Keisha Mabry Haymore
Keep up with local business news and trends
Subscribe to the St. Louis Business newsletter to get the latest insights sent to your inbox every morning.
Mabry Haymore is busy. Last year, the author, speaker, and motivator launched Heydays, a co-working space/content studio that breaks the mold from the traditional model. In fact, Mabry Haymore doesn’t really consider it a co-working space; instead, she says, it’s home, a place that celebrates community and collaboration. “Heydays was inspired by my mom and childhood home,” Mabry Haymore says. “Growing up, my house was the neighborhood home, the place and space where everyone could hang and feel safe, where people could grab snacks or a meal and just laugh and play. That’s Heydays: It’s a space for the homies and for community.” In its first 10 months, Heydays welcomed more than 100 businesses as full- and day-pass members, served 50-plus businesses through shared services, and trained more than 2,000 people on digital marketing. It’s also hosted more than 100 events and other activations to help empower founders and creatives. And what does the future hold for Mabry Haymore? “When I launched Heydays, I gave myself permission to have fun with it,” she says. “Meaning I wouldn’t measure the data or make decisions about the next steps too fast; instead, I would give myself a full year to learn and grow from there. And that’s what I’m doing.”
Danish Nagda and Jeff Gamble
When Nagda was in medical school, his father got very sick. Gamble, his friend and lab colleague, was a sounding board as Nagda learned to navigate the complexities of the American healthcare system as his dad’s caregiver. A few years later, after Nagda’s father had passed away from heart disease, Gamble encountered similar obstacles in caring for his ailing mother. “In both of our lives, a lack of access to timely and attentive primary care led to significant downstream difficulties for our parents and outcomes that could have been avoided,” says Nagda. Informed by life experience and expertise in the health, science, and tech fields, the two are working to build a better way. In 2016, they co-founded Rezilient Health, which now has remote clinics in three cities and works with customers to reduce healthcare costs and improve access to care. Rezilient combines in-person care with virtual care, so patients can see doctors immediately. At Rezilient’s brick-and-mortar clinics, each patient is accompanied by a presenter who manually provides the assistance needed for a remote doctor to do a thorough examination. And rather than going to a primary doctor and then making a later appointment with a specialist, patients can find help for 73 specialties on the same day. Rezilient’s subscription-based model incentivizes providers to take the time needed to prevent and solve health problems.
Josiah Cox
Central States Water Resources
There’s no looming infrastructure crisis in America—for many small communities, “the crisis is already here,” Cox says. In the United States, the water system is extremely fragmented; there are more than 80,000 water and wastewater utility companies. (For comparison, the United Kingdom has 16.) Small municipalities have struggled to update their water systems, many of which were not designed to meet modern environmental standards. When Cox started Central States Water Resources in 2014, his mission was to bring safe, reliable, environmentally responsible water resources to every community in the U.S. After almost a decade, the company has purchased more than 850 small systems across 11 states, making it the largest owner of individual domestic wastewater treatment plants and the 10th largest water utility in the country, serving 300,000 customers. CSWR uses technology and innovation to revamp current systems and bring them into compliance. It has taken complex civil engineering solutions, such as remote monitoring, and reconfigured them to bite-size scale to transform smaller systems and plants. Cox says it’s been rewarding to see how improvements in water and wastewater systems can impact communities. “We’ve gone into places that have had moratoriums on building or where people couldn’t buy or sell houses anymore because of failing wastewater plants,” he says. CSWR has been able revitalize communities by updating plants and bringing them into EPA compliance. “It’s amazing to see real transformation.”
