Twenty-three Mississippi entrepreneurs reached a significant milestone in May, graduating from the inaugural Mississippi cohort of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses (10KSB) program. Held at the Old Capitol Museum, the ceremony celebrated small businesses' growing energy and impact statewide. We're especially proud to celebrate two Innovate Mississippi alums who…
Innovate Mississippi is pleased to have supported the 2025 MSU Spring Startup Summit—a dynamic showcase of innovation, entrepreneurship, and collaboration. Held on April 24th and 25th, this year's summit welcomed over 75 startups nationwide and awarded nearly $100,000 in prizes to emerging businesses. We also thank the MSU communications team and Emma McRae…
Big thanks to Roslyn Anderson and the WLBT team for shining a spotlight on Mississippi’s rising entrepreneurs at The Bean Path's recent pitch competition. The competition offered two tracks "Innovation and Technology" and "Small and Diverse Business." The Tech & Innovation track focused on businesses that could be high-growth companies…
In 2020, Mississippi musician-turned-founder Seth Power launched Tribly to help musicians build direct relationships with their fans, bypassing the algorithms that dominate today's music marketing. While early iterations of the product leaned into blockchain and NFTs during the crypto boom, a market crash pushed the company to rethink its foundation.…
Mississippi State University at MCITy is calling on aspiring entrepreneurs and early-stage startups to step into the spotlight at Dawg Tank, a regional pitch competition and official qualifier for the CoBuilders statewide accelerator program. The event will take place on Thursday, June 26 at 12 p.m., on the second floor of MCITy…
One of the best parts of my role as Marketing Manager at Innovate Mississippi is spotlighting founders who are solving real problems—often creatively—right here in our state. Most days, I tell the stories of startups with big visions and plans to scale. But sometimes, a founder walks in with an…
In 2021, CampusKnot was at a crossroads. The startup, founded in 2015 in Starkville, Mississippi, had already been in the market for several years, experimenting with features and business models in the higher education space. But something wasn't quite clicking, says CEO Rahul Gopal. The product had features professors liked…
iQSports began because Andrew Doyle, sitting in a press box serving as an assistant high school coach, decided it'd be faster to type the plays he was tracking than to jot them down. He started in Word, but that only helped so much. When he switched to Excel and started…
If you've ever booked a real estate photographer, you know the pain points: scheduling delays, inconsistent results, and long turnaround times for media delivery. Home Tours Pro, a Mississippi-based startup founded by Jeff Smith and Mark Davis, is tackling all that head-on with an ambitious vision to automate and de-skill…
The Oxford-Lafayette County Economic Development Foundation in partnership with the University of Mississippi and the Mississippi Small Business Development Center Network, announced the return of Innovate Mississippi’s CoBuilders Program to Oxford in Summer 2025. CoBuilders, a Partnership-Driven Accelerator, first launched by Innovate Mississippi in 2022, is a 12-week intensive and…