Over 400 entrepreneurs, investors and politicians celebrated the state’s startup talent and community at Innovate Mississippi’s annual conference, Accelerate.

“Accelerate is really important, because you now have the platform to grow and dream as much as you want,” said Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann during one session last week.

Innovate Mississippi is a nonprofit that helps grow the state’s entrepreneurship scene. Innovate Executive Director Tony Jeff described it as a “connect the dots” organization, introducing entrepreneurs, business people and investors.

Campusknot, a Starkville-based company, is an Innovate success story and recently raised over $1 million in new funding. 

One of Innovate’s flagship programs is CoBuilders. The 12-week accelerator program helps early stage entrepreneurs get their ideas ready to pitch to investors. Startups first have to participate in one of eight regional competitions. Innovate heard over 120 pitches for this year’s program. Only seven made it into the final stage.

“The companies need to show that the market wants what they have, validating that, and then demonstrating they have the plan to go out and replicate that times a hundred,” Jeff said. 

A month before the event, Sugam Panthi, co-founder of MagnoliaEd, was “really confident” about the company’s product but was still nervous about the impending competition. 

Panthi cofounded MagnoliaEd with Fan Zhang, a professor at University of Southern Mississippi. Zhang was looking for a better way to manage all the classes she was teaching when Panthi, her research assistant, proposed an artificial intelligence tutor. He built an early prototype of what became MagnoliaEd over a few months and students found the tool helpful, especially in large online classes. 

Their AI agent creates a personalized chatbot trained on course content that can help students around the clock. 

During the competition, those pitching ideas fielded tough questions from the audience about their revenue model and potential competitors. But at the end of MagnoliaEd’s 15 minutes on stage, Panthi was grinning. 

Panthi said the University of Southern Mississippi and Innovate went the “extra length” to help him prepare. He said it was an exciting opportunity to make more connections and have discussions about what role AI should have in the classroom. 

These conversations are exactly what the conference was designed to do, generating new ideas to build innovative companies.

At the end of the competition, Jeff reminded the crowd that Innovate will soon be accepting pitches for its next round. 

“Let’s go build something great,” he said.