Startup Junkie’s Fuel Accelerator is returning this spring. The program helps enterprise-grade startups focus on real-world commercialization and innovation. The Fuel Accelerator has two flagship cohorts, one for companies in the health care technology sector and one for startups, and retail applications have closed for this spring’s health tech cohort. But ahead of the program getting underway, Director Grace Gill visited the Carver Center for Public Radio to speak with Ozarks at Large’s Jack Travis about this season’s program. She also brought a past participant in the Fuel Accelerator with her.
Lexi Applequist is the founder and CEO of Humimic Biosystems and was recently named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 science list. With her company, Applequist has developed technology that may usher in the end of drug testing on animals. She worked through the Fuel Accelerator last year with her company. She says it’s been a rush since the Forbes announcement last month, as she found out about her placement at the same time as everyone else.
Lexi Applequist: And following that, we’ve had a handful of investors reaching out to us. Lots of interviews like this. I recently did an interview with Little Rock news as well, so lots of just really good press and media attention from that.
Jack Travis: Let’s talk about your company that got you this recognition and that you worked through the accelerator with, Humimic Biosystems. Could you please explain what you do and how it may revolutionize drug testing?
Lexi Applequist: Yeah. So Humimic Biosystems was formed to commercialize our foundational technology, which is called organ on a chip. And this is essentially a really fancy petri dish. Instead of growing a single type of human cells in a flat layer on a piece of glass, which is obviously not representative of how cells are organized in your body, we’re able to use different kinds of cells, organize them like they are in your body, and then we introduce mechanical stresses. For example, we have fluid flow to mimic blood flow. We’ve got a nasal airway model that actually breathes it, has airflow through it. And so things like this allow us to make better predictions of how drugs will work in the human body, instead of just using that really basic petri dish or even animal models.
Jack Travis: Yeah. What can you tell me about the journey that this company took and you took personally to get to this point?
Lexi Applequist: Yeah. So I actually started my Ph.D. in Dr. Kartik Balachandran’s lab at the University of Arkansas. And so this lab was kind of where all of this core technology was birthed, where we’ve invented it, and also began our basic validation studies. So it was all developed under Dr. Balachandran in the lab, and then I developed personally the muscle model. Different people have — it’s really a whole team that’s created all of this so far — all of our different organ models. And Kartik and I co-founded the company and am now using that as a commercialization vehicle that I talked about. That’s really what’s finishing that validation and getting these products ready for the industry, and kind of bridging that gap and being able to create a larger impact out of just our set of small studies we’re doing in the lab.
Jack Travis: And can you tell me about the work you did with the Fuel Accelerator? How did that impact Humimic Biosystems?
Lexi Applequist: So Fuel accepted us. We were actually maybe a little bit premature for the program. They really prefer people that have steady revenue coming in, a set list of customers. We barely had one customer at the time. We had signed the contract, but we didn’t even have the revenue in yet. So we were very, very early on. But the director at the time that I had interviewed with mentioned to me that he just had a good feeling about us and was going to make an exception.
So the Fuel Accelerator really helped us to learn. We were kind of familiar with selling to the smaller academic laboratories and other small labs. But Fuel, I think, has really prepared us to be able to go into the Pfizers, the Modernas, those really big enterprises. They’re structured very differently. There are a lot of different people you have to go through when you’re looking at an academic lab where it’s a graduate student and then the one that runs the lab. So Fuel really prepared us for that.
And I think, more importantly, the networking opportunities within Fuel were amazing. We are based here out of Fayetteville, Northwest Arkansas, so we’re already pretty well connected in the area. But Fuel also allowed us to get connected with some investors, as well as just really great mentors that know the industry really well, give us feedback on our pitches, on the pitch decks themselves. Creating them really helped us with our communication. And just all around, it was just having access to all of the people we need to be able to take this venture forward.
Jack Travis: Could you pull one specific anecdote or example, maybe during your time in the program, that you found especially helpful or enlightening toward how all of this works? Like that’s changing from the graduate lab to a Fortune 500 company like Pfizer.
Lexi Applequist: Yeah, I think one of the key connections that we had was with someone who had worked with Pfizers, with Modernas, and he actually worked to transfer data across their platforms, so more on the software side. And he gave us a lot of insights on what it looks like to take a software along with our technology there. He gave us the advice that if you’re a hardware, be a hardware. “Don’t also try to develop this half-assed software on the side if that’s not what you do. Leave that to the people that are good at software.” And so I think he really helped us refine the scope of our offerings and our products themselves, and really just put our best foot forward and take good quality products to pharma instead of trying to do everything.
Jack Travis: That’s kind of reminiscent about something I’ve heard a lot of companies that have gone through programs like this. It’s defining scope. Grace, can you talk about that just a little bit more?
Grace Gill: Yeah, absolutely. So with the Fuel program, we’re focused primarily on commercialization and enterprise sales. So as Lexi mentioned, we’re working with companies that are usually post-revenue. They have their product in market. And so we bring in these founders who are technical founders. They know the product better than anybody. But what they may struggle with is that sales process.
