FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

January 24, 2023

For more information, please contact:

Alex Crowley, Director, Economic & Sustainable Development crowleya@bloomington.in.gov or 812-349-3477

Pat East, Executive Director, The Mill pat@dimensionmill.org or 317-965-2155

Jennifer Pearl, President, Bloomington Economic Development Corporation jpearl@bloomingtonedc.com or 812-320-1003

Andrew Krebbs, Communications Director, Office of the Mayor andrew.krebbs@bloomington.in.gov or 812-349-3406

City and The Mill Sign Innovation Partnership Agreement; Trades District and Tech Center Surge Forward

Bloomington, Ind.—The City of Bloomington and The Mill today announced they have formalized a new partnership to expand Bloomington’s innovation economy, attract cutting-edge companies, and create high-paying jobs. According to the Innovation Partnership Agreement approved by the Redevelopment Commission (RDC) on January 23 (https://bton.in/nuuxS), The Mill will now manage the development and marketing of the Trades District, a 12-acre portion of the Bloomington Certified Technology Park.

The first priority will be establishing an executive director position for the Trades District and Tech Center, finalizing the vision for the Trades District Technology Center (https://bton.in/aI8lp), overseeing its construction, recruiting tenants, and building collaborations and furthering partnerships with the City, BEDC, Indiana University, and private sector leaders.

“Innovation-based startups and growth-stage companies are critical for building a dynamic economy that creates good jobs for our region,” said Mayor John Hamilton. “This partnership positions us to quickly move forward and build on the long-term work of many partners. Since opening in 2018, The Mill has transformed our tech sector economy. Their startup expertise, operational experience, ecosystem connections across the state, and programming resources align with what we need to develop the Tech Center and the Trades District into a thriving hub of innovation.”

The Mill, a nonprofit center for entrepreneurship and coworking, offers entrepreneurial community, training, mentoring, and capital. Since its launch in 2020, Flywheel Fund, The Mill’s micro-investment fund, has invested $1.6 million in 29 Indiana-based startups (flywheelfund.vc). That seed funding has allowed those small, fast-growing companies to attract $8.9 million in additional outside investment, according to The Mill. The Kauffman Foundation, a nonprofit that tracks entrepreneurial growth, regards access to early-stage capital as critical to increasing business starts and creating jobs.

In 2022, Flywheel and The Mill helped propel Bloomington to #15 in the Midwest Startup City rankings, despite Bloomington being the smallest city in the top 20 and one of the smallest in the list as a whole. TechPoint, Indiana’s nonprofit industry group for the tech sector, named Bloomington Indiana’s Rising Tech City Award in 2021 and singled out The Mill as instrumental.

“To accomplish the economic development goals for our region, the Tech Center must become not merely a physical space but a hub of connectivity that sparks innovation and opportunity and attracts talent and investment. We’ve seen at The Mill how clustering tech companies in close proximity has a compounding effect on innovation. Multi-disciplinary, private/public partnerships will be essential in that network of connections,” said Pat East, Executive Director for The Mill. “The City and RDC have made a deep, visionary investment in the Trades District, and with the Bloomington Economic Development Corporation (BEDC) secured critical federal funding for the Tech Center, now is the time to take action and turn vision into reality.”

Construction on the Tech Center is expected to begin in the fall of 2023. In 2021, the Economic Development Administration awarded the RDC and the BEDC a $3.5 million CARES Act Recovery Assistance Grant to build the Tech Center. Acting on behalf of the City, the RDC will match the federal investment with a $1.6 million pledge to the project. The EDA projects that the grant will create 530 jobs and generate $51 million in private investment in the region.

“We’re excited for this next stage of the Trades District and Tech Center development, which The Mill is very strongly positioned to carry forward,” said Jennifer Pearl, President of the BEDC. “It builds on our earlier work with the City and other partners to foster an innovative economy while redeveloping the Trades District for our community’s future.”

Since the designation of the 65-acre Certified Technology Park in 2005, of which the 12-acre Trades District is part, the site has seen the transformation of the historic Dimension Mill into a business incubator and co-work space. Infrastructure improvements in the form of new streets, walkways, and other environmentally friendly amenities, and a new 350-space parking structure (the first in Indiana to achieve Parksmart certification, a sustainability credential) have made the area a benefit to Bloomington and friendly to visitors utilizing various modes of transportation.

Recently, in December 2022, the Showers Administration Building at 601 N. Morton Street (https://bton.in/_QO1n) was sold to Eurton Qualified Opportunity Fund, LLC, who is performing a preliminary restoration of the building’s interior and intends to solicit potential technology and innovation tenants this year. In November 2022, the Showers Brothers Furniture Factory Kiln Building at 642 N Madison Street was sold to The Kiln Collective (https://bton.in/XP3Pb), who will renovate the structure and occupy it with their respective ventures.   

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About The Mill

The Mill is the heart of southern Indiana’s startup ecosystem and its largest coworking space. A 501(c)3 nonprofit, its mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship. Learn more at dimensionmill.org

About the Trades District

The Trades District, a 12-acre portion of the Bloomington Certified Technology Park, is envisioned as a place of innovation, attraction, and job creation for the City of Bloomington. The Bloomington Certified Technology Park encompasses 65 acres of downtown and is adjacent to many cultural attractions, downtown restaurants, core neighborhoods, and downtown housing. The B-Line Trail (https://bton.in/wKq3F), the City’s multi-use urban trail, runs through the area, further linking the Certified Technology Park to other areas of Bloomington’s historic, vibrant downtown and to parts beyond. Learn more at bloomington.in.gov/trades.

About the Bloomington Economic Development Corporation (BEDC)

The BEDC is a nonprofit dedicated to economic development strategy and the retention, development, and attraction of quality jobs across Monroe County, Indiana. It has close to 100 members representing the private, local government, nonprofit, and educational sectors. The BEDC is funded through memberships and grants from private industry, the City of Bloomington, the Town of Ellettsville, Monroe County, Indiana University, and Ivy Tech Community College-Bloomington. Learn more at bloomingtonedc.com.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

January 11, 2023

For more information, please contact:

Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming, The Mill, andy@dimensionmill.org, or 812-679-6140

Jamie Tagg, Associate Professor of Music, Audio Engineering and Sound Production, IU Jacobs School of Music, jamtagg@indiana.edu

Jacobs Professor Wins Business Idea Competition for Innovative Cello Platform

Jamie Tagg takes home $2,500 investment for Celadore

Bloomington, Ind.— The Mill, Bloomington’s nonprofit center for entrepreneurship, announced today the winner of the Crossroads Idea Competition, held December 14, 2022. Jamie Tagg, Associate Professor of Music, Audio Engineering and Sound Production at the IU Jacobs School of Music, won for his business concept Celadore, an innovative performance riser for cellists soloing with orchestras. Celadore will receive a $2,500 investment from Flywheel Fund, The Mill’s venture capital fund for startup companies.

“I am so excited to have won the Crossroads Idea Pitch Competition,” Tagg said. “I want to highlight and thank the team at The Mill for their support through events and individual consultations, as well as the partnership they have forged with the IU Innovation and Commercialization Office, offering a wide variety of educational resources and events to IU faculty startups. There is no question that these resources have set me and my company up for success as we move from a simple prototype to a commercially viable product and company!”

Celadore is the world’s first acoustically optimized and modular cello podium. It harnesses the vibration of the cello’s endpin, focuses it into a resonant panel made of wood and carbon fiber, and makes the instrument louder and clearer for the audience and performer alike.

Cello podiums are essential in concert settings, Tagg explained, to promote visibility of the star performer. The problem is that each riser is different, and typically the endpin resonates it with it in ways that detrimental to sound or tone—the unique signature of the cellist. As a result, cellists are constantly forced to modify their performance to compensate.

Tagg first developed the concept in 2013 while working for a professional orchestra as a recording engineer. The orchestra had two events planned at a venue with no podium, so Tagg constructed one drawing on his knowledge of acoustics and carpentry. The prototype was such an improvement that both cellists performing with the orchestra asked if they could buy it.

“Celadore is a perfect example of how great business ideas are born,” said Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming at The Mill. “When someone like Jamie has expertise in a particular area, in this case musical sound and performance, they develop insights into that industry’s unique problems. And when you create a needed solution to one of those problems, that’s entrepreneurship. Great entrepreneurial ideas can come from folks working in any field, regardless of whether they have a business background. The key is creating a terrific solution to a pain point.”

Tagg has continued to modify the riser since then. Earlier in 2022, he participated in the IU Faculty Startup Accelerator, a collaboration between The Mill and IU’s Innovation and Commercialization Office to help IU faculty learn how to develop their promising entrepreneurial ideas.

Tagg will use the Crossroads Idea prize money, a $2,500 investment from Flywheel Fund, to take the Celadore prototype design to a manufacturable, cost-effective product. He plans to launch with direct to consumer sales to prestige musicians to build a reputation. Later, the company will use that experience to refine the product and eventually license the manufacturing to a company with established production and sales channels in the musical instrument and staging industries.

Crossroads Idea Competition was launched in 2020.  A panel of twelve entrepreneurs, investors, and business experts selected five finalists to pitch their ideas live over Zoom. The other finalists were Kristin Cummings, Andrew Riordan, Tyler Jones, and Jack Megnin. The Crossroads Idea Competition finals were judged by Samantha Ginther, Venture Associate at High Alpha; Adam Gross, Executive Director of Ivy+ Career Link at Ivy Tech; and Heath Murray, Partner at consulting firm Dioltas.

Visit https://www.dimensionmill.org/crossroads-idea-competition to learn more about the competition.

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About The Mill

The Mill is the heart of southern Indiana’s startup ecosystem and its largest coworking space. A 501(c)3 nonprofit, its mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship. For more information, visit https://www.dimensionmill.org/

About Flywheel Fund

Flywheel Fund is a member-managed capital fund for early-stage and high potential startups based in Indiana. It’s administered and run by The Mill.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

October 18, 2022

For more information, please contact:

Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming, The Mill, andy@dimensionmill.org

Jessica Bussert, CEO, Wave Therapeutics, Jessica@bussert.com

Riley Ellingsen, Co-Founder, CEO, heARsight, riley@hearsight.net

MedTech Devices Sweep 2022 Fall Crossroads Pitch Competition

heARsight wins pre-seed, Wave Therapeutics wins seed competition

Bloomington, Ind.—The Mill, Bloomington’s nonprofit center for entrepreneurship, today announced the winners of the Fall 2022 Crossroads Pitch Competition. South Bend company heARsight won the pre-seed competition for its augmented reality smart-glasses that provide real-time subtitles during in-person conversations. Nashville-based Wave Therapeutics won the seed competition for its therapeutic devices and software that prevent bendsores and blood clots for mobility impaired patients. HeARsight will receive a $10,000 investment from Flywheel Fund. Wave Therapeutics will receive a $20,000 investment.

“We’re proud to have been selected as the winners of the Crossroads pre-seed track, amongst an impressive and diverse group of startups,” said heARsight co-founder and CEO Riley Ellingsen. “The feedback we received from each round of the competition was invaluable, and the cash award gets us closer to our target for unlocking our next product development milestone. This recognition inspires confidence in our team that our recent efforts have demonstrated sufficient validation and traction to move forward with our pre-seed raise. We’re excited to be one step closer to creating a more accessible world for people who are hard of hearing and/or d/Deaf and incredibly grateful for Crossroads’ support of this mission.”

The pre-seed finals were judged by Geoff Zentz, Senior Director of Innovation at AgriNovus Indiana, and two past Crossroads winners, Jennie Moser, CEO of Stagetime, and Ellie Symes, CEO of The Bee Corp.

HeARsight’s glasses use an embedded microphone and speech-to-text and AR technology to create real-time subtitles. Danny Fritz and Ellingsen founded heARsight while students in Notre Dame’s Master of Science in Engineering, Science, & Technology Entrepreneurship Excellences program. Fritz saw his girlfriend struggling with speech comprehension—exacerbated by the prevalence of masks during the pandemic—and was inspired to explore how assistive tech could improve her quality of life. Globally, WHO reports that 430 million people have hearing difficulties, and as populations age and unsafe listening practices rise, that number is expected to grow to 2.5 billion by 2050. Earlier in 2022, heARsight was a semifinalist in the McCloskey New Venture Competition and won the third annual Recognition for Innovative Startup Excellence (RISE) Award.

Seed winner Wave Therapeutics, a Techstars Future of Longevity company, has also been on a winning streak this year. CEO Jessica Bussert won the Women’s Fast Pitch Finals and was selected as the judges’ and audience favorite pitch at the Revolutionize 2022 conference in Boston. 

Wave’s product is the culmination of Bussert’s diverse background in programming, nursing, entrepreneurship, and business consulting. As a nurse, she saw the horrific wounds caused by bedsores firsthand. She then drew on her tech experience to design the first smart active cushioning product for wheelchairs to prevent pressure injuries and report data automatically to physicians.

Wave has already secured one patent and a contracted research agreement with the VHA, which has 85,000 wheelchair-bound clients. At an affordable reimbursement price of $450, Wave’s initial serviceable obtainable market is over $38 million, and CEO Bussert has a plan to expand beyond that to a nearly $2.5 billion US market.

“The Crossroads competition brings in great companies from across the state, and I’m honored to be selected as the winner,” said Bussert. “We’re working on a life-saving technology to prevent bedsores, and it’s gratifying to know that the judges understand and support the work we’re doing. We’ve been a part of The Mill for several years, and we appreciate the support we get there and from the Indiana business community. Americans are 50% more likely to die of a bedsore than in an automobile accident, so the fact is we’re working on a product that impacts almost every family at some point in their lifetime.”

The seed finals were judged by Julie Heath, Vice President of Entrepreneurial Ecosystems at the IEDC; Jillian Ivers, Senior Manager of Global Research at Cook Medical; and John Wechsler, CEO of Spokenote.

“We were thrilled to so many great startups and such diverse founders from across Indiana,” said Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming. “We fully expect to see great things from the winners and finalists, and from many semifinalists as well. It’s especially gratifying to see our two winners using technology to create innovative products that have not just outstanding market potential, but also profound impact on human lives.”

The two winning startups also receive priority to pitch at Elevate Ventures’ Nexus Regional Pitch Competition, where they could win an additional $20,000 or $80,000 investment.

Crossroads Pitch Competition, now in its sixth year, is open to any Indiana-based startup with less than $250,000 in annual recurring revenue. A panel of over 50 entrepreneurs, investors, and business experts selected four finalists for each of the two tracks. The other pre-seed finalists were BeautyAround (out of South Bend, pitched by Ange Agasaro and Teayanna Leytham);  Dynamic House (Dyer,  Eva Rivera); and Soloist (Bloomington, Parker Busick). The other seed finalists were Juke (South Bend, Griffin Eaton); and Plantennas (Chesterton, Alexandra Moran); and  Quiptu (Bloomington, Joshua Roche).

Visit https://www.crossroadspitch.com/ to learn more about the competition or to download the Fall 2022 Crossroads Lookbook of all startup competitors.

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About The Mill

The Mill is the heart of southern Indiana’s startup ecosystem and its largest coworking space. A 501(c)3 nonprofit, its mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship. For more information, visit https://www.dimensionmill.org/

About Crossroads

Launched in 2017 as a regional event, Crossroads Pitch Competition is now one of Indiana’s biggest pitch competitions, attracting startups from all over the state. Crossroads takes place in spring and fall, with tracks for seed and pre-seed startups. The Crossroads brand also includes Crossroads Collegiate, for Hoosier students; the Crossroads Platform, white-label support for regional pitch competitions; and the Crossroads Idea Competition, for entrepreneurs exploring very early-stage business concepts.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

October 6, 2022

Contact: Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming, The Mill, andy@dimensionmill.org 

Program for Collegiate Entrepreneurs Expands Across Indiana

Startup Summer 2023 Applications Open

Bloomington, Ind.—Today The Mill, a nonprofit center for entrepreneurship, announced a statewide expansion of Startup Summer, its program that pays collegiate entrepreneurs to spend 10 weeks building their own companies.

Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming at The Mill, described the program as “a chance to spend the summer interning for yourself.” “Instead of spending the summer making coffee and copies for another company,” he said, “these students can make progress building their own businesses. We tailor our support to whatever they need and introduce them to other founders, investors, and experts who can help.”

The 2022 pilot program exceeded The Mill’s expectations, according to Lehman. Six students worked on startups ranging from a materials sourcing app for commercial real estate developers, to a sewing device for ballet dancers, to a new social media platform using augmented reality, to an app for solo musicians to practice along with high-quality recordings.

“We were amazed at how far they took their startups over the course of the summer,” said Lehman. “These founders are already receiving investment, winning pitch competitions, signing up customers, launching beta platforms.”

Andrew McMaster, CEO of Finniva, said that before his participation in Startup Summer, “The idea of an ‘ecosystem’ was really squishy to me – it was hard to know what that really meant. But being here this summer and meeting with all those people so excited to help us as well as us getting an opportunity to give back, I truly get what it means to be a part of an entrepreneurial ecosystem.”

The 2023 program will run for 10 weeks, from May 17 through July 26, on site at The Mill in Bloomington. Applicants must be currently enrolled at any Indiana university or college. In addition, their companies need to have their product or solution built, or be almost ready to launch. Those who are accepted and complete the program will receive stipends ranging from $4,000 to $4,500. The Mill also provides a four-month, full-time membership to ensure founders have ongoing access to resources and community.

Individuals or teams may apply, Lehman said, and The Mill is hoping to see all corners of the state represented. “We’ve been contacting entrepreneurship programs and centers across the state, and the feedback has been very positive. This is a very special, intensive program for student entrepreneurs. It’s a rare opportunity to get paid to pursue your passion.”

Students must apply by November 4, 2022, to be considered for the 2023 summer program. A panel of experts in entrepreneurship, business, and investing will conduct a blind review of all applications.

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About The Mill

The Mill is the heart of southern Indiana’s startup ecosystem and its largest coworking space. A 501(c)3 nonprofit, its mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship. For more information, visit https://www.dimensionmill.org/

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

October 3, 2022

Contact: Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming, The Mill, andy@dimensionmill.org

Mill to Offer Week of Free Events

Innovation Week Takes Place October 11-15

Bloomington, Ind.— The Mill, Bloomington’s nonprofit center for coworking and entrepreneurship, today announced the dates for Innovation Week (iWeek) 2022, a slate of free events on technology and innovation.

“Every year we partner with ecosystem leaders to celebrate and support innovation for one jam-packed week in October,” said Pat East, Executive Director of The Mill. “This year’s iWeek is a mix of celebration and hands-on practical sessions. For anyone interested in entrepreneurship or tech, this is a great way to explore, learn, and connect to the local startup community.”

The Mill will host events all week from TechPoint, gBETA, the Indiana Technology & Innovation Association (ITIA), the Gayle & Bill Cook Center for Entrepreneurship at Ivy Tech, the Alliance of Women Entrepreneurs, the Greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce, Indiana University Innovation & Commercialization Office, NSWC Crane, and Purdue MEP.

The week kicks off on the morning of October 11 with a free financial modeling workshop from Ivy Tech that provides a great tool to make projecting business financials easier. At 11:30, Bloomington celebrates its fourth annual Ada Lovelace Day, a global event commemorating the first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace. The local celebration will feature a buffet lunch, panel of speakers (including a mystery guest from Palo Alto), and a new Ada Lovelace Innovation Awardee. The day closes with the Community Innovation Awards, where Bloomington’s Best Places to Work, Fast 15 MVP Employees, and Fuse Innovation winners will be announced.

Several iWeek sessions focus on how to attract and retain tech talent, which East described as a critical issue for local companies and Indiana’s economic growth. TechPoint, Indiana’s nonprofit industry organization supporting the tech ecosystem, will share their findings on state trends, average salaries, and best practices on Tuesday, October 11. Then on Friday, October 14, Purdue’s Manufacturing Extension Partnership will lead a hands-on workshop to build an employee attraction and retention action plan.

Small group and working sessions do require registration, East noted, and the Bloomington Chamber’s session on innovation is members-only. Several large public events are open for drop-ins. On Wednesday, October 12, ITIA, which advocates for technology in the public policy and political arenas, will lead a Tech Town Hall. Mayor Hamilton and other elected local officials will be on hand to discuss the future of tech in Bloomington. On Thursday, October 13, speakers from NSWC Crane, IN3, the NavalX Tech Bridge, NSTXL, and others will explain how non-traditional and small businesses can participate in the vibrant defense innovation ecosystem at the Defense Innovation Enablers panel discussion.

iWeek will also include two pitch competition finals, one for the Crossroads Pitch Competition (Weds., October 12, 1-3 pm) and one for the IU Idea to Startup Pitch Competition (Thurs., October 13, 9 am-noon).

“If you’re a fan of ‘Shark Tank,’ this is your chance to see the action in person,” East said. “Local companies will ‘pitch’ their innovative ideas to a panel of judges to compete for thousands of dollars in cash and investment. Watching the finals is a lot of fun and a great way to get a better sense of the scale of innovation happening in Indiana.” 

For those looking to connect with startup founders on a more personal level, East suggested the gBETA breakfast on Wednesday, October 12 as the best opportunity.

Registration is required for some, but not all events. See the full slate here, or explore and RSVP on Eventbrite.

About The Mill

The Mill is the heart of southern Indiana’s startup ecosystem and its largest coworking space. A 501(c)3 nonprofit, its mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship. For more information, visit https://www.dimensionmill.org/

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

September 7, 2022

Contact: Julie Sylvester, Program Manager, The Mill, julie@dimensionmill.org 

Applications Open for Free AWS Cloud Practitioner Course

Bloomington, Ind.— The Mill, Bloomington’s nonprofit center for coworking and entrepreneurship, today announced that applications are open for the fall session of Code/IT Academy, a free upskilling program. The fall session will prepare participants to take the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud Practitioner exam.

“Code/IT is a great opportunity for anyone who’s looking to acquire in-demand skills and build a new career path,” said Julie Sylvester, Program Manager at The Mill. “AWS Cloud Practitioner certification is an industry-recognized credential that adds real value to a resume. This particular session is ideal for people who are laser-focused on passing the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam. You’ll study the critical skills, and if you meet attendance requirements, we’ll give you a voucher to take the exam.”

Applications are open now until October 2 for the AWS Cloud Practitioner course of Code/IT Academy. The course runs October 17 until December 14. Sessions are held in-person at The Mill on Mondays and Wednesdays from 5:30-7:30 pm. Participants should expect to spend 8-10 hours a week outside of class studying and completing exercises, according to Ivy Tech instructor Jason Endris.

The AWS Cloud Practitioner exam is considered moderately challenging for beginners. Before taking the course, participants should already have a basic understanding of IT services, such as networks, security, data storage, and their uses in an organization. There are no other eligibility restrictions, but enrollment is limited, said Sylvester, and preference is given to those without a college degree.

