It’s nice to have a seed-stage business catalyst in town. On July 24, 2024, Richmond, Virginia-based Lighthouse Labs announced the 17th cohort of companies participating in its accelerator program. (I wrote about Lighthouse eight years ago in a post comparing Richmond and Silicon Valley.) On August 27, Lighthouse hosted a meet-and-greet for this batch of seven companies at River City Roll, a boutique bowling/food/live music venue in Richmond’s historic and vibrant Scotts Addition district.

Lighthouse takes a founder-centric approach. It offers $20,000 grants per startup, but the bigger value is a three-month experience aimed at helping the founders develop and quickly expand their businesses. Public events are part of the deal. They help bring the tech and investing communities together, publicize the new ventures and remind us that launching a business is itself worth celebrating. This year’s lineup includes three medically related ventures, several riding the AI and automation wave, and one in the food category.

Medical Startups in Lighthouse’s 17th Cohort

The medical startups include Liquuet, which has developed a catheter that offers a personalized approach to treating blood clots in the lungs. Along with being able to treat both lungs at the same time with one device, their catheter provides real-time pressure monitoring, which can allow a doctor to optimize drug delivery on a patient-specific basis.

Liquuet caught my eye because of some writing I’ve been doing on a “moon-shot” initiative involving cardiovascular bio digital twin technology, which also envisions personalized medical treatments. Liquuet is closer to go-to-market, which can still be a long haul for medical devices. In my chat with Co-Founder and CEO John Schindler, I heard that achieving FDA approval was now top of mind.

The two other medically oriented ventures are SurgicalEd VR, which enables immersive, haptic-based training for surgeons doing “blind procedures,” and Parrots, an AI-driven smart assistant that provides early detection, personalized care and real-time monitoring for neurodegenerative diseases. The latter would seem a good fit for adults in the so-called ‘sandwich generation,’ busy with both children and aging parents.

More AI, HR and Comfort Food

Also on the AI front are Empathix and VerbaAI. Founded by social scientists, Empathix offers an “AI interviewer for global market research.” The idea is to harvest the insights you can gather from deep, qualitative interviews, yet do so at the scale and speed of surveys. VerbaAI has software that aims to “strengthen the information environment” through comprehensive news tracking and monitoring. Its Forentify digital forensics platform can detect manipulated media frame-by-frame and pixel-by-pixel.

For small and medium-sized companies that suffer from inefficient post-hiring or workforce development processes, the founders of Gateway have built an onboarding and training platform that streamlines the new employee journey and helps equip a company’s workforce with the skills they need to thrive and contribute.

Finally, on the business-to-consumer (B2C) front, for anyone who craves home cooking but is starved for time, Myles Comfort Foods has an answer: Mac & cheese. To be more specific, founder Myles Powell, trained as a civil engineer and reinvented as a culinary entrepreneur, offers macaroni with three flavors of “decadent cheese sauce”: Buffalo Style Chicken, Homestyle, and Philly Steak & Cheese. Frozen (but aiming to differ from “frozen foods”), these one-serving bowls are ready to eat in five minutes.

Shining Light and Rolling Strikes

Samples were on hand, as well as drinks and good conversation. (After running the circuit, I spotted a data scientist friend talking to one of his colleagues and joined their booth.) Compliments to Lighthouse, whose grants over the past 17 years have totaled about $2.5 million. They have a good track record. Most of the companies that have gone through their accelerator program are still active, and some have “rolled strikes,” successfully exiting through an acquisition. We’ll see what happens with these seven.