Julian Keaton
North County Innovation Center
By the time he was in his mid-twenties, Keaton had already launched three businesses, including Dimensions, a geolocation mobile game designed to introduce transplants to new cities and foster civic engagement. Now, as executive director of the North County Innovation Center, he’s poised to pass his knowledge on to other entrepreneurs and would-be founders. The center, which opened in October 2023, is a pillar of the R&R Marketplace, the $20 million development launched by pastors Ken and Beverly Jenkins that’s housed in a formerly vacant shopping plaza in Dellwood. At age 17, Keaton was part of an initiative called the Minority Youth Entrepreneurship Program, before discovering a gift for the administrative side of business. “I’ve been a lifelong entrepreneur that comes from a tradition of entrepreneurs,” says Keaton. “I want to share my experience to try to give businesses based in North County the tools they need to be successful.” The center currently serves as an 11,000-foot co-working space, and as it continues to expand, Keaton hopes to host workshops, speakers’ series, hack-a-thons, and a youth education program much like the one he did in high school. Beyond programming, though, Keaton helps with the day-to-day mentoring that’s often necessary for fledgling startups. “Communities are built around businesses. I want to make sure our innovators get the support they need,” Keaton says. “It’s not just for the entrepreneurs themselves but also for how their success can impact the community.”
Charlotte Dales and Sarah Bernard
Inclusively is revolutionizing the way workplace accommodations are managed by employers. Cofounded by Charlotte Dales and Sarah Bernard, the company uses its Retain AI tool to gather real-time feedback and data about employees, empowering employers to customize work environments to fit whatever needs their teams may have. The result is a highly optimized employee experience. “With Retain, employers are not just reacting to their employees’ needs; they’re anticipating and fulfilling them, leading to a more engaged, satisfied, and productive workforce,” Dales says. Founded in 2020, Inclusively began as a platform to help people with disabilities find and retain work. Since then, it’s expanded its scope to offer accommodation solutions for all types of employee needs. “Workplace personalization and accommodations are not only about compliance; they’re about unlocking potential at scale,” Bernard says. “This approach not only enhances productivity but also fosters a more engaged and loyal workforce, helping to solve the very unsatisfied relationship that exists today between employers and their employees.” Looking ahead, Dales and Bernard are focused on broadening their impact by helping companies establish scalable and accessible processes that target the long-term success of all employees. In late 2023, the company received $13 million in Series A funding, which will be used in part to help achieve this mission. “By continuously innovating and responding to the changing needs of the workforce, our platform sets a new standard for companies using accommodations to deliver the best employee experience,” Bernard says.
Dr. Mohamed Zayed
“Although cardiovascular disease continues to be the number-one killer in the Western world, many patients who have it don’t even know they do,” says Zayed, co-founder of AirSeal Cardiovascular and a professor of surgery, radiology, molecular cell biology, and biomedical engineering at WashU. “Currently, standard blood cholesterol tests performed at a doctor’s office are often not accurate enough, particularly in women, to identify people who are without symptoms or who are at the highest risk for developing a cardiovascular complication down the road.” AirSeal’s technology, however, aims to provide a more accurate, sensitive way to identify individuals who may be prone to developing cardiovascular disease or related issues. After discovering an enzyme that attaches to “bad cholesterol” in the bloodstream, the startup recently won the Texas Medical Center Innovation Healthcare Investment prize of $250,000, funding that will help the company bring its product to market. With the startup’s novel technology, Zayed hopes to improve both access and quality of care. “One of my greatest passions is building initiatives and watching them grow into their own self-sustaining entities,” he says. “Through rigorous scholarship, creativity, and collaboration, bold ideas can geminate, gain traction, and ultimately transform patient lives.”
Rick Shang
Shang and his father, chemical engineer Dihu Yu, have set out to make American manufacturing competitive again. The company they founded, Vulpes Corporation, makes oil-based products for use in the agricultural, industrial, and health sector. Even before the pandemic and supply-chain crisis, Shang (a WashU doctoral student at the time) and his father (a retired chemist and former college professor) had started planning the company’s launch. They hoped there might be a market for technologically innovative, competitively priced products that are locally made, an alternative to products that are primarily made abroad and imported to the U.S. When the pandemic disrupted the supply chain in 2020, more U.S. customers started looking for domestic suppliers, and Vulpes was poised to jump in. Since then, Vulpes has grown rapidly. The company recently opened its first full-size factory in Dallas and plans to expand nationally this year; its sights are set on international expansion in the near future. For Vulpes, it’s about more than delivering reliable products at competitive prices. “We also aim to reduce the environmental impact of our products,” says Shang. “And we don’t want to ship things from across the world that can be made here.”
