JAX Hub hosts pitch day competition at UNF to bolster global innovation

JAX Hub hosted a pitch competition at the University of North Florida that will help bolster Northeast Florida’s global innovation future.   

The UNF Coggin College of Business is the founding education partner of JAX Hub, a partnership with the City of Jacksonville; Paysafe, a leading global payments platform; and L Marks, a global corporation innovation leader; to drive innovation and collaboration. The partnership was announced last November. 

At the heart of JAX Hub is the 10-week innovation project pairing entrepreneurs and innovators with UNF students and faculty, and corporate and community partners. This “innovation-lab-meets-Shark-Tank” model provides startups and students the chance to pilot new ideas, refine scalable business models and showcase final solutions to industry and academic leaders.    

For this first cohort, focused on fintech, the L Marks team reviewed more than 600 companies from 16 countries. Fourteen exceptional startups were selected and invited to Jacksonville to pitch projects in the following categories: 

• Advanced financial services: Technologies that transform digital wallets into comprehensive financial hubs (micro-loans, credit cards, fractional investing, micro-insurance)   
• Merchant loyalty engine: Multi-merchant rewards ecosystems within digital wallets   
• Family-friendly finance: Tools combining parental controls with child-friendly financial learning and independence   
• Wildcard: Unconventional ideas with indirect but meaningful impact on digital payments or fintech  

The winning startups from pitch day will return to Jacksonville for a 10-Week Innovation Sprint from March to May, where they will work with Paysafe to develop their solutions and create pathways to commercial deployment. Final presentations will be showcased at Demo Day in June. 

“As a founding partner of JAX Hub, the Coggin College of Business is at the forefront of a new model for industry-academic collaboration,” said Dr. Gary Giamartino, Coggin College of Business interim dean. “Our faculty are embedding real startup data into the classroom, giving graduate students the chance to apply advanced analytics to live challenges in the global fintech space. We are pleased to contribute our intellectual resources and experience in providing leadership talent to this innovative partnership.”  

A centerpiece of UNF’s role in JAX Hub is a set of applied industry projects embedded directly into graduate coursework. Three Coggin faculty members are integrating real-world JAX Hub data challenges into data analytics, data visualization and programming for data science courses. Through these projects, students are applying text mining, large language models, clustering, visualization and scenario analysis to categorize applicants, identify patterns across startup categories and surface insights on geography and maturity for JAX Hub. The work gives students hands-on experience with live data while generating actionable intelligence for the program’s partners. 

Startups will gain access to industry expertise, real-world testing opportunities, mentorship and Jacksonville’s growing innovation ecosystem, enabling them to develop practical solutions that meet the evolving needs of consumers, businesses and financial institutions.   

For more information, visit https://jaxhub.us/.