Arizona’s startup ecosystem is in full bloom, with more high-growth companies sprouting locally and attracting attention from out-of-state investors.
The innovation ecosystem is bolstered by young people starting their own ventures and building solutions for problems in the state or around the world.
In our annual recognition of innovators under age 25, AZ Inno spoke with 10 young entrepreneurs about their companies and their journey so far. They work in software development, retailing, manufacturing and more. Read on to see what these young people have in the works.
Jai Agrawal, Modrinth
Age: 16
Agrawal is the founder of Modrinth, an open-source platform for people to share "mods" for the Minecraft video game, and eventually, other games as well. Mods are aftermarket software packages that augment a video game.
Agrawal has been building mods for Minecraft since he was 8 years old, but his work on Modrinth really picked up during the Covid-19 pandemic. Agrawal, now in 11th grade at BASIS Chandler, had more time to build Modrinth when school went remote (while still completing his coursework) and the platform has since exploded in popularity.
Modrinth now sees about 1.6 million monthly active users on the platform, up from around 100,000 when the site launched in February. Modrinth now has more than 4,000 apps available that tweak all different parts of the game.
Agrawal has done the lion’s share of the work building Modrinth, but since the platform is open-source, other developers have contributed greatly to improve the site.
The platform runs ads to make money, but thus far Agrawal has been diverting that revenue into a creators' fund for the people who post mods on the platform. Soon creators will get a redistribution of the ad money derived from their pages, a move that Agrawal hopes will develop a sense of community among users and creators.
Lexi Charles, Xtract
Age: 22
Charles is one of the co-founders of Xtract, a supplement company working to bring the nutritional benefits of the Lion’s Mane mushroom to the food and beverage industry.
Charles met her co-founders in the McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Arizona's Eller College of Management. The team originally came together over a shared interest in health, wellness and agriculture before working together in the center’s two semester program.
Two of the team’s members — Jorge Ramos and Edmundo Hernandez — had experience with the Lion’s Mane mushroom, which has compounds that help stimulate the growth of brain cells, according to Healthline.
The Xtract team is specifically looking at Erinacine A found in the mushrooms, crushing it into a powdered form to make their own supplemental product, called Neuracine. The goal is to sell their supplement to food makers to incorporate into their products.
The team won about $12,000 during its second semester in the McGuire Center program, which ended in May, and they have since developed a minimum viable product. The team projects they will need about 18 months to conduct additional research and development before launching their product.
Devon Cox, Toothio
Age: 23
Cox is one of the co-founders of Toothio, an on-demand staffing platform for the dental industry.
Cox started his career at Uber before joining Qwick, one of the fastest-growing startups in the Valley. Qwick is an on-demand staffing platform for the food service industry and while working there, Cox often heard that the dental industry would benefit from a similar offering.
The Covid-19 pandemic forced a lot of dental hygienists out of the industry, exacerbating the labor pinch for dentist offices. Cox and his co-founders — Ian Prendergast and Troy Amelotte — launched Toothio earlier this year.
The Toothio platform is now active for clients in Phoenix, Denver and in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. Cox said the company is already generating revenue and generally growing 100% month over month since launching.
Jordan Fourcher, Cryo X Co.
Age: 22
Fourcher is the founder of Cyro X Co., a company making tiles that stick on the backs of phone cases and reflect heat.
The company's main product, the CryoTile, is an unassuming piece of technology that connects on the back of iPhone 12 and newer phone products. When facing the sky, the tile’s special paint reflects heat radiating from the sun, cooling a phone up to 10 degrees, Fourcher said.
Fourcher got into entrepreneurship while he was a student at Arizona State University. He competed in various Venture Devils pitching contests and won around $30,000 before graduating with a degree in technological entrepreneurship and management earlier this year. He has several business ideas in the works, but the most active is Cyro X.
Fourcher said there are other companies that make radiative cooling tech for large business buyers, but Cryo X is the first company to bring it straight to consumers.
Cryo X is currently accepting pre-orders with hopes of launching the product next summer.
Talbert Herndon, Food Court
Age: 21
Herndon is the founder of Food Court, an artificial intelligence platform in development that predicts the specific dishes people might like at restaurants.
Herndon got the idea for Food Court earlier this year when he was debating which restaurant has the best chicken sandwich with his friends. (Herndon said it's Popeye’s.) He thought instead of relying on food critics or reviews to tell you what to eat, personal data could help reimagine the way people decide what they order.
The Food Court platform is an app for mobile devices that works like a responsive menu, noting how long diners study certain items and which dishes they eventually order. Given enough data, Herndon hopes the AI will be able to find food-preference patterns; people who like tacos at one restaurant might tend to like a certain spaghetti dish elsewhere, for example.
Food Court is currently in pilot testing with 10 Hispanic restaurants in Phoenix, thanks to a partnership the company struck with the Arizona Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. Food Court is aiming to fully launch its app by the end of 2023.
Herndon is a senior at Grand Canyon University, where he works out of Canyon Ventures, and he recently got accepted into a new program at Seedspot in Phoenix.
