Another year has come and gone. Looking back at the archives, 2018 was marked by some major headlines, including out-of-state companies setting up offices in Portland, a lawsuit that pits the new guard against the old, and a mega merger that will impact the local community for years to come.
Maine Startups Insider published 68 articles in 2018. Here are the 15 that attracted the most attention from MSI readers (measured by pageviews).
15. San Francisco e-commerce startup puts down roots in Portland
Grove Collaborative, a San Francisco-based e-commerce startup that bundles natural home, health, and beauty products and sells them via recurring subscriptions, opened its first East Coast office in Portland this fall. It cut the ribbon on a new office at 123 Middle Street in November, which houses its “community happiness” department, and has already hired roughly 50 people. Read the story.
14. Maine Med ER doctor launches startup to improve the ER patient experience
Samir Haydar, an ER doctor at Maine Medical Center in Portland, launched a startup in 2018 called NavigatER, which has developed a mobile software application that an emergency department could use to provide real-time updates to patients on their status while in the ER, as well as offer access to medical educational resources.
13. Local group in ‘active talks’ to rescue Fork Food Lab from closure
The sudden announcement that New York-based Pilotworks would close Fork Food Lab, the Portland incubator for food and beverage entrepreneurs, caused a flurry of activity. Maine Startups Insider was the first to break the story that a group led by Bill Seretta, president of The Sustainability Lab and chairperson of the Maine Food System Innovation Challenge, had formed to acquire the business and keep it running. Read the story.
12. Idexx v. Vets First Choice is an important test case for the use of non-competes in Maine’s innovation ecosystem
In August, Idexx Laboratories Inc. filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Portland alleging that two former employees “misappropriated” proprietary trade secrets and violated non-compete agreements when they left to join rival Vets First Choice. While the alleged misappropriation of trade secrets got the most attention in the local press, I chose to focus on Idexx’s attempt to enforce its non-compete agreements and the potential implications for Maine’s innovation ecosystem if a judge upheld them. To date, the case is still on hold as Vets First Choice continues to request more time, with Idexx’s agreement, to respond to the initial complaint. Read the story.
11. Portland startup helps colleges reduce student ‘melt’ rates by using technology to combat isolation
Nearpeer is a Portland-based startup that is attempting to use technology to reduce student dropout rates and what’s known as “summer melt,” when incoming college students fail to show up on campus at the beginning of the semester. Founded in 2017, Nearpeer claims its summer 2018 rollout at the University of Maine in Orono helped reduce melt by 16% and increase first-year tuition revenue by $500,000. Read the story.
10. New VC firm raising ‘first-of-its-kind’ fund to invest in Maine
Opus Ventures, a new venture capital firm based in Portland, announced that it was raising a $10 million fund to make seed investments in early-stage Maine companies. The VC fund would be unique, however, in that it would specifically be using its investments as a vehicle to give tax-exempt charitable organizations and out-of-state investors access to “refundable” tax credits via the state’s already over-taxed Seed Capital Tax Credit program, which reached its $5 million cap in April of this year. Read the story.
9. ‘Going for it:’ upBed founder goes all-in
For three years, Aron Semle worked on his healthcare startup on the side while also holding down a full-time job as director of solutions management at PTC (formerly Kepware Technologies, which PTC acquired in 2016). However, in March 2018 he took the entrepreneurial leap, leaving his job to dedicate his full attention to his company, upByte, and its first product—upBed, a wearable device that can send silent alarms to caregivers of patients with Alzheimer’s and dementia when a patient wearing one wakes up and gets out of bed. Semle’s first customer was Scarborough Terrace, an assisted living facility in Scarborough. Read the story.
8. The 2018 gubernatorial candidates on fostering innovation, R&D spending, non-competes, the Seed Capital Tax Credit, and more
Ahead of Maine’s gubernatorial election, the four candidates responded to questions posed by Maine Startups Insider about issues of specific interest to the state’s startup community, from whether they support expanding the Seed Capital Tax Credit to what their stance was on the use of non-compete agreements. For the record, Janet Mills, who won the race and will become Maine’s governor next month, said she would support expanding the tax credit program “if an economic impact study validates the program’s effectiveness” and would “support a review of our approach to non-compete clauses and consider whether there are reforms that would support economic growth without causing harm to our existing business community.”