The course provides a detailed overview of cloud concepts, core services, security, architecture, pricing, and support. Participants gain an understanding of cloud computing concepts, independent of specific technical roles. They also receive career counseling and interviewing support from Ivy+ Career Link.

The Mill is able to offer Code/IT Academy for free thanks to a partnership with Ivy Tech Community College–Bloomington and funding from the City of Bloomington and the Duke Energy Foundation, Sylvester said.

“Code/IT attracts a really diverse selection of participants,” Sylvester commented. “Some folks need training to advance in their current job, others are un- or underemployed and looking for better jobs. We’re always excited to see how Code/IT can ignite new possibilities for participants.

To learn more about Code/IT Academy, visit https://www.dimensionmill.org/code-it-academy/

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About The Mill

The Mill is the heart of southern Indiana’s startup ecosystem and its largest coworking space. A 501(c)3 nonprofit, its mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship. For more information, visit https://www.dimensionmill.org/

About Ivy Tech

Ivy Tech Community College serves as the state’s engine of workforce development, offering associate degree and short-term certificate programs, and trainings that align to the needs of the community. The College also offers courses and associate degree programs that seamlessly transfer to other colleges and universities in Indiana, as well as out of state, for a more affordable route to a Bachelor’s degree.

About the Duke Energy Foundation

The Duke Energy Foundation provides philanthropic support to meet the needs of communities where Duke Energy’s customers live and work. The foundation contributes more than $30 million annually in charitable gifts, and is funded by Duke Energy shareholder dollars. More information about the foundation and its Powerful Communities program can be found at https://www.duke-energy.com/community/duke-energy-foundation.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

August 12, 2022

For more information, please contact:

Gretchen Knapp, Head of Operations & Marketing, The Mill, gretchen@dimensionmill.org

Nominations Open for Awards to Recognize MVP Employees and Tech Innovation 

Bloomington, Ind. – Today The Mill announced that nominations are open for the Fast 15 MVP Employee Awards and the Fuse Business Innovation Awards. The awards are part of the annual Community Innovation Awards sponsored by The Mill and the Herald-Times. Winners will be announced at a live event and publicized in a special supplement to the Herald-Times in October.

“Every organization has key people that everyone knows are the go-to if you want to get something done,” said Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming at The Mill. “These are the folks who always seem to go above and beyond. When they’re on the team, you know you can do anything. The MVP Awards are a chance to celebrate these star performers and show that we appreciate them.”

Nominees must live in Monroe County but can work for any company, including those without a local location. Self-nominations are accepted. More information and links to nominate are available at: https://communityinnovationawards.com/fast-15-awards/

Fifteen MVP employees will be recognized at an evening gala at The Mill on October 11. The winners of two other programs will also be announced then: Best Places to Work Bloomington and the Fuse Business Innovation Awards. Nominations are closed for Best Places to Work, but there’s still time to nominate for Fuse, according to The Mill.

“We have a thriving local innovation ecosystem,” said Lehman. “Bloomington was recently ranked as the number 15 startup city in the Midwest, despite being much smaller than the other top-ranking cities. The Fuse Business Innovation awards recognize the leaders who are supporting and driving Bloomington’s growth as an innovation and tech hub.”

Fuse award categories include Entrepreneur of the Year, Mentor of the Year, Company of the Year, and others. More information and links to nominate are available at: https://communityinnovationawards.com/fuse-business-innovation-awards/

 Nominations for the Fast 15 MVP Awards and the Fuse Business Innovation Awards are open until September 16.

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About The Mill

The Mill (https://www.dimensionmill.org/) is southern Indiana’s largest coworking space. Its mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

August 3, 2022

For more information, please contact: Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming, The Mill, 812.679.6140, andy@dimensionmill.org

Crossroads Pitch Will Crown Two Winners This Fall

Flywheel Fund to Invest $30,000 Total in Seed and Pre-Seed Startups 

Bloomington, Ind.—Today The Mill, Bloomington’s nonprofit center for entrepreneurship and coworking, announced that applications are open for Crossroads Fall 2022, one of the largest statewide pitch competitions for startups. The fall event marks the debut of separate tracks for companies at the earliest, pre-seed stage of development and companies at the seed stage with a viable product.

“We’ve created two tracks to level the playing field for competitors,” said Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming at The Mill. “We’ve also simplified the application a bit and set up a pre-registration option so that founders can get reminders of the deadline. We’re really hoping to discover some exciting new startups from diverse founders across Indiana.” 

Two tracks will create two sets of finalists, Lehman explained. The seed winner will receive a $20,000 investment from Flywheel Fund, as well as priority consideration to pitch at Elevate Ventures’ regional Nexus Pitch Competition for the chance to win up to $80,000 more. The pre-seed winner will also receive priority consideration for Nexus, as well as a $10,000 investment from Flywheel Fund.

Contestants also gain connections and exposure to the statewide ecosystem. The judges for the fall competition include over 50 investors, entrepreneurs, and business experts from across the statewide ecosystem. In addition, Crossroads winners receive ongoing mentoring from Flywheel Fund’s network.

“Past participants have told us that Crossroads created important opportunities and connections for them, even when they didn’t win,” Lehman said. “We want to make sure we’re giving Hoosier innovators broad access to the Crossroads experience.”

Robert Henschel, Chief Technology Officer for WayZada, a two-time contestant at Crossroads, commented, “The Crossroads pitch competition has really motivated us to further refine our pitch deck and continue to work on the vision of our company. Every time we pitch, we get a question from the audience that we have never gotten, and this reveals a new aspect of our business.”

Spring 2022 finalist Paradise Spreads, headed up by CEO Emily Edwards, leveraged priority access to Nexus regional finals and won a $20,000 investment from Elevate Ventures. Paradise Spreads will be competing for further investment at the Nexus state finals on Friday. 

2019 Crossroads winner Ellie Symes, CEO of The Bee Corp, recalls, “Every company hits an inflection point where they transition from competing in competitions to competing for customers for big checks. Crossroads ended up being the last competition we needed to rocket our company into the competing for customers phase.”

To compete at Crossroads, startups must be based in Indiana and have annual recurring revenue of under $250,000. Applicants submit a pitch deck and a 3-5 minute pitch video. The application deadline for the fall event is September 2. Finals will be held live at The Mill in Bloomington on October 12.

The Mill launched Crossroads Pitch Competition in 2017 as a regional event. Since then, it has grown to become one of Indiana’s biggest competitions, with two competitions a year, in spring and fall. In 2021, The Mill added Crossroads Collegiate, a pitch competition exclusively for student founders. The Crossroads family of events also includes an idea competition and a white-label event platform to help other organizations and regions hold their own pitch competitions and grow Indiana’s innovation economy.

Startups can pre-register or apply to the Fall 2022 Crossroads Pitch Competition at https://www.crossroadspitch.com/.

About The Mill

The Mill (https://www.dimensionmill.org/) is southern Indiana’s largest coworking space. Its mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship.

About Crossroads Pitch Competition

Launched in 2017 as a regional event, Crossroads Pitch Competition is now one of Indiana’s biggest statewide pitch competitions. Dozens of startups from all over the state pitch to a panel of over 50 judges with expertise in entrepreneurship, business, and investing. In 2021, The Mill launched Crossroads Collegiate for Hoosier students and the Crossroads Platform to support regional pitch competitions.

About Flywheel Fund

Flywheel Fund is a member-managed capital fund for early-stage and high potential startups based in Indiana, with special attention to startups based in Bloomington and southern Indiana and underrepresented founders. Flywheel Fund launched in 2020 and is managed by The Mill.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Julie Sylvester, Program Manager, The Mill, julie@dimensionmill.org, 812-327-1566

Free Coding Program Receives $25,000 Grant From Duke Energy Foundation

Upskilling Program Accepting Applications Through June 17

Bloomington, IN—The Mill, Bloomington’s nonprofit center for coworking and entrepreneurship, today announced that Code/IT Academy, a free upskilling program that prepares residents for high-paying jobs in the digital economy, has received a $25,000 grant from Duke Energy Foundation. Applications are now open for the next session of the program, focused on web development skills.

“This program is a wonderful opportunity for anyone who has been thinking about making a career change,” said Julie Sylvester, Program Manager at The Mill. “Web developers are in high demand, and Code/IT Academy is a risk-free way to explore whether this is a good career fit. You don’t need any previous experience, and there is no cost except the time and energy you put into it.”

The Mill runs Code/IT to help build the talent pool to support Bloomington’s innovation economy, Sylvester noted. “It’s a win-win. Local residents need good jobs, and we need more skilled developers and coders here to fuel the growth of our local startups and attract tech companies.”

The summer session runs for 10 weeks starting July 11. Ivy Tech faculty lead classes at The Mill on Tuesdays and Thursdays, from 5:45-7:15 pm, with about three hours of additional study required outside of class. Participants gain a basic understanding of essential web development skills and business practices and learn to build websites using HTML and CSS, following the principles of “mobile first” and responsive web design. The program also includes career counseling through Ivy Tech’s Career Coaching and Employer Connections and a part-time membership to The Mill, to ensure participants have access to high-speed WiFi, a quiet place to learn, and a supportive community.

“The Code/IT Academy addresses the IT talent deficit facing business owners in the area by training and connecting graduates to those businesses in need of these valuable skills,” said Bruce Calloway, Duke Energy government and community relations for Monroe County. “The Mill, in partnership with Ivy Tech Bloomington, continues to provide much-needed support to tech companies by assisting those looking to skill-up and enter the tech sector.”

Code/IT also receives support from the City of Bloomington, through ARPA funding. Funding from community partners and the support of Ivy Tech are essential to keep the program free for residents, said Sylvester. 

“Code/IT Academy is a tremendous asset to the regional community and our economy,” said Adam Gross, Executive Director of Career Coaching and Employer Connections at Ivy Tech Community College–Bloomington. “Ivy Tech values our partnership with The Mill and Code/IT Academy as it seeks to support an additional talent pipeline into in demand IT careers for Hoosiers. We appreciate that the program is accessible to anyone interested in the training and provides valuable support for all participants.”

For more information, or to apply by June 17, visit: https://www.dimensionmill.org/code-it-academy/ 

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About The Mill

The Mill is the heart of southern Indiana’s startup ecosystem and its largest coworking space. A 501(c)3 nonprofit, its mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship. For more information, visit https://www.dimensionmill.org/

About Ivy Tech

Ivy Tech Community College serves as the state’s engine of workforce development, offering associate degree and short-term certificate programs, and trainings that align to the needs of the community. The College also offers courses and associate degree programs that seamlessly transfer to other colleges and universities in Indiana, as well as out of state, for a more affordable route to a Bachelor’s degree.

About the Duke Energy Foundation

The Duke Energy Foundation provides philanthropic support to meet the needs of communities where Duke Energy’s customers live and work. The foundation contributes more than $30 million annually in charitable gifts, and is funded by Duke Energy shareholder dollars. More information about the foundation and its Powerful Communities program can be found at https://www.duke-energy.com/community/duke-energy-foundation.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

May 25, 2022

For more information, please contact:

Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming, The Mill, andy@dimensionmill.org or 812-679-6140

Andrew McMaster, CEO, Finniva, andrew@finniva.com or 502-599-7560

Finniva Wins 2022 Crossroads Collegiate Pitch Competition

Bloomington, Ind.—The Mill, Bloomington’s center for entrepreneurship, announced today that Finniva won the 2022 Crossroads Collegiate Pitch Competition, sponsored by Velocities. Co-founder and CEO Andrew McMaster, a student at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University Bloomington, took home a $2,500 investment from Flywheel Fund and access to their network of investors and mentors.

Finniva is building a streamlined marketplace for large multi-family and commercial real estate developers to source materials directly from the supplier. Finniva helps developers efficiently locate the best materials for each project’s specs—keeping the work on time and on budget. McMaster founded the company with Kelley grad Michael Wayne, who is also CEO of Detroit Riverside Capital, a real estate investment firm with focus on constructing mixed-use communities.

The market opportunity is substantial. According to McMaster’s winning pitch, the US construction material market was $650 billion in 2021. Finniva has targeted Michigan for their initial launch, with a focus on doors: a $500 million market in itself. They’ve already begun working with developers at Counterpart to build the platform and are populating it with suppliers. Finniva expects to launch in January 2023.

“Crossroads Collegiate was a beautiful experience: ambitious student entrepreneurs coming together to explore their work with a group of passionate investors,” said McMaster. “Finniva, a real estate development material sourcing marketplace, is the startup I got the chance to share with the judges. We believe in rethinking how things are done and aim to revitalize the way developers source direct materials for good. I couldn’t be more proud of the work we’ve done and am ecstatic to dive into working with the Flywheel Fund!”

Crossroads Collegiate Pitch Competition was open to any student currently enrolled at any Indiana university or college with a startup based in Indiana. Each student submitted an executive summary, a pitch deck, and a 10-minute pitch video to the competition. A panel of seventeen judges of entrepreneurs, investors, and business experts selected four finalists from twenty-one semifinalists.

The four finalists were Finniva (Andrew McMaster, IU Bloomington), Freshen Up (Rahil Kumar, IU Bloomington), Lodos Theranostics (Scott Clark, Purdue University), and Platform (Patrick Startner, Notre Dame).

“Andrew McMasters and the team have done the customer validation and market analysis to set up Finniva for success,” said Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming for The Mill. “It’s exciting to see the scale of ambition from these Hoosier collegiate founders and the breadth of their reach. This year’s finalists pitched innovations in real estate development, personal care services, cancer treatment, and theater. They wowed our judges, and I hope to see them again in The Mill’s other entrepreneurial programs and competitions.”

The Mill’s mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship. The Mill runs Flywheel Fund, a member-managed capital fund for early-stage and high potential startups based in Indiana, with special attention to startups based in Bloomington and southern Indiana. For more information on Crossroads Collegiate Pitch Competition, visit https://crossroadscollegiate.com/ For more information on the flagship Crossroads event, visit https://crossroadspitch.com/

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

May 25, 2022

For more information, please contact:

Pat East, Executive Director, The Mill, pat@dimensionmill.org or 317.965.2155

Ravi Bhatt, CEO, Folia, ravi@folia.com

Flywheel Fund Participates in Folia’s $2 Million Seed Round 

Bloomington, Ind.—Flywheel Fund, a member-managed capital fund run by The Mill, today announced a $50,000 investment in Folia, as part of a $2 million seed round led by IU Ventures, with participation from the IU Angel Network and the IU Philanthropic Venture Fund, as well as Elevate Ventures. Folia’s digital collaboration platform and tools improve organizational productivity and security while reducing economic and environmental costs. 

Brian Hatton, Venture Partner for Flywheel Fund, said, “Folia solves a long-standing organizational challenge that’s been exacerbated by the rise of remote work: how to build shared knowledge. Folia’s tools allow organizations to assemble and share valuable information from a wide range of sources, while also collecting team insights on that information in real time, in a secure, user-friendly interface. One result, of course, is you get this terrific content repository. But what you’re really building is a powerful, paperless workflow of research, analysis, dialogue, decision-making and continuous improvement. Folia’s already got significant traction in the market, and we think they’re well-positioned for expansion.”

Folia’s iAnnotate tool already has more than million users across sectors such as education, legal, and finance. Folia’s ability to track comments revisions across versions also attracts users in creative fields such as screenwriting and design.

Pat East, Executive Director of The Mill, the nonprofit center for entrepreneurship that runs Flywheel Fund, commented, “As an investment fund, we’re constantly conducting research and due diligence and making notes on what we discover to inform our decision making about where to invest. So we can immediately understand the need for Folia’s software and its market potential. We’re thrilled to invest in Folia, and even more thrilled to see Folia putting down roots in Bloomington and making plans to significantly expand their workforce here.”

Cofounder and CEO Ravi Bhatt recently moved from Chicago back to Bloomington, where he had earned a degree in cognitive science at Indiana University. Cofounder and COO Erik Coyne is a Bloomington native and retired U.S. Air Force colonel. Both Bhatt and Coyne are attorneys and experienced firsthand the need for better annotation tools in the legal industry. Additionally, Coyne’s experience in the Pentagon gave him a unique perspective, he said, on the many benefits—security, environmental, efficiency—of eliminating reliance on paper.

Bhatt said, “We’re excited to be working with Flywheel to expand our vision of a paperless work life and help companies collaborate more effectively in the modern office. It’s also fantastic to see the impact that Pat, Brian, and team are having in our local startup community. It’s no small feat to get a member-run seed fund off the ground. Harder still to grow the program year over year and become one of the strongest match-makers (for investors, founders, and tech enthusiasts) in the state.” 

Folia will use the investment funds to expand their marketing, sales, and development teams and engage more companies in the paperless movement.

About Flywheel Fund

Flywheel Fund is a member-managed capital fund for early-stage and high potential startups based in Indiana, with special attention to startups based in Bloomington and southern Indiana. 

About The Mill

The Mill is the heart of southern Indiana’s entrepreneurial ecosystem and its largest coworking space. The Mill’s mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

April 4, 2022

For more information, please contact:

Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming, The Mill, andy@dimensionmill.org or 812-679-6140

Indiana Student Startups Vie for Investment at Crossroads Collegiate

Bloomington, Ind.—The Mill, Bloomington’s center for entrepreneurship, announced today that applications are open for the 2022 Crossroads Collegiate Pitch Competition. The competition showcases startup businesses founded by college students across the state of Indiana. The winner takes home a $2,500 investment from Flywheel Fund, the micro-investment fund run by The Mill, and access to its powerful network and mentoring support.

“Last year, we saw pitches from fifteen fantastic startups from eleven campuses around the state,” said Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming for The Mill. “We’d love to see even broader representation of Indiana’s universities and colleges this year. Crossroads Collegiate is just the first step for these founders. You only have to look at 2021 winner Andre Harakas’s success to see how far a startup can go in a year.”

 Andre Harakas from Indiana Wesleyan University won the 2021 competition for his company ProBook Sports, which recently rebranded to All In Sports Team Hub. All In streamlines sports team management, providing a complete platform for player development. Coaches can track and foster athlete development while building team culture through an all-in-one app where they can post game videos, set goals for athlete nutrition, share chat and news in a team feed, and more. After winning Crossroads Collegiate, Harakas went on to close a $350,000 pre-seed funding round led by Jim Zarvos and Michigan-based Skypoint Ventures. Flywheel Fund participated with an investment of $50,000.

“Indiana’s collegiate entrepreneurs represent diverse corners of the state,” Lehman said. “South Bend, Indy, West Lafayette, Notre Dame, Richmond, Columbus, Evansville, and of course Bloomington are bubbling with entrepreneurial activity. Part of what makes this competition so exciting is the process of discovery, seeing what’s happening all across Indiana and meeting the next generation of innovators. It’s energizing and inspiring to see the future they’re building.”

Crossroads Collegiate Pitch Competition is open to any student currently enrolled at any Indiana university or college with a startup based in Indiana. To apply, submit an executive summary, a pitch deck, and a 10-minute pitch video at https://crossroadspitch.com/ by midnight on April 18. A panel of entrepreneurs, investors, and business experts will judge four finalists on May 20.

The Mill’s mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship. For more information on Crossroads Collegiate Pitch Competition, visit https://crossroadscollegiate.com/

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

March 8, 2022

For more information, please contact:

Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming, The Mill, andy@dimensionmill.org or 812-679-6140

Jackson Bolek, CEO, Utiliz, jackson@utiliz.app or 812-217-7786

 Utiliz Wins 2022 Spring Crossroads Pitch Competition

Software uses machine learning to predict pipe failures for water utilities

Bloomington, Ind.—The Mill, Bloomington’s center for entrepreneurship, announced today that Evansville-based startup Utiliz won first place in the Spring 2022 Crossroads Pitch Competition, held Saturday, March 5, at The Mill. CEO Jackson Bolek and his team will receive $10,000 in cash and a package of startup and business services.

“We’re absolutely thrilled,” Bolek said of the win, “and our team is excited to be developing software that will change how utilities look at their infrastructure. Utilities of all sizes need access to cutting-edge tools at a price point they can afford, and we believe that we’re equipped to deliver those tools later this spring.”

Utiliz won by unanimous vote from the three finals judges: Alex Shortle, Partner at EO Advisors, the spotlight sponsor for the spring competition; Julie Heath, VP of Entrepreneurial Ecosystems at the IEDC; and Elise Young, Director of gBETA Bloomington-Columbus.

Utiliz solves a critical problem for water utilities: how to know which pipes are most likely to fail next. Many utilities don’t have data, or useable data, to predict breakage. As a result, they’re forced to guess which pipes should be replaced next. In his winning pitch, Bolek explained that the age of a pipe is a poor predictor for breakage, but is nonetheless often used by utilities without access to better data. This highly inaccurate system of risk assessment results in huge expense for the utility and its consumers: unnecessary replacement of sound pipes, and emergency response to failed pipes.

The subscription-based Utiliz app aggregates data from various sources, including from their partner Frontier Geospatial, to provide a user-friendly asset management dashboard that shows which pipes are most at risk—with 75% accuracy out of the box. As utilities collect and add their own data, accuracy rises to 87%. Directors can use the app to map out liabilities, plan for future replacement, and manipulate data to examine the impact of various scenarios.

Bolek, a data engineer, first began exploring the problem of how to predict pipe breakage as an 18-year-old undergraduate student doing research for a professor. Utiliz CTO Jon Kline is a software engineer, and their advisory team brings expertise in GIS and water utility operations.

Utiliz has enrolled three utilities in a private beta that begins in April and plans on releasing its MVP (minimum viable product) in May. As data security is essential, the MVP will be SOC 1 and SOC 2 compliant at launch.  

“I think we all understand the urgency of ensuring reliable access to water,” said Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming. “Utiliz is creating a user-friendly, essential solution that benefits not just their customers, but also communities and citizens as a whole. Its human-centered design makes insights from complex scientific data understandable and actionable, on one of the biggest infrastructure challenges facing cities across the county.”

Bolek estimates the US water asset management market at $2.1 billion. Utiliz hopes to eventually expand to other structural assets such as gas and electrical lines, increasing the potential market size to $102 billion.

Crossroads Pitch Competition, now in its sixth year, is open to any Indiana-based startup with less than $250,000 in annual recurring revenue. A panel of over 30 entrepreneurs, investors, and business experts selected four finalists. The other three finalists were NanoBio Designs (CEO Ryan Skaar, Indianapolis),  Paradise Spreads (CEO Emily D. Edwards, Schererville), and WayZada (CEO Adam Ward, Bloomington).

“Crossroads is one milestone of many yet to come for these finalists,” said Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming for The Mill. “They’ve made already remarkable progress in terms of patents, partnerships, product validation, sales, and other measures. It’s truly thrilling to see the range of innovation coming out of Indiana.”

Download the 2022 Crossroads Lookbook of startup competitors.

