Where should you build a business?
It's a simple question with seemingly complex answers. But for Brain Brackeen, general partner at Lightship Capital, the answer is "emphatically" Louisville.
"Here in this region, it takes about $15 million to generate $172 million exit and it costs a lot more to get the same exit in other places," he said. "That's your money. That's your children's money. That's your great-grandchildren's money. Keep it in your pocket by building your company here."
Brackeen was the keynote speaker at Render Competition on Thursday evening at Lynn Family Stadium, which celebrated eight startups that have chosen to build their companies here. Render Capital, a $15 million regional fund established in early 2020, announced the winners of its annual competition, each of which received a $100,000 investment.
Five winners were local to Louisville and the other three — from Colorado, Boston and Kansas City, respectively — will relocate their headquarters to this region. The competition aims to make funding more accessible to early-stage startups in Greater Louisville while also attracting new entrepreneurs to the region.
“On behalf of the entire Render Capital team, we want to thank all 302 startup applicants from 27 countries that applied, as well as our generous sponsors and our expert judges," said Marigrace Ragsdale, senior associate at Render Capital, in a news release. "We cannot wait to see how these funds will benefit the eight startups and to watch our local entrepreneurial scene continue to flourish as a result of the great work they will be doing here.”
The eight winning startups include:
- DiningTek (Broomfield, Colorado): DiningTek is an all-in-one business development engine empowering food and dining entrepreneurs (restaurants, cafes, food trucks, and food wholesalers). DiningTek provides marketing automation, branding and online sales under one platform, providing high-profit margins, brand elevation and customer retention.
- Innovative Therapeutix, Inc. (Louisville): Innovative Therapeutix, Inc. is a pediatric-focused device company solving medical and developmental issues in infants and children. Their current product, LullaFeed, is a music-based feeding device allowing parents and feeding specialists to support their child through the feeding progression, which is a problem for nearly 60% of infants every year — an estimated 74 million infants.
- Legal Gantt (Louisville): Legal Gantt eliminates unnecessary phone calls and reduces the risk of a communication bar complaint against attorneys.
- Moolathon (Louisville): Moolathon is a social fundraising platform built around a fitness tracking application. They give all groups and individuals the ability to raise money for a cause through the pursuit of a cause we can all relate to getting fit.
- Repaytient (Louisville): Repaytient increases hospital cash flow by up to 30% and reduces collections overhead by up to 15% by offering interest-free payment plans to patients to pay their ever-increasing out-of-pocket health care expenses, and help them get the care they need when they need it.
- Symba (Louisville): Real estate agents have extremely fragmented and chaotic sales processes preventing them from providing a modern customer experience. Symba helps agents close more business and provide better customer service with the industry's only mobile-first CRM that eliminates clunkiness and complexity.
- Veeper (Kansas City, Missouri): Veeper builds personalized loyalty programs for online stores and rewards customers with automatic, incremental discounts instead of cashback/points. They track customers’ shopping activities and apply the optimum discount that gets them to buy more. Each time a customer adds an item to the cart, they'll see their discount increase.
- Xena Intelligence (Boston): Xena Intelligence is an algorithmic engine that optimizes pay-per-click ad campaigns by continuously ingesting keyword and sales data from various sources and automates the decision-making process, thereby making the ad campaigns highly adaptable to the ever-changing e-commerce landscape.
The winners were selected by a group of expert judges, including: Allie Burns (CEO, Village Capital), Vik Chadha (CEO, Scalable Ventures and general partner, Unbridled Ventures), Kellie Kuzmuk (growth lead product manager, Rise Science), Jacob Schpok (vice president of entrepreneurial services, Elevate Ventures) and Patrick Henshaw (managing director, Render Capital).
Henshaw shared the economic impact of the eight companies that won Render Competition in 2020. Since last year's competition, that cohort received $1.1 million in additional investment, more than $570,000 in revenue, made over 50 strategic partnerships and created 41 jobs.
Render Competition's 2020 winners included: BrainSTEM University, Briocare, Moxie Girl, Roborus, SplitGym (now SplitPass), Stuccco, True Adherence and Unitonomy (now OrgVitals).
