Two student businesses pitch to room of business leaders for monthly Morning Momentum series
The three students who joined the Morning Momentum session were Blake Hopkins, the Founder of Partnerly, and Spencer Dore and Matthew Jones, who are the co-founders of New Horizon Precision.
For the final Morning Momentum session of 2025, the Knoxville Chamber welcomed the Anderson Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation to the room with two student business pitches.
The purpose of the Morning Momentum series is to gather Knoxville’s business leaders in the same space as emerging entrepreneurs, start-ups, and small businesses to help address any challenges they may face.
Big Slate Media sponsored this month’s session.
The three students who joined the Morning Momentum session were Blake Hopkins, the Founder of Partnerly, and Spencer Dore and Matthew Jones, who are the co-founders of New Horizon Precision.
Hopkins has participated in various pitch competitions and entrepreneurship programs in the Knoxville area. Those associated with the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) may have seen him at the Vol Court idea competition, the Graves Business Plan competition, or the Startup Studio.
The Knoxville entrepreneurial community may have also seen him at the ‘What’s the Big Idea’ Pitch contest, hosted annually by the Knoxville Entrepreneur Center.
Hopkins’ company, Partnerly, helps streamline paid partnerships between content creators and small businesses. The platform is designed to make influencer marketing more accessible and effective for brands seeking better ROI from their social media engagement. The company is not necessarily localized, but instead focuses on e-commerce brands across the country and helps them partner with the ideal influencers for their products
For the Morning Momentum crowd, Hopkins asked for perspectives from the business community on how his platform could help add value, gain traction, and grow!
One of the top recommendations coming from Justin Li, the Founder of Qore Performance, was to offer influencer reliability scores. Li detailed his experience trying to work with influencers: many do not produce results, many are unreliable, and searching and vetting potential candidates takes too much time for a business owner.
How can an influencer-business matchmaking platform like Partnerly effectively identify high performers versus hobbyists?
Another topical suggestion, made by Brandon Bruce, the co-founder of 121 Tech Hub and Managing Partner of Market Square Ventures, was to offer free resources or classes for creators to help them become acquainted with Partnerly.
Right now, Hopkins is manually building out his platform’s database of creators. He hopes to launch the platform in a public beta in the spring of 2026.
The New Horizon Precision team is using drones for specialty application of herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, fertilizers, and cover crops—targeting row crops, pastureland, and invasive species like Kudzu. Their target customer is farmers with acres of uneven or hilly land (that would be better served by drones versus traditional tractors).
Their business model is a mix of recurring contract services and/or one-time solutions.
The founders, Dore and Jones, also participated in the most recent Anderson Center Startup Studio cohort in the summer of 2025.
Their biggest pain point for their business is really two-fold: How do they break into the tight-knit farming community? And, how do they navigate ever-changing tariffs and trade deals, especially when most drones and drone parts come from China?
For the second question, Jonathan Halley, the Founder of Big Slate Media, said the answer is simple– the team would need to identify and create partnerships with manufacturers in the United States or the United Kingdom.
The challenge with the first question, about the tight-knit farming communtiy, is the low appetite for risk, due to traditional, generational farming methods.
A suggestion for that pain point would be to focus intently on the farms that are turning over from one generation to the next, where innovative methods are easier to integrate.
The next session of the Knoxville Chamber Morning Momentum will take place in February 2026.
Connect with the student founders:
Spencer Dore, New Horizon Precision
Matthew Jones, New Horizon Precision
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