From alarm clocks to coral reefs: How UT sophomore Max Gallinek is building businesses that matter
If you’re plugged into Knoxville’s startup scene, you already know Max Gallinek‘s name. The University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) sophomore has built more ventures before his junior year than most people attempt in a lifetime.
His track record through UT’s Anderson Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation (ACEI) pitch competitions includes ResQTalk, a voice-to-voice translation service designed to streamline 911 calls between callers and operators who don’t share a language, and Alert X, a campus-focused initiative to expand access to Narcan.
But Rise Alarm is really what has taken off.
What is the Rise Alarm?
Rise Alarm is a physical pod that can be placed anywhere in a home. Once an alarm goes off, it won’t stop until the user physically locates the pod and scans it with their phone, forcing them out of bed.
Gallinek’s target market: college students who need to make it to class, work or anywhere else on time.
Two things drove the idea. He’s never been great at waking up on time. Plus, he has always enjoyed building practical tools to solve problems in his own life.
But he’s the first to admit the alarm space is crowded. That’s why Rise’s early success isn’t just about the product. It’s vital who’s selling it and where.
Gallinek built his name on UT’s campus long before Rise launched, competing in pitch competitions, showing up in local news and becoming a recognizable face in the community he was trying to serve and is part of himself.
Going viral
Rise Alarm’s momentum has been hard to miss. This past spring, a viral marketing video filmed on UT’s pedestrian walkway sent sales soaring.
“January 1st through March 1st, we did $750 in sales,” Gallinek said. “March 1st through April 1st, we did $7,000. So we multiplied our sales by almost 10 times, which was pretty incredible.”
Rise also just earned first place in the Growth Category of the Graves Competition, taking home $5,000. This prize money helped the Rise team hire a marketing student. Their next marketing campaign idea is to target parents of incoming college students.
“Parents want their kids to succeed,” Gallinek said. “My parents, before my freshman year, bought me so much random stuff. If it had the slightest chance of helping me succeed in college, they bought it, thankfully. A lot of kids have that same experience with parents just wanting to support their college kid.”
Despite the momentum, Gallinek is in tune with reality.
“Alarm clocks aren’t the one idea that’s going to retire my family,” he said. “I see it as an opportunity to learn along the way. I’ll make a couple extra bucks and it was fun. But I do see myself being an entrepreneur for life, whatever that means.”
This kind of self-awareness and his passion for building has led him to pivot to his most technical venture idea yet.
Introducing Reefy
Gallinek has long wanted to compete in Red Bull Basement, a global innovation competition. He applied last year and didn’t make it. When he looked back at past winners, he saw a pattern. Nearly all businesses that made the cut had a sustainability angle, but Rise doesn’t.
“I’m a big scuba diver,” he said. “I was talking to a dive instructor about how messed up the ocean has become over the past 10 years. I went home and did a bunch of research on coral reefs. Over the past 10 years, 70% of the coral reef on this planet has died, and it’s continuing to increase at an exponential rate.”
During this research, he learned of a promising coral reef restorative method called acoustic enhancement. You play the sounds of a healthy reef near a dying one, and marine life will be drawn back to it. While the science behind acoustic enhancement has been validated, the problem is scale.
Reefy aims to solve that through a networked, AI-powered smart approach.
“When I say smart, what I mean is that there is a pod,” Gallinek explained. “The pod is an underwater speaker with an AI brain and a microphone in it. You drop it at a coral reef, then another one at the next reef, then another one down the way. You get all of these spread across the planet.”
The pods play sounds, listen and communicate. Reef A can learn from Reef B, comparing which sounds are working, at what times of day, in what climate conditions, at what depths.
“Over time, because there’s a giant network of them and it becomes this AI brain, maximizing the recovery cycle for each individual reef based on hundreds of factors,” he said.
Early proof points
Reefy didn’t win Red Bull Basement, but just making it to the stage was huge. Out of 24,000 applicants, Gallinek was selected as a top-60 semifinalist and then advanced to the top 15, presenting at nationals in Detroit earlier this month.
Two days after posting about Reefy on LinkedIn, a family friend who lives in the Cayman Islands reached out asking for a pitch deck to send to the head of marine research there.
For an idea still in the concept phase, these are meaningful signals. Still, Gallinek knows there is still a hill to climb.
“I’m not a marine biologist and I’m not an engineer,” he said. “And those are the two things needed for this. I had the idea, now how do we move to the next step of it?”
He’s looking for collaborators, advisors and connections who can help bridge that gap.
Connect with Max Gallinek on LinkedIn.
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