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June 7, 2019

‘Pitch Day’ not just a windup, but a beginning

PHOTOS | New Haven Biz Dabre-Rufus hopes her Zen Zilla Yoga & Wellness can help to ‘promote success of urban youth.’
By Michael C. Bingham

Some 150 friends, family, well-wishers and potential investors packed the State House performance venue on State Street Wednesday evening for the fourth Collab Pitch Day.

The event is the culmination of Collab New Haven’s core mission as a community-centered accelerator: to provide education, mentorship, and funding to Connecticut entrepreneurs who aim to build enterprises that impact their communities.

Pitch Day is the culmination of a 10-week entrepreneurship incubator and accelerator, which awards $1,000 in grant money and mentors to community-based startups. The Wednesday evening “Pitch Night” event, explained Collab co-founder and co-director Caroline Smith, is more of a graduation celebration and coming-out party for the program participants than it is an actual make-or-break pitch to potential funders. “It’s not like Shark Tank,” Smith said.

The vision of Collab co-founders and -directors Lee (left) and Smith is ‘a city of entrepreneurs.’

For this spring’s program, Collab fielded 251 applications from 531 entrepreneurs. Because diversity and inclusion are at the core of Collab’s mission as a community-driven accelerator, it was important for the group to point out that nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of the applicant ventures were headed by females, 72 percent by people of color, and half (49 percent) were led by females of color.

“This is truly a city of entrepreneurs,” said Smith. She and Collab co-founder and -director Margaret Lee are themselves examples, as their own enterprise is a beacon for others who hope to do good and do well.

Six ventures made the cut for participation in the 2019 Collab Spring Accelerator.

• Nestl — Founded by architect, designer and mother-of-two Della Leapman, Nestl uses adaptive modifications and prefabrication to create affordable, turnkey lactation spaces for workplaces. For working mothers of young children, “Finding a place to pump [breast milk] is one of the biggest barriers,” Leapman said. Her business model is to refit existing workplace flex spaces — an IT room, say, or even a closet — into a safe, clean and fully functional lactation space including running water and milk storage. The Nestl product line, offered in Basic, Better and Best grades, starts with a Basic unit price of $3,750. Leapman is seeking partners and funders to prototype the product, which she says will help companies with younger female workers enhance employee satisfaction and reduce absenteeism.

Montgomery’s Threads by Tea are designed for customers ‘who want to make some noise in the world.’

• Threads by Tea — Handcrafted, bespoke wearable art from designer Terone (Tea) Montgomery is intended to inspire and motivate those who wear it “to take risks in fashion and express themselves.” Montgomery’s story is “a journey of self-discovery,” he told the assembled crowd, “I needed to find what my superpower is.” He discovered it when he taught himself to sew. Now, through designing custom fashions his mission is “to inspire and empower dreamers who want to express themselves through what they wear — customers who want to make some noise in the world,” he said. Montgomery was seeking investment capital to open an online retail site later this year, hire an employee, launch new collections and “eventually get into manufacturing,” he said.

• DreamKit — Co-founded by Marina Marmolejo and Yusuf Ransome, DreamKit is a web-based app for homeless young people to catalogue their “lived experiences” as well as to access support services and supportive communities. Yale grad student (MPH ‘19) Marmolejo grew up in Los Angeles, which now confronts a “huge homeless population.” When she came East she found that condition mirrored in her new home. There are more than 5,000 homeless youth in Connecticut and 800 in greater New Haven, she told the crowd. And while there are services to help that population with shelter, food and other services, “They are mostly siloed,” she said, and difficult to both find and access. Her DreamKit is a smartphone app that helps its users navigate the universe of available services and support and help to transform their lives. Marmolejo said her enterprise had already attracted “significant startup funding,” and now she was hoping to attract a new round of financing to scale DreamKit nationally.

• Emergent Access Services — A mobile app that provides emergency-room patients with service timeframes, wait statuses, etc. before their hospital visits. Founded by Aneetrai Rowland, EAS likewise is targeted to a marginalized population — people who use hospital emergency rooms as a source of primary care. Rowland’s app helps users navigate the ER experience, including treatment and wait statuses, as well as access to transportation options such as Uber or Lyft, before they even go to the hospital. Rowland, who said average wait times at hospitals can be long, is seeking partners and investors to help develop the EAS app to the prototype phase and eventually sell it to hospitals and other emergency care providers.

• Stoll Enterprises — Founded by Melissa Stoll, women’s track and field coach at Southern Connecticut State University, an event-management company specializing in sports events as well as team-building and leadership development. Her enterprise’s market niche to date has been to organize, plan and run indoor winter track meets for Connecticut high schools. The biggest hurdle faced by high-school winter track coaches, Stoll said, was that there are just five functional indoor track facilities in Connecticut (including two in New Haven). Demand for the spaces exceeds supply, and indoor meets at facilities like Hillhouse High School are typically large, long in duration and challenging to run. Stoll’s enterprise specializes in turnkey management of such events, from facility rental and setup to managing admissions and concessions on event days. She already counts some 94 high-school coaches as existing and potential clients, and hopes to attract funding to scale the enterprise.

• Zen Zilla Yoga & Wellness — Led by creator/prime mover Jumai-Shefau Dabre-Rufus, it offers individuals and groups guided meditation, yoga and mindfulness sessions to address disparities in access to resources for health and wellness in the African-American community. A teacher by training who has observed urban schools becoming increasingly violent (she herself was assaulted by a student, she said) Dabre-Rufus hopes to introduce a curriculum of guided yoga and mindfulness set to black music, she said, into public schools, other educational facilities and summer camps. Her objective, she said, was “to address youth violence and promote success of urban youth.” Applications for the Collab Fall Accelerator 2019 will open in later summer. Learn more at collabnewhaven.org. 

Contact Michael C. Bingham at mbingham@newhavenbiz.com

 

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