CO.LAB wraps mobility innovation accelerator with ‘Night with the Founders’ reception in Chattanooga
Five mobility start-ups. A room full of the right people. One final night to make connections that could deepen their roots in the Tennessee innovation ecosystem.
The Company Lab’s (CO.LAB) 2026 mobility innovation accelerator is nearing the end of its six-week run, and on Tuesday, the organization marked the milestone with a “Night with the Founders” reception at The Waymark’s rooftop event space overlooking downtown Chattanooga.
CEO Tasia Malakasis opened the night by noting an exciting announcement she just learned that day: Chattanooga will soon be one of just three U.S. cities with autonomous public transportation!
But founders come here for the people as much as the infrastructure, she said — the customers, mentors and investors “willing to help them get to that next round.”
She then introduced two key figures that help do just that:
- Craig Fuller, founder and CEO of FreightWaves, explained the origins of the “Freight Alley” moniker, noting the region’s white-collar logistics jobs have grown from roughly 7,000-8,000 to 12,000-14,000 in recent years. He invited the cohort to FreightWaves’ F3: Future of Freight Festival conference taking place next month to keep their momentum going.
- Mayor Tim Kelly also spoke, pointing to the city’s municipal fiber network and test-bed potential as draws for founders, noting that there will be countless opportunities for crossover between quantum and mobility.
Pitches
Over the past few weeks, we covered each company and their backstory. But last night, we finally got to hear their pitches and see what six weeks of work produced.
Cybership
Jack Kelly, founder of the Kansas City-based Cybership, pitched a solution to margin leakage in warehouse operations. Cybership’s software platform tracks real-time warehouse activity and automates complex billing processes, capturing labor and materials that often go uninvoiced.
Early customers have saved dozens of hours per billing cycle and improved invoicing accuracy by 15%. Targeting a $657 million market opportunity, Cybership plans to scale through deep customer trust and high-value fulfillment center partnerships.
Seeteria
Seeteria‘s path to Chattanooga might be the most unique. Founder Sarit Tamir relocated from Israel to Canada in 2023 through an innovation program. A conference trip later led them to Nashville, and from there, to Freight Alley.
The company uses AI and computer vision, layered onto a warehouse’s existing camera systems, to identify the hidden causes of idle time and congestion. These are common problems standard systems record but don’t explain. Seeteria delivers real-time feedback and additional “eyes” to supervisors, managers and executives through an app, helping warehouses recover capacity that can cost them up to $1.2 million a year. The company has a few successful pilots, and is moving toward a monthly subscription model.
Surge
Surge, a Kansas City-based public benefit corporation, was pitched by co-founder Miguel Jaramillo. Surge is building privacy-first mobility data infrastructure using LiDAR sensors rather than cameras. The technology captures real-time movement data like pedestrians, cyclists and vehicles without storing personal identifiers. They call this approach “anonymous by physics.”
Digital signage is Surge’s initial market wedge, but the company aims to eventually monetize entire intersections by selling data to retailers, insurers and utility companies. They are currently running live tests in New Orleans and closing the final dollars of a $700,000 pre-seed round — a gap the team hoped to close in the room Tuesday night.
The team also announced a new customer: a colocation deal with Georgia Power along a downtown Atlanta corridor facing venues that host more than 200 live events a year. They’ve made it a goal to have a Chattanooga location within just a few years.
Meridian
Daniel Lucas, founder of Meridian, said he didn’t set out knowing his idea was business-worthy, but knew he had to try. He’d watched mom-and-pop freight brokerages get buried under fragmented systems: A broker fields a question at a conference, has to travel home, dig through multiple platforms and consult the team, and 12 days later, a bigger competitor has already won the business.
Meridian is a private cloud intelligence platform for freight brokerages that lets executives ask complex business questions in plain English, pulling from systems across HR, finance and brokerage data. The platform cuts data turnaround from 12 days to 12 seconds, and levels the playing field for brokerages of all types. With Lucas being local to the area, he plans to establish the company’s beachhead in Chattanooga before scaling further.
Endeavor Composites
Closing out the pitches, founder and CEO Hicham Ghossein presented Knoxville-based Endeavor Composites. The company develops lightweight, advanced composites targeting weight-sensitive industries like electric vehicles, aerospace and defense using domestic, recyclable materials. Their current traction includes more than $7.5 million in non-dilutive funding, more than 40 clients, roughly $2 million in revenue and capacity for up to 2,000 parts a month.
Ghossein used the pitch to unveil a new logo, announce the opening of their new 20,000-square-foot facility later this month and outline funding needs that will expand their people and production capacity. They are planning a $1 million funding round backed by a potential $500,000 NSF matching fund, followed by a possible $5 million round involving a matching grant with the U.S. Air Force.
Got a warehouse, a pilot opportunity or a connection that could help one of these founders?
CO.LAB ended the night by encouraging Tennessee’s ecosystem supporters to work their magic! Email managing director Bryan Barringer now to get connected.
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