Minnesota Innovates welcomes the Founders of five companies as they share insights and their experiences funding the growth of nationally and internationally successful companies.
Mentor Morning: Financing Scaling from Traction to IPO!
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Dave Neville is the President of Infinity Robotics, which specializes in machine vision/AI for automation and robotics. As a Robot Integrator Infinity possess in house machine shop and bare metal embedded HW/SW product design. Dave is a Kawasaki Preferred Partner, OMRON Certified Integrator, Soft Robotics Distributer, OnRobot distributer who helps customers navigate the Cobot and Industrial Robot space.
Charlie Youakim is a serial tech entrepreneur who has founded two payments companies.
His most recent is Sezzle, a publically listed company he co-founded. Sezzle has the goal of financially empowering the next generation. Sezzle offers consumers an interest-free installment payment option in over 16,000 online stores and has over 1.4 million active users.
Prior to Sezzle, Charlie founded Passport, where he had a focus on mobile payment solutions for parking and transit systems. Passport is the software behind many of the largest municipal parking and transit installations in North America, including ParkChicago, and ParkBoston.
Tyrre Burks is currently the Founder and CEO of Player’s Health, a Minneapolis-based risk management and insurance platform for youth athletes. Prior to starting Player’s Health, Tyrre spent time as a professional football player in the Canadian Football League (CFL).
Tyrre began his career as a coach on the amateur level and has leveraged his sports experience to inform strategic efforts for the Player’s Health platform.
A connector across sectors, bringing strategic and tactical analysis, vision, trend identification, and contacts to advising individuals, businesses, organizations and communities. A business owner, MN Economic Growth Champion, Start-up Competition Judge and Mentor (TechnovationMN, E-Fest, Gener8tor, Midwest Cleantech Open, MN Cup).
Liz Giorgi is a media entrepreneur and general badass. She's the co-founder and CEO of soona, a fast casual content company that's makes high-quality content accessible for all. She also founded Mighteor, , one of the world's first internet video production companies.