Brinlee Kidd, Jotted
Age: 19
Kidd is the founder of Jotted, an application designed to help democratize learning for everyone from students to industry professionals. Jotted is still in development, but Kidd described it as a “brilliant bookmark bar” for use on the web, which will ideally help people translate information into knowledge.
Kidd is a sophomore at Arizona State University and she got the idea for Jotted in school after struggling to manage all the different digital education tools available to her during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Jotted platform was originally conceived as a tool to help with note taking and flashcard creation and that idea earned Kidd a trip to Turkey earlier this year.
Kidd traveled to Istanbul in March for the Red Bull Basement student innovation event to compete with student representatives from around the world. Kidd and her co-founder Sylvia Lopez (who has since left the business, but remains friends with Kidd) won first prize for Jotted, beating out 43 other teams.
Since returning to the states, Kidd has brought on two other co-founders — fellow ASU student Josh Tint and Mark Naufelto, executive director of the Luminosity Lab at ASU — to help her scale the business. The Jotted team intends to launch a beta version of its software later this year.
Pramod Kollamparambil
Age: 23
Kollamparambil is the founder of OnlyMortgageJobs.com, a job board for people in the mortgage industry.
Kollamparambil has been interested in entrepreneurship since his days as a student at Arizona State University when he participated in the Venture Devils program. After graduating in 2020, he worked at Goldman Sachs before deciding he wanted to start his own business.
While scrolling Twitter one day, he saw a tweet about an entrepreneur struggling to secure a mortgage. That tweet inspired Kollamparambil to study the mortgage industry, the way self-employed people interact with it and the problems throughout.
He first started a lead generation business that connected entrepreneurs in need to mortgage brokers, but has since moved on to other projects in the industry, most recently with OnlyMortgageJobs.com.
Kollamparambil said the job board was a “gym thought” that he built over a weekend in July, and it has already started attracting about 5,000 visitors a day. The site also is generating money by charging mortgage companies to do email marketing campaigns as a way for them to find new hires.
Christian LaRosa, Rosotics
Age: 23
LaRosa is the founder of Rosotics, a company developing a new process for 3D printing large objects out of metal.
When he was a student at ASU, LaRosa had internships at NASA where he realized that 3D printing had yet to be utilized much in heavy industry. 3D printing tech is generally used to make small things, but LaRosa started Rosotics to find a way to print very large things like rocket parts.
LaRosa said they are starting in aerospace both because of his engineering background and because the industry is held to a high performance standard; He said they’ll later look to work in other industries as well.
Rosotics recently closed a major round of outside funding which will be used to finish some of the research and development on its platform called Mantis. LaRosa said they hope to deliver early pilots of the Mantis to customers by the end of the year.
The Mantis printing device is a cylinder about 10 feet tall and 4 to 5 feet in diameter.
“It folds up into that extremely compact form that's small enough to even throw in the back of a van. But it folds out almost like origami, to encapsulate an incredible build volume,” LaRosa said.
Rosotics employs about 15 people and expects to hire more through the end of this year.
Jaron Lodge, Skip NN'
Age: 23
Lodge is the creator of the Skip NN’ Hole game system, a versatile backyard game setup that combines skipping stones, cornhole and more for use in the pool or on land.
This game system, though, wasn't what Lodge originally intended to create. He set out to make an industry standard skipping stone for competition. Lodge prototyped a few ideal skipping stones (with help from the Guinness Book of Records stone skipping record-setter Kurt "Mountain Man" Steiner) and set out on product testing.
While letting people try out the stone prototypes, Lodge made cornhole boards as makeshift targets. It was during this testing that he realized his stone design needed some work (it was originally going to be made out of fish food) and that people were having fun trying to skip stones at the targets.
Shortly after, Lodge abandoned the idea for a competition stone and the Skip NN’ Hole was born. The product had a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2020 and is now available on Amazon and at some Big 5 Sporting Goods, Dick's Sporting Goods and Scheels locations.
When he spoke to AZ Inno in August, Lodge was preparing to depart for a sales trip that would take him to Dick’s Sporting Goods head office in Pennsylvania and Walmart’s HQ in Arkansas in hopes of landing more of his products on their shelves.
Evan Zavitz, Grav Mouse
Age:22
Zavitz is one of the founding members of the team making the Grav Mouse, a computer mouse designed to be more efficient for people playing video games. Microseconds matter in competitive gaming, and the Grav Mouse team wanted a mouse that had less wasted movement, and thus better performance.
Zavitz met his co-founders — Newton Ryan, Armen Demirjian and Jack Drescher — at the University of Arizona in the McGuire Center's New Venture Development program. These four worked together during the two semester course to bring Ryan's idea to life and to develop a business plan for the Grav Mouse that would thrive outside the classroom.
Most of the four Grav Mouse team members have graduated, but they are still preparing to bring the mouse to market some time next year. Zavitz said they are preparing the company to accept outside funding before launching manufacturing.
Click on the gallery below to see scenes from the Sept. 14 Inno Under 25 event at the PHX Beer Co. Brewery + Taproom.
