Mike Schmid is confident his Winston-Salem startup is onto something big.
Schmid is the founder and CEO of inStryde, which won the lightning round pitch competition and $3,000 at the ConvergeSouth Conference in Winston-Salem last week.
“I think it just shows were onto something big here,” Schmid said.
inStryde offers customized, affordable insoles delivered in days to bridge the gap between medical orthotics and off-the-shelf insoles. Customers take a fit quiz, foot scan and gait analysis on their smartphone; inStryde then uses AI to create a 3-D image of the customer’s feet and will 3-D print the custom insole. It's a cheaper, faster way to produce the custom orthotics.
“We’ve been selling since early 2022, getting some great traction with our B2C customers.
inStryde, which closed a $400,000 fundraising round a few months ago, is looking to modernize its sales process, moving from relying largely on the social media efforts of Schmid and CTO Andrew Plant to a scalable process.
Schmid said inStryde is ready to handle the increased sales because the combination of its app and 3-D printer capabilities is the “holy grail of mass customized production.”
inStryde has had some big wins in the last six to eight months, winning the Winston Starts Investor Forum and $10,000 as well as being one of 10 companies selected into the “Tech Stars” accelerator program out of 10,000.
Minerva Lithium, which has a developed a filter that can trap lithium from water that is a vast improvement over traditional recovery methods, finished second in the lightning round and won $2,000.
Green Solutions Group, a Salisbury startup that has developed an environmentally friendly embalming fluid, finished third and won $1,000.
