Current & Past Partners

The Cade Museum for Creativity + Invention

The mission of the Cade Museum is to inspire creative thinking, future inventors, and early entrepreneurs. In its first phase, the museum will focus on the neuroscience of creativity, the Gatorade story, and America’s history of support for innovation. In partnership with the City of Gainesville (FL), the Cade Museum will be a cornerstone of the newly revitalized Depot Park—one of the most important environmental reclamation and urban renewal projects in the city’s history.

ThemeWorks, Inc.

ThemeWorks is a full-service custom fabrication firm combining the talents of artists, craftsmen and technicians to create engaging environments at theme parks, zoos, museums, and other attractions. They partner with entertainment industry developers, designers, and construction firms to produce the character facades, environments, interactive exhibits, and props that make themed destinations so memorable. With a diverse and talented team of experienced professionals and 54,000 square feet of production space, they have the capability to collaborate with clients at any stage of a project.

Reading Pals—United Way of North Central Florida

United Way of North Central Florida (UWNCFL) is focused on the building blocks that lead to a good quality of life—Education, Health and Income—because we all gain when children are successful in school, when families are financially stable and when people are healthy. UWNCFL devotes 70 percent of resources to long-term strategies and a large part of those efforts are focused on education. Our primary goal is to increase high school graduation rates, through investments in quality early childhood education and family strengthening programs (Success By 6).

Designed by The Children’s Movement of Florida, Reading Pals is a statewide early literacy program that provides volunteer mentor for young students. Reading Pals aims to improve students’ early literacy and social-emotional development. Collaborate with parents, teachers, and nonprofits to encourage elementary students in reading success.

Loss Prevention Research Council

The Loss Prevention Research Council (LPRC) is made up of over 70 retailers and 75 solution partners collaborating to develop effective loss and crime control solutions through extensive research. LPRC is founded on innovation, collaboration, and evaluation, and they conduct research to improve the performance of its members and the industry.

The Repurpose Project

The Repurpose Project is a non-profit community-based effort to divert useful resources from the landfill, redirect these items to the public for art and education, inspire creativity, and help us all rethink what we throw away.

Slice Engineering

Slice Engineering is an engineering company that pushes the boundaries of thermodynamics to help people print their dreams. The company is an additive manufacturing component supplier that produces 3D printer components.

Past Partner Information

ApexTek Labs

ApexTek Labs was born from a team of ambitious engineers trying to create the products they wanted to see in the world. As a team, their equipment, automation, and experience grew. The founders quickly realized that they were not the only team seeking to create amazing products.

Local innovators and entrepreneurs often have the drive and ideas to create something amazing, but want to avoid the overhead that comes with the equipment and team needed to develop a fully market-ready product. Knowing that, ApexTek Labs opened its doors to those looking to utilize our engineering, marketing, and fulfillment knowledge in moving their business to the next level. ApexTek Labs has worked with 100+ projects that are now collectively making millions as successful products and services. 

Sequential Artists Workshop

The Sequential Artists Workshop (SAW) is a 501 (c)3 non-profit grassroots comics school and creative community. We teach people how to tell stories and make comics in Gainesville, Florida, USA and around the world via our online courses and resources.

At SAW we help budding cartoonists discover their own path in visual storytelling. Students learn core comics techniques like storytelling, character creation, panel design, storyboarding, inking and lettering. In addition to a enthusiastic, supportive community of artists, resources at SAW’s headquarters in Gainesville, FL include studio space, a well-stocked comics reference library, a risograph printing station, and first-rate instructors armed with knowledge, talent, experience and generosity of spirit. SAW brings celebrated cartoonists from around the world to Gainesville to lecture, teach workshops, and exhibit their work. We host art shows, draw jams, talks, and other events, helping to make Gainesville a vibrant oasis of creativity in the region. Through a variety of online offerings, from courses to one-on-one instruction to comics mentorship groups, we’ve made the unique SAW experience available around the world. 

Cotton Club Museum & Cultural Center

A restoration project of a historic and culturally rich building. When fully restored this building will bring a wide variety of artistic and culturally significant venues to the area, provide education programs relative to the arts, provide a meeting place for the community, a site for weddings and other family-related activities and a place to preserve the history of African Americans in the Gainesville/Alachua County area.

PaleoGanic

All around the United States, people are searching for ways to live better. At PaleoGanic, our soups do more than just provide nutritious meals — we believe that your food should be your medicine, and your medicine should be your food. Each bowl of our flavor-packed soups supplies your body with the ingredients for strong, efficient immune system function to promote longer, healthier lifestyles. 

Omninox

Omninox is dedicated to helping students and teachers learn better together by creating highly collaborative, digital learning materials. 

Student Maid/MaidSuite

As a locally owned cleaning and concierge service, Student Maid™ caters to the unique needs of Gainesville residents. Student Maid™ is a full service company, offering virtually any cleaning or concierge service you can imagine. We provide house sitting, pet sitting, dog walking, party preparation and clean up, errand running, organization, and any other service that will help simplify your life.

