Meet the 8 companies comprising StarTUp at the Armory’s first winter cohort

After several years of running a program that supported some of the Baltimore area’s most promising startups, Towson University‘s executive director of entrepreneurship Patrick McQuown decided to open even more opportunities to ambitious founders by creating a winter cohort for the StarTUp at the Armory accelerator.

McQuown told Technical.ly that this eight-company-strong cohort, which recently started similar programming to the  accelerator programming, reflects the strength of a startup community that he affectionately refers to as “Smalltimore.”

“That’s kind of our superpower, right?” McQuown said about the term, adding that members of this cohort came from a mix of applications and suggestions from both within and beyond McQuown’s immediate network at one of Maryland’s largest public universities.

These are the eight companies selected for the winter program:

• Let’s Tap In: Founded by three recent Towson alums, this startup developed a mobile app to aggregate user- and venue-submitted information and ratings of bars, restaurants and similar nightlife offerings in the area. After graduating from StarTUp at the Armory’s most recent summer cohort, the company landed a contract with Inner Harbor’s Power Plant Live! complex and landed an honorable mention in Technical.ly’s 2023 RealLIST Startups roster. McQuown said that he brought Let’s Tap In’s founders back “as a mentor company … so that they’re not just hearing from me.”
• EriTea: This company creates and distributes iced tea with ingredients, products and a name inspired by cofounder Ruth Behrane-Williams’ family’s experiences fleeing conflict in Eritrea. EriTea secured its spot in this cohort after winning Towson’s College Cup Innovation Challenge last year.
• Dental Desires: Based in Timonium, Dental Desires sells toothpaste with flavors like red velvet and tiramisu that its founders hope will make dental hygiene interesting for children and adults alike. McQuown said that this company’s application came via a referral from Lindsay Ryan, the interim executive director of economic development for the University System of Maryland.
• Sparen: Founded in Detroit, Michigan, this graduate of the first Techstars Equitech Accelerator cohort is a digital marketplace that aims to make home buying easier by integrating real estate purchasing, selling and inspection processes into one platform.
• Engage All: Cofounded by former USAID program analyst Geeta Raj and based in DC, this company operates a program known as The Global Sleepover that offers educational programming and resources to teach K-12 students about other cultures, STEAM topics and more.
• Haven Cloud: Referred to McQuown by Kevin Fulmer, the director of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Haven Cloud is a cloud storage platform that describes itself as “the world’s first decentralized, encrypted and privacy-focused cloud storage app.”
• Athlytic: Another 2021 Techstars Equitech Accelerator graduate with connections to Detroit, Athlytic aims to help athletes turn their likeness into a marketable and money-generating product through its athlete-to-brand platform.
• The Loop—Baltimore: Working in tandem with Towson University assistant professor Ryan King-White, this non-profit uses a camp model and golf caddying as a vehicle to help young people build business and leadership skills.

McQuown said that this cohort’s ventures are all led, founded or cofounded by a woman-identifying or minority founder.  In addition, three of the ventures are pre-revenue while the remainder boasted an average of $288,000 in revenue last year. The companies and their leaders will undergo a similar eight-week training program to the summer cohort, which began with StarTUp at the Armory’s founding in spring 2020, and earn the same $10,000 non-equity stipend that goes to their summer peers. The current cohort will wrap up its mix of education, mentorship and networking with a demo day this summer.

Until then, McQuown is excited to bring another group of companies into a program that he sees as uniquely preparing founders for success beyond the potential market correction that’s gripping the investment world right now.

“We really do a lot of programming on: What is the cap table? How do you build one? What does this mean? What are you giving up when you take institutional money?” he said.

He added that he even showed the movie “Take Shelter,” in which a doomsday vision-plagued father prepares for a coming storm despite his family’s worries about his sanity, to the last cohort to prove a point: “There’s a massive correction coming. It’s coming. We really get into that stuff hard.”