Launched in 2017 as a regional event, Crossroads Pitch Competition is now one of Indiana’s biggest pitch competitions, attracting startups from all over the state. In 2022, for the first time, The Mill will host two competitions, one in spring and one in fall. The Crossroads brand also includes Crossroads Collegiate, for Hoosier students; the Crossroads Platform, white-label support for regional pitch competitions; and the Crossroads Idea Competition, for entrepreneurs exploring very early stage business concepts.

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About The Mill

The Mill is the heart of southern Indiana’s startup ecosystem and its largest coworking space. A 501(c)3 nonprofit, its mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship. For more information, visit https://www.dimensionmill.org/

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

March 2, 2022

CONTACTS:

Jeremy Brilliant, Managing Partner, Dioltas, jbrilliant@dioltas.com, (317) 508-3928

Jenna Dix, Technology Transfer Director, Office of Research & Technology Applications, Chief Technology Office, NSWC Crane, cran_T2@navy.mil

Pat East, Executive Director, The Mill, pat@dimensionmill.org, 317-965-2155

NSWC Crane to Offer Navy Technology for Commercial Applications 

Entrepreneurs to license government IP free of charge, through PROPELS Accelerator

Bloomington, IN.– Today the Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane Division (NSWC Crane), in collaboration with The Mill, Dioltas and the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum (DEF) announced the launch of the PROPELS Accelerator. PROPELS offers teams of academics, entrepreneurs and small businesses an exciting opportunity to commercialize patented government technology.

“Scientists at NSWC Crane have invented some amazing technology, and while it’s great for the Navy, we believe that there are other use opportunities that can be explored,” explained Jenna Dix, Director of Technology Transfer at NSWC Crane. “We’re excited to see what kind of commercial applications can come from government-created tech.”

The new program will kick off with a Tech Expo at the Mill on April 14. NSWC Crane scientists will present the tech–what it is and how it’s being used by the Navy. Some examples of government-invented technology that will be showcased include: long-range heat detection, machine learning for “cleaning” data, assistive devices for low-light emergency response, and drone tracking technology.

Participants will then select one of the showcased technologies and develop a commercialization plan for a new product or platform during the six-week PROPELS Accelerator program that runs from May 4 through June 17.

“The Mill’s mission is to launch and accelerate startups,” said Pat East, Executive Director of The Mill, “and the technology at Crane provides an exceptional opportunity for entrepreneurs. PROPELS bridges the gap between cutting-edge innovators in the public and private sectors.”

Supporting the accelerator program are Dioltas, a defense-disruptive technologies strategic advisory, and the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum, a non-profit organization that promotes innovation in the national security community.

“This is exactly the type of event that will help introduce the Navy and its tremendous research and development capabilities to entrepreneurs looking for great new technologies,” said Mike Dodd, Dioltas Advisory Board Chairman. “We applaud NSWC Crane for their proactive approach to connecting with the business community.”

“At DEF we strive to break down barriers that often keep the government closed off from commercial entities,” said Heath Murray, Bloomington DEF Agora Lead. “PROPELS is the kind of event that not only breaks down those barriers, but also plants the seed for many future connections between entrepreneurs and the Navy.”

At the conclusion of the event, participants will be invited to pitch their ideas and compete for prizes at the Radius Indiana Crane IP Defense Innovation competition.

Learn more here about the PROPELS Accelerator. The deadline to apply to participate is April 22.

Register here for a March 28 virtual informational session.

Register here for the April 14 in-person Tech Expo at The Mill.

All events are free, and complimentary hors d’oeuvre and drinks will be provided at the Tech Expo.

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 About NSWC Crane:

NSWC Crane is a naval laboratory and a field activity of Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) with mission areas in Expeditionary Warfare, Strategic Missions and Electronic Warfare. The warfare center is responsible for multi-domain, multi- spectral, full life cycle support of technologies and systems enhancing capability to today’s Warfighter.

 About The Mill:

The Mill is the heart of southern Indiana’s entrepreneurial ecosystem and its largest coworking space. The Mill’s mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship.

 About Dioltas:

Dioltas is a global firm dedicated to providing design, implementation processes of superior technologies and next-generation security solutions to governments, global corporations, and organizations. Dioltas advises public and private clients on all facets of business strategy, planning, development, management, marketing, directorship, and obtaining access to capital markets in exchange for equity stakes in the companies and/or management fees.

 About DEF:

The Defense Entrepreneurs Forum (DEF) exists to inspire, connect and empower people committed to US national security through convening events, forging partnerships and delivery of tangible solutions. DEF does this in order to promote and enable a culture of innovation in the US national security community. DEF is an independent, 501(c)(3) registered, non-profit.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

February 23, 2022

Contact: Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming, The Mill, andy@dimensionmill.org, 812-679-6140

ReBoot Program to Help Veterans Become Entrepreneurs

Applications are open now for spring session

Bloomington, Ind.—The Mill, Bloomington’s nonprofit center for entrepreneurship and coworking, today announced that applications are open for the spring 2022 session of ReBoot. ReBoot is a six-week program to help people turn business ideas into business plans. The spring session is offered exclusively to all current and former military members.   

“We started the ReBoot program last year to help more people reap the rewards of entrepreneurship,” said Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming for The Mill. “The discipline and grit developed through military experience lay a great foundation for starting a business. We’d like to help veterans design that next adventure.”

No previous business experience is required to participate, Lehman added. Participants meet once a week for six weeks to learn how to focus their business ideas, get customer validation, and present their business to potential investors. They’ll have access to mentors, successful entrepreneurs, and a slate of expert speakers. Participation is limited to a small group to increase the effectiveness of instruction and to encourage peer connections.

At the end of the program, participants present their business plans at a live showcase, and the winner takes home a little seed money for their business. All participants receive free part-time memberships to The Mill to connect to other founders and to access member perks to help grow their businesses.

“ReBoot is for folks at all stages of the entrepreneurial journey,” Lehman said. “We tailor the experience depending on whether you’re exploring a brand-new idea or growing a fledgling business.”

The ReBoot program, billed as “inclusive entrepreneurial development,” launched in 2021. The pilot session offered entrepreneurial training and support to the formerly incarcerated. To design the 2022 sessions, The Mill worked with the 180° Consulting, a group out of the Kelley Institute for Social Impact at Indiana University, to identify other populations who might benefit from small-group training. The spring 2022 session for veterans kicks off on March 28. In the summer The Mill will offer another ReBoot session for the formerly incarcerated. In late fall or winter, they’ll offer a new session tailored to women who are returning to the workforce or who have been impacted by the pandemic.

ReBoot is supported through ARPA funds from the City of Bloomington. The deadline to apply to the spring 2022 session is March 20, and the program kicks off on March 28. Visit https://www.dimensionmill.org/reboot/ to learn more, apply, and subscribe to updates on future sessions.

About The Mill

The Mill is the heart of southern Indiana’s startup ecosystem and its largest coworking space. A 501(c)3 nonprofit, its mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship. For more information, visit https://www.dimensionmill.org/

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

February 21, 2022

For more information, please contact:

Pat East, Executive Director, The Mill, pat@dimensionmill.org or 317.965.2155

Flywheel Fund Participates in Qualifi’s $2.5m Series Seed Round 

Bloomington, Ind.—Flywheel Fund, a member-managed capital fund run by The Mill, today announced a $50,000 follow-on investment in Qualifi, as part of a $2.5 million seed round led by Rally Ventures. Qualifi’s on-demand screening platform allows recruiting teams to phone interview hundreds of candidates in minutes.

Pat East, Executive Director of The Mill, a nonprofit center for entrepreneurship, said, “I first became aware of Qualifi in 2019, when Darrien Mikell competed at Crossroads Pitch Competition. Darrian recognized then that phone interviews were the biggest bottleneck in the hiring process, particularly for high-volume recruiting efforts. And now, post-pandemic, with the global surge in hiring, Qualifi’s solution is needed more urgently than ever.”

Qualifi’s audio-based platform enables recruiters to phone screen multiple candidates simultaneously, resulting in faster time-to-hire (up to 8 days faster) with a more convenient, accessible, and unbiased hiring experience. Candidates respond to pre-recorded questions over a standard phone call, and because there’s no need for scheduling or phone tag, recruiters can vet seven times more candidates per day on average. The platform captures rich, actionable data so that recruiters can make the best hiring decisions without bias and scale their efforts with integrations to more than 30 of the top Applicant Tracking Systems.

Other investors this round included Techstars, Sixty8 Capital, Elevate Ventures, Debut Capital, Northwestern Mutual Black Founder Accelerator, Converge, Service Provider Capital, and multiple strategic angels. The Mill had previously invested $25,000 in Qualifi in February 2021. Brian Hatton, Venture Partner for Flywheel Fund, commented, “We’re particularly proud to invest in HR tech that not only solves a logistical problem in interviewing, but simultaneously reduces bias in hiring, enabling companies to quickly build highly qualified, diverse teams.”

Qualifi Co-Founder and CEO Mikell said, “Flywheel Fund is one of the most founder-friendly funds you can ask for. Not only is Pat East an excellent advisor, but the members of the fund are experienced in a variety of industries, and they are engaged in their companies. One of the happiest surprises I’ve had is how quickly they make funding decisions. They recognize that fundraising is a huge time commitment, so they don’t bog founders time down with long processes.”

Qualifi will use the financing to advance its product with additional AI, ML and Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities and expand go-to-market efforts with marketing and sales to support its rapid growth. Qualifi is an alumnus of Techstars Anywhere ’21.

About Flywheel Fund

Flywheel Fund is a member-managed capital fund for early-stage and high potential startups based in Indiana, with special attention to startups based in Bloomington and southern Indiana. Flywheel reserves a minimum of 13% of its funds for Black founding teams. Flywheel Fund launched in 2020 and is managed by The Mill.

About The Mill

The Mill is the heart of southern Indiana’s entrepreneurial ecosystem and its largest coworking space. The Mill’s mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship.

About Qualifi

Qualifi is a platform that sends, shares, and tracks audio-based, on-demand asynchronous phone interviews for recruiters. This speeds up the hiring process, mitigates bias, and maintains a human touch while allowing recruiters to interview hundreds of candidates in minutes. With Qualifi, recruiters go from struggling to fill roles to becoming a talent engine.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

February 15, 2022

For more information, please contact:

Pat East, Executive Director, The Mill, pat@dimensionmill.org or 317.965.2155

Wyatt Wells, Co-founder & CMO, The Bee Corp, wyatt.wells@thebeecorp.com

The Bee Corp Receives $50,000 Investment from Flywheel Fund

Bloomington, Ind.—Flywheel Fund, a member-managed capital fund run by The Mill, today announced a $50,000 investment in The Bee Corp, as part of a $1 million round led by IU Ventures. The Bee Corp’s agritech solution Verifli uses infrared (IR) imagery to measure the strength and pollination value of a honeybee colony without opening the hive.

Ellie Symes and Wyatt Wells launched the Bee Corp in 2016, while they were still students at Indiana University, where they founded the Beekeeping Club. A benefit corporation, the Bee Corp has gone on to raise over $3 million in funding. In January 2022, Symes and Wells were names to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list for enterprise technology.

Pat East, Executive Director of The Mill, said, “The Bee Corp has always been a winning team. I’m personally a three-time investor and proud the Flywheel Fund has the opportunity to support their innovative hive health technology. Ellie Symes is one of Indiana’s best young CEOs — resourceful, pragmatic and well-connected. Her drive to overcome obstacles that would defeat others will continue to serve The Bee Corp well as they scale their tech to break into new markets.”

Beekeepers use Verifli to reduce labor costs associated with sorting hives before pollination and prove the value of their bees when negotiating pricing. Users gain access to tools and information to improve pollination management on the Verifli dashboard, including an interactive hive mapping tool and a customizable report builder.

“The Bee Corp is thankful for the opportunities that the Flywheel Fund has provided through their investment,” said The Bee Corp CEO, Ellie Symes. “We have had the ability to develop fast, accurate, non-invasive hive strength technology that will continue to provide growers with more data to improve their fields and support them through continuous technology advancements.”

According to COO Wells, the funding will go to hiring key roles and scaling the technology to new, underserved markets. The Bee Corp has a strong customer base in the California almond industry, but many other staple crops rely on bees for pollination, including berries, apples, and avocados. “This new investment round will provide the resources to maintain our momentum and capitalize on the mounting interest for fast, accurate, non-invasive hive strength assessments,” Wells said.

About Flywheel Fund

Flywheel Fund is a member-managed capital fund for early-stage and high potential startups based in Indiana, with special attention to startups based in Bloomington and southern Indiana. Flywheel Fund launched in 2020 and is managed by The Mill.

About The Mill

The Mill is the heart of southern Indiana’s entrepreneurial ecosystem and its largest coworking space. The Mill’s mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

February 2, 2022

Contact: Melissa Ward, Head of Initiatives and Partnerships, The Mill, melissa@dimensionmill.org

Free Training for Cybersecurity Jobs

Code/IT Academy opens applications for spring 2022

Bloomington, Ind.—The Mill, Bloomington’s nonprofit center for entrepreneurship and coworking, announced the launch of a new session of Code/IT Academy. A partnership between The Mill, Ivy Tech Community College, and the City of Bloomington, Code/IT is a free 10-week upskilling program for locals seeking to transition to higher-paying jobs in the digital economy. The spring 2022 session prepares students to take the CompTIA Security+ certification exam, which is a springboard to intermediate-level cybersecurity jobs. 

“For this cohort, you do need to have a basic understanding of computer systems and network infrastructure in order to participate,” Melissa Ward, Head of Initiatives and Partnerships for The Mill. “But that’s the only prerequisite. We’ll provide access to laptops to those who need them, and a voucher to cover the exam costs.”

The spring 2022 session launches in early March and runs for 10 weeks. Classes are held twice a week, on Tuesday and Thursday evenings from 5:30-7:00 pm. Participants should also expect to spend about 3 hours a week outside of class, according to Ward. Code/IT Academy will be held in person, on site at The Mill, with full COVID safety precautions.

“We’ve found that in-person instruction with peers produces deeper engagement,” said Ward. “The ultimate purpose of this program is to help participants improve their career options, and for that, we need to do all we can to be sure they emerge skilled, confident, and ready.”

The program also includes career counseling through Ivy Tech’s Career Coaching and Employer Connections, mock interviews, and job placement support. Participants receive a part-time membership to The Mill to ensure they have access to high-speed WiFi, a quiet place to learn, and a supportive community.

Code/IT Academy is funded in part through a generous grant from the City of Bloomington. Priority is given to applicants without a college degree.

The deadline to apply for the CompTIA Security+ cohort is February 25. Learn more and apply here. Employers interested in supporting Code/IT Academy graduates with mock interviews or job placement should contact Melissa Ward.

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About The Mill

The Mill is the heart of southern Indiana’s startup ecosystem and its largest coworking space. A 501(c)3 nonprofit, its mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship. For more information, visit https://www.dimensionmill.org/

About Ivy Tech

Ivy Tech Community College serves as the state’s engine of workforce development, offering associate degree and short-term certificate programs, and trainings that align to the needs of the community. The College also offers courses and associate degree programs that seamlessly transfer to other colleges and universities in Indiana, as well as out of state, for a more affordable route to a Bachelor’s degree.

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 January 25, 2022

Contact: Pat East, 317.965.2155 pat@dimensionmill.org

Remote Workers Fleeing Big Cities Get “Instant Raise”

Lower Cost of Living, Higher Quality of Life Fuel Exodus

Bloomington, Ind.—Last fall, Taylor R., a senior designer for the Washington Post, and her husband, a contractor for National Geographic, packed up their bags and their cat and drove from Washington D.C. to their new home in Bloomington, Indiana. Taylor was one of 14 people accepted to Bloomington Remote, a remote worker recruitment program from The Mill, a nonprofit center for entrepreneurship and coworking.

See why remote workers are leaving traditional tech hubs: https://www.bloomingtonremote.com/

“When we started this program, we got a few raised eyebrows,” said Pat East, Executive Director of The Mill. “We don’t offer a cash incentive, and most remote worker programs are run through municipalities. But we’ve found that remote workers are hungry for creative and human connection. Our startup and cowork community makes it easier for transplants to feel at home.”

For Taylor and her husband, cost of living was a significant motivator. “Moving here was like getting an instant raise,” she told The Mill. 

Program participants receive three years of free coworking at The Mill, an iconic historic space. Applicants must live outside of Indiana, have full-time remote employment, and move within the year.

“Bloomington Remote is bringing diverse, tech-skilled, creative people into our community,” said Mayor John Hamilton. “We look forward to welcoming this year’s cohort of new Bloomingtonians.”

Indiana is emerging as a competitive state for tech talent, and in 2021, Bloomington was named Indiana’s Rising Tech City. The city also received a $3.5-million federal grant to build a new technology center to support Bloomington’s burgeoning startup ecosystem.

Tech community is attractive to Bloomington Remote participants Blake R., a cybersecurity engineer, and Pablo F., founder of a data science company. Others appreciate the arts scene and outdoor life. UX writer Lauren S. knew Bloomington by its improv comedy reputation, but had never visited. Neither had software engineer and rock climber Ritchel C. Fashion historian and YouTube influencer Abby C. remembered Bloomington fondly from college. Native Hoosiers Luke and Andi wanted to be closer to family after years in a tiny Bay Area apartment.

“The pandemic is driving remote workers to seek a fresh start and higher quality of life,” East remarked. “Bloomington offers cultural richness without big-city hassle or costs.”

Bloomington is home to Indiana University, with top-rated music, business, environmental policy, and informatics schools. A Democratic stronghold, Bloomington is known within Indiana for its progressive culture, college basketball, outdoor recreation, and 60-block entertainment and arts district.

Bloomington Remote provides relocation support through Century 21 Scheetz, concierge onboarding, networking events, banking discounts, and other benefits, with financial support from the City of Bloomington.

See details on eligibility and application at BloomingtonRemote.com.

About The Mill

The Mill (https://www.dimensionmill.org/) is southern Indiana’s largest coworking space. Its mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups. Its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship.

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 January 3, 2022

Contact: Andy Lehman, 812.679.6140, andy@dimensionmill.org

Crossroads Pitch Competition Announces New Spring Event

Indiana-Based Startups to Compete for Cash, Connections 

Bloomington, Ind.—Today The Mill, a nonprofit center for entrepreneurship and coworking, announced the launch of a second date for Crossroads Pitch Competition, its statewide competition for Indiana-based startups. Now in its fifth year, the flagship Crossroads event occurs in fall. Applications are open for the new spring event, with finals scheduled to take place in March.

See how Indiana’s entrepreneurial ecosystem is gaining momentum at https://www.crossroadspitch.com/

“Indiana’s startup scene is hot right now,” said Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming at The Mill, “and fast access to capital is essential to startup growth. Founders can’t afford to wait a whole year for the next Crossroads. We’re adding a spring event to expand the window of opportunity and grow Indiana’s innovation economy.”

The winner of Crossroads receives a prize package of cash and in-kind services valued at over $10,000, as well as priority consideration to pitch at Elevate Ventures’ prestigious Nexus Pitch Competition for the chance to win up to $80,000 more. Competitors also connect to the state’s startup ecosystem leaders by gaining exposure to Crossroads judges, a panel of over 30 representatives from state and regional investors, entrepreneurs, and business experts.

Entrepreneurs report that Crossroads has significantly impacted their business growth. Stuart Lowry, co-founder of ArcticRX, the fall 2021 winner, described winning Crossroads as “a dramatic milestone” that put his startup “at a crossroads to the world.” ArcticRx’s reusable, low-cost shipping pod keeps vaccines at ultra-low temperatures up to five times longer than current methods, thus solving a critical problem in transporting vaccines to remote and rural areas.

Jennie Moser, CEO of Stagetime, a networking platform for the performing arts, won Crossroads in 2020. “The non-dilutive prize money allowed me to move to Stagetime full-time before I had originally planned,” she commented, “and even more importantly, to seize the opportunity to bring one of my most valuable contractors on full-time.” In 2021, Stagetime went on to close a $1.55 million seed round.

Ellie Symes, the first winner of Crossroads in 2017 (then known as inX3), was recently named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for enterprise technology. Symes is CEO of The Bee Corp, an agri-tech company that uses infrared imagery to measure the strength and pollination value of honeybee colonies.

To compete at Crossroads, startups must be based in Indiana and have annual recurring revenue of under $250,000. Applicants submit an executive summary, a pitch deck, and a 3-5 minute pitch video. The application deadline is January 31.

The Mill launched Crossroads Pitch Competition in 2017 as a regional event. Since then, it has grown to become one of Indiana’s biggest statewide competitions, each fall attracting competitors from all over Indiana. In 2021, The Mill added a collegiate division exclusively for student founders. The Crossroads family of events also includes an idea competition and a white-label event platform to help other organizations and regions in Indiana hold their own pitch competitions and grow Indiana’s innovation economy.

See details on eligibility, prizes, and application to the spring 2022 Crossroads Pitch Competition at https://www.crossroadspitch.com/.

About The Mill

The Mill (https://www.dimensionmill.org/) is southern Indiana’s largest coworking space. Its mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship.

December 20, 2021

Contact: Pat East, Executive Director, The Mill, 371.965.2155, pat@dimensionmill.org

Invoke Learning, media@invokeintelligence.com

EdTech Company Brings Behavioral Analytics, AI to Higher Ed Data

Flywheel Fund invests in Invoke Learning

Bloomington, IN— Flywheel Fund, a member-managed capital fund run by The Mill, today announced a $50,000 investment in Invoke Learning, a higher education augmented-analytics company. Invoke Learning leverages artificial intelligence to provide higher education institutions with personalized data insights to help them improve student enrollment, retention, engagement, and DEI.

Invoke Learning was founded by Lige Hensley, former Chief Technology Officer for Ivy Tech Community College, and Brendan Aldrich, former Chief Data Officer in the Office of the Chancellor for the California State University system.

Pat East, Executive Director of The Mill, commented, “Higher education is at a crossroads. Enrollment is down, many students aren’t graduating on time or at all, and fulfilling the promise of diversity, equity, and inclusion has become a priority. Invoke provides the clear, actionable data colleges and universities need to navigate and address these challenges.”

Invoke Learning’s products, such as the InvokeDataLake, provide solutions for each stage of the student journey, from recruitment through application, enrollment, engagement, course completion, and retention. Behavioral analytics, like those used in the private sector for years, help paint a picture of how well the institution is achieving its goals, for example, those regarding equity and inclusion. Invoke Learning estimates that the higher ed market spends over $155 billion annually to address all of these student success issues.

Brian Hatton, Venture Partner for Flywheel Fund, commented, “Lige Hensley and Brendan Aldrich bring extensive experience from some of the largest higher ed institutions in the US and have won several international awards for their work with data and education. They deeply understand their market’s needs and have the technical knowledge to develop the right tools to meet those needs.”

