Built to ‘Go Bigger’ | Exactrx takes home 3686 Pitch Competition win
Nashville-based AI medical billing platform, Exactrx, claimed the 3686 Pitch Competition's $10K prize designed to help the startup "go bigger."
You always hear people saying that Launch Tennessee‘s (LaunchTN) 3686 Conference is the best way to get to know Tennessee’s startups and the state’s innovation ecosystem.
The fan-favorite 3686 Pitch Competition, presented by Amazon, returned Tuesday, and it’s safe to say that the quality of talent only proved this to be true.
Five startups took the stage to showcase their companies before a panel of judges: Brandon Bruce of Market Square Ventures, Logan Leatherwood of LaunchTN, George Wilson of Vanderbilt University, Jason Kuo of Tech Square Ventures and Whitney Williams of Beliade Consumer Partners.
A packed crowd watched as the founders competed for a $10,000 cash prize and a 12-month package from LUCID Private Offices. An Audience Choice Award also gave one founder a six-month LUCID Private Offices package.
Setting the stage
There’s no one quite like Chris McAdoo of the Spark Innovation Center to get a crowd pumped up as emcee. With the event in Nashville just after Dolly Parton’s passing, McAdoo built his opening theme around her famous line: “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” A founder himself and longtime supporter of the startup community, he told the crowd that entrepreneurship is the ultimate test of knowing who you are to your core and having the boldness to act on it.
That’s exactly what these founders did by taking the stage and the mic.
ExactRx
Athena Doshi, co-founder and CEO, presented Exactrx and ended up walking away with the big win of the night. This Nashville-based startup is an AI-driven billing system built to streamline medical billing. The platform reduces claim denials by preparing and submitting claims that meet payer policies, using institutional knowledge to improve accuracy and speed.
The system processes 1,500 pages a month with a 99% first-pass acceptance rate and 98% zero-touch claims. ExactRx has contracted $1.3 million in annual recurring revenue without any marketing spend and plans to raise $2.6 million for expansion. Longer term, the company wants to handle claims on behalf of insurance companies, cutting administrative burden and speeding up transactions.
The biggest barrier to care is financial. Doctors paid late can’t see more patients — and the common denominator was always the claim. We’re building toward the last claim ever submitted.
The judges were impressed with her track record and expertise in the space, having built and sold two healthcare businesses already.
Give it up for the other founders
One of None
One of None was pitched by former NFL quarterback and CEO DeShone Kizer. The company focuses on cutting through content saturation as AI makes it easier for brands to produce more images, video, and campaigns by linksing physical goods to digital experiences through embedded NFC technology.
AI is allowing brands to make more images, more videos, more campaigns. There’s one thing that it isn’t going to make more of, and that’s our attention. The easier it gets to create content, the more difficult it gets to keep your customers interested.
Provision Surgical
Pitched by CEO Abdullah Bahour, Provision Surgical’s product transforms 2D medical imaging into real-time 3D vision with 99% accuracy. They aim to capture 11% of the orthopedic surgical market within five years. Provision Surgical also snagged the Audience Choice Award.
Orthopedic surgery has these markers or QR codes. Once they drill them into the bone, then they’re projecting and adding that onto the patient. If you misalign that at wrong depth or different angle, all your alignments are out of place. What we do is we use computer vision to do that with AI — and we’re the only one in the market doing that.
For the People
This AI system was built for physical retail and drive-throughs. It helps crew members manage complex customer orders in real time, with a pilot underway at Chick-fil-A. Integrating with existing restaurant technology, just increasing upsells by a mere 1% can bring in $62,000 in added revenue.
We are building this because we believe that technology should handle complexity and allow people to serve people.
Blackwing Space
Pitched by founder and CEO Paul Anderson, Blackwing Space is making space accessible with commercial, American-Made nanosatellites. They designed and launched their first commercial satellite, “Baby Bird,” in five months and report gross margins above 50%.
Space is too expensive, too complex, too bespoke and niche for everyday businesses to leverage the economic potential of the space economy. Our mission is simple: to make it faster, easier, and more affordable than ever for companies to ship their products to space.
Catching up with last year’s winner
The pitch competition closed with a conversation with last year’s winner, Folx Table as a reminder of how much this stage matters as a platform to help founders “go bigger.”
Their main update? They’ve rebranded as Outpost. Last year, the founders said their audience was anyone who seeks connection. But like any mature startup will admit, you can’t target everyone. So, the company has since narrowed its focus to organizing small-group dinners for university alumni engagement networks. They are working to have 10 universities on the platform by year’s end and seek introductions to alumni networks to expand their reach.
We’re excited to do a deeper dive on each founder in the coming weeks!
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