7. MedRhythms raises $5M Series A, adds board members
MedRhythms, a Portland-based healthcare startup, raised $5 million this year as part of an oversubscribed Series A investment round. The company’s first product is a digital therapeutics device that uses sensors, artificial intelligence, and music to help people recover mobility after suffering from a stroke. Werth Family Investment Associates, a Connecticut-based firm that invests in startups in the pharmaceutical, veterinary, and medical-device field, led the round. As a result of its investment, Peter Werth will join MedRhythms’ board, as will Ray Pawlicki, former chief information officer for Biogen and Novartis. Read the story.
6. Kadabra raises $1M, deploys next-gen, tech-enabled food ‘pod’
Kadabra, the Portland startup that was formerly known as Veebie and is now known as Minnow (confusing, I know), raised $1 million in seed funding over the summer. The company, which changed its name to Minnow later in the year, has developed a self-serve food kiosk and companion smartphone app that allows people to browse a menu, and select and pay for a meal from the app. The meal would be waiting for the customer in a locked cubby, the identifying number of which would be shared with the customer on the app after the meal is paid for. The cubby wouldn’t unlock until the customer physically arrives at the pod to pick up their lunch.
5. NYC-based owner places Fork Food Lab on the chopping block
As noted above, the news that Fork Food Lab’s owner, NYC-based Pilotworks, planned to close the kitchen incubator only a year after it acquired it caught everyone by surprise. The initial story also made it into the top 15 stories of the year. Read the story.
4. Hydroswarm, an underwater-drone startup, opens office in Brunswick
This story requires a postscript. Maine Startups Insider reported in January 2018 that Hydroswarm, an underwater-drone startup founded in Boston by roboticist Sampriti Bhattacharyya, had opened an office at TechPlace in Brunswick and planned to hire up to five people. However, at the time, I noted that its future in Maine was far from certain. The company had applied to the Maine Technology Institute to receive a grant from the Maine Technology Asset Fund 2.0, which was capitalized with $45 million from a voter-approved R&D bond. Hydroswarm did not end up receiving any of those funds. As a result, it closed the Brunswick office and did not follow through on the hiring. The company still maintains a very small presence in Maine, and Bhattacharyya still expresses hope to have operations in Maine, but she told MSI that her focus right now is on securing funding and scaling up operations, primarily on the west coast. Read the (now out of date) story.
3. On leaving: Chris Bunnell, CEO of UniteGPS, shares why he’s moving his startup to California and how Maine could improve its startup culture
Chris Bunnell founded his tech startup in Portland in 2014, but four years later he announced that he was moving it to California, citing a general frustration with the lack of traction he was able to achieve with local customers and a general lack of support in Maine’s startup community. His startup, UniteGPS, has built a GPS-enabled platform that allows school districts the ability to provide students and parents with mobile and desktop apps to track the location of buses. In a candid discussion, Bunnell spoke with Maine Startups Insider about why he was leaving Maine, his advice for Maine entrepreneurs, and why he thinks the Seed Capital Tax Credit should be scrapped. Read the Q&A.
2. Another San Francisco company is opening a Portland office
In October, Maine Startups Insider broke the news that Taylor Stitch, a San Francisco-based clothing company that has developed an innovative model that combines brick-and-mortar stores with an online crowdfunding platform, is opening an office in Portland. The company’s co-founders, Michael Armenta and Michael Maher, are Maine natives and selected Portland as the location for the company’s first East Coast office because of the city’s growing reputation as a trendy place to live and work—and its affordability compared to the Bay Area. The Portland office will be home to its “customer-success team,” as well as some finance and digital marketing positions. Read the story.
And the most-read story of the year…
1. Vets First Choice to go public via merger, expected to become Maine’s largest publicly traded company
This isn’t a surprise. Vets First Choice’s announcement in April that it would merge with the spun-off animal health division of Henry Schein Inc., a Nasdaq-listed Fortune 500 company with $12.5 billion in 2017 revenue, is arguably the most important story of the year within Maine’s innovation ecosystem. The combined company, to be renamed Covetrus, will be headquartered in Portland and Benjamin Shaw, Vets First Choice’s founder and CEO, will retain the CEO title. If the successful, the merger, which is slated to close in the first quarter of 2019, will create Maine’s largest (measured by revenue) publicly traded company with more than $3.6 billion in pro forma revenue (based on 2017 numbers). Read the story.
