Join us for our 2024 Holiday Social 🎄
December isn’t just a time for celebrating the holidays.
It’s also a chance to look back, to celebrate the wins of the past year. An opportunity to take stock of where you stand, and perhaps most important of all, look forward to all the growth still to come.
Which is exactly what 757 Collab did on Tuesday, Dec. 3, when revelers gathered to toast the holiday season, salute the growth that defined 2024, and look forward to the turning of the calendar with optimism.
Winning in the Middle of Transitioning
2024 was “a year of transition,” in the words of Paul Nolde, managing director and executive director of 757 Angels. There were still plenty of things for us to celebrate over the past 12 months, including:
- Crunchy Hydration became the first company to complete the entire 757 Collab journey, from Startup Studios all the way to 757 Angels; Crunchy also rebranded in 2024, a journey Walsh said “validated our model;”
- The addition of 60 founders to the community, with the completion of two more incubation cohorts;
- More than 150 events and programs were offered;
Launched the Capital Readiness Program; - Opening of the Hampton Roads Capital access hub powered by Bridging Virginia and the Metropolitan Business League;
- Seven of the 12 finalists from Pitch Peninsula were Startup Studio participants, including two of the three winners;
- Startups Reelist and Edenic Energy were accepted into the Techstars program;
- Glove Scaler was one of Black Ambition Prize Demo Day’s winners;
- Four Startup Studio companies received Commonwealth Commercialization Fund (CCF) grants;
- Four of the 10 finalists for the $1 million RISE Prize Challenge were Startup Studio alumni;
- Nine startups successfully completed 757 Accelerate’s Cohort 7; Mentor accepted the co-founder role with Tina Bove and Markbotix, while negotiations are on-going between Mentor and ALN Tech for a CTO role and LuftCar relocated from Florida to Virginia based on the Cohort 7 experience.
- Build Weekend in February grew by 350%;
- Founders and entrepreneurs connected with public figures such as musician (and Hampton Roads native) Pharrell Williams and U.S. Senator Mark Warner (D-VA).
Internally, we solidified our mission, values, and vision. In addition, a brand refresh was conducted, in addition to developing a three-year strategic plan–a 12- to 18-month process.
“We were really fortunate from the moment that the organization got started in 2015 [with the founding of 757 Angels], there was just this natural curiosity and people leaning in, unsolicited, to get involved,” said Hunter Walsh, director of 757 Startup Studios. “We were always so busy, we never had time to step back and really look at, ‘What are we doing? What should we be doing? Are we aligning … it actually let us take a step back and pause.”
Growing Military Connections at the MATB
Dating back to 2022, we have increased our funding for work with the Mid-Atlantic Tech Bridge (MATB).
Funding comes from the United States Navy and the Department of Defense.
Even with one of the nation’s leaner budgets for a tech bridge, the growth is evident. There were 12 public MATB events in 2024, totaling 662 attendees, while more than 800 people attended one of MATB’s 85 private events. We hosted Sen. Warner earlier this year regarding this engagement and the innovation at the heart of it.
MATB’s partnership with NavalX also grew in 2024, to run the new pilot defense accelerator in 2025. This pilot will focus on critical DoD needs, and startups will be recruited nationwide.
The pilot will consist of roughly four to six startups.
The region’s first defense accelerator will launch in the second half of 2025, according to Nolde. 757 Accelerate’s Cohort 8 will be moved to the spring to accommodate this addition.
Given Coastal Virginia’s heavy military presence, having a partnership with NavalX, being involved with the DoD, and embracing the military through these partnerships is both an inevitability and a necessity.
Most tech bridges are affiliated with a single command; ours is connected to several.
“This is paramount,” Walsh said. “We’re in a wartime economy now. We’re trying to do everything we can to pound the drum beat to make something that can take 10 years happen exponentially faster.”
The Way Forward as the Calendar Turns
“Collab 2.0” is how Nolde describes what we have coming in the next 365 days.
With the “year of transition” in the rearview mirror, with the strategic plan in place and the number of founders and entrepreneurs growing, the coming year will be one of further growth, further diversification, and a greater emphasis on the defense and technology sectors.
In addition, our alumni network will be more in tune and more connected with startups entering the Startup Studio pipeline and along all steps of the developer and entrepreneur pipeline through an initiative called the Collab Founder Circle.
More specifically, Nolde points to the incorporation of AI in 757 Collab’s operations and automation, adding, “We are mapping our organizational assets against a new set of innovation metrics and framework to guide our strategic initiatives: the Innovation Topography Matrix.”
This will help us better align with the region’s economic development leaders, particularly in terms of industry clusters and verticalization.
In the end, though, the story will always be about innovators and entrepreneurs.
“The greatest compliment we can have is that no one knows who’s operating behind the scenes,” Walsh said. “What resonates with people is that peer-to-peer, ‘Wow, that happened to this startup or founder … how can that happen to me next?’”
Photography by Foster Gray Photography.
