Stories of Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship in the Southeast

Scruffy City Hall was packed on Sunday evening. Not a single chair was left empty, as the community came out in full support of the six founders who were granted the opportunity to pitch in the Knoxville Entrepreneur Center (KEC) ‘What’s the Big Idea?’ competition.

“This takes a lot of work from a lot of incredible people,” said Jim Biggs, the Executive Director of the KEC. “Many people came out to mentor this weekend, and these founders worked so hard.”

The six companies 0 CRB, Fibarcode, Partnerly, DataRook, Modern Day Stay At Home Mom, and TeachCraft, couldn’t be more different. The businesses range from job connection platforms to patented technologies, and virtually everything in-between.

Teach Craft, founded by Joel Smith, took home the first place award and $10,000 in cash. DataRook, founded by Gustavo Alvarez-Suchini took home the “Crowd Favorite” award, and a year worth of unlimited car washes, thanks to Harper Auto Square.

Meet the presenters

Brian Iezzi, the Founder of Fibarcode took the stage first. He is currently a fellow in the 2024 Cohort of Innovation Crossroads at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and a recent graduate of the Spark Cleantech Accelerator. Teknovation first interviewed Iezzi in November of last year, where he shared a bit about his novel concept.

“It’s a thread that can be read,” he said, sharing how his Fibarcode technology could replace clothing tags as we know it. “It’s a vin number for clothing, a fingerprint directly within the textile of the fiber.”

During his Sunday night pitch, Iezzi said his new thread would be able to help clothing manufacturers and clothing recyclers read the exact makeup of materials in any given clothing item. This comes at a critical time, as textile waste has grown by 80 percent in recent years, largely due to fast-fashion and lack of circular economy in the clothing industry. His invention would help track millions of items through their lifespan.

His target audience to start will be the 80 outdoor apparel brands that are already investing in sustainability, and selling $100 million items per year, per brand.

Up next, Kimberly O’Neal, the Founder of Modern Day Stay At Home Mom (SAHM) broke down her online platform that connects SAHMs with gainful employment.

“Businesses are struggling to find that quality fractional talent, meanwhile, they’re overlooking SAHMs because of a career gap in the resume,” she pointed out.

Currently, her platform has 200 moms subscribing, but she has a Facebook community of more than 4,000. She said the conversation rate is largely due to the shortfall of participating businesses up to this point.

“We need more businesses to engage with our community – and see just how valuable hiring a stay at home mom can be,” she said. SO far, her greatest traction has been with start-ups, contract work, and administrative part-time positions.

Read more about Modern Day SAHM in Teknovation.

Gustavo Alvarez-Suchini took the stage to share with the audience about DataRook, a company he founded to revolutionize how young people engage with data science by making it relevant, exciting, and directly applicable to their interests. footyLab, is the flagship program, which is a groundbreaking after-school initiative that combines youth soccer with hands-on data science education. In footyLab, students collect and analyze their own performance data, learning crucial STEM skills in the process.

He mentioned how there are no direct competitors in the space – “Our competitors are teaching STEM, but our platform makes students fall in love with it,” Alvarez-Suchini said.

The start-up dates back to 2022, and ran its first pilot program in 2023 with One Knoxville Collective. The success of this program led to partnerships with organizations like Girls Inc. in Oak Ridge, East Tennessee Freedom Schools, and the University of Tennessee (UT).

DataRook was voted the “Crowd Favorite” at that ‘2025 ‘What’s the Big Idea?’ Competition.

 

The founder of 0 CRB, Fela Akinse, shared about his ground-breaking, patented footwear technology that converts carbon dioxide into breathable oxygen just by walking. Each person could now convert 6.76 grams of CO2 to O2 annually with this technology.

“Footwear and carbon go hand in hand,” Akinse said. “You can walk with us on the road to clean air.”

Currently, his primary focus is on shoe-wear brands. He has already been in close communication with the likes of Adidas, where he is developing a proof of concept. His goal is to have the technology ready to begin commercializing in June of this year.  Looking even further out, Akinse wants to adapt the technology for buildings, aeronautics, and automotive industries.

Blake Hopkins followed up with a lively presentation about his Partnerly platform. As a micro-influencer, Hopkins experience firsthand how difficult it can be to get in front of brands, and vice versa – how hard it is for a brand to find the right influencers.

The influencer market is growing rapidly. Hopkins said today it is worth $250 billion, and there’s no single platform that helps streamline the process. Partnerly would be an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered matching website that connects small businesses and brands with the right micro-influencers.

Hopkins’ goal for this year is to onboard 200 companies, and engage a host of local influencers through the “Partnerly Conference,” which he hopes to host in Knoxville this year.

You can read more about Partnerly in Teknovation.

 

And, last but not least, Joel Smith pitched his company Teach Craft, which ended up taking first place in the ‘What’s the Big Idea?’ pitch competition. TeachCraft is a groundbreaking platform that helps teachers create impactful, standards-aligned Project-Based Learning (PBL) experiences.

Smith explained how a typical project-based lesson takes an educator about 50 hours to create, and a typical lesson plan takes about two hours. However, his platform can help teachers do this in minutes.

Smith trained an AI model to make lesson plans for his own classroom. One of his peers inquired about it, and quickly implemented it as well. Before long, about 25 teachers in Smith’s school are using TeachCraft every week to speed up the process of making lesson plans.

“Education budgets are made a years in advance, so if I want to get this into the hands of more educators then I need to commercialize it now,” he said, explaining how the $10,000 prize would be put to use.

Learn more about the What’s the Big Idea? competition through the Knoxville Entrepreneur Center.

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