City / Birmingham

Three Alabama Accelerators Draw 18 Startups From Across The Map

Photo by Carol Highsmith's America / Unsplash

BIRMINGHAM & DOTHAN, ALABAMA, November 6 (Hypepotamus) - Three accelerator programs, designed to help energy, forestry, and HealthTech founders, are going on across Alabama currently. And their three cohorts have pulled a geographically diverse set of founders to the Yellowhammer State over the course of fall 2026.

Meet the companies here:

Techstars EnergyTech Cohort

Now in its seventh year (which has built up a portfolio of 68 startups), Techstars runs a 13-week program in partnership with Alabama Power, Innovate Alabama and the Economic Development Partnership of Alabama.

Eight companies make up this year’s class.

Sea Lumber (Miami, FL): SeaLumber™ transforms Sargassum seaweed and recycled plastics into a high-performance, low-carbon alternative to plywood.
MayimFlow (San Francisco, CA): MayimFlow predicts leaks and cooling failures in water- and liquid-dependent infrastructure by pairing non-invasive ultrasonic and vibration sensors with machine learning to catch the early signs of failure, giving operators time to act before downtime.
Synapse Thermal (Boston, MA): Predictive thermal software that cuts energy overhead in data center cooling systems. 
Orbyfy Earthflow (Boston, MA): Machine learning models that estimate remaining lifespan and failure risk for underground utility cables. 
Utilyst (Raleigh, NC): Startup that builds AI-native spatial and causal intelligence ("Utility Brain") for critical infrastructure industries, including electric, water, natural gas, and oil utilities
Znrg Innovations (San Diego, CA): Smart thermal water heating company that focuses on affordable, grid-friendly home water heating and energy solutions
Coulomb Technology (Knoxville, TN): Sodium-ion starter batteries engineered for extreme temperatures and mission-critical applications.
Cold Spark (Longmont, CO): Cryomilling and cold storage systems that recover more than 99% of raw materials from spent batteries and e-waste.

gBETA Prosper Healthtech Accelerator

Now rolling into its 6th cohort, gBETA Prosper brings biotech, computational biology, medical devices and physical AI companies to Birmingham for a 7-week, equity-free program.

gBETA Prosper’s Fall 2026 Cohort

ARNAV Biotech (Atlanta and Alabama): Develops mRNA products, research services, and a proprietary therapeutic pipeline spanning infectious disease and oncology

Vaxonyx (Huntsville): develops AI-powered computational biology platforms for genomic analysis, translational immunology, vaccine development, and neoantigen discovery.

STRYD Orthopedics (Birmingham): Developing a smart knee sleeve that captures muscle activation and motion data during rehabilitation and exercise, giving patients, athletes, and clinicians greater visibility into movement and recovery between visits.

Limpossible (Birmingham): Developing an ultrasound-based physical AI system designed to predict high myopia progression in children by measuring the biomechanics of the eye’s sclera.

ScopeAssist (Birmingham): Developing a six-degree-of-freedom scope holder for urology operating rooms that gives surgeons a “third hand” during ureteroscopy.

Want to see these HealthTech and MedTech startups in action? The gBETA team is hosting a showcase on December 1 for these companies in Birmingham.

Alabama Forestry Accelerator

A Gener8tor program, the Alabama Forestry Accelerator is designed for founders building in forestry, agriculture for rural and urban vegetation, circular economy for bio-materials, and carbon removal.

Meet the fall forestry cohort here:

DNA Source (Dothan, Alabama): What started as a forestry research grant at HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, DNA Source uses DNA-based technology to support the timber and forest-product industry, to help them verify what they grow, protect what they develop, and prove what they sell.

enVerde (Minneapolis, Minnesota): Serving agriculture, industrial, commercial, and other key sectors, enVerde turns wood waste into heat and fuel gas (syngas) using a patented catalytic gasification technology licensed exclusively from the University of Minnesota.

Gulf Coast Biomass (Dothan, Alabama): Developing a wood pellet manufacturing facility in Dothan to convert locally sourced sawmill and forestry residuals into premium residential heating pellets for export. Shipping from Savannah and other southeastern ports, the facility will produce pellets to ENplus A1 specifications for residential markets throughout Europe, with focus on the large and growing Italian market.

Proon-Tech (Bozeman, Montana and Bucarest, Romania): Proon-Tech helps land owners reduce the resource intensity of growing, managing and protecting trees: the water, labor and inputs each tree needs to survive and thrive.

Treelyon (Paris, France and San Francisco, California): A Physical AI company building the biophysical intelligence infrastructure for the world's forests, starting with Alabama's timber industry. Its sensor-agnostic AI pipeline fuses LiDAR, hyperspectral and thermal imaging, ground-based sensing, and environmental DNA (eDNA) technologies to measure individual tree structure, species, health, and defects, while developing automated timber product and grade classification.

You can meet these forestry founders on December 11 for a showcase breakfast at the Wiregrass Innovation Center in Dothan.