Hatton noted that Invoke Learning’s tools provide a broad range of data on critical but difficult to quantify factors such as student and faculty engagement. “In addition to surfacing insights from aggregate data, Invoke Learning’s AI allows schools to measure stress and anxiety levels for each individual student on a daily basis,” Hatton said. “Particularly in the post-COVID era, these are essential predictors of student success.”

“We had a great 2021, with significant growth in our customer base and their ability to positively impact the full student journey at their institutions,” said Lige Hensley, CEO and co-founder of Invoke Learning. “Our InvokeDataLake and supporting solutions are proving to be beneficial in facilitating improved results. This additional funding from Flywheel Fund will help us invest further in sales and marketing and expand our impact in higher ed.”

Invoke Learning has raised just over $2 million to date, signed 18 colleges and universities, and secured partnerships with Google, Snowflake, and others.

About Flywheel Fund

Flywheel Fund is a member-managed capital fund for early-stage and high potential startups based in Indiana, with special attention to startups based in Bloomington and southern Indiana and underrepresented founders. Flywheel Fund launched in 2020 and is managed by The Mill. 

About The Mill

The Mill is the heart of southern Indiana’s entrepreneurial ecosystem and its largest coworking space. The Mill’s mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship.

About Invoke Learning 

Invoke Learning provides an advanced-analytics solution for higher education that positively impacts the full student journey – enrollment, retention, engagement, and DEI – all leading to better student success. By combining academic and public data, along with artificial intelligence, Invoke Learning provides personalized and unique institutional insights that drive actionable results.

December 16, 2021

Contact: Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming, The Mill, 812.679.6140, andy@dimensionmill.org

John Laughlin, jlaughlin@nearthebox.com

Platform for Renting Outdoor Gear Wins Idea Competition

WANDR Aims for April 2022 Launch

Bloomington, Ind.— The Mill, Bloomington’s nonprofit center for entrepreneurship, announced that John Laughlin and Josh Roche are the winners of the 2021 Crossroads Idea Competition for their proposal, WANDR. WANDR will build a community of outdoor adventurers who want to either rent out their own gear or seek to rent others’ gear.

Roche, Senior Financial Analyst at Cook Medical, and Laughlin, Account Director at Near The Box, a custom software engineering company, have been exploring the WANDR concept for a few months. Outdoor adventure gear is expensive, they say, and cost is a major barrier, as is storage space. Meanwhile, people who do buy specialized equipment often find that it sits idle in the garage for most of the year. WANDR will connect the dots between adventurers who need gear and equipment owners who’d like to recoup some of the costs. Roche and Laughlin won the Crossroads Idea prize of $2,500, sponsored by Velocities, to develop the idea further.

This is the second year for the Crossroads Idea Competition (rebranded from Spark). Applicants submitted a one-page executive summary explaining the problem the startup would address, the solution, the customer base, revenue model, and evidence of need. Five finalists were selected to submit a five-minute recorded pitch for the demo night, which was held Wednesday afternoon on Zoom. Finalists then had five minutes to answer questions from judges. The judges were Elise Young, Director of gBETA Bloomington-Columbus; Adam Gross, Executive Director, Career Coaching & Employer Connections at Ivy Tech; and Dave Bittner, SCORE business consultant and retired executive.

“We designed this event to be a low-barrier entry to the entrepreneurial ecosystem that builds confidence and connections,” explained Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming for The Mill. “We see it as one of the first steps in bringing an idea to market. WayZada made their first pitch at this event last year, for example, and now they’ve just graduated from gBETA and secured a $20,000 investment from Elevate Ventures. I’m sure we’ll see other success stories emerge from this year’s participants.”

Roche and Laughlin have already done customer research and interviews, user flow mapping, and brand-building. Last month, they won the Elevate Nexus Regional Pre-Seed Competition. 

“The WANDR team is incredibly thankful for the opportunity to share our vision of the company through the Crossroads Idea Competition,” CEO Roche said in a statement. “Being selected not only validates what John and I have built thus far, but the funds will be useful as we continue to develop our MVP and engage in market research over the coming months. A secondary thanks to The Mill for their continued support of the startup community here in Bloomington. They are a resource any entrepreneur is lucky to have.”

Roche acknowledges that a few startups already exist in the outdoor equipment rental space, but none, he says, has achieved the robust pairing of supply (owners) and demand (renters) that fueled the growth of successful peer-to-peer platforms such as AirBnB. WANDR aims to solve this problem and leverage partnerships with retailers as well. Their next step is to build an MVP for a regional launch in the Midwest in April 2022. Key product categories will include camping/hiking, biking, and canoeing/kayaking.

About The Mill

The Mill is the heart of southern Indiana’s startup ecosystem and its largest coworking space. A 501(c)3 nonprofit, its mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship. For more information, visit https://www.dimensionmill.org/

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December 6, 2021

Contacts: Pat East, Executive Director, pat@dimensionmill.org, 317.965.2155

Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming, andy@dimensionmill.org, 812-679-6140 

New Program Pays College Students to Develop Startups

Bloomington, Indiana—The Mill, Bloomington’s nonprofit center for entrepreneurship and coworking, today announced the launch of Startup Summer, a new program to pay collegiate founders to build out their startups.

“Startup Summer is essentially a paid internship program for collegiate founders,” said Pat East, Executive Director of the Mill. “In this case, however, the students are getting paid to work for themselves: to intern at their own startup.”

Participants will work on their startups for 25 hours a week out of The Mill’s coworking space in downtown Bloomington. They’ll set individualized goals for their businesses and receive personalized support. Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming explained, “This program targets founders who already have a minimum viable product or close to it. We know many students have businesses that are almost ready to launch, or even up and running. Startup Summer makes it possible for these founders to spend the summer positioning their startups to succeed, without having to sacrifice getting paid.”

Startup Summer will run eight weeks, from June 6 to July 29. The program includes weekly lunch and learns with experts from the startup ecosystem, mentoring from successful entrepreneurs, a chance to pitch investors for feedback, and leadership opportunities for college students to connect with K-12 students interested in entrepreneurship. Residency in Bloomington over the summer is required, as is current enrollment at Indiana University or Ivy Tech. Participants will receive a $2,000 stipend.

The Mill developed the program in collaboration with SEEK, a member of the Kelley Institute for Social Impact at Indiana University (KISI). SEEK—the Social Enterprise Engagement at Kelley—strives to create unique, hands-on experiences that simultaneously give back to the community. SEEK connects future business leaders to socially responsible companies and instills the concept that business can be both profitable and have a positive social impact.

“Since we want to offer this summer internship program to college students, we figured let’s go straight to that target market and see what they come up with — really find out what would make for an engaging program and get some validation for the concept,” East said.

Mill staff worked with the case competition team at SEEK for several weeks to write the scenario and set guidelines. Student teams had to provide programming options for the summer that would help accelerate startup growth without increasing staffing. Teams also considered housing needs, made recommendations for the application process, and identified potential grants or funding sources for the summer 2022 program and beyond.

This was SEEK’s first case competition since the onset of the pandemic. Ten teams submitted one-page proposals, and five finalists presented in-depth solutions to a panel of judges that included Mill staff, KISI Associate Director Shawna Meyer-Niederman, and two additional Kelley faculty.

“The winning team nailed it,” Lehman said. “They included things like a blind review process for applicants to remove bias, a realistic and comprehensive budget, and good ideas for how to engage the ecosystem to support these collegiate entrepreneurs.” He added that the case competition as a whole uncovered ten new potential sources for funding and showed an impressive commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

“The energy and intelligence we saw in the SEEK case competition students came as no surprise to us,” East commented. “We meet exceptional collegiate founders at The Mill all the time, and we’re excited to offer Startup Summer to help nurture their talents.”

Applications for Startup Summer are open now and close on January 28. The Mill will accept up to 6 participants (co-founders may apply together). For more information, visit https://www.dimensionmill.org/startup-summer/

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About The Mill

The Mill is the heart of southern Indiana’s entrepreneurial ecosystem and its largest coworking space. The Mill’s mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship.

November 16, 2021

Flywheel Participates in Series A Raise for Stagetime

Bloomington, Ind.—Flywheel Fund, a member-managed capital fund run by The Mill, today announced a $75,000 follow-on investment in Stagetime, as part of a $1.55MM raise led by Hyde Park Angels with participation from M25, IU Angel Network, and others. Stagetime is a networking platform for the performing arts industry founded by Jennie Moser in 2019.

CEO Moser, who is also an opera singer, often describes Stagetime as “LinkedIn for the performing arts.” Stagetime provides networking benefits to connect artists, agents, composers, arts organizations, and others in the performing arts industry. Unlike LinkedIn, however, Stagetime is designed to showcase artistic talent and experience in a highly visual interface based on dynamic multimedia portfolios rather than traditional resumé format. Stagetime’s additional career and networking tools are geared toward the unique needs and expectations of the performing arts industry as well.

Pat East, Executive Director of The Mill, a nonprofit center for entrepreneurship, commented, “Stagetime holds a unique place in our hearts at The Mill as Jennie was a Mill member even before she founded her company. Jennie Moser’s vision, her drive, and leadership have been honed through her experiences as an opera singer, a web design business owner, and now a tech CEO. It’s very satisfying to see the VC community recognize the unique value proposition she’s creating in Stagetime. Flywheel Fund is proud to play a small role in her growing success.”

Flywheel Fund was founded in July of 2020, and Stagetime was its first investment. Stagetime was also the winner of The Mill’s Crossroads Pitch Competition in 2020.

“Our partnership with Flywheel Fund has generated benefits far beyond capital,” Moser said in a statement. “Not only has the fund followed on in our subsequent fundraising round, but the connections and buzz from the network have been significant in securing other investors, sourcing talent, industry connections, and more. Flywheel Fund clearly has the founder top of mind, which makes for a great partnership when it comes to doing business that benefits both the company and the investors – everyone wins.”

The Series A raise marks a significant milestone in the startup’s growth, according to Moser, and will allow Stagetime to aggressively grow its user base and refine the platform. Stagetime expects to launch a new casting tool in spring 2022 to support industry professionals in planning for future talent needs.

About Flywheel Fund

Flywheel Fund is a member-managed capital fund for early-stage and high potential startups based in Indiana, with special attention to startups based in Bloomington and southern Indiana. Flywheel Fund launched in 2020 and is managed by The Mill.

About The Mill

The Mill is the heart of southern Indiana’s entrepreneurial ecosystem and its largest coworking space. The Mill’s mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship.

For more information, please contact:

Pat East, Executive Director, The Mill, pat@dimensionmill.org or 317.965.2155

Jennie Moser, CEO and founder, Stagetime, jennie@stagetimearts.com

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November 9, 2021

For more information, please contact:

Pat East, Executive Director, The Mill, pat@dimensionmill.org or 317.965.2155

Rian Mc Donnell, CEO and founder, FloWaste, rian@flowaste.com

Bloomington Fund Re-Ups Investment in Food Waste Startup

Bloomington, Ind.—Flywheel Fund, a member-managed capital fund run by The Mill, today announced a $75,000 follow-on investment in FloWaste. FloWaste’s technology and analytics help food producers reduce waste and boost margins through sustainable, environmentally friendly processes. Founded by Rian Mc Donnell, FloWaste is currently preparing to launch a pilot program at over 100 locations.

Pat East, Executive Director of The Mill, the nonprofit center for entrepreneurship that runs Flywheel Fund out of Bloomington, said, “The food industry has notoriously tight margins, and at the same time, it’s experiencing a surge of interest in sustainability issues. FloWaste has found a way to leverage business interests to also serve a higher purpose that benefits the globe: reducing landfill and greenhouse gasses. It’s truly a win-win.”

FloWaste uses cameras and a proprietary machine learning system to track food-related data at workstations, production lines, and trash cans. The resulting data and analytics help industrial and commercial food processors, cafeterias, quick-service restaurants, and other customers identify patterns in food waste to target. Mc Donnell estimates the serviceable obtainable market for FloWaste’s platform at $580 million within a nearly $3 billion total market.

FloWaste has just closed a $1.1 million pre-seed funding round, led by Rockstart, a global accelerator and VC that invests in energy, agrifood, and emerging technologies, with additional participation from U.S. venture funds, including Underdog Labs and Flywheel Fund. This is Flywheel’s second investment in FloWaste. In February of 2021, Flywheel made an initial investment of $20,000.

“Flywheel Fund has been a great partner for FloWaste,” said CEO Mc Donnell. “Working with Pat and Brian has been a huge asset, and having great midwestern syndicate members broadens our network and creates new opportunities.”

Mc Donnell, a native Irishman, studied mechanical and manufacturing engineering at Trinity College Dublin, and currently works out of South Bend. FloWaste’s technology is currently being used in businesses across Indiana and the US, as well as in Europe. For one leading protein producer monitoring waste on a beef production line, Mc Donnell notes, the platform creates significant financial, environmental, and ethical returns.

Brian Hatton, Venture Partner for Flywheel Fund, commented, “The global opportunity here, and the fact that Rian is already engaged with European food producers and investors, speaks volumes about the value proposition and where FloWaste can go next. Flywheel is proud to invest not only in this great tech startup, but in a sustainable future.”

About Flywheel Fund

Flywheel Fund is a member-managed capital fund for early-stage tech startups based in Indiana, with special attention to startups based in Bloomington and southern Indiana.

About FloWaste

FloWaste is a technology startup with a mission to address the business, environmental and ethical issues of food waste. FloWaste’s food analytics platform empowers food processors, cafeterias, and restaurants to optimize food usage, reduce waste and associated costs, thereby reducing harmful environmental and supporting ethical business practices. Learn more at https://www.flowaste.com. 

About The Mill

The Mill is the heart of southern Indiana’s entrepreneurial ecosystem and its largest coworking space. The Mill’s mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship.

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October 18, 2021

For more information, please contact:

Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming, The Mill, andy@dimensionmill.org or 812-679-6140

Stuart Lowry, Co-Founder, Chefsfridge Co, StuartLowry@chefsfridge.com, 317- 437-4318; Shane Bivens, Co-Founder & President, Chefsfridge Co, shane@chefsfridge.com, 317-371-3988; Lindsey Barton, Marketing & PR, Chefsfridge Co, lindsey@wildirispr.com 347-452-8909

 ArcticRx Wins 2021 Crossroads Pitch Competition

Product extends global reach of COVID vaccine to remote areas

Bloomington, Ind.—The Mill, Bloomington’s center for entrepreneurship, announced today that ArcticRx won first place in the 2021 Crossroads Pitch Competition. Co-Founders Shane Bivens and Stuart Lowry will receive $10,000 in cash, a package of startup and business services, and priority consideration to pitch for an additional $20,000 at Elevate Ventures’ Nexus Pitch Competition in the pre-seed category. 

Watch the winning pitch. 

“We are beyond grateful for the opportunity this affords ArcticRx,” said Lowry. “It’s really satisfying for others to understand the change this product can bring across the globe, and we can’t thank The Mill enough for their part in the future of #VaccineEquity. The Mill has done a tremendous job fostering a spirit of camaraderie in the Hoosier community of entrepreneurs and change makers. We hope all the participants find paths for success.”

ArcticRx solves a critical problem in transporting vaccines to remote and rural areas: how to keep the doses cold enough, long enough to reach their intended populations. ArcticRx is a reusable, low-cost pod for shipping that keeps vaccines at the required ultra-low temperatures (ULT) up to five times longer than current methods. The pod provides 21+ days of stable, ultra-low temperature (-77c) using dry ice and without requiring batteries or electricity. 

In his winning pitch for Crossroads, CEO Shane Bivens explained that to ship vaccines to countries like the Congo, the current ULT options will only keep the vaccine cold over the flight there. On arrival, they must be repacked with fresh dry-ice and driven over great distances, through challenging terrain, before the ice melts and the vaccine loses viability. In fact, this cold-chain supply gap has prevented vaccines from ever reaching some locations. “Fifty percent of vaccine waste is rooted in cold-chain storage and transportation,” Bivens stated, noting that less than 2.5% of low-income countries have received a single dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, with devastating outcomes on human life.

ArcticRx’s ultimate goal is to close this supply chain gap and achieve global “vaccine equity.” Lowry noted that, as the virus continues to thrive and mutate in areas without adequate vaccination, “Protecting the world is necessary to protect local communities.”

Beyond COVID-19, ArcticRx has applications for shipping other pharma as well as food, such as seafood or produce, that require stable ultra-low temperature. The broader cold chain market is estimated at $340 billion, with the ArcticRx’s immediate corner of the ultra-low temperature market coming in at $24.4 billion.

ArcticRx was designed and developed by Rolls-Royce engineers in Indianapolis and Chefsfridge Co, the Anderson-based startup founded by Bivens and Lowry. They announced the opening of their pre-seed round in July of 2021 and currently have 5 functioning prototypes and 3 manufacturers lined up.

Crossroads Pitch Competition is open to any Indiana-based startup with less than $250,000 in annual recurring revenue. This was the fifth year for the competition, which is run by The Mill and was sponsored this year by Velocities. A panel of over 30 entrepreneurs, investors, and business experts selected four finalists, who pitched live by Zoom on October 13. Studia.app came in second and will receive priority consideration to pitch at Elevate Nexus in the seed category, which awards an $80,000 prize. The other two finalists were GittaSitta and AeonCharge. 

“We were thrilled with diversity of applicants and judges for Crossroads 2021,” said Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming for The Mill. “Indiana is bursting with innovation, and the quality of the pitches this year was outstanding. ArcticRx blew us away, and they faced tough competition. We expect to see many successes emerge from this year’s Crossroads.” 

Download the 2021 Crossroads Lookbook of startup competitors. 

The Mill’s mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship. For more information on Crossroads Pitch Competition, visit https://crossroadspitch.com/.

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About The Mill

The Mill is the heart of southern Indiana’s startup ecosystem and its largest coworking space. A 501(c)3 nonprofit, its mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship. For more information, visit https://www.dimensionmill.org/ 

About Crossroads Pitch Competition

Launched in 2017 as a regional event, Crossroads Pitch Competition is now one of Indiana’s biggest statewide pitch competitions. Dozens of startups from all over the state pitch to a panel of over 30 judges with expertise in entrepreneurship, business, and investing. In 2021, The Mill launched Crossroads Collegiate for Hoosier students and the Crossroads Platform to support regional pitch competitions.

October 4, 2021

Contact: Pat East, 317.965.2155, pat@dimensionmill.org

The Mill Awarded Nearly $400,000 from the EDA

Build to Scale Grant Will Increase Risk Capital, Fuel Job Growth 

Bloomington, Ind.—Today Dimension Mill, Bloomington’s nonprofit center for entrepreneurship and coworking, announced that it was awarded a $399,650 Build to Scale grant from the US Economic Development Administration (EDA). The grant will allow The Mill to grow its existing investment fund for early stage startups, Flywheel Fund, and create a second fund called Turbine.

“It’s no secret that wages in our community lag the national and state averages,” said Executive Director Pat East. “In part, that’s because Indiana ranks 41^st in employment in high-paying tech sector jobs. To get those jobs, we need more tech companies, and tech startups need risk capital to grow quickly. We’ve made great progress in the last few years in building our startup ecosystem. This grant from the EDA will allow The Mill to accelerate our successful work to cultivate the next generation of angel investors, fuel innovative new companies, and grow our regional economy.” 

The Build to Scale program aims to accelerate technology entrepreneurship by increasing inclusive access to business support and startup capital. Fifty organizations across 26 states received grants totaling $36.5 million. The Mill is one of two Indiana organizations to receive funds under the program’s Capital Challenge grant, which provides operational support for early-stage investment funds. 

The Mill launched Flywheel Fund in the summer of 2020 to invest in early stage startups. Flywheel is a private annual fund composed of members who each contribute at least $10,000. Members meet regularly for presentations by startups, then make a group vote on whether to invest. Flywheel’s first round of 11 members invested $120,000 across five companies in less than six months, investing more money, faster, in more companies, than planned. For its second round, Flywheel quadrupled membership to 50 investors and grew its investment pool to $640,000. The current round of Flywheel Fund will finish dispersing its funds in early 2022. 

“Our deal flow is strong,” said Brian Hatton, Venture Partner for Flywheel Fund. “Indiana is producing great tech startups that are ripe with opportunity for investors, for our workforce, and for our economy.”

Flywheel is designed to educate new investors and lower the financial bar for entry into the investment community, according to East. The grant will allow The Mill to grow Flywheel Fund to the private fund legal limit of 99 members and to establish Turbine Fund for seasoned investors to make bigger investments. Both funds will invest in Indiana-based startups, with special attention to creating equitable access to capital for women and diverse founders. The Mill partners with IU Ventures, Elevate Ventures, and other organizations across the state to locate and vet companies for investment.

For more information about Flywheel Fund, visit https://www.flywheelfund.vc/.

About The Mill

The Mill (https://www.dimensionmill.org/) is southern Indiana’s largest coworking space. Its mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship.

About Flywheel Fund

Flywheel Fund (https://www.flywheelfund.vc/) is a one-year, member-managed capital fund that invests in early stage startups based in Indiana. A minimum of 15% of Flywheel Fund investments are reserved for Black founding teams. 

About the U.S. Economic Development Administration
The mission of the U.S. Economic Development Administration (www.eda.gov) is to lead the federal economic development agenda by promoting competitiveness and preparing the nation’s regions for growth and success in the worldwide economy. An agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce, EDA invests in communities and supports regional collaboration in order to create jobs for U.S. workers, promote American innovation, and accelerate long-term sustainable economic growth. 

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

September 7, 2021

Contacts:

Melissa Ward, Head of Initiatives and Partnerships, The Mill, melissa@dimensionmill.org 

Adam Gross, Executive Director, Career Coaching & Employer Connections, Ivy Tech Community College, 812-330-6004, agross52@ivytech.edu

Free Program Provides Fast Track to Better Wages

Local upskilling powered by $34,000 grant from Duke Energy Foundation

Bloomington, Ind.—The Mill, Bloomington’s nonprofit center for entrepreneurship and coworking, announced today that applications are open for Code/IT Academy, a free upskilling program. A partnership between The Mill, Duke Energy, Ivy Tech Community College, and the City of Bloomington, the program is tailored to community residents seeking to transition to higher-paying jobs in the digital economy.

“What makes Code/IT Academy so effective,” Melissa Ward, Head of Initiatives and Partnerships for The Mill commented, “is its combination of intensive training, career coaching, and job placement after graduation. We can’t say enough good things about the quality of instruction and support participants get from our partners at Ivy Tech. This program can change lives.”

Previously known as The Mill Code School, Code/IT Academy offers virtual training over 10 weeks. The fall 2021 program focuses on software development and teaches skills in Python, CSS, HTML, Java, and more. Participants receive one-on-one technical mentoring as well as career coaching to prepare for the interview and job placement process. No previous experience in coding, IT, or tech is required. The courses are self-guided and can be completed while working full time.

