2024 Business Accelerator Cohort
Introducing the 2024 Praxis Business Fellows and ventures.
We’re thrilled to welcome the 2024 Business Accelerator Fellows and introduce you to their ventures, representing innovation in industries including agriculture, medicine, and technology, across the US, as well as in Kenya, Nigeria, and Korea. Ben Bohannon, Praxis Partner for the Business Portfolio, says, “These founders already have the imagination for how they want to work on the major issue of their time, and they’re committed to investing their time and energy into building a scalable venture.” We invite you to keep reading to learn about these Fellows and their ventures.
Our flagship 9-month Business Accelerator helps entrepreneurs become deeply formed as leaders who guide their ventures to become more effective and more redemptive in their impact as they address Opportunities for Redemptive Innovation (ORIs). This mentorship-driven, non-residential Accelerator equips founders of top ventures as they innovate in their industries.
During the Accelerator, Fellows connect with Mentors and team members through in-person events and virtual coaching sessions. Many thanks to the Praxis Capital Partners, a community of investors and philanthropists creating redemptive impact, who are providing $100K in opt-in investment to these ventures to advance their work.
Adaptic Health
- Fellow: Luke Stewart, CEO
- ORIs: Redemptive Application of Frontier Technologies, Meaningful Interventions into Healthcare’s Quagmire
Adaptic Health serves people in a healthcare crisis by connecting them to clinical studies that may be their best option for care through a broad network of churches and community organizations. Adaptic Health’s unique engagement model helps address the social factors of health, leading to better outcomes and aligned incentives with researchers and
healthcare organizations.
Aro
- Fellows: Heath Wilson, Co-Founder, and Joey Odom, Co-Founder
- ORI: Managing Technology in Everyday Life
Aro exists to create an entire generation of intentional families. By combining the power of a connected device with a habit-forming app, Aro’s platform enables parents and kids alike to pursue four pillars of digital wellness. Aro helps change the relationship we have with our phones which, in turn, changes the relationship with everyone around us.
Delegate CX
Delegate CX partners with US businesses to scale their teams more cost-effectively and support ambitious growth. They make it easy by recruiting highly-skilled talent from the Philippines, walking through proven best practices in hiring, training, and onboarding, and tapping into the expertise of their US team to guide their partners along the way. The result is dedicated, engaged, long-term team members who help their partners get back time to focus on growing their business.
GoBEBA
- Fellows: Lesley Mbogo, Co-Founder & CEO, and Peter Ndiangui, Co-CEO
- ORI: Infrastructure Building in Developing Economies
GoBEBA is digitizing the distribution of essential utilities such as water and cooking fuel to households and workplaces in Africa. They provide a superior direct-to-customer distribution model for bulky essential utilities using digitized and controlled micro-distribution networks, reducing losses for manufacturers/brands and providing consumers and businesses with hassle-free access to genuine and safe utilities. Their mission is to help utility brands distribute household and workplace essentials.
HerVest
- Fellows: Solape Akinpelu, Co-Founder & CEO, and Yomi Ogunleye, Co-Founder & CTO
- ORI: Entrepreneurship & Capital for Upward Mobility
HerVest is an inclusive fintech company providing affordable loans for smallholder women farmers and women-led micro SMEs in Africa. With over 40,000 members, HerVest is creating opportunities for underserved and financially excluded women, enabling them to 10X their earnings through business training, affordable loans, and access to market sales.
Infinite Giving
Infinite Giving bridges the gap in banking services that nonprofits face, including low FDIC coverage, noncompetitive rates, high minimums, painful account openings, and a lack of nonprofit expertise. Their award-winning technology platform is an easy-to-use way for nonprofits to raise, manage, and conservatively invest their money.
Kangsters
- Fellows: Tyrion Kim, Founder & CEO, and John Cho, Co-Founder & COO
- ORIs: Meaningful Interventions into Healthcare’s Quagmire, Valuing Special Needs as a Gift to Society
Kangsters is an able-tech company for individuals with disabilities based on the family stories of its two founders. The team believes that exercise is essential for a healthy lifestyle, especially for someone who sits all day. For wheelchair users, exercise and cardio-fitness can be a cumbersome and inconvenient process that is often hard to access. Wheely-X makes it easy for users to enjoy their favorite fitness activities and cardio workouts conveniently in their own wheelchair.
Patient Sortal
Patient Sortal is a healthcare organization that provides continuity of care during community reintegration. By contracting with Medicaid and Medicare payers to provide primary care, internal medicine, and care management to the formerly incarcerated, Patient Sortal is building the VA of the criminal justice system to ensure returning citizens receive the
world-class healthcare they deserve.
Procure Impact
- Fellows: Lauren McCann, Co-Founder & CEO, and Jen Collins, President
- ORIs: Building Virtue-Driven Consumer Brands, Developing New Labor Models & “Good Jobs”
Procure Impact is a B2B marketplace that helps companies achieve their social impact goals through everyday purchases and create job opportunities and economic mobility for vulnerable populations. Each vendor on their platform employs individuals with barriers to work in the USA: individuals with disabilities, refugees, veterans, and individuals who have experienced poverty, mental health challenges, homelessness, trauma, incarceration, and addiction.
Pureflow
- Fellows: Collin Wenrich, CEO & Managing Partner, and Jared Fulks, Managing Partner, US Growth & Development
- ORI: Entrepreneurship & Capital for Upward Mobility
Pureflow creates opportunities to thrive by engaging people in kingdom initiatives that transform communities through financing income-generating assets for those who do not have access to affordable financing. In East Africa, the primary mode of transportation is motorcycle taxi (boda boda), and this creates the problem that Pureflow solves: helping these taxi drivers move toward ownership of their own motorcycle.
RhizeBio
- Fellows: Josh Toal, Co-Founder, and Douglas Toal, Co-Founder & President
- ORI: Building a Sustainable Food System
RhizeBio is an agriculture technology company whose innovation involves digitizing, decoding, and deciphering biological data in the soil using advanced DNA sequencing technology paired with predictive machine learning. RhizeBio is developing groundbreaking techniques to identify bio-centric patterns for optimizing soil health, empowering farmers to restore biodiversity within depleted soils, and improving crop health, performance, and environmental sustainability.
VeroSkills
The UN Refugee Agency reports over 35.3 million global refugees, and despite being educated and motivated, many refugees resort to unsustainable manual labor. With 97 million AI/automation/tech roles emerging, there’s potential for refugees to secure dignified, upwardly mobile careers. VeroSkills trains refugees through an AI-assisted platform with 3,000+ industry-leading tutors. Successful trainees are placed in apprenticeships and jobs, building new trajectories for themselves and their families.
