JumpStart names 10 startups to fifth software accelerator cohort
The equity-free Trailblazer program provides non-dilutive capital and hands-on mentorship to pre-seed and seed-stage founders. Beyond tapping a network of 200 service providers, the group will present their traction to Ohio's investment community at a showcase on August 27.
JumpStart has selected 10 Ohio companies for the fifth cohort of its Trailblazer Software Accelerator, a roster of founders building tools to take on costly, time-consuming problems across industries from construction and hospitality to behavioral health and wholesale distribution.
This cohort drew the most competitive applicant pool the program has seen, according to Abel Castillo, JumpStart Venture Program Manager. "This cohort drew the most competitive applicant pool we have seen, a fantastic sign of the strength of Ohio's startup ecosystem," Castillo said.
The Trailblazer Software Accelerator is a three-month program for pre-seed and seed-stage Ohio founders preparing to grow. Participants work with JumpStart's services team and experienced founders to sharpen their products, validate their markets and get ready to scale. They also tap the organization's Preferred Partner Program, a vetted network of more than 200 providers spanning legal, engineering, marketing and finance. The program carries no cost and takes no equity.
Kaleigh Gallagher, JumpStart Vice President of Tech Services and Network Management, said the sophistication of what founders bring has grown alongside the program itself. "We are now five cohorts in, and what has changed most is the sophistication and diversity of what founders are bringing to us," Gallagher stated. "It has become a very competitive process, and it is hard to pick just ten."
Early cohorts leaned more heavily toward classic software as a service, she noted, while this group spans everything from AI-driven insurance risk modeling to a smart-room platform for hotels to an app that helps people follow along with a live church sermon. Gallagher added that the Preferred Partner Network has grown to more than 200 vetted service providers since the first cohort, and pointed to alumni who have gone on to raise, scale and, in some cases, exit as evidence the ecosystem is compounding.
Meet the 10 startups
CentSight Inc., led by Gerald Hetrick, offers an artificial intelligence (AI) virtual chief financial officer (CFO) platform aimed at businesses in the $1 million to $50 million revenue range that operate without a dedicated finance hire. The platform pulls together bank, invoicing and payroll data to produce real-time cash flow forecasting, runway analysis and plain-language financial summaries.
Construction Risk AI, founded by Jeremiah Woods, draws data from a project's construction technology stack and applies more than 100 proprietary key performance indicators (KPIs) to forecast operational outcomes and insurance risk, giving owners, contractors and carriers a clearer view of risk before it turns expensive.
Dwarpaal Inc., led by Sudhanshu Patki, targets economy and mid-market hotels weighed down by energy costs, dated access systems and aging infrastructure. Its smart-room platform combines edge-AI energy management, access control and mobile and wallet keys with rebate-backed retrofits designed to pay for themselves over time.
Greenlight Grocery, founded by Matt Vann, takes on the pricing gap that leaves independent restaurants paying more for food than national chains, pooling operators' demand on its food purchasing platform and routing it to aligned distributors to unlock pricing closer to what large chains command.
Kuddo Inc., led by Wenyi Zhu, addresses a persistent challenge in behavioral health: confirming that evidence-based therapies are delivered as designed. Its AI fidelity measurement platform ingests clinical protocols and analyzes therapy sessions, giving supervisors quality oversight across an entire provider network at a scale manual review cannot reach.
LTCareNav LLC, founded by Lindsay Friedman and Shannon Lyons, helps families work through how to care for an aging parent or loved one. The decision-intelligence platform offers planning tools and connects families to a curated network of senior living, home care and benefits providers matched to their needs.
Motiv, led by Nida Aslam and Jaden Walton, brings order to high school athletic departments juggling spreadsheets, group texts and paper forms while managing growing student-data privacy requirements, pulling coaches, parents, students and administrators into one compliance-first system.
Ordermatic, founded by Dan Mizener and David Boone Jr., focuses on wholesale distribution, where many orders still arrive by email, fax or handwritten purchase order and get keyed in by hand. Its AI platform reads and validates those orders in seconds.
Velocity AI Partners, led by George Granchi, works with fitness and wellness franchises where response time often decides whether a lead converts. The platform answers new leads in 11 to 14 seconds, revives dormant prospects and surfaces retention analytics to help operators grow membership and curb churn.
Velora, founded by Jonathan Hooper and Colin Hooper, is an AI-powered Bible app for churchgoers who want to engage more deeply during a service. Using a device's microphone, it follows sermons in real time, turns to referenced scripture, transcribes and summarizes the message and surfaces related passages for later study.
Gallagher described a through-line across the cohort of AI being applied to industries software has largely passed over. Ordermatic is using it to read and validate purchase orders that once required manual entry, she pointed out, while Kuddo is applying it to measure whether behavioral health therapy is delivered as designed, at a scale and speed no human reviewer could match. Velocity AI Partners, she added, is using it to respond to sales leads in under 15 seconds. Gallagher also noted a strong thread of founders building for industries such as construction, wholesale distribution and hospitality that generate enormous amounts of data but have historically lacked good tools to act on it.
The cohort wraps up with the Trailblazer Software Accelerator Cohort 5 Showcase on Aug. 27, where the founders will present their work to Ohio's startup community. Castillo said the community should expect to see 10 high-impact companies with real traction, real revenue and investor networks that already believe in their vision. "After three months of hands-on mentorship, these founders will take the stage as venture-ready operators primed for scale," he said, encouraging investors or those with investors in their network to reach out about one-on-one meetings with Trailblazer portfolio founders that day.
