What Atlanta’s Corporate Giants Want From Engage’s 8 New Portfolio Startups
ATLANTA, November 13 (Hypepotamus) - Want to know what corporations care about right now?
Look at the startups they want to work with through the Engage program.
Engage, an investor and accelerator that connects startups with major corporations in the Southeast, just wrapped up its 17th cohort. The program brought eight companies to Atlanta to learn from corporate leaders and explore opportunities to work with industry giants like Chick-fil-A, Coca-Cola, Cox Enterprises, Delta Air Lines, The Home Depot, Inspire Brands, Wellstar, and UPS.
Those corporations span everything from air travel to healthcare. But they share an interest in finding technology that can improve how they operate, from warehouse floors to employees’ daily workflows.
Engage’s corporate-startup model has numbers to back it up.
To date, Engage has built up a portfolio of 130 companies that have landed more than 220 corporate contracts. Those startups have gone on to create 4,000 jobs and recorded 20 exits, according to Engage.
Of the portfolio companies that have not yet reached and exit or acquisition, more than 95% of Engage-backed startups are still in operation, according to Hypepotamus’ analysis. That is an impressive number for any startup program, where shut downs are prevalent if not normal.
Atlanta-based startups make up 30% of Engage’s portfolio, though the program draws companies from across the country and around the world. Its latest cohort, which concluded this week, reflects that reach. Just two of the eight companies are headquartered in the Southeast.
With businesses spanning cybersecurity to wastewater, the cohort offers a window into corporate priorities and the problems large companies are turning to startups to help solve.
Meet the founders behind Engage’s 17th cohort and the technologies they are bringing to the corporate table.
Sumorwuo Zaza, CEO of nicklpass
Zaza, a Harvard University football player and previous Director of International at The Huffington Post, is building nicklpass to help organizations save money on their subscriptions and AI tools (which is costing organizations tens of billions of dollars each year).
Yosh Rozen, CEO of PartRunner
The international representative in this cohort, Rozen is building an AI trucking marketplace for Mexico, which today mostly relies on a fragmented system.
Ryan Schonfeld, CEO of HiveWatch
Schonfeld, a police officer-turned-entrepreneur, is building a physical security platform that unifies cameras, access control, and other security system alarms into a single platform that triages, prioritizes, and resolves incidents according to a company’s protocols.
Maanav Iyengar, CEO of Retina Robotics
Iyengar is building WAM, a compact, plug-and-play robotic device that mounts to existing forklifts. The goal is to make it easier to find things inside a busy warehouse.
Brayden Levangie, CEO of Causality
Despite being everywhere these days, AI agents are hard to build. Causality is making it easier…without increasing the cost of deploying agents.
Jeremy Banon, CEO of The Cyber Health Company
In one of the more memorable pitches at the Engage Cohort #17 reception, Banon showed how he is building a toolkit to support personal cybersecurity and online privacy with agentic, 24/7 monitoring.
Ben, a Stanford graduate, is building a media and marketing technology platform designed to scales creator programs infinitely. It does that by watching millions of videos a day to figure out what is going on and tracks brand performance across creators.
Jahanzeb Khan, CEO of 4Earth
Hypepotamus readers will know all about what Khan is building in Metro Atlanta. 4Earth is an industrial waste water reuse and treatment option that has caught the attention of major corporations. Previous Hypepotamus reporting here.