“Code/IT Academy is a perfect fit with Ivy Tech’s expertise and our mission,” said Adam Gross, Executive Director of Career Coaching and Employer Connections. “We’re making tech skills accessible for everyone, regardless of income, job status, or previous education, and we’re empowering Hoosiers to transition to great new careers where they can earn higher wages.”

In June of 2020, The Mill was awarded a $34,000 Powerful Communities Workforce Development grant from the Duke Energy Foundation in support of the program. “Duke Energy’s support enables us to offer Code/IT Academy at no cost to participants,” Ward said. “Their sponsorship ensures that our community’s most vulnerable members, including the un- and underemployed and those typically underrepresented in tech, have access to opportunity. We couldn’t do it without them.”

The Duke Energy Foundation’s Powerful Communities program makes strategic investments to build powerful communities where natural resources thrive, students can excel and a talented workforce drives economic prosperity for all. The Foundation annually funds approximately $2 million in shareholder-funded grants to communities throughout Duke Energy’s Indiana service area. Bruce Calloway, Government & Community Relations Manager for Duke Energy, presented The Mill with their check earlier this summer. “We hear consistently from Indiana businesses that well-trained workers are one of their greatest needs,” Calloway said. “With this training, more of our community’s residents can enter the 21^st century economy with the valuable skills that employers seek.”

The Mill’s coding program was launched with a $100,000 Recover Forward grant from the City of Bloomington in fall 2020. The pilot program focused on software development and received 120 applications for 40 slots. Of that round, 60% of graduates have been placed in new jobs. In July of 2021, a second cohort focused on IT administration. Over 20 diverse participants earned credits toward an academic pathway at Ivy Tech while preparing to take the CompTIA Network+ exam. Job placement for all graduates is ongoing. 

Applications for the third cohort, focused again on software development, are open now and close on September 24. More information and the link to apply are available at: https://www.dimensionmill.org/code-it-academy/

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Caption: Bruce Calloway presents The Mill with the $34,000 Powerful Communities check. 

About The Mill

The Mill is the heart of southern Indiana’s startup ecosystem and its largest coworking space. A 501(c)3 nonprofit, its mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship. For more information, visit https://www.dimensionmill.org/

About Ivy Tech

Ivy Tech Community College serves as the state’s engine of workforce development, offering associate degree and short-term certificate programs, and trainings that align to the needs of the community. The College also offers courses and associate degree programs that seamlessly transfer to other colleges and universities in Indiana, as well as out of state, for a more affordable route to a Bachelor’s degree.

About the Duke Energy Foundation

The Duke Energy Foundation provides philanthropic support to meet the needs of communities where Duke Energy’s customers live and work. The foundation contributes more than $30 million annually in charitable gifts, and is funded by Duke Energy shareholder dollars. More information about the foundation and its Powerful Communities program can be found at https://www.duke-energy.com/community/duke-energy-foundation.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

September 1, 2021

For more information, please contact:

Pat East, Executive Director, The Mill, pat@dimensionmill.org or 317.965.2155

Hunter Hawley, CEO and founder, Blueprint Stats, hunter@blueprintstats.com

Blueprint Stats Receives $50,000 Investment from Flywheel Fund

Bloomington, Ind.—Flywheel Fund, a member-managed capital fund run by The Mill, today announced a $50,000 investment in Blueprint Stats. Blueprint Stats unlocks the full potential of basketball game film for athlete development and evaluation, team strategy, and entertainment. Founded in September 2020 by Indiana University grad Hunter Hawley, Blueprint is available on-demand to teams, individuals, and leagues.

Pat East, Executive Director of The Mill, a nonprofit center for entrepreneurship, said, “Sports tech is booming, but it hasn’t yet tricked down to youth sports. Hunter has found a way to make modern technology accessible to the massive, fragmented high school and AAU market. We’ve watched him grow this company at The Mill over the past year, and we’re very impressed with what he’s done so far and where Blueprint Stats is headed.”

Hawley began building the company while still a student at Indiana University, driven by his love for basketball and a vision for how players and teams could use statistics to improve their performance, if the data were available quickly and affordably after a game. Users upload game footage directly to the platform, which then breaks it down with time-stamped stats. The platform generates lineup analysis, statistical maps, and other data, while also making the footage searchable. Coaches and athletes then use the data and indexed footage to improve athlete performance, generate highlight reels, and more.

Brian Hatton, Venture Partner for Flywheel Fund, commented, “Less than 1% of the basketball world uses breakdowns, due to the cost and difficulty of accessing the technology. Blueprint Stats attacks that problem head on at a time when both sides of the market are looking for player insights. Recruiting budgets are being cut, and athletes want to stand out to scouts to make the most of new NIL opportunities. The timing is right for Flywheel to invest in Blueprint Stats.”

Blueprint uses a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and a gig-economy network of human statisticians to deliver breakdowns at 25% of the usual costs and eight times faster than the industry average, according to Hawley.

Hawley has been a member of The Mill, Bloomington’s nonprofit center for coworking and entrepreneurship, since his student days. “I never raised a ‘Family and Friends’ round for Blueprint, but doing a deal with the Flywheel Fund is about as close as I’ll ever get,” Blueprint CEO Hawley said in a statement. “Over the course of the last several years I’ve built incredible relationships with Pat East, the folks at The Mill, and several members of the Flywheel Fund. These folks are like family to me, and they’re going to continue to play an important role in the success of Blueprint Stats.”

Blueprint is currently raising a $500,000 seed round and estimates the market for breaking down basketball film at $615 million. The breakdown market swells to $4 billion when expanded to other sports. Blueprint has partnered with SmartSports, an alliance of best-in-class sports technology, product, and media partners.

About Flywheel Fund

Flywheel Fund is a member-managed capital fund for early-stage and high potential startups based in Indiana, with special attention to startups based in Bloomington and southern Indiana. Flywheel reserves a minimum of 13% of its funds for Black founding teams. Flywheel Fund launched in 2020 and is managed by The Mill.

About The Mill

The Mill is the heart of southern Indiana’s entrepreneurial ecosystem and its largest coworking space. The Mill’s mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

August 18, 2021

Contact: Melissa Ward, Head of Initiatives and Partnerships, The Mill, melissa@dimensionmill.org 

Remote Worker Pilot Program Drawing Talent to Bloomington

Century 21 Global Mobility to assist with relocation

Bloomington, Ind.—The Mill, Bloomington’s nonprofit center for entrepreneurship and coworking, today announced that its Bloomington Remote program is already working to entice remote workers to relocate to Bloomington. After eight weeks, the program has received over 150 applications from 39 states and 29 countries—even without offering a cash incentive. Several candidates have visited Bloomington, and four have accepted offers.

“The early results from our pilot program show that what’s most important to remote workers is finding a great community and high quality of life,” said Melissa Ward, Head of Initiatives and Partnerships for The Mill. “The coworking and startup membership at The Mill makes it easy to quickly connect and become part of a creative, welcoming community.”

Launched in June 2021 and sponsored by Velocities, the Bloomington Remote program offers free lifetime coworking membership to The Mill and local onboarding supports to entice remote workers to move to Bloomington. Century 21 Global Mobility, in an exclusive partnership, is providing extensive relocation and real estate services to support participants.

“Several cities and regions in Indiana are developing or already offer programs to attract remote workers as part of their economic development initiatives,” said Pat East, Executive Director of The Mill. “We think Bloomington can be a leader for the state in talent attraction.” The Bloomington program is unusual in that it does not offer a cash incentive, but instead leverages the city’s high quality of life to entice people to relocate. 

Tulsa sparked the trend to attract remote workers in 2018. Tulsa Remote offered $10,000 in cash as part of their package, and in the first year, they received 30,000 applications from all over the globe for about 300 slots. Post-pandemic, the movement has grown as remote workers relocate to places with lower cost of living and more relaxed quality of life than traditional tech hubs. Today, cities all over the US are offering incentives to attract remote workers. Remote workers earn an average salary of $91,000 and contribute an average of $11,000 to the local tax base and $50,000 in consumer spending in the first year of relocation. Remote workers increase a community’s talent pool and make it attractive to other remote workers and their employers.

“If we want more and better jobs in Bloomington,” East commented, “we need to make our talent pool irresistible to the employers of the future. Bloomington already has the most highly educated population in Indiana, and fortunately, workers with only a high school diploma also earn more when they work for tech companies. Indiana’s reputation in tech circles is growing, but we need many more jobs in this high-paying sector.”

The Mill is using the Bloomington Remote pilot to test and refine the incentives and supports that will be most effective at attracting and onboarding new residents. Once The Mill meets its benchmarks for success, the City of Bloomington has committed funds to help expand the program. The Mill worked with Aaron Bolzle, creator of Tulsa’s groundbreaking remote worker program, to design Bloomington’s offer. The program is promoted through its website, PR, social media, and through MakeMyMove.com.

Applicants to the program don’t necessarily have Bloomington connections. Only about a third of applicants have been to Bloomington (as a native, as a college student, or as a visitor). Roughly another third have been to Indiana, but not to Bloomington, and the remaining third have never been to Indiana at all.

Two of the program’s first accepted applicants, Pablo and Sarah, are a married couple who both work remotely in Texas. Pablo is an experienced entrepreneur whose current startup is a custom AI-powered geospatial application that employs 15 remote workers. Sarah is a freelance graphic designer who specializes in user interface and web design. They are familiar with Bloomington and are looking forward to taking full advantage of living in a college town where they are close to family and can connect with people who have similar career interests.

“Of course this program has great tax benefits for our city,” East said, “but what we’re really excited about is new energy and new ideas these new residents will bring to our community.”

Learn more about why The Mill launched Bloomington Remote.

Explore the Bloomington Remote program. 

About The Mill

The Mill is the heart of southern Indiana’s startup ecosystem and its largest coworking space. A 501(c)3 nonprofit, its mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship. For more information, visit https://www.dimensionmill.org/

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

August 17, 2021

Contact: Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming, The Mill, andy@dimensionmill.org

Applications Open for 2021 Crossroads Pitch Competition

Winner takes home $10,000 in cash

Bloomington, Ind.—The Mill announced today that applications are open for the fifth annual Crossroads Pitch Competition, sponsored by Velocities. Entrepreneurs from across the state of Indiana will pitch their business ideas to a panel of expert judges to compete for $10,000 in cash, a package of in-kind services and support, and priority consideration to pitch for up to $80,000 more at the prestigious Elevate Nexus Pitch Competition.

“If you’ve never seen a pitch competition, they are incredibly exciting, energizing events,” said Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming for The Mill. “Entrepreneurs are passionate about their startups, and they really seize the opportunity to tell their story, talk through the numbers, and explain the business model. Crossroads competitors are building all kinds of innovative startups, from sports tech to medical devices to software and beyond.” The 2020 winner was Stagetime, a professional networking platform for the performing arts, founded by Indiana University graduate and opera singer Jennie Moser.

The Mill launched Crossroads Pitch Competition in 2017, as a regional competition under the name inX3, and since then it’s grown into a statewide event.  The Mill works with partners across the state, Lehman said, to attract diverse competitors from all corners of Indiana. Early this year, The Mill also created a new collegiate version of the event. The Crossroads platform has been so successful, according to Lehman, that other cities and organizations now leverage it to run their own events. Project Activate SouthEast (PASE) Fort Wayne, a new program for entrepreneurs in that region, will debut later this year, powered by the Crossroads platform.

The 2021 Crossroads Pitch Competition is open to any Indiana-based startup with less than $250,000 in annual recurring revenue. A look through past competitors and judges is a who’s who of entrepreneurship in Indiana and the region. While there is only one winner, all competitors benefit from forming connections with potential investors, mentors, talent, and customers.

Crossroads is open to any Indiana-based startup with less than $250,000 in annual recurring revenue. A look through past competitors and judges is a who’s who of entrepreneurship in Indiana. Yes, the prizes are awesome, but the real win is connections with potentiaal investors, mentors, talent, and customers. At Crossroads, vision meets opportunity

This year’s competition will have three stages. First, contestants will submit a 3-5 minute recorded pitch, along with their pitch deck and executive summary, by the application deadline of September 10. Next, judges will evaluate those recorded pitches and select semi-finalists to pitch live over Zoom. The finalists from that round will then advance to pitch live at The Mill on October 13 as part of The Mill’s Innovation Week slate of events.

“We learned from our all-virtual competition in 2020 that there are some real logistical advantages to holding the semifinal rounds via Zoom,” Lehman said, “so we’ll do that again this year. And, health mandates permitting, we’re really looking forward to seeing our finalists pitch before a live audience again.”

Last year’s winner, CEO Jennie Moser of Stagetime, said about her Crossroads experience, “I can’t overstate how positively Crossroads changed the trajectory of the end of the year (and the first full year of Stagetime!). The non-dilutive prize money allowed me to move to Stagetime full-time before I had originally planned, and even more importantly, it gave me the confidence and ability to seize the opportunity to bring one of my most valuable contractors onto Stagetime full-time. These two items have changed my day-to-day dramatically — professionally and personally.”

Learn more at Crossroads Pitch Competition. The deadline to apply is September 10, 2021. Finals will be held on October 13 and will be open to the public to attend.

About The Mill

The Mill is the heart of southern Indiana’s startup ecosystem and its largest coworking space. A 501(c)3 nonprofit, its mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship. For more information, visit https://www.dimensionmill.org/

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contacts: Melissa Ward, Head of Initiatives and Partnerships, The Mill, melissa@dimensionmill.org

Jenna Dix, Technology Transfer Director, Office of Research & Technology Applications, Chief Technology Office, NSWC Crane, cran_T2@navy.mil

August 5, 2021

The Mill and NSWC Crane Join Forces to Spur Innovation, Grow Regional Economy

Partnership Intermediary Agreement connects startups and researchers to cutting-edge technology and IP 

Bloomington, Ind.—Today The Mill, a nonprofit center for entrepreneurship and coworking in Bloomington, Indiana, announced a new five-year agreement with NSWC Crane to increase access to and development of Crane’s technology, subject-matter expertise, and intellectual property (IP).

“As a center for entrepreneurship with close working relationships with Indiana University and Ivy Tech, we are ideally positioned to serve as a partnership intermediary for Crane,” said Melissa Ward, Head of Initiatives and Partnerships for The Mill. “Crane offers incredible opportunities for researchers and entrepreneurs to further explore, develop, and bring to market cutting-edge technologies. We couldn’t be more excited about connecting local innovators to those opportunities. Working together to increase tech transfer has the potential to commercialize groundbreaking IP, create high-paying jobs, and fuel our regional economy.”

Under this new agreement, The Mill will help the small companies and educational institutions it serves to take advantage of technology-related assistance from NSWC Crane. This includes the ability to license Crane IP, submit research proposals, collaborate on marketing and showcasing technology, and more. In return, NSWC Crane will collaborate, license, and/or provide access to specific intellectual property, subject matter experts, facilities, and equipment.

The new relationship formalizes and deepens existing cooperative activities between NSWC Crane and The Mill. Jenna Dix, Technology Transfer Director at NSWC Crane, currently serves on the board of directors for the Cybersecurity Exchange, a new network that The Mill launched in January 2021 to help make cybersecurity an economic driver in the region. In addition, in June, The Mill was contracted by Radius Indiana to run the backend of their 2021 Crane IP Defense Innovation Pitch Competition. The Mill’s experience in running pitch competitions and  innovation sprints create a natural platform for connecting entrepreneurs to Crane’s technological innovations, according to Ward. 

“We are proud to bring our laboratories, facilities, and technical experts into partnership with private businesses, academia, scientific establishments, and State and local governments,” Jenna Dix said in a statement. “Commercializing Navy-developed technology not only supports our forces, but also our regional economy. We look forward to working with The Mill and their partners to rapidly move innovations from the NSWC Crane patent portfolio from concept to market.”

About NSWC Crane

NSWC Crane is a Federal Laboratory of the U.S. Department of the Navy, providing multipurpose research and development, manufacturing technology, engineering, testing, manufacturing, and fleet support.

For more information, visit https://www.navsea.navy.mil/Home/Warfare-Centers/NSWC-Crane/

About The Mill

The Mill is the heart of southern Indiana’s startup ecosystem and its largest coworking space. A 501(c)3 nonprofit, its mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship. For more information, visit https://www.dimensionmill.org/

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

August 3, 2021

Contact: Melissa Ward, Head of Initiatives and Partnerships, The Mill, melissa@dimensionmill.org

2021 Flyover Podcast Festival Pivots to Go Virtual and Free 

Bloomington, Ind.—Today The Mill announced that the third annual Flyover Podcast Festival will be held virtually on August 20, and that for the first time ever, admission would be free. Flyover Podcast Festival attracts podcasters from across the Midwest to learn, connect, and celebrate the art and business of podcasting.

“We worked with podcasting expert Adam Schaeuble of Podcasting Business School to design this year’s event,” said Melissa Ward, Head of Initiatives and Partnerships for The Mill. “Adam has been a hugely popular speaker at past Flyovers. He knows exactly what challenges podcasters face. He’s successfully grown a huge audience for his own podcasts and figured out how to monetize them. Most of all, he just really loves podcasting and brings so much energy and fun to sharing what he’s learned with others.”

This year’s festival is sponsored by Podcasting Business School and WFHB. It was originally planned to take place in person over two days, Ward said, but feedback from podcasting fans led The Mill to pivot back to the virtual format used in 2020. “Flyover has some very loyal fans, and we decided that right now what’s most important is that we keep connecting and sharing great information. Going online makes it easier for everyone to attend, and we have such great speakers lined up this year that we wanted to open up the event to the public.”

Ward credits Schaeuble with securing expert speakers with top-ranked podcasts. Allison Melody’s “Food Heals” podcast has been hailed as the “Sex and the City for Food.” “Allison is the go-to person in podcasting when it comes to teaching podcasters how to set their show up for success with sponsorships,” said Schaeuble. “I’ve sat in on a few of her workshops, and they are amazing. She can teach any podcaster what they need to know to get connected with great sponsors and build relationships.” Other speakers include Karl Sona, co-founder of Streamlined Podcasts, who will speak on podcasting technology to improve audio quality, and Laura Michelle Powers, who has a top 100 podcast on Apple Podcasts and was recently interviewed by Will Ferrell on his podcast, “The Ron Burgundy Podcast.”

“All of our guest speakers are seasoned interviewers,” said Schaeuble, “but Jerome Myers takes things to a whole different level. I’ve been on his show ‘DreamCatchers,’ and he curated one of the best conversations I’ve ever had as a guest on a podcast. He’s going to teach us how to become an elite interviewer and create a unique experience for our podcast listeners.”

The Mill launched Flyover Podcast Festival in 2019 to support the booming use of podcasting among entrepreneurs, startups, and hobbyists. The Mill has its own professional grade podcasting studio, sponsored by Shine Insurance, whose owner Jeremy Goodrich is also a passionate podcaster and shared his insights at the 2019 and 2020 festivals. Over a dozen member podcasts have been recorded there, including The Mill’s own podcast for startups, “Like a Glove,” featuring interviews with successful entrepreneurs about how they found product-market fit.

Tickets are available on Eventbrite and are free. See the complete schedule, speaker bios, and venue information at https://flyoverpodcastfestival.com/

About The Mill

The Mill is the heart of southern Indiana’s startup ecosystem and its largest coworking space. A 501(c)3 nonprofit, its mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship. For more information, visit https://www.dimensionmill.org/ 

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

August 2, 2021

For more information, please contact: Pat East, Executive Director, The Mill, pat@dimensionmill.org

Andre Harakas, CEO and founder, ProBook, andre.harakas@probookteam.com 

Bloomington, Ind.—Flywheel Fund, a member-managed capital fund run by The Mill, today announced a $50,000 investment in ProBook Sports. ProBook provides an all-in-one platform to streamline team management and athlete development and is led by founder and CEO Andre Harakas. The new capital will help ProBook further develop the app’s features and expand its customer base.

Pat East, Executive Director of the Mill, said, “I first became aware of ProBook from Jason Whitney at IU Ventures, who said I had to check out this great startup from a student at Indiana Wesleyan. Then in spring of 2021, an hour after taking his last exam as a college senior, Andre pitched ProBook at our inaugural Crossroads Collegiate pitch competition and took home top honors, beating out other startups from across the state. We saw a great opportunity there for Flywheel Fund to get in early with an up-and-coming sports tech startup. ProBook provides a needed solution and has a smart strategy for going to market.”

Harakas, a first-generation college graduate of Indiana Wesleyan University, started developing ProBook Sports as a freshman football player. He noticed that athletic directors and coaches were forced to cobble together multiple apps to meet their needs and designed ProBook to consolidate features into one app. Brian Hatton, Venture Partner for Flywheel Fund, commented, “ProBook Sports provides an end-to-end platform for coaches to engage with their team members in aspects ranging from video and analytics to nutrition and calendar management. In a market where the dominant player is focused on providing video to very large, professional organizations, ProBook is poised to fill a gap with the thousands of other teams that can utilize their management software.”

Earlier this year, Harakas won a spot in the competitive gBETA program from nationally ranked accelerator gener8tor. He was also named Entrepreneur of the Year at Indiana Wesleyan.

“We are excited to have the Flywheel Fund invest into the #probookfamily,” Harakas said in a statement. “The funds are going to ramp up our already growing customer pipeline. Thank you, Brian Hatton, Pat East, and Jason Whitney for hosting the pitch! Flywheel did not just invest in us, but provided two amazing mentors from the organized sports space. We look forward to learning from Regan and Anthony! #bethepro.”

ProBook is closing a $350,000 round with participation from Skypoint Ventures, Flywheel Fund and other notable investors, including Jim Zarvos. The organized sports team vertical market in the US and Canada is estimated at $1.78 billion. ProBook has already secured brand ambassadors from celebrity figures working in that space, including Stevie Johnson Jr, a former NFL receiver turned head coach, and Dwane Joshua, an ABA semi-pro head basketball coach. The ProBook platform can be used for any team sport.

About Flywheel Fund

Flywheel Fund is a member-managed capital fund for early-stage and high potential startups based in Indiana, with special attention to startups based in Bloomington and southern Indiana. Flywheel reserves a minimum of 13% of its funds for Black founding teams. Flywheel Fund launched in 2020 and is managed by The Mill.

About The Mill

The Mill is the heart of southern Indiana’s entrepreneurial ecosystem and its largest coworking space. The Mill’s mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 

June 23, 2021

For more information, please contact: Sharrmaine Pechac, GreyPrint Consulting, sypechac@gmail.com

Local Woman Creates “Greyprints” for Education, Employment Success

Bloomington, Ind.—“Policies and procedures are often written in black and white, but humans make them grey.” So says Dr. Sharrmaine Pechac about her business, GreyPrint Consulting, LLC. That grey space is her sweet spot.

