Featured Interview

John Boucard is a serial entrepreneur, inventor, engineer, hacker, and maker. His current company, Tesseract Ventures, is developing a system that gives businesses the ability to connect ultra-high speed processing backends to intuitively reveal, organize, and display vast amounts of information through proprietary extended reality interfaces, robots, and IoT-connected devices. But he stresses that, so…

CatalystXL is a Detroit-based company whose focus is helping to solve the problem of information overload among employees, clients, partners, and suppliers. Its platform, Cardware, integrates with database systems and offers a way to communicate and share content more easily. Flyover Future spoke with Mark Russell, co-founder of CatalystXL, about the company and how its…

Gene therapy is a relatively new field that involves altering the genes inside the body’s cells in an effort to treat or stop genetic diseases. There’s a lot of excitement about the potential of these therapies and a lot of investment across the U.S. and globally to bring these kinds of transformative medicines to the…

What are innovation districts and are they the model for mid-sized cities who want to become globally competitive? Is your city building one?  If not, should they? Flyover Future hosts regular virtual events with leaders from across Flyover Country to discuss the innovation trends, challenges, and opportunities in the region. Last week, we tackled these…

The field of agriculture has been shaped by technological advances since the beginning of time, whether you’re talking about irrigation methods or the productivity-increasing machinery that came out of the industrial revolution like tractors and threshing machines. Today, applications of agritech are far-ranging and encompass several different types of agricultural and technological innovations from robots…

OhioX is a member-based nonprofit organization with representation from Fortune 500 companies, universities, research organizations, startups, and tech-focused businesses. Launched in December 2019, OhioX is working to build Ohio into a tech hub. We spoke to Chris Berry, OhioX’s CEO, and Scott Allen, the Dr. James S. Reid Chair in Management at John Carroll University,…

Nashville-based Possip is a primary and secondary education platform founded by Shani Dowell. Possip uses routine, multilingual SMS surveys (i.e., pulse checks) to empower feedback between students’ families, teachers, and school administrators. Dowell says the idea for the company came out of a dinner table discussion with her husband. We spoke to Dowell about the…

The Oakland neighborhood in Pittsburgh, PA, has been called the best example of a naturally occurring innovation district. While many cities might have one research institution that produces transformative innovation, this one has two, within one square mile of each other—Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. It is in the middle of this…

Growing an innovation ecosystem is not something a city leaves to chance. Some of the fastest-growing cities in Flyover Country have taken on this challenge in creative ways. In our virtual event “Attracting Talent & Capital to Flyover Country,” moderated by Flyover Future CEO Tom Cottingham, we spoke to four representatives from cities doing great…

Christopher Nilsen, founder of Pluto Aerospace Aerospace technology development is often slow, expensive, and inaccessible. But a startup in West LaFayette, IN, is trying to buck that trend. Two-year-old Pluto Aerospace is developing launch vehicle platforms to allow researchers rapid economical and reliable access to sub-orbital flight environments. Charon, its first reusable sub-orbital rocket, is…

Universities have been the breeding ground for many of the world’s most significant innovations. From the Internet to GPS, many amazing innovations were the products of professors and students working at universities. Some of these innovations have changed the world, saved lives, and have had a significant impact on life. Hotspots for university technological research…

After recently closing on $16.6 million in Series A funding, Louisville-based Virtual Peaker is poised to continue on a rapid growth curve that saw both its team and revenue double from 2020 to 2021. Utilities across the globe now use the Louisville-based company’s SaaS solution for managing Distributed Energy Resources (DERs), smaller-scale power generation stations…

Creative things can happen between rabid football fans when one is a tech entrepreneur and the other is an engineer. XReps is a startup that hopes to transform the way that quarterbacks are trained. We spoke to XReps CEO and co-founder Brandon Fuhr about the company and how prototyping changed its trajectory. Fuhr is recognized…

2021 was a record year for venture capital, according to a new report called Beyond Silicon Valley compiled by Revolution in partnership with Pitchbook. The report explores where venture dollars are going and finds that investor interest is increasingly tipping toward “rising cities.” The data also shows that the proportion of seed- and early-stage VC…

Partly owing to the “Great Resignation” and partly due to the fast pace at which technology advances, the demand for skilled tech workers is higher than ever. Companies are finding it harder to find the talent needed to keep up with digital transformation. A survey of 750 CIOs and other IT leaders by software company…

Ann Arbor-based SpellBound offers a platform called ARISE, which is an augmented reality scavenger hunt. What’s unique about the product is how it’s used to help sick children. In 2018, SpellBound received $652,000 in seed funding from Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, followed in 2020 with a $1.8 million grant from the National…

  This is the kind of innovation that happens when a city is a nexus of high tech and health care. Pittsburgh’s Highmark Health and Allegheny Health Network will be pioneering the use of an audio AI, created by Bosch Research, to help detect childhood asthma. The device was originally used on the International Space…

2021 was an “insane” year for CoPilot and its iOS-based personal training app, says CEO and co-founder Matt Spettel. Fueled by customers looking for ways to stay fit during the pandemic, revenue exploded to 18x the previous year. The Pittsburgh-based startup grew to about 50 employees, many of whom are full-time trainers, and it secured…

Columbus, OH-based Heartland Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in high-growth technology startups that they then connect to their LP network of large corporations as customers in the heartland. We spoke with Max Brickman, Managing Director of Heartland Ventures, about what they’re up to. How did the idea for Heartland Ventures happen?…

Keeping track of passwords can be frustrating and time-consuming. Poor password management can also be expensive for an enterprise. According to Forrester, organizations allocate over $1 million annually for password-related support costs. A startup in Cleveland may have the answer to the frustration and cost due to password management—right at your fingertips. We spoke to…