Built in Miami Program Inspires Local Startups
In an effort to empower young and rising entrepreneurial spirits in their own backyard, the leadership team in the city of Miami has initiated the City of Miami and Venture Miami’s Built in Miami program. Through this program, the city looks to implore and inspire young minds to do their best work and engage in friendly competition with some of their peers, all while providing them with tools, knowledge, and opportunities to fund their dreams that they would not usually have.
Demo Day Highlights Success and Innovation
Thus far, the results speak for themselves. Over the past eighteen weeks of the program’s free incubator initiative, more than three hundred startups have been built and initiated in Miami. The culmination of the Built-in Miami program was Demo Day, where over one hundred of these young entrepreneurs were given a chance to give a four-minute pitch on their vision and ideas to mentors, potential investors, and the tech community at large. Of the one-hundred-plus startups and inventors who took to the stage, only eight would be chosen by the judging panel to be funded and seen through from idea to product launch.
Burhan Sebin, Venture Miami’s head of research and program lead of Built in Miami, said, “Months ago, we made a call and said ‘it’s time to build’—and the best city to build is Miami.” According to Sebin, the Built In Miami program was engineered to offer support to entrepreneurs building local tech companies and “to foster economic development in this beautiful city.”
Chris Daniels, Built in Miami’s lead program instructor and founder of The Shrimp Society, said, “In 2024, we knew we wanted to build something bigger and better with Built in Miami. Over the last 18 weeks, we took 300 local Miami entrepreneurs and turned them into 100 launched startups. These startups have done the work, and they’re building real companies.”
The judges for Demo Day were Olivia Gaudree from Fuel Venture Capital, Jared Schwitzke from Miami Angels, Aditi Joshi from Google Cloud, Darien K. Smith from D.K. Smith & Co, and Rich Robert from JustWorks.
The stakes were high: the winning startup would receive a trip to New York, powered by JustWorks, along with $5,000 in Google Cloud credits and $1,000 in Delta Airline credits. The runner-up would win a dinner with top executives and venture capitalists in Miami in addition to $2,000 in Google Cloud credits.
The runner-up at Demo Day was ultimately Smart Aerosol Technologies. They aimed to promote precision and sustainable agriculture through innovative Nano fertilizer technology. Smart Aerosol Technologies was founded by Sruti Choudhary (a PhD candidate at the University of Miami), Ramesh Railya (a scientist and University of Miami graduate), Pratim Biswas (the dean of the University of Miami’s College of Engineering), and Sujit Modi (a PhD student at Washington University). This team has already established a partnership with the Illinois Farm Bureau Association.
The first-prize winner was Investrio, a debt payoff platform that provides tools, guidance, and community to help young professionals pay off their debt. This personalized approach includes a self-service tool, a humanized platform for advice and plans, and a support community. Their platform will also include analytics-driven features. Investrio was founded by Joyce Medeiros (a former trader at Goldman Sachs) and Laura Muriel Texidor (a former program manager at Outlier Ventures).
