Nationally ranked Wisconsin-based startup accelerator gener8tor announced Monday this year’s cohort for its 12-week accelerator in Madison.
The six companies selected for the cohort each receive an investment of $100,000. Given the Covid-19 pandemic, the accelerator and its Premier Night, when the startups pitch their businesses to investors, will be virtual this year, said Ben Stanley, managing director of gener8tor Madison. The cohort kicked off on April 16.
The startups are:
Cultured Decadence (Madison, WI.): Led by co-founder and CEO John Pattison, this minority and veteran-owned company develops novel methods to make crustacean products using cell culture and tissue engineering techniques, allowing the company to make lobster and crab meat directly from the animals’ cells (no shell, no organs, no waste) to help serve the growing demand for nutritious and sustainable seafood worldwide.
Gem + Jewel (Lexington, Ky.): Founded and led by Shelia Bayes, the company created a marketplace that allows independent jewelry retailers and jewelry wholesalers to sell merchandise directly to consumers online.
NEER (Kansas City): NEER developed a real-time water quality and infrastructure management platform that uses machine learning to identify leaks and predict failures in municipal drinking water, sewer and stormwater systems. The company’s technology, founded and led by Elango Thevar, analyzes and scores each water asset on their likelihood/consequence of failure, allowing utility directors to make pragmatic monitoring, maintenance and replacement decisions based on real-time data.
PinkLion (Minneapolis): Co-founded and led by CEO Jennifer Bonine, this Minnesota company assembles AI tools into custom subscription bundles for enterprise app teams. These custom solutions are then managed through PinkLion’s dashboard and paid for through an annual subscription.
RealityBLU (Beloit, WI.): Under CEO and co-founder Stefan Agustsson, this startup developed a self-service design platform enabling non-technical marketers to create and publish augmented reality experiences for AR-enabled smartphones and devices.
Sigo (New York, New York): Led by co-founder and CEO Nestor Hugo Solari, Sigo’s mobile-first auto insurance platform allows customers with limited insurance histories to get basic liability policies directly from their phone, in English or Spanish.
“We’ve been thrilled by the engagement from mentors and investors with this cohort in spite of the economic uncertainty of the past three months and the transition to a virtual format,” Stanley said in a statement. “Each company has connected with more than 120 mentors and customers, engaged in hours of one-on-one mentorship and coaching, and grown their revenue. More than 160 venture funds, angel investors and angel groups have engaged with the six founding teams in this cohort over the past nine weeks, and I think that speaks to the quality of the founders and the strength of their accomplishments this spring.”