Drs. Jennifer Avari Silva and Jonathan Silva
Drs. Avari Silva and Silva are changing the way doctors approach surgery. The married couple helped develop SentiAR technology, which relies on mixed-reality technology that allows 3-D digital objects to be placed in a real-world setting. “A big trend in the past 20 years has been to make surgeries as minimally invasive as possible,” says Silva. “However, taking away the ability to see the organ that the physician is working on, or just showing a picture of it in two dimensions, has made these procedures more difficult. By being able to bring 3-D representations of the anatomy to the operating room, we believe that we will improve the success of these procedures for patients.” Avari Silva is a pediatric cardiologist and associate professor of pediatrics at Washington University School of Medicine, while Silva is an associate professor of biomedical engineering at WashU’s McKelvey School of Engineering. In spring 2023, WashU announced SentiAR had raised $8.5 million for a hands-free cardiac ablation guidance system, the culmination of an eight-year journey since the Silvas came up with the idea. The funding will help SentiAR work to create a sort of “mixed-reality command center,” with a headset that allows physicians to visualize the anatomy they are operating on while controlling various systems in the operating room. “Most of our effort is spent on making sure that we get SentiAR to the finish line,” says Avari Silva, “where the technology is available to physicians worldwide.”
Ge Song
In 2021, Song swapped life as a Big Law attorney for in-house counsel at Whole Foods Market. Following her previous path as a judicial clerk at a major law firm in Washington, DC, it was a significant change that took a lot of courage. “Having various experiences helped me push through self-doubt and fear,” says Song, “to better communicate with both empathy and boundaries.” Today, Song serves as senior regulatory counsel for Whole Foods Market, assisting with regulatory compliance of food law. She works with fewer lawyers than she used to but with more business partners who are experts in other areas, such as nutrition and technology. In 2023, she volunteered with her family on a farm through Whole Foods Market’s Whole Cities Foundation and local nonprofit Operation Food Search, an experience that reinforced how much Song connects with Whole Foods’ mission to nourish people and the planet. “It was great to combine family time, fresh food access in the community, and agriculture,” she says. “And it allowed me to see a slice of agriculture in Missouri. I am hoping for more opportunities like this in the next year.”
Jordan Russell
Quantum computers and sensors are still emerging technologies, and a tremendous amount of work remains to be done to make them practical and scalable. With Gateway Quantum Electronics (GQE), founder/CEO Jordan Russell is building the tools to make this possible. “There’s very much been an element of being in the right place at the right time: In the last 10 years, there’s been a global explosion of interest and funding for quantum technologies, largely driven by advances in quantum computing,” Russell says. “And WashU has been making consistent investments in quantum research here in St. Louis.” Russell earned his PhD in physics at Washington University, where he studied fundamental quantum phenomena closely related to quantum computing. Since then, he’s worked as a research scientist at the university to develop quantum technologies. Russell is quick to point out that most people will likely never directly use a quantum computer, yet the impact of it and related technologies will likely have profound impacts on many people’s daily lives. “It’s widely believed that quantum computing will revolutionize our abilities to treat diseases; design new chemicals and materials and technologies; optimize supply chains and other logistics problems; and process the large datasets that underpin technologies, like machine learning and artificial intelligence,” he says. Russell founded his company in 2023 to develop technologies that streamline this transition. He hopes that the startup will make it easier for major tech companies to build quantum computers in significant numbers—and accelerate potential breakthroughs.