An Ohio native, Pechac built a career in human resources and student services and started her PhD in higher education there. When her husband got a job with the IU football program, she had to pivot, finish her dissertation, and keep building her career—from Bloomington. She needed something that would allow her to continue to work in what she considers her purpose: helping others be successful through education and employment opportunities. But at the same time, she needed flexibility with family in Indiana and Ohio.

The result was GreyPrint, a consultancy to bridge the gap between education and employment opportunities. Pechac’s previous experience working in HR showed her how policies on how to apply for jobs, get promoted, or take sick leave were sometimes too inflexible to accommodate the real needs and potential of unique individuals. The same was true in higher education, she found, when it came to black-and-white admissions policies, curriculums, and academic standing.

“Success is not a blueprint, especially when it comes to education and employment,” Pechac noted in a recent interview. “There are so many different factors that go into being successful. It is a greyprint.”

At first glance, the scope of GreyPrint’s work appears broad. It spans implementing a regional scholarship for minorities and women to diversify the digital tech field, to designing a national community engagement strategy for STEM PhD students, to creating a student-focused mental and behavioral health coaching program.  The common thread between them is importance of strategic partnerships and what it takes to accomplish them.

“A lot of people don’t understand what it takes to come up with an idea for a strategic partnership and then figure out, what are the exact next steps to accomplish this idea? Who are the stakeholders that need to be at the table? How much money will it take to accomplish this idea? And oftentimes they don’t have the capacity or the expertise internally. If it’s a strategic partnership that involves an educator and an employer, they need somebody who could sit right in the middle, right in that grey space.”

This need exists, according to Pechac, as employers and educators are re-examining what their own success looks like. Higher ed sees the need to ensure more students complete their studies and graduate. Employers need better ways to source talent. These are related issues, Pechac says, best solved through strategic partnerships that close the gap between education and employment, in ways that accommodate unique individuals and connect them to opportunities.

“I believe that my purpose is to help other people be successful through education and employment opportunities,” Pechac said. “And so I can’t be quiet. I have to meet people, I have to network, because the more projects that I work on, the more opportunities I can help develop for other people. I have to tell myself, ‘You’re shy, you’re introverted, you don’t want to do this—do it anyway. Get out of your own way, because if you open your mouth or if you send this email and you connect with somebody, that could give you a project. There are hundreds of students that you could help get a degree, hundreds of people that you can help get an employment opportunity.”

GreyPrint’s current client list includes Greater Washington Partnership, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and  Health Management Systems of America.  She recently served as contributing writer for a publication from Achieving the Dream, one of the most well-known organizations seeking to transform the community college system.

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 June 16, 2021

Contact: Pat East, pat@dimensionmill.org

The Mill Launches Program to Attract Remote Workers to Bloomington, Indiana, Bucks Trend of Offering Cash

Program Cites “Goldilocks Factor” of Right Fit

Bloomington, Ind.—Today The Mill, a nonprofit center for entrepreneurship and coworking, announced the launch of Bloomington Remote, a program offering free coworking membership and additional benefits to attract remote workers to move to Bloomington, Indiana.

Experience the future home of remote work: https://www.bloomingtonremote.com/

“Remote workers bring fresh talent and energy to our community,” said Pat East, Executive Director of The Mill. “The pandemic caused many people to rethink how and where they want to live. It’s the perfect time to shine a spotlight on Bloomington’s creative, independent spirit. The Mill can help remote workers connect quickly to their new home.”

Program participants receive lifetime free coworking at The Mill, a renovated historic building with a distinctive sawtooth roof and over 280 members. Applicants must live outside of Indiana, have full-time remote employment, and be willing to move within six months.

“Bloomington Remote builds on our city’s recognition as Indiana’s 2020 Rising Tech City. Bloomington is a place where diverse, tech-skilled people want to live and work,” said Mayor John Hamilton. “We are very excited to welcome remote workers into our thriving community.”

In May, the nonprofit group TechPoint awarded Bloomington with the Mira Award for Rising Tech City and noted that Bloomington  has excelled in creating a quality of life that is attracting new talent to the region. Indiana has emerged as a competitive state for tech as major companies like Salesforce have chosen to locate headquarters there.

“As people look for new homes outside the legacy tech hubs, some cities try to stand out with cash incentives,” East remarked. “We’re looking for people who will be happy here. For them, Bloomington has that ‘just right’ Goldilocks factor. You don’t have to get on the highway to go to the gym, your kids’ school, or a peaceful spot in nature. You can enjoy world-class culture, great food, exciting sports. You can afford to own a home and to travel. The payoff is a very high quality of life and a community of smart, creative people.” 

Bloomington Remote offers ongoing networking events and concierge onboarding to ensure remote workers connect quickly. The program includes banking discounts, volunteer service opportunities, and other benefits.

Bloomington is home to Indiana University and its top-rated music, business, environmental policy, and informatics schools. A Democratic stronghold, Bloomington is known within Indiana for its highly educated and socially conscious culture, college basketball, recreational boating, and 60-block entertainment and arts district.

The Mill launched Bloomington Remote, sponsored by Velocities, to grow the local talent pool and showcase Bloomington to the national tech community. See details on eligibility, benefits, and program application at BloomingtonRemote.com. 

About The Mill

The Mill (https://www.dimensionmill.org/) is the heart of southern Indiana’s entrepreneurial ecosystem and its largest coworking space. Its mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

June 8, 2021

Contact: Ankush Bikkasani, CEO, Deep Word, ankush@deepword.co

Synthetic Video Startup Takes Ethical Approach to Deep Fakes

Bloomington, Ind.—When it comes to synthetic video, seeing is believing. Synthetic video pairs any face with any words, in any language, in any voice. It’s created not by a person filming an actor on a set, but by artificial intelligence (AI), in cyberspace. The result is surprisingly realistic, as this demo from Bloomington-based startup Deep Word shows.

CEO Ankush Bikkasani, a senior at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business, launched Deep Word in November 2020. Since then, Deep Word has acquired 19,000 users, who have generated 38,000 synthetic videos.

As a freelance videographer, Bikkasani experienced the pain points associated with traditional filming firsthand: traveling to a location, setting up equipment, filming multiple takes, and so on. He started to read about deep fakes and the available software, but found that wasn’t a solution. “Deep fakes are essentially a very high-quality face swap,” he explained in an interview with The Mill, Bloomington’s center for entrepreneurship. “They put your face on mine, or my face on yours. But what we needed was the ability to change or modify the things that somebody was saying.”

In the summer of 2020, Bikkasani began talking to friends studying data science at Indiana University, and a few months later, they launched Deep Word’s current prototype. Users select one of Deep Word’s video actors or upload their own video, and then supply either a script or an audio file. The AI generates a new video that matches the original video to its new audio in minutes. Deep Word’s AI converts text to audio spoken through an artificial voice called a neural voice. Deep Word trains its neural voices on 30-40 hours of data of people talking. Eventually, they hope to offer users the ability to clone their own voices (without having to sit behind a microphone for a week).

There are a few limitations: the technology works best with a relatively stationary actor facing the camera, for example. But that’s improving quickly. Even over the last six months, Deep Word’s demo videos have added more hand gestures and movement.

One of the biggest opportunities for application, Bikkasani noted, lies in e-learning. “Research shows that when people have a face to associate with the information they’re learning, they retain almost up to 40% more information. And a lot of content being produced doesn’t have that. So it’s a very easy and cheap value proposition to these companies. We’re communicating, ‘Hey, if you’re producing content, or if your past content doesn’t have a teacher, just integrate with our software, and you can automatically have teachers overlaid over all of your content.’”

Although it’s very early in the field, other deep fake software is already online and open for anyone to use. In fact, Deep Word has competitors in Synthesia and Rephrase.ai, although their technology works differently. “They are essentially puppeting faces,” Bikkasani explained. “Every time their software sees a new face, they have to train a model to output video with that face. Ours is a generalized model, meaning that it will work with video of anyone without further training, so it’s a much faster and more versatile process. If I wanted to integrate a thousand video actors into our website in the next hour, I could, but for them, each one would take several days of model training and integration.”

Synthetic video’s potential—to quickly and easily put words into anyone’s mouth, on video, in a realistic way—raises obvious concerns about ethics, as well as business concerns about regulation. Bikkasani and his team have established strict ethics for using their product, and they’re prepared to comply with regulations.

“At the end of the day, we only want content being produced that is intended to be produced by the people who are in the video,” he asserted. “We really put our foot down. We monitor all the content produced through our website. We’ve developed auto flagging systems for content, and we’re working on an internal video verification tool.”

Bikkasani sees potential in that verification tool not only as an internal solution for Deep Word, but as a large market opportunity in itself: a chance to become the standard for verifying if a video has been produced synthetically. Synthetic video also has the potential to make a positive ethical impact, by making it easy to increase the diversity of faces, voices, and languages represented in training and educational videos.

“I think synthetic video is a hundred percent here to stay,” Bikkasani stated. “It’s just too much of an improvement—or its potential is too much of an improvement—over how we currently produce video. And I think that regulators will understand that. It’s an evolving field. It’s a very gray area. The ultimate goal is that we and other companies hold the same ethical grounds, but we can’t always guarantee the perceptions of others.”

In addition to CEO Bikkasani, the Deep Word team includes two data scientists and a software engineer, all IU graduates. In 2020, Deep Word won a $20,000 pre-seed award in the Elevate Nexus Regional Pitch Competition. They also secured $100,000 in Amazon Web Services (AWS)—another important win that saved the company 85% on operational costs. Earlier this year, Deep Word placed first at the Clapp IDEA Competition and second at the Cheng Wu Innovation Challenge. In May they secured an additional $20,000 investment from the Community Ideation Fund (run by Elevate Ventures through the Velocities partnership) to enable further technological improvements.

Later this summer, Deep Word will launch an API that allows companies to generate videos at scale. For example, a large company using a learning management system could pass specific information about each individual employee (name, title, duties, supervisor name, etc.) to Deep Word’s servers and receive back training videos personalized for each employee.

“Deep Word has really been able to prove out the technology with individual users,” said Cy Megnin, Elevate Ventures’ entrepreneur-in-residence serving Velocities, a partnership supporting startups in south-central Indiana. “What has me most excited about this company is the release of its API, which will allow video production to be truly scalable.”

The Mill’s mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship. For more information, visit https://www.dimensionmill.org/

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

May 25, 2021

For more information, please contact:

Megan Cox, CEO, Genie Supply, megan@geniesupply.com

Photos available from Gretchen Knapp, Head of Marketing and Communications, The Mill, gretchen@dimensionmill.org

Bedford-Based Clean Beauty Company Expanding CBD Products

Bedford, Ind.—Bedford native Megan Cox has always been a maker. As a young girl growing up in Bedford, she knitted, crocheted, made jewelry—and then hawked her wares to schoolmates to earn money and buy more craft supplies. “I’ve been wheeling and dealing and making things and selling things since I was a kid,” Cox commented. “The only time I went to the principal’s office, I had a price list I was passing around the classroom, and it got intercepted.”

Today, her company Genie Supply offers white label manufacturing, custom formulation, and contract manufacturing for startup beauty and skincare companies. Genie Supply bills itself as “the beauty lab for entrepreneurs” and is the hidden source behind brands seen at free people, Urban Outfitters, Nordstrom, TJ Maxx, and other stores. Cox chose to locate Genie in her hometown of Bedford to take advantage of her personal connections there and the region’s experience and expertise in manufacturing.

Genie Supply launched in 2018 and has 20 employees, including five full-time remote, one of whom is in China. Cox travels to China every three months to meet with staff and vendors, but she hasn’t been able to travel there since the outbreak of COVID. That hasn’t impacted Genie Supply’s growth or sales, however. During COVID, Genie crossed the $1m sales lines and saw its third product line release in Urban Outfitters.

The internet and social media have made it easier for startups to break into industries dominated by massive global companies, and the beauty industry is no exception. Cox knows all about creating a startup beauty company, because she launched her first company, Amalie, from her dorm room at MIT. Amalie’s sales blew up literally overnight when, unbeknownst to Cox, the Indy Star picked up a story from the Bedford Times-Mail.  “I woke up, and I had $10,000 of sales overnight. And people just kept buying and buying and buying and buying all day.”

She was 21. For the next five years, Cox worked full time to build the company. She learned not only how to formulate, package, and sell beauty products, but also how hot the opportunity for startup brands is, what kind of help they need to launch—and how hard it is for them to find a lab to work with in the U.S., on a small scale, in what’s called “clean” beauty.

Cox, who speaks Mandarin, spent three years in China building a supply chain of labs and manufacturers, not only for her own business, but also for clients she helped with quality control and negotiation. Launching her own lab, in the US—in Bedford—was the natural next step.

These days, clean has become the standard for startup companies. But the majority of products on the market, Cox explained, are still pushed out by two or three multinational companies, such as LVMH and L’Oréal, that own all the major brands.

“The only reason that the entire industry hasn’t moved to clean—because that’s what people want—is because those big companies don’t want to go back and reformulate or recall those products. But that’s going to happen soon enough, in the next two or three years. But all the small and medium brands are going clean now.”

Genie has launched well over a hundred new brands to date. So what are those new brands, exactly? It’s a secret, for good reason.

“We are not trying to be the media superstars. We want to stay behind the scenes, because if we make too much noise, people are going to be asking, ‘Who’s working with Genie Supply?’ This is very much still a hush-hush industry, because things do not get patented. All you have are your trademark secrets.”

Genie’s focus to date has been replicating top-shelf formulas and making classic products clean. The next step for Genie is becoming a leader in putting out all-new formulations. Cox predicts that CBD will become the next hot trend in the beauty industry. “CBD is not just a fad. CBD is really powerful, and it does work well in skincare. It’s still in this very early stage. There’s so much that’s unknown that people dismiss it. We know that CBG is better for anti-aging and skin and CBN is better for sleep. I think once we have a little bit more research there, especially surrounding the different minor cannabinoids and their benefits, then it will be even more useful.”

Genie Supply is currently developing a behind-the-scenes formulation for a major, Sephora-level vendor and beefing up their hybrid beauty offerings that combine color and skincare. In June Genie will launch 10 new CBG products. Beyond that, Cox and her team are exploring their options.

“I’ve had a lot of fun with this venture so far, and I’m really excited for these next steps. We’re at a pretty critical point right now. We have been feeling out strategic partners. People like our formulas, but we’re still very small. So we’ve been having these conversations to figure out if we’re going to work with factories that already exist, that have big machinery and can do our filling and assembly pieces, and keep a small team here. We’ve been having conversations with other partners that might buy part of the business or provide more funding.”

“We went from zero dollars in this teeny tiny garage in 2018 to doing $100,000 a month. Last year, we were doing $30,000 a month. We’ve been growing so quickly. That doesn’t sound quick to someone who has funding, but to someone who’s been working off of no funding and just reinvesting the profits, I feel like it’s been a very quick journey. I’m very happy with where the team’s at right now and everything we’ve accomplished so far—and no one knows that we exist.”

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

May 3, 2021

For more information, please contact:

Pat East, Executive Director, The Mill, pat@dimensionmill.org or 317.965.2155

Brian Anderson, co-CEO, beastcoast, brian@beastcoast.gg 

Bloomington Fund Announces Investment in Esports Startup

Bloomington, Ind.—Flywheel Fund, a member-managed capital fund run by The Mill, announced a $50,000 investment in beastcoast. Beastcoast is an industry-leading esports and professional gaming content network led by co-CEOs Grant Zinn and Brian Anderson.

Pat East, Executive Director of the Mill, said, “Flywheel Fund is so fortunate to have the opportunity to invest in Beastcoast. E-sports viewership is growing by double-digits annually, and Beastcoast is the fastest-growing pro-gaming content creator online. It’s just a really cool company with tremendous potential that’s already being realized.” A Techstars company, Beastcoast has 1.5 million subscribers to 14 content channels.

Anderson, a graduate of the Indiana University Kelley School of Business, developed the model for Beastcoast while working in finance. His work doing due diligence on the esports industry uncovered an opportunity to move away from the traditional model for physical sports, in which media rights, box office, merchandising and sponsorships drive revenue, to an integrated model that monetizes the content itself. The content advertising market size of esports is estimated at $400 billion. Beastcoast’s success is powered by tight relationships to a roster of top-level pro players with extensive fan bases.

“Beastcoast is extremely excited to announce an investment from Flywheel,” Anderson said in a statement, “especially because this partnership goes beyond just capital. Flywheel has already opened their incredible network of midwestern investors, entrepreneurs and business leaders to Beastcoast and is helping us continue to grow the leading gaming and esports content network online. I grew up in West Lafayette, Indiana, and went to school at IU Bloomington, so finding amazing midwestern partners is especially important to me. At Beastcoast, we love Flywheel’s support of Indiana entrepreneurs and are so proud to be the first investment in their second fund.” 

Beastcoast closed its $2.5m pre-seed capital raise last week with participation from Elevate Ventures, Techstars, Andover Ventures, and other notable sports tech and media angel investors, including Steven Temares and Scott Dorsey. 

Flywheel Fund launched in summer of 2020. Now in its second round, Flywheel Fund II has 49 members and $640,000 to invest. One-third of the fund is reserved for follow-on investments of $50,000 to $150,000 in Fund I’s five companies (Boost, Civic Champs, FloWaste, Qualifi, and Stagetime), as merited by their progress, terms, and opportunity. The fund seeks early-stage and high-potential companies based in Indiana, with special attention to startups based in Bloomington and southern Indiana. Flywheel reserves a minimum of 13% of its funds for Black founding teams; the first round of the fund awarded 20% of funds to Black founding teams.

The Mill’s mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship.

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 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

April 29, 2021

For more information, please contact:

Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming, The Mill, andy@dimensionmill.org 

Andre Harakas, Founder and CEO, ProBook Sports, andre.harakas@probookteam.com 

Indiana Wesleyan Student Wins Inaugural Crossroads Collegiate Pitch Competition 

Bloomington, Ind.—The Mill, Bloomington’s center for entrepreneurship, announced today that ProBook Sports won first place in the inaugural Crossroads Collegiate Pitch Competition, sponsored by Purdue Ventures and Velocities. Founder and CEO Andre Harakas from Indiana Wesleyan University took home a cash prize of $5,000, priority access to the Indiana University Maurer School of Law IP Clinic, and a guaranteed spot to pitch at the prestigious Elevate Nexus Pitch Competition.

ProBook Sports streamlines sports team management, allowing coaches to track and foster athlete development while building team culture through an all-in-one app that allows them to share game videos, set goals for athlete nutrition, share chat and news in a team feed, message players and their families, and more. Harakas and co-founders Carter Dood and Graham Terry have already developed an MVP (minimum viable product), secured celebrity sports ambassadors, and begun selling in a market they estimate at $1.78 billion in size. 

Harakas, who had taken his last exam as a senior as Indiana Wesleyan just one hour before pitching to the judges, said the Crossroads Collegiate prize money will go toward marketing the app this summer.

Zokos, a startup from Ryan Ryker at Ivy Tech South Bend, placed second in the competition and will also pitch at Elevate Nexus. Zokos is a software company that has developed a proprietary app for resellers of liquidated e-commerce returns to process and post products to online marketplaces up to seven times faster. 

Crossroads Collegiate Pitch Competition was open to any student currently enrolled at any Indiana university or college with a startup based in Indiana. Fifteen startups competed from eleven campuses around the state, including Butler University, Hanover College, Indiana University, Indiana Wesleyan, Ivy Tech Bloomington, Ivy Tech Richmond, Ivy Tech South Bend-Elkhart, Purdue University, Taylor University, the University of Notre Dame, and Wabash College.

The four finalists were Naxos Neighbors (Joanne Kelley Cogdell, Ivy Tech South Bend, and Kirk Hoey, Ivy Tech Richmond), ProBook (Andre Harakas, Carter Dood, and Graham Terry, Indiana Wesleyan University), Spoke Locally (Matt Baggott, Hanover College), and Zokos (Ryan Ryker, Rod Baradan, Julian Marquez, and Michael Altenburger, Ivy Tech South Bend). 

“Crossroads Collegiate attracted terrific student entrepreneurs,” said Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming for The Mill. “Indiana college students are not just thinking about entrepreneurship; they’re already creating exciting, viable startups, while they’re still in school. We were impressed by their innovation, their passion, and their market savvy. ProBook is an outstanding startup with a very bright future.”

Each student submitted an executive summary, a pitch deck, and a 10-minute pitch video to the competition. A panel of seventeen judges of entrepreneurs, investors, and business experts selected four finalists, who pitched live by Zoom. This was the first year for the collegiate pitch competition, which was inspired by The Mill’s flagship event, the Crossroads Pitch Competition. The fifth annual Crossroads Pitch Competition will be held October 13, 2021.

The Mill’s mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship. For more information on Crossroads Collegiate Pitch Competition, visit https://crossroadscollegiate.com/ For more information on the flagship Crossroads event, visit https://crossroadspitch.com/

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

April 14, 2021

For more information, please contact:

Gretchen Knapp, Head of Marketing and Communications, The Mill, gretchen@dimensionmill.org 

Darcy Neureiter, Civic Champs, darcy@civicchamps.com

Bloomington Tech Startup Promotes Volunteering, Builds Community  

Bloomington, IN—Serial entrepreneur Geng Wang had already built and sold two tech startups—Rent Jungle and Community Elf—before founding his current venture, Civic Champs in 2019. Having experienced early success, he decided to invest his next efforts in supporting something he had long believed in and practiced: volunteering. 

“Startups are hard, and you’re always going to have down moments,” CEO Wang said. “It’s certainly helpful if you believe in the mission in what you’re building and you’re excited at the prospect of building a really large company around that idea. Volunteering is something that almost everyone is like, ‘Oh yeah, I think that’s a good idea.’ It’s one of the few times that across racial, ethnic, political, and income lines, you have people actually rubbing shoulders with each other. There’s something special about that in terms of building empathy. Because if you don’t meet other people, how are you ever going to build that type of empathy?” 

Civic Champs is a mobile and web application that helps nonprofits easily manage, track, and engage their volunteers: tasks that are typically both time-intensive and critical for nonprofits. But the ultimate vision of the company to inspire volunteerism, strengthen nonprofits, and improve lives and communities. Every month, Civic Champs staff get together to do a service or volunteer project of their own.

“Volunteering is such a great way to show love and kindness,” Wang said. “And being able to promote that and encourage that in your community, within people, that’s something that I can definitely get behind.” 

The original idea for Civic Champs was a mobile game, like Pokemon Go for volunteering, that would make volunteering fun and easy. As the founders explored the idea with potential customers, they started hearing a common theme. Most nonprofits either were unhappy with their volunteer management platform or didn’t have one: and they were willing to pay for a solution. So Civic Champs quickly repurposed their technology and signed up nonprofits for a pilot program. It took a while to get the product right, but they had an early sense that it was needed and would eventually work for customers. Today, over 90% of users who download the Civic Champs mobile app keep it on their phone, making Civic Champs an unusually “sticky” application. 

