in equity funding, according to an SEC filing, will involve a chain of plant-based restaurants and wellness centers that offer fitness and spa services. Mackey stepped down as CEO of Whole Foods in September. The new firm comes after Amazon acquired Whole Foods in 2017 for $13.7 billion.
Pam Marrone
Pam Marrone is the founder of Marrone Bio, a company that made biologically-based products for agricultural pest management and plant health. It went public in 2013 and was sold after nearly a decade for $236 million. Last year, Marrone announced the launch of Sacramento-based Invasive Species Foundation and Invasive Species Control Corp., which aims to develop biological controls to combat invasive species in waterways, forests and agriculture.
Garrett Brown
Brown, a prolific Philadelphia inventor and member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, helped create innovations in filmmaking such as the Steadicam, which has been used in movies from Rocky to The Shining. He also created the SkyCam, a camera that slides across a suspended cable above the fields at NFL stadiums. His latest invention is the Zeen, an alternative to a wheelchair and a walker that falls somewhere between the two. It can manually boost someone from a sitting position to a standing one without a battery or motorization. It can also provide support for a person who would rather be on their feet than sitting.
Anu Vora
Vora sold her first business AdmitAlly, a video chat platform that matched students with mentors to navigate the college application process, to California-based Nestlings in 2020. Her next business, PayTile, launched the following year. Cincinnati-based PayTile is a peer-to-peer payments app to allow private cashless payments without sharing personal details. Its technology is similar to AirDrop, but instead of sending a file, users send money.
Dave Copps
Copps founded Brainspace, a machine learning platform for digital investigations that was acquired in a $2.8 billion private equity deal in 2017. Just this month, Copps announced the completion of a $21.2 million round in his new startup Worlds Enterprises, a Dallas firm building AI infrastructure for the metaverse. Focusing on the industrial sector, Worlds says it builds "digital twins of real-world operations" to help companies improve their processes.
Samir Arora
Arora spent a decade at Apple in the early 1980s working on the Lisa and Macintosh computers. In the 1990s, he co-founded NetObjects, an early website building tool that was acquired by IBM in 1997. Last year, the Bay Area entrepreneur announced a $10 million raise for his newest company Kyro Digital, a web3 native development platform. Kyro is trying to make it easier for people to build native web3 apps.
David Levine
Levin launched Cleveland-based Wireless Environment in 2006 to create a line of Mr. Beams LED, battery-powered lights that homeowners could install themselves and use for safety and security purposes. The company sold in 2017 to Ring, the popular doorbell security camera system that was acquired by Amazon a year later. Last year, Levine co-founded a public benefit corporation called My Home Park to assemble and sell kits of native plants that feed wild bees.
Marcelino Alvarez
Alvarez launched Portland product design and strategy firm Uncorked Studio, leading it through an acquisition in 2019 to Fresh Consulting. His next venture is Photon Marine, a startup building high-powered electric outboard motors for commercial boats. Photon’s systems can be used 18-foot rigid inflatable boat used for tourism in the Galapagos as well as 80-foot tender vessels that transport passengers between cruise ships and shore.
Want to meet more startups to follow? Check out our inaugural list of American Inno's Startups to Watch.
