End of a Season | Knoxville Entrepreneur Center graduates 2026 WORKS Accelerator cohort
The six founders who participated in the nine week 2026 WORKS Accelerator celebrated a summer of scaling their startups with the annual demo day.
Just like a TV show, different seasons symbolize narrative character arcs and storyline development. Knoxville Entrepreneur Center (KEC) 2026 WORKS Accelerator went through a season of change this summer. There were a lot of program alterations – a new leader, new mentors, and six new companies entering the scene.
Jim Biggs, the CEO of KEC, welcomed the room to the annual Demo Day.
Biggs introduced Dylan Jones, the Managing Partner of Boldsquare, a Knoxville-based marketing and communications firm, who took the reins as the WORKS facilitator for his first season this summer. The program was previously guided by Chris McAdoo, former Chief Experience Officer at the KEC, who stepped away to start his own business in late 2025.
For the past eight years, Jones has notably scaled up Boldsquare to receive national recognition – including being named three times on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies.
“I am an entrepreneur and also have a background in TV. The highlight reels are never really true, right? There are some highs and some lows. And in this season of the WORKS, we saw both,” Jones said.
Some founders in the program secured capital and onboarded thier first customers; others walked through legal battles and the infamous entrepreneurial valley of doubt. But all six came out on the other side – and five out of the six companies presented their progress at the 2026 WORKS Demo Day on Wednesday.
Check out how the WORKS companies scaled up this summer
Green Routine, founded by Ryan Ebanks
Unfortunately, Ryan Ebanks was unable to join the Wednesday night program to present his progress on Green Routine. However, Jones stepped in to share some of the top highlights about the company.
“Ryan is a seasoned entrepreneur with a handful of startup experience under his belt,” Jones said. “Green Routine is deeply focused on helping organizations make energy-related decisions. They influence operating costs, capital investments, reliability, sustainability, and long-term competitiveness.”
Tekovation’s Lindsay Turner sat down with Ebanks to interview him about his company. You can read that full feature here.
Equipment Locker, founded by John Nelson
John Nelson was also unable to attend the demo day pitch on Wednesday; however, the company’s CEO, Bob Vanderhoff, was able to step on stage to provide a few remarks about the company’s progress.
“Downtime is a critical problem that manufacturing businesses face. On average, downtime costs a business $265,000 an hour,” Vanderhoff explained. “Businesses face the cost of workforce readiness, safety declines, and the pressure of the clock to get back into operation.”
Equipment Locker is a tool that holds instructions about all the machines in the plant, including how it works, previous maintenance, and step-by-step instructions for how to fix them. Vanderhoff said there are about 80,000 facilities in the United States that have equipment that could benefit from the streamlined Equipment Locker software, and thousands of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) that could help the software become integrated alongside their products.
The product is complete – and Nelson and Vanderhoff are looking for partners to pilot the program.
We sat down with John Nelson early in the WORKS program. You can read that full feature here.
VACScore, founded by David O’Dell
David O’Dell is building an AI-powered platform that helps hospital Value Analysis Committees (VAC) evaluate new medical devices faster by aggregating and scoring clinical data. His startup, VACScore, cuts a process that once took months down to minutes.
“I spent 20 years in medical device sales, watching that decision get made. Every hospital runs these decisions through a value analysis committee, and it costs millions – if not billions of dollars,” he said. ” In one pilot, the hospital used VACScore to avoid $490,000 in unnecessary spending. Physicians had requested newer, pricey products, but after reading our report, they figured that there was no added clinical benefit and pulled the request.”
O’Dell said it can also flag financial ties between device manufacturers and physicians to keep smaller, clinically sound companies competitive against larger manufacturers with big contract advantages.
We sat down with O’Dell to interview him about his company. You can read that full feature here.
VeriQual, founded by Bryan Crosby
VeriQual is a Knoxville startup founded by Bryan Crosby that automates income verification for self-employed borrowers. It is a deterministic, patent-pending verification engine that processes self-employed borrowers’ tax returns in under 60 seconds and plugs directly into lenders’ existing loan operating systems, replacing roughly $1,000 and two and a half months of manual review per file with a flat $150 fee.
“Last year, more than 50 million individuals filed tax returns that included non-W-2 income. That number is projected to grow to more than 90 million by 2035,” Crosby said in his pitch, indicating a large (and growing) market.
VeriQual’s VOSE platform is in active pilots across multiple verticals and closed a pre-seed round with a group of angel and strategic investors.
We sat down with Crosby to interview him about VeriQual. You can read the full feature here.
Raina, founded by Raymond Decker
Raina, founded by Raymond Decker, is a real-time trust and verification platform for newsrooms, election authorities and universities that assesses claims, images and video for authenticity, provenance and corroboration before misinformation spreads. Rather than acting as a fact-checker, it aggregates verification signals and pulls in Wayback Machine data so users can see how a story has changed over time and decide whether it holds up.
“A synthetic video will go viral in about three hours. Proving it is fake takes about three days. That’s the gap we are solving for,” Decker said in his pitch.
Decker said Raina is not a deepfake detector, but rather the infrastructure that those technologies could sit on top of.
We sat down with Decker to interview him about Raina. You can read the full feature here.
DhyanaTech, founded by Steve Dickens
Steve Dickens is building DhyanaTech, an affordable, mobile-friendly ERP system built specifically for precast concrete manufacturers, covering production and mold management, CAD integration, yard logistics, order fulfillment and delivery routing in one platform.
Dickens is a former mason who worked his way up to plant leadership. He built DhyanaTech to replace the disconnected spreadsheets and generic ERP tools he saw failing precast operations firsthand.
“I am deeply intimate with the pains of our users, experienced in software engineering and civil engineering technology. I am in the perfect position to solve this problem,” Dickens said in his pitch. “DhyanaTech is ready for takeoff. I’m here tonight looking for connections to shops who can benefit from our services.”
We sat down with Dickens to interview him about DhyanaTech. You can read the full feature here.
The Demo Day also included a fireside chat session with two former WORKS participants: Jenna Johns, formerly with RDI Technologies (2016 cohort) and Joel Smith with TeachCraft (2025 cohort).
📸 All Photos courtesy of Teknovation’s Lindsay Turner.
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