In just two years, Civic Champs raised a million dollars from investors and hired nine employees—a large team, by startup standards. When COVID hit, like most other companies, Civic Champs needed to reestablish their footing. The company launched its own pro-bono initiative, Helping Hands. They were accepted into two prestigious startup accelerator programs: MassChallenge and Techstars. Then they added a new COVID-specific feature set and received funding support from the Hillman Foundation and Jewish Healthcare Foundation to launch a pilot program with the United Way of Southwestern PA. In February of 2021, Civic Champs’ microdonations feature was selected as one of 10 winners of the IDEO and Gates Foundation Reimagine Charitable Giving Challenge out of more than 400 concepts submitted from over 68 countries.

“I think there is something really special that we can bring to the table for these organizations outside of the core features that I know that they want,” Wang noted. “And that’s around building community for them, which essentially drives donations because people are more invested in you and becoming true champions of your cause. And if we can build that for these nonprofits, they’ll have much more engaged people who are going to want to advocate for them, to donate to their cause. That’s the key vision piece that keeps me excited.” 

Civic Champs now serves 61 nonprofits in 23 states, including Habitat for Humanity, Animal Shelters, United Way, and the Boys and Girls Club. 

Learn more about Civic Champs.

# # #

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

April 7, 2021

For more information, please contact: Melissa Ward, Head of Partnerships and Initiatives, The Mill, melissa@dimensionmill.org

The Mill, gener8tor and Ivy Tech Partner for Rapid Reskilling in Bloomington

Program Uses Cohort Model for Job Seeker Training, Support and Placement

BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA – Local entrepreneurship and coworking center The Mill, nationally ranked startup accelerator gener8tor, and the nation’s largest singly accredited statewide community college system, Ivy Tech, announced today a program to help individuals get new digital skills in IT administration. This partnership builds on The Mill and gener8tor’s partnership called The Mill Code School, a gener8tor program.

Funded in part through a $100,000 investment by the City of Bloomington, the Mill Code School is currently accepting applications from Indiana residents. The program is focused on quickly getting people into jobs in the digital economy, and is tailored to individuals seeking to develop new skills or become proficient in a variety of in-demand technologies and programs associated with IT. Program participants do not need any prior experience or degrees. gener8tor team members will guide participants through the IT Administrator learning modules that are available at no cost via the LinkedIn Learning platform. The deadline to apply is May 5, and the course runs from May 10 through July 16.

The modules associated with the IT Administrator prepare participants to take the CompTIA Network + certification. Coursework covers skills to become a certified Network + administrator, including essential networking concepts, techniques to manage and administer network infrastructure, and preparation for the N10-007 exam. Participants may select to take the CompTIA Network + exam; those who pass can earn Ivy Tech credits to start a full academic pathway. Additionally, participants will earn LinkedIn Certifications in diversity, inclusion, and belonging and professional soft skills.

This 10-week, cohort-based program will include:

• Self-paced virtual curriculum from Microsoft and LinkedIn to learn skills for positions such as IT Administrator and earn industry-recognized certifications;
• One-on-one concierge support from the gener8tor team on the skills content, plus career coaching on resume and cover letter writing, LinkedIn profile creation and interviewing;
• Technical support and mentoring from Ivy Tech faculty and professional staff;
• Virtual access to a network of peers for support and community;
• Access to The Mill’s coworking space and community-wide tech network during the program;
• Opportunity to earn LinkedIn certifications, gener8tor Upskilling certification and industry-recognized CompTIA Network + certification;
• And interviews with companies ready to hire candidates with skills taught during the program.

 Through this partnership, participants will have the ability to leverage the resources of these organizations to find a living-wage job in our community. The final week of the program includes an “interview swarm” where participants will use their new technical and job-seeking skills to impress hiring companies during a speed-dating-style facilitated meet-up.

Those interested in learning more can visit gener8torupskilling.com/mill-code-school. Program participants do not need any prior experience or degrees. Eligible participants do not need to pay any fee if they meet the following criteria:

• Indiana residents
• Have a high school diploma or GED/High School Equivalency
• Have not previously received an associate degree or higher (bachelors, masters, etc.)
• Have not previously used Next Level Jobs funding (if you have a question about this, please email bloomington-workforcetraining@ivytech.edu)

“We are excited to be expanding the programming for The Mill Code School to include IT Administrator. This program has transformative potential for struggling individuals, families, and Monroe County’s economy,” said Pat East, Executive Director of The Mill. “Earning industry-recognized certifications and credits toward an academic pathway at Ivy Tech provides an additional benefit and access to high-paying jobs in high demand. Over 3.9 million IT Administrator jobs were posted on LinkedIn in 2020. Pivoting our skill building and learning to reflect the market is imperative to our community lifting itself out of economic uncertainty. The Code School is just one component of our commitment to supporting a sustainable, equitable future for Bloomington.” 

“Partnering with The Mill and gener8tor to engage un- and underemployed or traditionally underrepresented in the digital economy, get skills and help to move into tech careers was a no-brainer,” said Chancellor Jennie Vaughan. “The last year has proven IT and digitally enabled careers will be more and more important in our community. We look forward to contributing our piece to make this a success.”

“gener8tor focuses on helping communities invest in themselves in projects just like this,” said Joe Kirgues, Co-Founder and Partner of gener8tor. “Mayor Hamilton’s commitment to helping provide traditionally underrepresented individuals a career pathway in technology based on market need is forward thinking. gener8tor’s Upskilling program is excited to use the Microsoft global skills initiative in partnership with The Mill and Ivy Tech to help participants grow their skills, earn industry-recognized certificates and find higher paying jobs.” 

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About The Mill                      

The Mill is Bloomington’s nonprofit center for entrepreneurship and coworking. Its members are entrepreneurs, startups, techies, freelancers, remote workers, innovators, and independents. Funded with the generous support of the City of Bloomington, Cook Group, and Indiana University, The Mill’s mission is to launch and accelerate startups.

About gener8tor

gener8tor’s turnkey platform for the creative economy connects startup founders, musicians, artists, investors, universities, and corporations. The gener8tor platform includes pre-accelerators, accelerators, corporate programming, upskilling, conferences and fellowships focused on entrepreneurs, artists and musicians.

About Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana

Ivy Tech Community College, serves the people of Indiana through accessible and affordable world-class education and adaptive learning by empowering our students to achieve their career and transfer aspirations. Our vision of economic transformation is inspired by the education and earnings attainment of our citizens, the vitality of our workforce, and the prosperity of our unique and diverse communities.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

April 2, 2021

For more information, please contact:

Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming, The Mill, andy@dimensionmill.org

Formerly Incarcerated Entrepreneurs Pitch Business Ideas

Bloomington, Ind.—The Mill, Bloomington’s nonprofit center for entrepreneurship, announced the conclusion of its pilot cohort of ReBoot, an entrepreneurial development program for the formerly incarcerated. Participants pitched their businesses live over Zoom on Thursday, April 1. Danielle Morris won the night and took home the winning prize of $2,500 for her business Heroine Studios, a photography service to help women in recovery from substance abuse reclaim their self-esteem. Her business model, based on TOMS shoes, would match each purchased photography session with a free session for a woman in recovery.

“We’re thrilled with the success of the ReBoot pilot,” said Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming for The Mill. “We learned so much from our partners, participants, and guest speakers, and the participants showcased great ideas on demo night.” The pitches were judged by Christopher Emge, Manager of Talent and Education at the Greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce; Samantha Ginther, Senior Associate and Head of Platform, IU Ventures; and Adam Gross, Director of Industry Outreach and Personal Enrichment, Ivy Tech. Velocities sponsored the prize money for the winning pitch.

ReBoot is a partnership with New Leaf – New Life, which supports incarcerated individuals to make a successful transition back into the community, and Courage to Change, which offers low-barrier housing and services to individuals in recovery. Participants in the six-week program learn how to focus their business ideas, get customer validation, and present their business to potential investors. At the end of the program, participants become members of The Mill, where they can take advantage of additional free programs to grow their businesses and connect to an extensive network of mentors and investors.

The Mill is currently seeking sponsors for the fall 2021 cohort of ReBoot.

The Mill’s mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship. To learn more about ReBoot or becoming a mentor or program sponsor, contact Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming: andy@dimensionmill.org.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

April 6, 2021

For more information, please contact:

Nichelle Whitney, CEO, The Guarden, business@theguardenllc.com

Diversity Education Firm Promotes Racial Healing

Bloomington, Ind.—A diversity education consulting company located in Bloomington, Indiana, believes that forgiveness and grace are key to healing racial tensions, according to a news release.

The Guarden started in 2018 as a podcast and grew into a consulting firm offering diversity education workshops, cultural sensitivity training, and cultural remediation. “The end goal is that everyone who has an experience in The Guarden grows through their education around race, class, gender, and identity,” founder and CEO Nichelle Whitney said. “It doesn’t matter where you are on the spectrum, if you’re at the point of resistance, or if you’re at the point of, ‘I’m energized and motivated around this work.’ We help people build toolkits for dealing with DEI stuff.” 

Whitney has been involved in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues across a broad range of organizations. As senior assistant director for admissions at Indiana University (IU) and state chair of the Inclusion, Access, and Success Committee for the Indiana Association for College Admission Counseling, she works to ensure that college admissions practices increase campus diversity. As chair of the Monroe County Women’s Commission, she helps to lead an annual coding camp for girls and its Brown Girls Who Code program. Whitney also serves as staff champion for the Black Women & Tech Alliance through IU’s Center of Excellence for Women in Technology.

“I always try to support marginalized groups in many different industries,” Whitney commented, “one of them being tech, because that’s where Black and Brown women are so under-represented.”

Recently, The Guarden delivered a workshop on imposter syndrome with Justus Coleman Kelley, Mrs. Indiana, whose platform is Building Inclusive Societies. Whitney noted that talking about imposter syndrome, a relatively common experience, provides an accessible, low-pressure entrée into sensitive discussions. Participants explore the role of culture, implicit bias, and internalized messages on individual and team behaviors. The workshop concludes with a self-assessment on imposter syndrome. “Seeing Mrs. Indiana talk about her experience—everyone sees you as perfect, your body’s perfect, your hair’s perfect—for her to sit upright and say, ‘I struggle a lot with imposter syndrome, and here’s my score,’ that was phenomenal,” Whitney said.

The Guarden’s trainers place a heavy emphasis on forgiveness and grace, according to Whitney. “You’ve got to give people room to learn and to make mistakes. So much grace is needed in such racially tense times. People don’t know what to say. They don’t know what to do. They don’t know what to believe, they don’t know what to feel.”

Diversity education has an immediate impact on many participants, Whitney said. Others may not fully understand the message until they have a personal experience, such as a family member coming out as LGBTQ or marrying someone of another race or culture. The goal for effective DEI training is to create openness to ongoing learning and further conversation, even—or especially—when the parties involved don’t agree or like each other.   

In the last year or so, The Guarden has completed 21 contracts, including international contracts and organizational contracts with large teams of 300+. Learn more about The Guarden. 

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

March 11, 2021

For more information, please contact:

Melissa Ward, Head of Partnerships and Initiatives, The Mill, Melissa@dimensionmill.org 

New Cybersecurity Network Launched in Southern Indiana 

Bloomington, Ind.—A new network for cybersecurity in southern Indiana held its first meeting on March 9. The Cybersecurity Exchange (CSX) is the brain child of The Mill, a nonprofit center for entrepreneurship based in Bloomington. 

“The Innovation Corridor that runs from Crane through Bloomington and on to Columbus and Muscatatuck is uniquely positioned to become a global leader in cybersecurity,” noted Executive Director Pat East. “Cybersecurity is a rapidly growing, multi-billion-dollar industry that has the potential to transform our regional economy. We have world-class higher ed programs, the third-largest naval installation in the world, a globally unique city for urban training, and companies who are already major players in the industry.” 

The Mill formed the Cybersecurity Exchange to bring together leaders from the private sector, higher education, government and defense, and the nonprofit sector. The Exchange provides the platform for cybersecurity leaders to learn from one another, collaborate on ideas and projects, and advocate for cybersecurity to become an economic driver in the Innovation Corridor.

Half of the 22 members of the CSX advisory board represent leading businesses in the region, including MetroStar Systems, Warrant Technologies, Scientia, DAXEOS, Dioltas, Cummins, and General Dynamics Information Technology. Representatives from Crane, the National Security Innovation Network, Atterbury-Muscatatuck, Purdue@WestGate, the Indiana Innovation Institute, Regional Opportunity Initiatives, the Indiana Economic Development Corporation, Indiana University, Ivy Tech College, and Monroe County Council make up the rest of the board. 

The advisory board is currently laying the groundwork for the CSX’s future operations. The board is conducting a technical inventory of the region’s collective strengths and needs in cybersecurity, assessing entrepreneurial pain points in accessing the market, and defining future community engagement and public relations.

The advisory board will meet quarterly, with intermittent working group meetings. Opportunities and events to engage the broader cybersecurity network of talent, startups, students, and agencies will be announced at a later date. 

The Mill submitted a $500,000 federal grant in December of 2020 outlining three goals for the Cybersecurity Exchange: 1) create a regional network of cybersecurity leaders, 2) catalog resources and opportunities in a digital portal to increase entrepreneurial access and attract talent, and 3) support turning intellectual property and innovations around cybersecurity into thriving enterprises. 

“We’re forging ahead with the Cybersecurity Exchange,” East said. “The time is right to seize this opportunity.” If the grant is received, dedicated staff will be able to develop the CSX faster, and if not, The Mill will use existing staff and partners to build the network. 

“The breadth of experience and knowledge represented on the advisory board is outstanding,” commented Melissa Ward, Head of Partnerships and Initiatives at The Mill. “These are highly regarded companies and individuals with national and global reputations who are already shaping the economic future of our region. Their collaboration through the CSX has the potential to exponentially increase the opportunities across our ecosystem.”

The Mill’s mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 

March 18, 2021

For more information, please contact: Ansley Fender, CEO and Founder, Atlas Solutions, Ansley@getatlassolutions.com 

Tech CEO Speaks Candidly on Risk and Personal Resilience

Bloomington, Ind.—Ansley Fender, Founder and CEO of Atlas Solutions, is no stranger to risk. She’s been a homeless teenager, a classically trained violinist, a pregnant grad student, a small business owner, and now she’s a non-technical founder of a software as a service (SaaS) company that streamlines grant management. All of these experiences have shaped who she is today, she says, and prepared her to compete in an arena where women are underrepresented and underfunded. 

Fender’s tech startup, Atlas Solutions, provides end-to-end management of the grant and government contract funding cycle for that 2 trillion–dollar market. In October of 2020, Atlas received $20,000 in pre-seed investment from Elevate Ventures’ Community Ideation Fund and is currently running a pilot with MVP software developed with those funds.

Fender’s early life laid the foundation for the resilience need to survive the competitive startup world. “I was a homeless teenager,” Fender said, “so the drive to hustle started really early. You learn to deal with the cards you’ve been dealt. I still went to school, and I maintained straight As.”

Music brought Fender from Florida to Bloomington, Indiana, to attend the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. After injuring her hand, she transferred her credits into an arts management program at SPEA. “Music is very high risk—arguably more high risk than starting a company,” according to Fender. “Thousands of violinists graduate every year, and there are only a couple of hundred positions available in orchestras worldwide. So I actually de-risked myself by leaving music school.”

After finishing her undergraduate degree, Fender started on a masters of public affairs in public finance. When she got pregnant, she worked from home doing books for nonprofits. That spiraled into a full-blown business, and she quickly saw that as much as 30% of grant funding was used to cover administrative costs. Nonprofits get into a vicious circle, Fender noted, of applying for more grants to pay for the labor to manage their other grants.   

Siloed software is one of the biggest problems, Atlas has found. The accounting deadlines for financial reporting, for example, may not align with the program schedules for executing work to meet grant milestones. The resulting conflicts cost precious time and hard-won dollars to reconcile. Atlas’s pilot is currently testing the software’s tracking and reporting capabilities while the team builds out a new feature, a grant-finding tool powered by machine learning.

Fender speaks candidly about the stresses of being a CEO. “Being a startup is not all about the fancy IPO or billion-dollar exit. It’s antidepressant meds and homeless teenager stories. This the actual reality of being a CEO of anything, a tech company or non-tech company. You’ve got a baby screaming in the background while you’re trying to pitch.”

Nonetheless, Fender says, her experiences have developed a repertoire of skills that she uses today as a CEO. “As a violinist, the number of hours you’ll spend on a single measure, drilling it to perfection, is mind numbing. There’s spontaneity, but also muscle memory—and that’s the heart of a good pitch. You have to know exactly what you want to say, and you have to improvise, to react to the people listening. You get a really thick skin really quickly, and you get used to rejection.”

Only 3% of venture capital dollars go to female founding companies, and while 2020 was one of the biggest years for venture capital, the share received by women-led companies went down. To date, women have led fewer than two dozen IPOs.

Despite these daunting numbers, Fender is currently looking for a technical co-founder or CTO to bring not only skill, but more diversity to her organization. “I would love to find a person of color or someone who identifies as LGBTQ,” she commented. “It might hurt my odds, but I think it’s important to have representation. It’s hard to balance all of this, to keep in mind what’s best for the company, and what’s also best for morality and my own personal beliefs.”

Atlas Solutions will raise an angel round later in 2021 and is currently participating in nationally ranked startup accelerator gener8tor’s gBETA program. 

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

March 24, 2021

For more information, please contact: Pat East, Executive Director, The Mill, pat@dimensionmill.org 

Bloomington-Based Fund Sees Rapid Expansion of Startup Capital and Investors 

Bloomington, Ind.—The Mill, Bloomington’s nonprofit center for entrepreneurship, announced today the start of the second cohort of Flywheel Fund, its member-managed capital fund for early-stage and high-potential startups. Flywheel Fund I launched in the summer of 2020. The first cohort of 11 members planned to make four investments of $25,000 in a year. By January 2021, the fund had exceeded expectations, investing $120,000 across five companies in less than six months. The second cohort has quadrupled membership to 50 investors and grown the investment fund to $640,000—an increase of over 500%. 

“We’re seeing a lot of excitement around the opportunities in Indiana right now,” said Mill Executive Director Pat East. “When we launched Flywheel, we knew promising startups existed here. With critical investment at the right time, the opportunities for innovation and investment can increase exponentially. In five years, the startup and investment landscape in southern Indiana in particular is going to look very different. The snowball is starting to roll.”

Flywheel Fund II plans to make six to eight investments of about $50,000 each, double the investment from Fund I. One-third of the fund is reserved for follow-on investments of $50,000 to $150,000 in Fund I’s five companies (Boost, Civic Champs, FloWaste, Qualifi, and Stagetime), as merited by their progress, terms, and opportunity. 

Flywheel Fund aims to grow not only the pool of startup funding in the region, but also the pool of experienced investors. Many of Flywheel’s members are first-time investors, East said. The Mill educates them on how the investment process works, what to look for in a pitch, and what to expect in terms of return. “About 80% of the members and total dollars in our second fund are from Bloomington,” East said, “but we’ve also got members from Indianapolis, South Bend, and across the state.” Two-thirds of the investors have contributed $10,000 to Flywheel Fund II, The Mill reports; about 30% of members have contributed $20,000.

As a member-managed fund, Flywheel forms a separate LLC for each investment. The fund seeks early-stage and high-potential companies with an Indiana connection, with special attention to startups based in Bloomington and southern Indiana. Flywheel reserves a minimum of 13% of its funds for Black founding teams and awarded 20% in its first cohort.

East, who is himself a founder of Hanapin Marketing and an experienced angel investor, sources startups for the fund and mentors founding teams after investment. In March, Flywheel brought on Brian Hatton to help manage the fund’s rapid growth. “Brian’s four years of VC experience at the UK firm QVentures are an incredible asset to our fund,” East said, noting that Hatton is also a Flywheel investor. Hatton oversees startup screening and due diligence. The Mill also consults with IU Ventures, IU Angel Network, Vision Tech, and other experienced groups to determine best practice for Flywheel Fund. 

Flywheel Fund II will hear its first startup pitch in early April.

The Mill’s mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship. 

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

March 4, 2021

For more information, please contact:

Josh Owens, CEO & Co-founder, Boost, jowens@boost.education; Gretchen Knapp, Head of Marketing & Communications, The Mill, Gretchen@dimensionmill.org, 

New App out of IU Helps College Students Stay on Track to Graduate

Bloomington, Ind.—A year ago, former SupplyKick CEO and 2020 Indiana gubernatorial candidate

Josh Owens was getting ready to fly to Italy for an extended trip. Then COVID struck, the flight was canceled, and Owens found himself back in Indianapolis.

In the tight-knit Hoosier entrepreneurial ecosystem, word of opportunity spreads fast. A few months later, Owens was contacted by Cy Megnin, the Entrepreneur-in-Residence for the Velocities region and Jason Whitney at Indiana University (IU) Angel Network, about a new edtech startup called Boost developed by Ben Motz. It was helping students stay on top of what they needed to do that day and increasing the number of students who were completing a class and staying on track for graduation. As a former faculty member at IU and Butler University, Owens immediately understood the problem that Boost was trying to solve.

And that’s how in the middle of a pandemic, Owens found himself back in the startup world, as CEO of a new venture that elegantly sidesteps one of the biggest problems for edtech: adoption.

“Most solutions in the education space require a lot of faculty or teacher input to manage it,” Owens says. “And Boost was inadvertently solving this problem: it was focused directly on the student, using existing data.”

Boost is a lightweight solution that doesn’t add to the instructor’s burden, and yet it still provides substantial results in student learning. In the age of COVID and massive shifts in education, this advantage is even more critical, for overwhelmed teachers and for struggling students. The Boost app pulls data that’s already in the learning management system (LMS), and then repurposes it to empower students to control the notifications they receive about assignments.

The premise sounds simple: can reminders really make a difference? Shouldn’t students already know what they have to do? Learning today looks different, Owens argues. “For a lot of students, college involves transferring schools, changing majors maybe three, four, five times. That might set them back a year or two. Now that schools are flipping between online, hybrid, and in-class learning, things are changing dynamically for students. They might also be working two or three jobs to help pay for school, on top of family obligations and other things.”

The base-level assigned work at typical universities works out to just over one assignment per school day, so one “bad week” can quickly take a toll on academic performance.

“It’s not unreasonable for students to simply not be able to stay on top of all the things that are due in their classes, things that do add up to missing points here and there. It can make the difference between staying on track versus being at a really difficult decision point of, are their grades in a place where it’s even worth continuing at school?”

As a research scientist and director of the eLearning Research and Practice Lab at Indiana University, co-founder Ben Motz studies the intersection of student psychology and behaviors. The origin of the research project that led to Boost was one simple question: How can we make an impact on students turning in assignments?

The first route Motz and his team explored was email reminders. But students, like most people, receive so many emails that reminders get lost there. The solution lay in harnessing an existing student behavior: checking their smart phones.