Feathr

Feathr makes digital marketing software for live events. We package multiple layers of the adtech stack still out of reach for many companies (audience analysis, audience extension, DMP integration, etc.) into a simple, automated solution that allows live events to grow attendance, engagement, and digital sponsorship sales.

LovEd®

Our approach to love starts with you. We are passionate about empowering you, educating you, and helping you make smart love choices. Through unique programs and interactive training experiences rooted in research, we teach the importance of relationship education and emotional maturity to help you have success in love and in life. 

Alachua County Humane Society

Alachua County Humane Society is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping pets in Alachua County for more than 40 years. Together with our Maddie’s Fund Community Partners, we work closely with Alachua County’s municipal public intake shelter, Alachua County Animal Services to reduce the euthanasia rate from over 7,000 per year to under 1,000. Our goal is to become a community where no healthy or treatable animal is euthanized due to lack of space.

Aha Pure Foods

After conducting nearly thirty years of naturopathic research, Wayne teamed up with American Chef Alfie Crescentini to integrate the world’s most powerful medicinal herbs, spices and vegetables into the Standard American Diet both deliciously and naturally. Together they launched aha Pure Foods. With the goal to inspire and educate people about the healing powers of whole, plant-based foods, aha Pure Foods is here to be your “aha” health moment.

SCAD Media

SCAD Media, LLC is a multifaceted advertising and communications agency offering an infinite spectrum of creative services including website design & production, video production, animation, content generation, and digital consulting.

Front Street Commercial Real Estate Group 

Front Street is a boutique, full service, commercial real estate service firm offering its clients brokerage, leasing, property management, and insurance solutions. We are invested in our clients, the community and in the commercial real estate industry. Through our INVESTED program, we maximize our impact in the communities we serve through action and leadership. Our mission is to impact our community, clients, and industry by doing commercial real estate differently. Our vision is to serve a select group of owners and users of commercial real estate by leveraging the experience of our specialized, collaborative, team and to impact our community through investment in cause-related organizations.

Shadow Health

At Shadow Health, we are in the business of learning. We create leading-edge educational technology for learners. But we’re learners, too. We have a heart for learning.

A heart for learning means that Shadow workers have never fully arrived. We are constantly taking in feedback from customers and end-users, increasing our understanding through thought-leaders and subject matter experts, listening and learning from one another to iterate and ship better and better product.

Every team member here adds value to our understanding, and every team member is a potential source for new insights and innovations based on their interactions with our customers and contacts around the world. Because we continuously deliver improvements in our products, Shadow as a company has to continue to learn. That means every one of us has to continue to learn and share our learning, as well. Every single worker at Shadow is a learner. 

AxoGen

AxoGen Inc. seeks to provide surgeons with solutions to repair and protect peripheral nerves, as well as provide solutions to measure and monitor nerve function. The company has created and licensed a unique combination of patented technologies and has a rich pipeline of new products to change the standard of care for patients with peripheral nerve injuries.

AxoGen (AXGN) is the leading company focused specifically on the science, development and commercialization of technologies for peripheral nerve regeneration and repair. We are passionate about helping to restore peripheral nerve function and quality of life to patients with physical damage or discontinuity to peripheral nerves by providing innovative, clinically proven and economically effective repair solutions for surgeons and health care providers. Peripheral nerves provide the pathways for both motor and sensory signals throughout the body. Every day, people suffer traumatic injuries or undergo surgical procedures that impact the function of their peripheral nerves. Physical damage to a peripheral nerve, or the inability to properly reconnect peripheral nerves, can result in the loss of muscle or organ function, the loss of sensory feeling, or the initiation of pain.

SharpSpring

SharpSpring helps thousands of marketing agencies and small- and medium-sized businesses in more than 50 countries. We’re committed to helping our customers—real people working to grow their companies—achieve success. SharpSpring has a startup atmosphere, but we’re way past the startup phase and we’re growing like crazy. We’re looking for the best and the brightest to join us—people who are committed to their work, confident in their strengths, and ready to help us grow. 

Just a few years ago, SharpSpring had four people in our Gainesville office. They’ve jumped to 150 and have their sights set on 250. They’re looking for people who like working in small teams, but are excited about being part of a global organization.

We Are Neutral

We Are Neutral is an environmental nonprofit that helps businesses and individuals understand, reduce, and offset their carbon footprints. We accomplish this through environmental education and hands-on carbon reduction/offset initiatives. Establishing businesses and individuals as carbon neutral leaders allows us to weave sustainability into existing frameworks while directly improving the communities around us.

WHOA GNV Podcast

Hosted by Collin Austin, founder of New Scooters 4 Less, and Michael Dees, the WHOA GNV Podcast shares the stories of whoa-inspiring entrepreneurs and business people every Monday. Centered on Gainesville, the podcast also occasionally features guests from outside of the Greater Gainesville Area.