Onrise wins “3686 Pitch Competition” and $10,000 check
Four other competitors offered solutions ranging from a bilingual tax app to ways to help artists and venues not just survive but thrive.
Onrise, a Knoxville-based start-up co-founded by Kim Quigley, an MD, and Derrick Furlow Jr., a former Tennessee football player, captured first place and the $10,000 cash prize in Tuesday’s “InvestTN Pitch Competition.” The prize money came from Amazon and was awarded during the final event for the day at “3686” before a happy hour.
Explaining that “traditional mental healthcare doesn’t work,” Quigley launched the company as a telehealth solution with a business-to-business model/ The company said that it has served 17,000 athletes. Onrise empowers athletes through athlete-specific peer support, therapy, psychiatry, and crisis services.
Furlow serves as Chief Athletic Officer and said the company expects to have revenues of at least $5.25 million by 2026.
Other finalists were:
Fathom, founded by JoAdel Adeola, makes it easy to find, employ, and track talent in the world of work.
The Ma$ Refund app, founded by Simon Karmarkar, revolutionizes tax filing by making it as easy as uno, dos, tres!
Perseus Materials, co-founded by Dan Lee, invents new ways to build our largest load-bearing structures reliably, quickly, and at low cost.
TuneHatch, founded by Christal Hector, Nathan Youssef, and Reece Franklin, is an end-to-end show management platform for live music and entertainment. They make show management easy — empowering venues, promoters, and artists to do more shows in less time and sell more tickets.
Hector said the goal of TuneHatch is to allow venues and artists to “do more in less time . . . not just surviving but thriving.”
For Adeola, his experience after graduating from high school in Nigeria led to the launch of Fathom. He wanted to attend Middle Tennessee State University, but his credits were not accepted. That led to the founding of Fathom and its signature product called the “Workforce Wallet.”
It was a similar need – in this case, a bilingual accounting and tax filing system for non-English speakers – that led Karmarkar to launch the Ma$Refund app that is available for both Google and Apple devices.
Lee, who is part of the 2023 cohort of “Innovation Crossroads,” explained that his company builds big machines that build even bigger parts.”
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