It kind of resembled speed dating, but no one was looking for love. They were looking for M-O-N-E-Y.
Participants sat at small tables. Sometimes the conversations started with a tad bit of awkwardness, like speaking with strangers often does. Then it was time for the fervent pitch. An organizer signaled that time was up. Then on to the next table and the hope of making a connection.
These one-on-one sessions that paired the founders of startup companies with venture capitalists and angel investors looking to invest happened this week at the Ohio VC Fest ’25 at the Huntington Convention Center. This was the third year JumpStart Inc., which provides entrepreneurs various services including linking them with funding, held the conference. This year’s conference drew 820 attendees.
The conference, held Tuesday and Wednesday, coincided with the first Cleveland Tech Week, which runs through Saturday.
The sessions also had something else in common with matchmaking. Entrepreneurs didn’t randomly move among tables. JumpStart had set them up with investors with whom staff at the nonprofit believed they would hit it off. Unlike in speed dating, in which participants only usually get a few minutes to see if they’re a match, startup founders and potential investors got 15 minutes to determine whether there would be a future together.
Mohamed Kamara of Cleveland Heights, founder and CEO of InovCares, which uses telemedicine, cellphone apps and other remote technologies to help women have healthy pregnancies, said he wasn’t nervous about the “matchmaking” sessions. He’s already raised $800,000, but he needs more money to expand his four-year-old business.
“It’s more of a conversation for me,” said Kamara, who participates in JumpStart’s entrepreneurship programs. “I lead with the fact that I’m gaining traction. We generated $1.1 million in revenue last year. We project $4.9 million this year.”
He opened a pink cardboard box. InovCares is printed on one side,and “Healthy babies are our future” on the other. He begins taking out devices that help a woman to work with her healthcare provider in monitoring her pregnancy. One device measures blood pressure. Another can capture a detailed image of the developing fetus.
Kamara then pointed to two InovCares apps on his cellphone. One is for the healthcare provider and the other is for the expectant mother, who can use it to order everything from rides to appointments to nutritious groceries. InovCares partners with health insurance companies, which can offer the company’s product free or at low cost to expectant mothers, Kamara said. Health plans in Texas, Illinois, Florida and Georgia currently use InovCares, he said. The entrepreneur said he is working on getting InovCares offered in Ohio.
Kamara prides himself on creating what he considers to be a “culturally sensitive” approach to increasing the chances of a woman having a healthy pregnancy. He points to a chat on the app taking place in Spanish in Brownsville, Texas, which has a large Latino population. The app offers a forum for expectant moms to come together to discuss their pregnancies and healthcare.
Maternal mortality rates are high among women of color, which Kamara wants to help lower. The maternal mortality rate in the United States in 2023 was 8.6 deaths per 100,000 live births, according to Centers for Disease Control data. Black women had the highest rate at 50.3 deaths per 100,000 live births.
Kamara said two of his relatives died during pregnancy due to preventable complications — one in Columbus and another in his native Sierra Leone. This is what motivated Kamara to transition from a career in finance to starting InovCares. The preventable loss of his two relatives is always part of the pitch to investors, he said.
This is the first Cleveland Tech Week
While the startup founders worked on landing investors, McKelvey Packard was participating in other Ohio VC Fest ’25 sessions. As founding organizer of Cleveland Tech Week, he is attending many of the more than 30 events being held this week at different venues in the city. They range from sessions on cybersecurity to those on tech in the life sciences.
The entrepreneur had attended tech weeks in other cities and wanted to bring the same “spark” here.
“It’s about supporting each other, building relationships, building collaboration, and everybody promoting each other and what they’re working on,” he said. “It amplifies everything going on in a city to a much greater extent. It’s the social network effect. Tech weeks bring a lot of attention, both locally and nationally, to the cities that they have been in.”
Packard sees Cleveland Tech Week’s impact spanning past Saturday.
“There is a lot of momentum going, and I just see it continuing throughout the entire year, ” he said.
Venture capital firms and angel investors met with startups at Ohio VC Fest ’25
Back at the “matchmaking” sessions, Archie Scott III of Columbus, founder and CEO of Asynt Solutions, was working on finding investors. The company uses reinforced polymers and other lighter-weight products to replace concrete and steel in its products, which include construction barriers used in work zones on highways and city streets.
“Our Ape Barrier is 90% lighter than a concrete barrier, so we can ship eight times more per truck,” said Scott, who has participated in JumpStart’s entrepreneurship programs. “For contractors, that reduces their freight costs. It also reduces carbon emissions because now you have one truck hitting the site instead of eight.”
Michael Supeck, managing director of the Ohio Angel Collective, was looking for potential startups in which to invest. Industry didn’t matter, he said, but a company must have a tech component.
“There are a lot of commonalities between the companies that we invest in,” he said. ”It is very important to us that a founder … has deep expertise in a space, that a founder understands their market very clearly and allows the market to tell them what they should build and how they should build it.”
Alex Killian of Endeavor, which invests in founders, is a partner at BOLD Ventures, which focuses on founder wellness in the stressful world of startups. He said there are pros and cons of having investors.
“You have these funds so that you can now hire people, invest into your product or your software,” he said. “The inherent double-edged sword of that is there are expectations from those investors. They need to get their money back in a certain amount of time, and so it creates external pressure for those founders.”