BRINK is a new program designed specifically to address the challenges faced by very early stage technology startups. The program provides mentorship and support to promising startups at the critical early stage of development.
The program targets tech businesses showing potential for high growth and the ability to scale up rapidly and impact their industries. The goal is to help founders build investment readiness and confidence as they prepare for the next steps in their journey.
Developed by Blue North, Northern Kentucky’s innovation hub, BRINK fits well into the hub’s mission to empower high-growth startups and entrepreneurs to scale. Blue North accelerates success by connecting startup founders with critical resources, expert mentorship, access to capital and support from a thriving entrepreneurial community.
BRINK provides mentorship through pairing new founders with experienced founders known as “traction advisors.” The mentors meet regularly with the founders over a 90-day period. Together, they set goals of what success might look like for that period. With the help of financial partners, BRINK also provides access to a small amount of financial support.
According to Reese Watson, chief of staff at Blue North, a successful 90 days for these very early stage companies could mean developing and launching a product, validating and growing their markets or otherwise becoming ready to raise additional capital.
EmpathEQ: A tool to arm nurses with vital skills
Jon Monahan, Alex Von Rosenberg and Lucas Consoli, founders of EmpathEQ, completed the BRINK program last spring and are working on the next step in their journey. The company has developed an AI-powered, video-based simulation training platform to help teach nurses and healthcare professionals the vital soft skills they will use throughout their careers.
The mentorship and financial support provided by the BRINK program was critical from the very beginning, Monahan said. Before they applied for the program, they had taken care to work with nurse educators and others to ensure their idea truly fit their needs.
“Through doing education technology consulting work last year, we ended up in a lot of nursing schools. We were asking higher level questions like, what keeps you up at night, what feels harder than it should? And the theme that kept emerging over and over again was soft skill training,” said Monahan.
Soft skills include bedside manner, communication, empathy, de-escalation, skills health care professionals need to be successful at their jobs.
Monahan tells the story of meeting with Gina Fieler, director of Northern Kentucky University’s Simulation Center. After describing their project, she said she recently attended the largest simulation conference in the country and had hoped to find a solution to the soft skills problem. She couldn’t find anything that did what the founders were describing.
The founders went home and wrote up a business plan the next day. They were ready to seek support and funding. After speaking with people whom they knew within the network of founders and investors in the region, they set up a meeting with Dave Knox, executive director of Blue North.
“I had met Dave Knox a couple of years earlier. We ended up going down to have a coffee with him and talk to him about this. He put us onto the BRINK program…He thought that it might be a good fit, and that’s how we ended up as part of the program,” said Monahan, “BRINK was a really key partner for us early on. It was our very first funding, actually.”
Von Rosenberg said having a support network of knowledgeable people who have been through building businesses was key. BRINK partnered Paul Bessire, founder of the digital insurance platform MGT Insurance, with the EmpathEQ founders.
“Throughout our early phases, we would meet weekly, and he always had a lot of great feedback and ideas. And, you know, the only motivation is to see you be successful,” Von Rosenberg added.
Monahan explained how the platform works. Students interact on screen with an AI-generated patient, family member or healthcare colleague in a variety of scenarios. Similar to a Zoom call, the platform uses the computer’s camera and audio, and records the session. It also uses emotion recognition technology to measure nonverbal communication and turns that into objective data.
“It’s measuring what you’re saying as well, and then it’s combining all that data and converting it into objective scores for how well did you interact, how well did you achieve the objectives of this particular conversation, and then it gives you feedback on how you might improve.”
The platform would also be useful for academic institutions and hospitals to collect data on their students and programs to present to healthcare accreditation bodies, Monahan said.
“At this stage we now have a product. We have the first scenario developed and are working on building the second scenario. We have this advisory council that has 13 members on it, mostly local nursing school deans, simulator center directors,” said Monahan.
All the members of the council have signed a letter of intent to pilot the EmpathEQ platform.
Storyaliz: A new (old) way to read
Author Ann Bauer and her husband John Gateley, founders of the interactive digital reading app Storyaliz, are just beginning their journey with BRINK.
When the Minnesota couple felt they were ready to take the next steps with their startup, they researched opportunities in several states before deciding to make the move to Northern Kentucky, Blue North and the BRINK program.
“We had a meeting with Nick [Cramer] maybe three weeks before we settled here, and he spent an hour and a half asking us just the best questions and really challenging us to think about things. We have a lot of experience between the two of us, but we have no entrepreneurship in our backgrounds, and he is invaluable because he always says the things that we never would have thought,” said Bauer.
Bauer and Gateley started with an idea, a love of reading and a desire to instill the reading habit in kids and adults alike. Most important was their commitment to boosting literacy in children, especially in the critical 10-to-14 year-old age group.
During and after Covid the couple became increasingly concerned about the period’s effect on young readers.
“During those pivotal years when they’re learning to read, these kids were out of school, and it has indeed really had an effect. Literacy rates have plummeted,” said Bauer.
Gateley, who has an IT background, had been developing apps for his personal use as a side hobby for years. They decided to create an application that would encourage reading for enjoyment for both children and adults.
The couple combined skills to develop Storyaliz, an application that could be described as “old-fashioned story telling for the digital age.” Storyaliz breaks classic and new works of fiction, nonfiction, essays and reportage into bite-sized sections, and presents them much the same way as the newspapers of old serialized chapters from novels.
For fun Bauer had been writing fiction on Twitter — a work of fiction in 40 tweets. Gateley suggested he could create a program that could do something similar.
“I happened to be working on a novel at the time, and he said, I’m going to put it in this format and see if we can get it strung out the way Dickens wrote. It’s the way Tolstoy wrote, the way Edgar Allan Poe wrote and all of these great writers,” Bauer said.
Gateley broke the novel up into smaller sections (about 900 words) and found it easy and enjoyable to read. He then decided to load in classic novels he’d always meant to read. He loaded in The Count of Monte Cristo, Treasure Island, Don Quixote. The shorter sections seemed perfect to draw in readers (young and old) accustomed to quick digital-age reads.
After speaking with their son and other millennial readers, they decided to add interactive elements including curated discussion comments that explain unfamiliar terms or references and add more context. Readers can add their own comments to the conversation. The comment section will be monitored to keep everything on track, and there’s an option to turn off the comments as well.
The founders selected four goals for their 90-day program including development of an MVP, or minimum viable product to get in front of readers for feedback. They also plan to begin cultivating a stable of writers to produce new content, establish a business framework to help navigate publishing rights and related legal issues and develop a marketing strategy.
BRINK: The little program designed to grow big things
Since it launched in July of 2024, nine businesses have completed the BRINK program, and three more are working toward their 90-day goals.
Entrepreneur and designer Nick Cramer was one of the first to come on board the BRINK program to serve as a traction advisor/mentor. He noted that the community requires a tapestry of different types of businesses to support a healthy economy and support for a broad range of businesses is available in Northern Kentucky.
The BRINK program is one that focuses primarily on technology-based businesses with the potential for broad impact on their industries. Businesses best suited to the program must be at an early stage of development where the influx of a small amount of capital and strong support and guidance will help them overcome hurdles and allow growth at a faster pace.
Being a part of BRINK and witnessing that growth has been wonderful, said Cramer.
“Just to see the growth, the progress that these companies make in short order, and then the growth that the founders make as entrepreneurs and as people is gratifying…It’s been a wonderful experience so far. And the truth is, we’re just getting started,” he said.To learn more about Blue North and BRINK, visit bluenorthky.com or reach out to our team here: bluenorthky.com/connect.