Students’ Canvas accounts already held all the relevant information on assignments and due dates; all that was needed were optimized push notifications. The research project led to an alpha test across 200 students and a beta test across 5,000 students. Boost increased the number of students who were submitting assignments by 6%, increased the overall course grade by 4%, and increased the number of students who would pass the class by 3%.

“All of those success metrics were coming not from faculty members having to put more hours into it, or the school having to find the students who were having troubles,” Owens says. “The success came from giving students more control over understanding what was due that day, when it needed to be done, and how they needed to do it. And that support turned out to be incredibly powerful.”

IU quickly saw the potential in commercializing the technology and spinning it out into its own company. From mid-2020 on, the focus was first on building the team, then fundraising, and now expanding the pilot into many different universities and ultimately into K–12 schools.

Boost was developed in close communication and now has a partnership agreement with Canvas.

Owens developed domain expertise in elearning in the summer of 2013, when he helped develop Butler Lacy School of Business’ online classes in economics and statistics.  “I’ve used Moodle, Blackboard, Canvas, many of the major learning management systems. They are incredibly powerful, but you do need a vision for what you’re trying to build, time, resources. . . . What we’re asking of faculty members today is to not just be great at teaching students, but also also to become technology experts.”

Boost is only a few months old but is already active at Indiana University and IUPUI. Owens and Motz are hoping to get Boost into about a dozen more schools before the start of the 2021–22 school year, including some K–12 schools.

“From a business perspective, you have to make some bets. Hopefully you’re doing enough testing and having enough conversations around the underlying product to think through, Is it the right solution at the right time for the right people? And then if that’s the case, are you getting it into the right people’s hands at the right time? And do you have a pricing mechanism to help pay for it, but not get too much in the way of scaling the solution?”

“I’m cautiously optimistic that we have been able to put a lot of those pieces together quickly. We’ve been lucky to have a lot of really great people along for the ride: Cy from Elevate, Jason at IU Ventures, Pat East and the community at The Mill, the Flywheel Fund . . . It’s just been really helpful for me as a founder. It’s also been really rewarding to be going back through this journey as a startup leader and to have so many Hoosier leaders and entities along this journey with us.”

Boost recently closed a round of funding in January 2021 and will soon be hiring an additional technology leader and a few sales and marketing positions.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

December 17, 2020

For more information, please contact:

Gretchen Knapp, Head of Marketing and Communications, The Mill, gretchen@dimensionmill.org  

Bloomington, Ind.—The Mill, Bloomington’s nonprofit center for entrepreneurship, announced the 2020 FUSE Business Innovation Awards today, December 17. The FUSE Awards recognize the accomplishments of both companies and individuals in Bloomington’s thriving technology and innovation scene.

“These innovation leaders drive growth in our entrepreneurial ecosystem and our local economy,” said Pat East, The Mill’s Executive Director. “Some of the 2020 winners, like Jeff Mease of One World Enterprises, have been bringing creative ideas to life for years. Others, like Megan Cox’s company Genie Supply, are bringing new energy, new talent, and whole new industries to south central Indiana. The Bloomington metro area is rich in experience and ingenuity, and we’re going to need both to fully recover from the economic repercussions of the pandemic.”

The 2020 winners are:

• Bill & Gayle Cook Entrepreneur of the Year: Jeff Mease, One World Enterprises
• Mentor of the Year (awarded to an outstanding role model who has advised and encouraged best practices in an early stage company’s growth): Cy Megnin, Velocities
• Company of the Year (awarded to a company who exemplifies Bloomington’s values while achieving revenue and job growth): Catalent
• Rising Star of the Year (awarded to a company with less than ten employees that has laid the foundation for future revenue and job growth): Genie Supply
• Partner of the Year (awarded to an organization who directly impacts the success of The Mill and its members): Cook Center for Entrepreneurship
• Community Leader Supporting Entrepreneurship & Innovation (awarded to an individual who proudly and unapologetically supports The Mill and its members with time, energy, and talent): Lynn Coyne
• Newsworthy Event of the Year (voted by Mill members and awarded to an individual, corporation, or organization who best demonstrates through public relations that great things are happening in Bloomington: Catalent invests $50mm and hires 300 additional employees to support a COVID-19 vaccine

The Mill’s mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship. The FUSE Awards were founded by the Indiana SBDC (Small Business Development Center) in 2004. The Mill rebooted the awards and has been celebrating the community’s successes since 2017.

For a full list of all nominees and winners, visit https://www.dimensionmill.org/fuse-business-innovation-awards/

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

March 10, 2021

For more information, please contact:

Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming, The Mill, andy@dimensionmill.org

New Entrepreneurship Program for the Formerly Incarcerated Launched in Bloomington

Bloomington, Ind.—The Mill, Bloomington’s nonprofit center for entrepreneurship, has launched ReBoot, a new entrepreneurial development program for the formerly incarcerated. “Entrepreneurship presents powerful opportunities for individuals and communities,” said Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming. “So we want to grow our startup ecosystem and create access for more people. And that means we not only open the door to the ecosystem wider, but also step outside and invite more folks in.”

Participants in the six-week program learn how to focus their business ideas, get customer validation, and present their business to potential investors. At the end of the program, participants become members of The Mill, where they can take advantage of additional free programs to grow their businesses and connect to an extensive network of mentors and investors.

This new philanthropic program was inspired in 2020, when The Mill sponsored a pitch night for REDi, the ReEntry Entrepreneurship Development Initiative run by the Indy Chamber. The winner of that pitch night won a spot to pitch at The Mill’s Crossroads Pitch Competition. “I was really impressed with the winner’s story and her scrappiness,” Lehman said. “She had everything you want to see in someone starting a business.”

Monroe County didn’t offer any similar programming, however. So The Mill developed ReBoot in partnership with New Leaf – New Life, which supports incarcerated individuals to make a successful transition back into the community, and Courage to Change, which offers low-barrier housing and services to individuals in recovery. These organizations helped identify and refer program candidates. All participants met stability metrics—full-time employment, stable living situation, established sobriety—and were fully vetted. “We couldn’t ask for better partners,” Lehman said. “Stacy Flynn at New Leaf – New Life and Marilyn Burrus at Courage to Change have been instrumental in launching the ReBoot program.”

The first cohort of seven participants includes four men and three women with business ideas ranging from a stocked pay lake for sport fisherman and fishing tournaments, to a painting business, to a photography business focused on helping victims of domestic violence re-see and reclaim their sense of self. Guest speakers have included Mark Harsley, founder of Kitemail, who is himself formerly incarcerated, and Pete Yonkman, president of Cook Medical.

Participants are already leveraging their new access to the ecosystem. One person told Lehman, “Being part of your ReBoot Program has me doing more research on things I need and want to know about what I want to do, and reaching out to connections I now have for answers I need.” Another said, “I really just love your dedication to us. It makes me smile.” 

ReBoot will wrap up with a demo night of business pitches. The winner will take home a little seed money for their business, and all participants will be able to continue developing their enterprises as Mill members.

The Mill’s mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship. To learn more about ReBoot or becoming a mentor or program sponsor, contact Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming: andy@dimensionmill.org.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

February 23, 2021

For more information, please contact:

Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming, The Mill, andy@dimensionmill.org 

The Mill Launches New Pitch Competition for Indiana College Students

Bloomington, Ind.—The Mill, Bloomington’s center for entrepreneurship, announced the launch of a collegiate version of its flagship pitch competition, Crossroads. The new spinoff event, called Crossroads Collegiate Pitch Competition, is open to any student currently enrolled at any Indiana university or college with a startup based in Indiana. The winner will take home a cash prize of $5,000.

The collegiate competition was inspired by the success of going virtual with the signature event last fall, explained Andy Lehman, Head of Accelerator Programming for The Mill. “Going virtual allowed us to expand our reach considerably,” Lehman said. “We were able to attract not only more startups, but also more judges, and more diverse participation from every corner of Indiana.” The Mill saw a surge in student interest in 2020, in Crossroads and its other programs, including its Spark Business Plan competition and boot-camp startup classes offered through Indiana University. “We already work with some incredibly talented college students, and we know there are many more across the state. This new event will showcase their innovation and drive. Crossroads Collegiate gives student entrepreneurs the chance to not only win some money, but also to get out in front of judges, entrepreneurs, and investors from all over the state, from South Bend to Evansville.”

To apply to Crossroads Collegiate, students will submit an executive summary, a pitch deck, and a 10-minute pitch video by April 12. “The video takes some of the pressure off of pitching,” Lehman explains. “You can re-record it a dozen times, as many as needed to get it just right. New entrepreneurs really benefit from the practice and the opportunity to get feedback.” A judging panel of respected Indiana entrepreneurs and angel investors will view the recorded pitches at the semi-finals and select finalists, who will pitch live over Zoom on April 29.

“Students are thinking about becoming entrepreneurs earlier and earlier,” Lehman commented. “It’s the right time to feed their interest and build on the current momentum in our startup ecosystem.” Indiana has seen a surge in investment in early stage startups. Elevate Ventures recently reported that despite COVID, in 2020, pre-seed investments in Indiana more than doubled to 100 from 46 in the prior year.

The Mill’s mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship. For more information on the new Crossroads Collegiate Pitch Competition, visit https://crossroadscollegiate.com/ For more information on the flagship Crossroads event, visit https://crossroadspitch.com/

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

February 3, 2021 

For more information, please contact:

Gretchen Knapp, Head of Marketing and Communications, The Mill, gretchen@dimensionmill.org 

or Britain Taylor, CEO, ShuffleMe, btaylor7@iu.edu

Photos available at https://www.dimensionmill.org/britain-taylor-shuffleme/ 

Startup Develops Tool for Managing Social Media Burnout 

Bloomington, Ind.— “I just want to help people to have a healthy relationship with social media,” says CEO and Cofounder Dr. Britain Taylor about ShuffleMe, a predictive software app that helps people track the impact of social media on their mental health.

Taylor has been working toward this mission since long before Twitter wars, the pandemic, and doomscrolling. She’s invested eleven years in preparing herself: she holds an undergraduate degree in psychology and neuroscience, an MBA in behavior and marketing, a masters in industrial and systems engineering, and now, at Indiana University, is completing a PhD in intelligent systems engineering. Taylor is a member of The Mill, a nonprofit startup accelerator in Bloomington, and won The Mill’s 2020 Spark Business Plan Competition.

An early adopter of the first social media platforms­—in 2004 she was the 16^th user on MySpace, where she had over a million followers—Taylor grew up hacking and coding. In those days, social media was very different, Taylor says, without much cyberbullying.

By 2011, Facebook had exploded. “Facebook gave you more options to actually talk to each other,” Taylor says. “So a lot of my friends started using Facebook to express their emotions. And now that I’m older, I realize some of them were reaching out for help.” By the time Taylor was 18, she had lost three friends by suicide. In fact, the CDC has reported that between 2007 and 2016 (years of tremendous growth in social media usage) rates of suicide among young people jumped 56 percent.    

“I told myself, there has to be a way around this. I told myself that I was going to college, and I was going to stay in college as long as possible to build some sort of solution,” says Taylor. 

Her solution, an app called ShuffleMe, is still in beta testing. Users download the app and give it access to their webcams. From there the app runs in the background, tracking social media activity against facial expressions, and recording patterns in emotional responses. A dashboard then shows users which social media channels and specific content have impacted their mood, thus empowering them to make specific, effective changes to their social feeds, their behavior, and ultimately, Taylor hopes, their happiness. 

ShuffleMe addresses privacy concerns head-on. User data is only used to create the dashboard report, then deleted from the server immediately. “The beautiful thing is that our younger generation is so obsessed with data,” Taylor says.  “They’re like, ‘What are you doing with my data, with my phone?’ That’s a plus. You want to know what that data means. And you want to see if some data can actually help you.” 

The app uses algorithms and a face classifier, based on research on universal facial expressions and trained on over a million people, to connect your facial reactions to social media to specific emotions. It achieves 98.9% accuracy in classifying emotional responses, an impressive accuracy for software. 

ShuffleMe is currently pre-revenue and running a closed beta program for practitioners. They recently completed an NSF I-Corps program and noticed a different niche market, where the data from the end users can be shared in one-on-one sessions with their practitioners. In February ShuffleMe will launch a second closed beta for end users. About 2,000 students from Indiana University, Purdue University, and Ball State have signed up, and Taylor and her team are thinking about expanding to other students in the Midwest. Possible next steps include entering an accelerator program and opening up a pre-seed funding round for angel investors. Eventually, Taylor expects to release a viable product in a public launch.

For all the promise ShuffleMe shows for its research and market potential, neither of those is what excites Britain Taylor the most.

“What I want to see is whether something that I spent 11 years building is going to benefit people in the long run. Not just, ‘Your software helps me to understand that when I spend this amount of time on social media or use it this way, it impacts my mood,’ but ‘Hey, here are the changes I can make because of it.’ That’s something that motivates me every single day.”

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

January 20, 2021

For more information, please contact:

Melissa Ward, Head of Partnerships and Initiatives, The Mill, melissa@dimensionmill.org  

Bloomington, Ind.—Over the last six months, five startups have received investment from a new member-managed capital fund run by The Mill, a nonprofit center for entrepreneurship. The Flywheel Fund launched in the summer of 2020 and planned to make 4 investments of $25,000 each over the course of a year. By January, the fund had exceeded expectations, investing $120,000 in five companies in less than six months.

Flywheel is a member-managed fund that invests in early stage and high-potential companies. Rotating cohorts of members join, each contributing $10,000 to the fund upon joining. The group meets every other month to listen to one pitch, and each member then votes on whether to invest. When a majority votes “yes,” the company receives an investment of $25,000.

“Our first cohort was really excited about this opportunity to support startups in southern Indiana,” said Pat East, the Executive Director of The Mill. “So we started with a bigger pool to invest than we expected—$120,000—and we were able to invest quickly in some very promising startups.” Flywheel Fund is open to first-time investors and includes an educational component to support them in learning how the investment process works, what to look for in a pitch, and what to expect in terms of a return on the investment. 

“Flywheel Fund is committed to providing equitable access to critical startup capital,” East noted. “We’ve promised that at least 13% of our investments will be in companies with Black founding teams, and I’m proud that in our first year we exceeded that promise and invested 20%. Diversity is a matter of ethics, and it’s also a matter of economics. It’s simply better for our fund to invest in all the great ideas that could fuel our community’s future economy. When we’re inclusive about our approach, the possibilities for everyone are really limitless.”

The five companies who received investment are:

• Stagetime, an online professional network for the performing arts
• Civic Champs, an app for nonprofits that automates volunteer management
• Boost, an app that helps students manage and meet assignment deadlines
• Qualifi’s technology allows HR professionals to conduct very high volumes of phone interviews quickly
• Flowaste’s data analytics provide cafeterias, restaurants, and individuals actionable insights on food waste patterns

The second cohort of Flywheel Fund starts April 1, 2021. Given the success of the first cohort, East expects the second cohort to be significantly larger in terms of members and the total investment pool. “Word is getting out about the high-quality startups we have in our region, and investors want to get in on that opportunity,” East said. “The Mill is thrilled to help grow resources for startups and a new pool of angels and investors.”

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

December 11, 2020

For more information, please contact:

Melissa Ward, Head of Partnerships and Initiatives, melissa@dimensionmill.org

Bloomington, Indiana (December 11, 2020)—On Friday, December 11, the first cohort of The Mill Code School, powered by gener8tor, graduated in a virtual ceremony. Featured speakers include Mayor John Hamilton and Secretary Blair Milo, the State of Indiana’s first Secretary for Career Connections and Talent.

Funded in part through a $100,000 investment by the City of Bloomington, The Mill Code School was a 10-week free pilot program for Bloomington residents to gain entry-level coding skills, in order to access better employment options.  No prior experience or degrees were required. Participants could complete the program while also working full-time.

The Mill started brainstorming about the program June of 2020, in response to the economic challenges of COVID, and partnered with nationally ranked startup accelerator gener8tor to bring their ground-breaking upskilling programs to Bloomington. To find Code School students, The Mill and gener8tor worked together to spread the word, collaborate with local organizations, and conduct outreach. The pilot program quickly received about 140 applications for 40 slots, which were prioritized for participants who were unemployed or underemployed and not typically represented in tech jobs. Almost 30% of applicants were minorities, 20 applicants identified as immigrants, and 20 identified as LGBTQ+. Half the participants selected were women.

Over the course of the program, gener8tor team members guided participants through LinkedIn Learning Platform’s Software Developer modules related to core technologies for web development, software development, and databases.  In addition, Code School participants received technical, resume, and interview coaching; gained virtual access to a network of peers for support and community; attended lunch and learns; and received interview placement with companies ready to hire candidates with these skills. Gener8tor even went above and beyond the partnership contract and generously donated a Chromebook to a student in need. Secretary Milo praised the program for being “trailblazing” and commented, “This is such a perfect example of another way that Bloomington is continuing to lead the way in the world, with the collaboration you’ve brought together, and the skill set that graduates have learned to become  part of an emerging economy.”

Ivy Tech Community College also supported the program. Their Workforce Alignment Office volunteered for The Mill Code School Lunch & Learn series, and computer science instructors in the School of Information Technology donated hours of technical coaching.

Many of the participants finished the self-paced curriculum early. The program had an 80% retention rate (compared to the average 50% rate). Of the 40 original participants, 32 will graduate on Friday. Moreover, the program is reaching beyond those students. The Mill surveyed applicants who weren’t selected to join the program, and of those who responded, 20% have started the software development career track on their own; another 30% said they hadn’t started yet, but plan to.

The Mill and its partners supported participants in and outside of the program, addressing life obstacles and working on job placement. “Even once the curriculum is done and the participants have graduated, there’s still work to be done,” said Executive Director Pat East, “including the important work of finding funding and preparing for additional cohorts in 2021. We want to build on this success, grow Bloomington’s tech talent pool, and create more opportunities for more citizens to enter the digital economy.”

“We’re your long-term advocates,” gener8tor’s Cole Shearer told graduates during the virtual ceremony. Graduates will receive ongoing job postings; several graduates have already received offers or interviews.  “Each one of you is in a position to turn a page and start a new chapter in your life,” Mayor Hamilton noted.

The City of Bloomington’s investment in the pilot program of The Mill Code School is part of Recover Forward, Mayor John Hamilton’s initiative to rebuild Bloomington from the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent economic collapse in a way that more thoroughly embodies the community’s goals for racial equity, a sustainable and resilient economy, and climate action.

“We’re so proud of the first cohort of Code School graduates,” East said, “for their persistence, bravery, and engagement. We’re excited to see where they go from here.”

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BLOOMINGTON/COLUMBUS, INDIANA – gBETA has announced its newest Indiana program Bloomington-Columbus in partnership with Velocities, The Mill and the Columbus Chamber of Commerce. gBETA is nationally ranked accelerator gener8tor’s free, seven-week accelerator program for early stage startups with local roots. gBETA Bloomington-Columbus is an expansion of gBETA’s programming in Indiana, with previous expansions to Terre Haute and Ft. Wayne in 2020.

The program is slated to kick off in early March, 2021, and will be industry and vertical agnostic. Geoff Zentz, who ran the gBETA Indy, Terre Haute, and AgBioScience programs in 2019 and 2020, will serve as the gBETA Bloomington-Columbus Director. The gBETA program will work with five startups from the Velocities region, helping them refine their business models, connect with mentors, gain more customer traction and prepare their pitches. The companies will also pitch to a minimum of 25 investors.

The program will culminate with a Pitch Night in late April. The participating gBETA companies will give a five-minute pitch in front of a captive audience of entrepreneurs, mentors, investors and community members. The Velocities-region community will be invited to attend, and the event will be free and open to the public.

“gBETA’s entry into Columbus and Bloomington presents a tremendous opportunity for area entrepreneurs to accelerate their startups, by opening doors to top-notch expertise and a powerful network of investors,” says Cindy Frey, President of the Columbus Chamber of Commerce. “I’ve witnessed, first-hand, how gBETA can transform entrepreneurs with a big idea into leaders of a focused, fast-growing company.”

The gBETA program is offered in Bloomington-Columbus thanks to the support of the Indiana Economic Development Corporation and Velocities.
Interested Startup founders looking to accelerate the growth for their business and/or also potentially raising venture capital, mentors, or investors interested in learning more should contact gBETA Indiana Director Geoff Zentz (geoff@gener8tor.com). For more information, visit https://www.gbetastartups.com/bloomington-columbus.

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About gener8tor
www.gener8tor.com

gener8tor’s turnkey platform for the creative economy connects startup founders, musicians, artists, investors, universities and corporations. The gener8tor platform includes pre-accelerators, accelerators, corporate programming, conferences and fellowships.

About gBETA
www.gBETAstartups.com

gBETA accelerates the growth of early-stage companies through its network-driven program. gBETA supports five teams per cohort and requires no fees and no equity. Since launching in 2015, gBETA program alumni have raised $111M+ in capital and created 1,000+ jobs across the U.S. and Canada.

About Velocities
https://velocitiesin.com/

Velocities is a partnership between The Mill of Bloomington, the Columbus Chamber of Commerce, and Elevate Ventures. This partnership provides a wealth of resources to entrepreneurs and early stage companies. Starting and growing a business takes more than passion. It takes the support and resources that two of Indiana’s most inspiring and vibrant cities can offer. Let passion fuel your dreams. The partners of Velocities can provide funding, marketing support, business coaching, and professional resources to accelerate your success.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

December 15, 2020

For more information, please contact:

Gretchen Knapp, Head of Marketing and Communications, The Mill, gretchen@dimensionmill.org or 812-369-1399

Bloomington, Ind.—The Mill, Bloomington’s nonprofit center for entrepreneurship, announced that ShuffleMe was the winner of the inaugural Spark Business Plan Competition today, December 15. ShuffleMe is predictive mood software to help social media users monitor the impact of social media on their mood. The SaaS solution runs in the background, using facial recognition and emotional AI to gather data for users and their mental health providers. Founder Britain Taylor took home $2,500, which she says will be used to help make sure the software is multiplatform. Test pilots are already running now with several medical institutions.

The competition was open to entrepreneurs in the Bloomington-Columbus area, and sponsored by Duke Energy. Entries were scored by a panel of judges including investors and experts representing Elevate Ventures, IU Ventures, the Kelley School of Business, the Columbus Area Chamber of Commerce, Velocities, and Ivy Tech Community College.

Additional high scores were earned by: OurSafeQ, a virtual system to manage lines of waiting; Reezy, an app to help consumers easily save all digital and print receipts from any store; and WayZada, which creates custom 3-D works of art to memorialize outdoor achievements such as long distance runs.

The Mill’s mission is to spark Bloomington’s innovation economy by launching and accelerating startups, and its vision is to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship. For more information on the Spark competition, visit https://www.dimensionmill.org/business-plan-competition/

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