Announcing the 5 Micro Grant Winners

This newsletter is dedicated to last night’s Asheville Impact Micro Grant ceremony. Below check out our five winners, the takeaways from this first round of applicants, and the list of ten finalists. You can also watch last night’s awards on the multi-cam live stream thanks to local videographer Matt Dunn of AVlive.co here at this link. P.S. Don’t forget about tonight’s Pitch Party! Details on that, along with some other startup happenings, are further down.

Meet the Asheville Impact Micro Grant Winners! From left to right: Relaspen (Dr. Jason Cook), No Sweat Undies (Carol Ann Bauer), 3 Mountains (Sara Stender), Asheville Wedding Collective (Alexandra Herman), Burban (Ailis Grosh).

A familiar distribution to what we see in industry and female representation. 9% is uncharacteristically low for underrepresented minority founders, and leads us, once again, to the need to do more work to engage our entire community in entrepreneurship. We found that many applications didn’t really need $5,000. They really needed a business partner. Only 8 applications had cofounders. Let’s dive into that some more.

The Venture 15 is our annual event rating and ranking the fastest growing startups in the area. These top 15 companies contribute more than $52 Million dollars in local revenue. Importantly, 12 of the 15 are cofounded startups. On the other end of the spectrum, our micro grant applicants only had 8 of 99 cofounded.

As a reminder, these are our 10 finalists.

And here are our 5 winners. From here, they all go into pitch training, and they’ll pitch a cohort of local support providers on May 16. We’ll be tracking, and reporting back, their entrepreneurial journey’s. Stay tuned.

Other Happenings

• Pitch Party tonight at Anthroware – 6pm – Sponsored by Hillman Beer! Thanks, Greg and family!

• Next week, May 9, 8am at Hatchworks, Spark Session with Big Path Capital’s Michael Welchel on “Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained. How to think and act like an investor.”

• Epic news from Auxbus (formerly known as Podcraft): this elevator company has raised its seed round, expanded its team, and launched a prerelease version. The round was led by High Country Impact Fund with additional investment from Entrepreneurs on Fire podcaster John Lee Dumas, who will also serve as Chief Ambassador.

• Our favorite plant-based meatmakers No Evil Foods is the latest feature in Capital At Play’s entrepreneur series. Check it out here.

• Focal Point Coworking will host a roster of events from May 6-10 that include presentations from us, Western Women’s Business Center, Mountain BizWorks and more, as well as networking opportunities and a cybersecurity workshop from Asheville Digital Lifestyle.
More details on Focal Point’s events here.