The following article on Bennit AI was featured in Impact magazine and written by Beth W. Orenstein 

Entrepreneurs: when pitching to investors, you need to stay focused on only a few key items. While most likely you will be asked about many different aspects of your business, there are three elements you need to understand and be able to discuss in depth and with clarity. Most entrepreneurs would prefer to discuss their product or business idea, because that's what they've been focused on developing for months or years. But investors only have one goal—making a return on their investment.

It all began at a funeral home on Cleveland’s west side. The funeral director wanted to help families with the grieving process when not all members could travel to attend the service. He asked his tech-savvy friend Gordon Daily to help.

Every year nearly 800,000 people in the United States have a stroke. One-third of the survivors experience vision loss. This team plans to give them back their sight.

Next month the Innovation Fund will announce the latest group of companies to win funding awards. This money is usually the first market validation that a new business idea has the potential for success. But there are a number of reasons why a good idea might not be awarded funding—at least not on the first attempt.

Every startup that’s raising money needs to start somewhere. For startups in Northeast Ohio, that place is the Innovation Fund. That’s where Doug Carr brought his company.

Cleveland Whiskey is one of Northeast Ohio’s most successful and well-known startups. The company has raised more than $2 million, perfected a disruptive technology that dramatically accelerates the maturation of distilled spirits, and sold more than 200,000 bottles of its whiskey around the world. 

“VR is not a trend. VR is the sandbox the future will be created in.”

Todd Doehring spent years working as a scientist at the Cleveland Clinic and as a professor of Bioengineering at Drexel University. His projects centered on images and micro-testing systems. He wanted to make them work better for doctors and other scientists. Todd researched and taught biomechanics of soft tissues and microscopy.

If you’re running a startup, chances are you’ll need to know how to raise capital.  You need to know how to find the right potential funding sources and once those sources are identified, how to increase your odds to get funding from those sources.

Beth Potratz owns an eharmony.com of sorts for truckers. Not for love, but for matching truck drivers with jobs they will love. The human resource expert was working on driver recruitment solutions for a trucking industry client when she spotted a two-way challenge: employers couldn’t find the best-fitting drivers and drivers couldn’t find the best-fitting jobs.

Some growing startups are flashy, hit social media hard, and make headlines in Inc. or Entrepreneur. Others grow in a quieter, more conservative way. David Levine built Wireless Environment like that.

This guest blog was contributed by Andrew Bennett, co-founder of KnowledgePost and $25,000 Innovation Fund award winner. It's a firsthand perspective on the Innovation Fund application process. 

As virtual reality continues to make headlines as it floods into the main stream tech scene, one startup recently funded by Innovation Fund Northeast Ohio is hoping virtual exercise follows suit.

This month, the Innovation Fund announced its latest funding round, injecting $250,000 into seven Northeast Ohio startups. This cycle was a first for us—it was our first venture into gaming technology.

Every quarter a handful of entrepreneurs are pitching their companies to the Innovation Fund investment committee. That same day, the committee decides which companies will receive between $25,000 and $100,000 to advance their technologies.

The founding team of Renewable Carbon & Electric is trying to change how we produce energy and make products. With a recent $25,000 Innovation Fund award, the company will continue to test the wood-based carbon products they hope will help reduce the environmental problems facing the world today.

You know the old saying, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again?” Well, it’s pretty fitting for the Innovation Fund’s application process. On average, it takes entrepreneurs two to three attempts before they win funding. Surprised? I’m not.