The University of Missouri-St. Louis’ Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center has selected nine emerging local businesses for its 2026 Anchor Accelerator Cohort, which it has identified for their strong potential for growth, innovation, and local impact.
This is the program’s sixth cohort and includes Unique Visions LLC, Timebolt, OpCompanionAi, Venture Beyond Aspirations, Blue Reason LLC, Raknida, ASL Aspire, SugarBot, and Cheryl’s Herbs. Each of the selected companies will receive a $10,000 grant as well as targeted educational programming on how to approach and achieve scaling and growth.
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Scott Morris, who directs UMSL’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center, says the members of the 2026 cohort will learn how to write a business plan and then turn that plan into a presentation for investors representing different types of capital: angel investment groups, venture capital, private equity, and traditional lenders, like banks.
“When these businesses leave our accelerator, they know what their preferred source of funding would be, how close they are to getting that funding, and what they need to do to get from today in order to get the funding necessary to achieve that next level of growth,” he says.
Morris adds his expertise after a career in private equity comes in handy; he’s reviewed scores of business plans and considered the challenges founders can face when scaling. He’s learned that having a good business idea doesn’t automatically make a founder a good head of human resources, sales, or finance.
“You’ve typically got at a couple of things and you can get a business going that way, but then as you scale up and you have to bring in subject matter experts and take real money from real investors, and you’re hiring people whose lives are dependent on you being a responsible employer, the stakes really go up,” he says.
The accelerator also draws on the resources available at UMSL, in the form of space and subject matter experts, as well as students who will take the same training as the founder and work “at the direction” of a founder in developing business plans and other requirements of the program, Morris says.
He adds that it was important to differentiate the university’s offering from other programs in the local community. That’s why the curriculum is tailored to achieving growth, something Morris says he identified as a gap in the local ecosystem.
“It’s in my DNA because of my professional background. In that private equity environment, we are trained to just exhaustively look for inefficiencies and growth opportunities,” he says. “If all of our accelerator programs look similar, and we’re all going to different funding sources around town, we’re sub-optimizing the result, because we’re just stealing market share from one another, and not really growing the pie.”
The cohort for this coming year was assembled from referrals from the local entrepreneurship ecosystem, Morris explains, including Cortex, T-REX, local banks, law firms, the St. Louis Arch Angels, Schnucks’ Accelerator, TechSTL, Arch Grants, and graduates from past cohorts.
“Our job isn’t to be the one-stop solution,” Morris says. “We’re taking these businesses from someone else within the ecosystem and then handing them to that next group,”
He says he looked for participants that are “not tinkering anymore, not beta testing, not performing rapid trial and error,” but ones that “have something and now we’re just going to pour gas on it and make it bigger.” It’s businesses where the demand signal is strong enough to have outstripped a founder’s ability to finance and bootstrap on their own.
That meant using clear screening criteria: founders who are local to the St. Louis region, fully invested in their businesses and able to financially sustain themselves from them, and making at least $100,000 in annual revenue. He says these are indications that a business is ready to start growing and mirror what he was trained to spot in his private equity career.
“I’m using that exact training to say this is the profile of the type of business that will succeed in our program and we know how to screen the others out,” Morris says. “That’s not to say we think they’re bad businesses. We’re just saying that their time and our resources are better spent elsewhere if they’re not a perfect match.”
He says he’s excited to see how the program continues to develop. Of the 44 participants, including this coming year’s cohort, nearly half are women-owned businesses and 91 percent come from historically underrepresented groups.
