Immunophotonics, a local biotech startup, won the St. Louis regional finals of the Startup World Cup and will move on to represent the region at next month’s grand finale in San Francisco.
The company topped a field of 100 St. Louis-area startups that submitted and presented their businesses at TechSTL pitch events over the past four months, culminating in 10 finalists presenting Monday night.
“I’m in shock because there was a lot of phenomenal companies that presented tonight,” said Lu Alleruzzo, CEO and co-founder of Immunophotonics. “It represents the tremendous innovation in St. Louis, and to be selected in this competition, I am just really lucky and blessed.”
Alleruzzo’s company is developing a drug that augments treatments for cancerous tumors to make the body better at fighting future cancer. He explained that the drug is delivered into a tumor already killed by an existing medical technique, like radiation.
“We invented a drug that you inject into that ablated tumor, and it trains the immune system to identify cancer wherever it might be in the body,” Alleruzzo said. “The truth is, we need to get the word out. We're scientists, but if we can be out there sharing our story, I'm hoping to bring more people along the journey to help us achieve our goals.”
Immunophotonics now moves on to compete against the winners from the 100-plus other regional Startup World Cup semifinals in cities worldwide for a $1 million investment prize.
Monday’s competition featured local companies with products focused on medicine, manufacturing, software and even consumer packaged goods, which spurred Rachel Burns, founder of ice cream company Bold Spoon Creamery, to participate.
“I thought it was heavy tech focused,” she said. “And then I learned that there was a consumer packaged goods component, which then made me look into it deeper and know that there could be a space for a company like ours here.”
Burns said participation helped give her practice in communicating the vision and goals of her company.
“The biggest piece of it was just honing my message to make sure that in five minutes, I got across what my passion was, why we were doing this and where we’re going,” she said.
And that represents the value of these kinds of competitions beyond the grand prize, said Steve Payne, a partner at Pegasus Technology Ventures, the Silicon Valley-based venture capital group that also manages the pitch competition.
“The whole thing about Startup World Cup is the exposure to investors and collaborators along the way,” he said.
Payne noted the rigor of St. Louis’ competition.
“A lot of the innovation here is real. It’s not just a PowerPoint and a good story,” he said. “Someone just listening to these pitches can’t go and replicate the same thing because there’s more technology behind it. A lot of it’s built-in hard work of coding, medical research or core science.”
The St. Louis regional competition helped connect Emily Hemingway, executive director of TechSTL, the region’s tech council, to more of the innovation happening here that may not be front and center.
“We had so much interest and support from the community — to start with 100 startups, which so many of them I was not actually aware were here in St. Louis,” she said. “For me, it was really getting some exposure to some of the new talent and innovation.”
Hosting the pitch competition over the past four months also gave Hemingway a front-row seat to the innovation in the region and how founders can be better supported, as well as what’s next for the local tech ecosystem. She added the region faces challenges to retaining entrepreneurial innovation that many other cities around the world are facing too.
“The timing of this was really profound for us,” she said. “What is it that St. Louis can be offering to really fill the gaps that exist, because unfortunately, we do have a lot of gaps.”
Factors like access to capital, programming for founders or connecting them with other resources that can help them grow, Hemingway said.
“We can’t afford to keep losing great founders,” she said. “Some of our biggest opportunities are things that are unreachable by founders and really trying to figure out how we unlock that – our major corporate partners and anchor institutions or research universities.”
Hemingway added that it could help if municipal governments seek more contracts with local innovators to solve operational challenges.
“Great innovation is spurred often from challenges that government agencies face, that they're able to then open up either contractual opportunities or even innovation challenges,” she said.
