UNF Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation holds Demo Day to unveil first cohort’s six start-up companies

The University of North Florida’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation (CEI) recently hosted their inaugural Demo Day where six of the Center’s promising start-up entrepreneurs revealed their developed business concepts to members of the Advisory Council and University community.

UNF’s CEI facilitates the development of early-stage companies by offering a variety of programs to support and nurture selected startup businesses, including business plan development, co-working space, help from student interns, professional support and networking opportunities.

The six featured companies from UNF’s CEI first cohort of founders include:

• Anact: Brianna Kilcullen’s company Anact is short for "an act". Anact believes in taking simple acts to use Earth's natural resources to make products that solve everyday problems. Anact's hemp towels are one-of-a-kind, do not exist anywhere else on the market and are sold direct to customers and wholesale to retailers, hotels, spas and more.
• Adeleigh’s Treasure: Alexis Lior’s company is a plant-powered, toxin-free hair and skincare company that formulates products for the advancement of hair and skin health. Not only do the products work effectively, they are all-natural and dedicated to positive results.
• Baby Boldly: Megan Mangiaracino and Natalie McBride’s company believes that better pregnancy, birth and postpartum experiences are the foundation for a better world. Their signature product, a birth bag, promotes a confident, prepared and comfortable birth experience for expecting mommas while giving them the most precious gift of all - time.
• Beem: Paul Brown’s company is a full featured mobile, touchless payment platform that allows anyone to pay any bill to any company from the palm of their hand. Beem is a company’s accounts receivable department that does billing, invoicing, mobile payments, payment reconciliation and accounting.   
• Tauruseer: Jeremy Vaughn’s company delivers continuous Risk Performance Management (RPM), giving CISOs and CTOs of cloud-native software organizations real-time insight into their risk effectiveness. Tauruseer's lightweight platform specializes in helping organizations understand the true risk performance of your IT investments into systems, capabilities, and skills by automatically assuring controls and verifying risk remediation in code pipelines.
• Urban SDK: Drew Messer and Justin Dennis’s company is a smart mobility platform connecting city and transportation planners to the reliable data sources they need to accelerate more confident decisions. Cities, public service agencies and urban planners use the platform to integrate complex, connected and smart mobility technologies to improve safety, gross domestic product, workforce accessibility, and environmental impacts.

In addition, CEI announced the “Mark Dawkins Spirit of Entrepreneurship” award in honor of Dr. Mark Dawkins, professor and former dean of the UNF Coggin College of Business. This award and a $1,000 cash prize were given to the entrepreneur that most embodies the spirit and characteristics necessary for success. The entrepreneur selected was Drew Messer with Urban SDK and represents the “best of the best” in terms of overcoming obstacles, believing in their dreams, taking risks and persisting in the face of long odds. 

More information on CEI and its next cohort of healthcare entrepreneurs can be found at www.unf.edu/coggin/CEI/.