And looking at a really large enterprise, the sales process is very complex. There’s a lot of behavioral psychology involved. There’s a lot of hoops, there’s a lot of steps. And for a small startup of a team from three to 10, how do you manage that approaching a large enterprise? And so that’s where we try to come in and really show that you can make a repeatable process that then allows you to have the scale that you need to really grow and get over that hump of getting those initial, those first — from that first three customers to the first 20 customers for a company.
Jack Travis: Yeah. Lexi, if you met someone who was in your position maybe one or two or three years ago, would you suggest that they do a program like the Fuel Accelerator?
Lexi Applequist: Yeah. I mean, if you have a venture that you are taking forward, if you have set this up and you truly believe in it. A lot of people have those, I’ll call them hobbies, like the side hustles they’ve got going on to pull in a little bit of revenue. If that’s where you are, that’s wonderful. But I would say Fuel is not for you. Fuel is for those people that really have a scalable venture, and you want to see this grow and be across the United States, international. This is for those really high-growth companies. So if you think you might have one of those, you have that special thing that less than 10% of companies have to succeed, if you think you have that, use Fuel and it will help increase those chances for you to actually be able to be one of those few success stories.
Jack Travis: Do you all think Humimic Biosystems has that?
Grace Gill: Obviously. Absolutely. I mean, we’re sitting here with someone who’s recognized by Forbes. I mean, that’s incredible. That’s something, as a young business, aspiring business student, I was like, man, maybe one day I could be on the Forbes 30 Under 30. And here I get — I feel rewarded enough to get to work with the people who are on that list. So absolutely.
Lexi Applequist: That’s so funny because Forbes never crossed my mind. My goal was to publish and get patents and very much on the science realm.
Jack Travis: You were thinking more Nature or something like that, right?
Lexi Applequist: Yeah, absolutely.
Jack Travis: All right. Well, of course, I want you to mention where people can go for more information and to apply for this cohort, but is there anything that I forgot to ask or anything else that either of you wanted to be sure that we mentioned?
Grace Gill: Yeah, I would just add on to some of Lexi’s anecdote of her experience and kind of say what makes Fuel unique in the realm of entrepreneurial support and accelerators is, one, it is an equity-free accelerator. So with the support of our funders, we’re able to work with these founders without asking for any fees and also without taking any equity, which helps us work with kind of that growth stage where they are really navigating the venture capital or just their capital journey in general, and we can really come in and say, hey, we’re here to just support you and see you succeed.
And it also highlights then the region, right? Because that’s our main goal is to see this tech and the talent from in the state and outside of the state to come into Northwest Arkansas and do business, hire people. I mean, as Lexi mentioned, there’s a huge talent pool here that might be underrated, I think, from a national perspective.
And so we bring in companies and say, hey, you can find the talent you need, you can find the business you need. There’s plenty of opportunity on that front. And so that’s where I think we’re really unique from that support perspective.
And then for kind of the future, what’s coming up: Our applications are closed currently for our most upcoming program, the health tech program. But the call to action then is really for a lot of our local ecosystem to get involved. We have a cohort of eight to 10 companies that are all in health tech solving issues in rural health, which is obviously a huge focus across the country and disproportionately affects Arkansas being a mainly rural state. So looking a lot at rural health, looking a lot at hospital efficiencies, how do we make it so that our physicians and our health care workers can have a better work environment and also deliver better patient outcomes?
Obviously, we’re looking at a lot of things in preventive health as well, with the interest and investments from the Alice Walton School of Medicine and the whole Health Institute, with their emphasis on preventive health. We want to compound and really emphasize a lot of the work that they’re doing by helping in bringing in technologies that support that.
And so for subject matter experts in health care, for folks that are working in health care systems, hospitals, specialty clinics, insurance companies, any — like across the board — diagnostic labs, reach out to us on our website and we’d love to get you looped in and connected.
And then for prospective companies, our next program will be our AI and machine learning program in the fall. So those applications will be opening up in April. And otherwise you can just monitor our website and our LinkedIn. That’s the best way to find more information is either at fuelaccelerator.com or our LinkedIn page.
Lexi Applequist: As founders, we have a forever-long list of accelerators that we can choose from. And I think what has really set Fuel apart from other ones I’ve been in in the past has been the fact that it’s in person here in Northwest Arkansas. Compared to the virtual ones I’ve done, it just really brings a whole other element of learning. Being able to sit with people, learn the content in person, ask your questions, not in a Zoom chat that they’ll get to an hour later at the end of the session.
And then that face-to-face interaction with these other founders as well. Like I mentioned, I’m very early on for this program specifically. So the quality and the caliber of founders and companies that they’re bringing in is amazing. They’re working with Mayo Clinic, with Cleveland Clinic, with MD Anderson Cancer Center. These are really beneficial connections for me, as these founders have also, in the health tech space, offered to introduce me to some of their investors.
We don’t have a huge health tech investment landscape here in Northwest Arkansas. So being able to access those other founders, form those lifelong relationships and take advantage of their network as well has been very helpful.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
