Why a Techstars founder is extending his stay in Knoxville
Witching Hour's founder, Lance Adler was accepted into the 2024 Spark Cleantech Accelerator cohort.
Lance Adler came to Knoxville in April for the third cohort of the Techstars Industries of the Future Accelerator. Most of the founders who came through the highly- esteemed accelerator left the Scruffy City after Demo Day in June, but not Adler. He decided to stick around to utilize all the resources, partnerships, and assets East Tennessee has to offer.
“Knoxville Utilities Board (KUB) has been so helpful to us, allowing us to throw our materials on their powerlines at their testing site off Middlebrook Pike,” Adler said. “It’s a great opportunity to get real-time feedback and see what works.”
Adler’s start-up, Witching Hour was founded after his experience working for a power company in California. teknovation.biz featured his entrepreneurial journey in May (read the article here).
“These companies start a lot of fires. Most people think it’s lightning, but many of the most destructive fires come from the power lines,” he said.
Witching Hour is developing robots that would crawl powerlines and add a special coating to avoid sparking. Adler is developing both the coating material and robots. Furthermore, he would deploy drones to place the robots on the powerlines.
Adler said in Tennessee, our power companies are incredibly cautious and aware. Few fires are started in the Smokies due to utility company error. However, in California, it’s a completely different story.
“The air and land are very dry, which make for perfect fire conditions” he said, sharing that he plans to eventually move back to California once his product is ready for market.
In the meantime, Adler is focused on launching his first major round of fundraising. He is looking to secure $1 million in investment to further the research, development, and deployment of his technology in pilot projects.
To do that, he is participating in the 2024 Spark Cleantech Accelerator at the University of Tennessee Research Park at Cherokee Farms.
“Techstars was more of a financial investment with little structure, and Spark so far has been a business accelerator with a lot of structure,” he said.
Connect with Lance Adler here.
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