When the Georgia Tech Food and Beverage Accelerator (GT.FBA) launched its first cohort in January 2025, the program set out to help food and beverage entrepreneurs take their products from home kitchens to retail shelves. One year later, the results speak for themselves.

Daniel Beecham switched majors, failed out twice and watched his first startup fold. Now his company Propagent is betting that AI can take the chaos out of proposal work, and ATDC is betting on him.

Starting a company had been an ongoing goal of Woonsun Song’s, including when he was previously working at a cryptocurrency startup. And being part of the winning team of DARPA’s Artificial Intelligence Cyber Challenge in August 2025 gave Song the opportunity to pursue his goal of founding QED Audit, which is focused on making critical software more secure.

Most startups spend years and marketing budget building a brand from nothing. Vettex Sports used its Georgia Tech connections to skip that step to build under a name that already had history. 

More than 70 percent of families with special needs children stay home rather than participate in everyday activities. Ashley Hanchett is building a platform to change that.

“I didn’t start Unicoils to build 'just another hair brand.” I started it because women with textured hair—especially students like me—were doing everything right and still not seeing growth,” said Dajheonna Perry, Founder of Unicoils. Dajheonna is a Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business MBA alum, CREATE-X founder, and licensed cosmetologist growing Unicoils, a natural hair care brand focused on retention and scalp health.

‍Startup ecosystems have traditionally been measured by how much funding has been raised, the number of exits, or planned initial public offerings, but these only tell part of a larger story. Consider instead “Network Impact Accounting” and how it provides a framework for measuring the economic value created through trusted relationships inside innovation ecosystems.

Mehul Jasti, a computer science sophomore at Georgia Tech, isn’t leaving his academic goals up to luck. Instead, he developed JustLmk, an application that lets you be the first to know when availability or restrictions change so you can sign up for the courses you need to graduate on time.

On May 21, Georgia Tech's CREATE-X program filled the Georgian Ballroom of the Biltmore Innovation Center with energy as 26 newly launched startups showed off what they do. The room also began to fill with the investors, founders, and students eager to meet them.

A simple observation on Georgia Tech’s campus led Joseph Lee to rethink how people enter sales. AGORA turns everyday communication into a scalable, low-barrier training ground for building one of the workforce’s most valuable skills.

In Tech Square, startups and Fortune 500 companies work within blocks of each other. But proximity alone does not guarantee collaboration. That gap is where Engage operates.

Atlanta doesn’t need to reinvent community; it needs to activate it. The next phase of growth for the city’s startup ecosystem won’t come from more events, programming, or even capital. It will come from more people helping each other. And when people know who to connect, what a strong introduction looks like, and perceived risks are reduced, participation increases.

Deleon Technologies, a CREATE-X alumni company, is bringing daily metabolomics tracking of ten amino acids into homes by miniaturizing lab testing equipment and leveraging data-driven insights to provide athletes with personalized workout and recovery tips.

Askari Defense is building decentralized systems to counter autonomous threats, starting with drones. Now out of stealth, they are operating out of the Biltmore Innovation Center. The team is focused on tools designed for individual operators in the field.

When Martin So saw how outdated intelligence workflows still were, he set out to change them. Panoptica Technologies is using AI to modernize how analysts in the military process and act on data.