The Southern Startup Report is a bi-weekly publication with curated news and information to support the southern startup ecosystem.
October is here. Nationally, the IPO market spent September holding its breath ahead of Anthropic's expected listing, and Holtec Nuclear and Bamboo Insurance Services both pushed back their plans, citing market conditions. The South didn't wait around. Miami landed a nine-figure stablecoin round and, oh, an entire Carnegie Mellon campus. Alabama's new venture studio launched its first two companies, Mississippi introduced nine CoBuilders, and New Orleans crowned a new Open Season champion. Here's what's new since our last issue.
The Southern Startup Report is a bi-weekly publication with curated news and information to support the southern startup ecosystem.
Founder Office Hours
Raising your first round, planning your next one, or starting to think about an exit? SSR partner Cara Stone, LLP has helped companies across the South raise capital, scale, and exit, and its team is offering free office hours for founders who want a sounding board. Bring questions about fundraising strategy, investor introductions, deal terms, or what investors in your space are looking for right now.
Reach out here to grab a time.
Louisiana
Nuclear power startup Applied Atomics, co-founded by two former SpaceX engineers, is putting its headquarters and training center in the Bywater. The company plans to build small modular reactor power plants and will spend more than $8 million converting an 18,500-square-foot industrial building on Chartres Street. In Lafayette, Opportunity Machine welcomed 13 startups into its fall Builder 1.0 pre-accelerator. Only three are software companies, and the rest are applying tech to energy, manufacturing, agriculture, and the trades. Over at Tulane, OralExam.ai won first place ($3,000) and People's Choice at Open Season for its AI examiner that quizzes students out loud on the papers they turned in, with Usufruct taking second and Loratone third.
Alabama
Birmingham's Innovate Alabama Venture Studio has launched its first two companies. The studio is run by Harmony Venture Labs, led by Copysmith AI founder Shegun Otulana, and it builds startups around problems that established Alabama industries already understand better than anyone. PackPay, with Regions Bank as an early investor, helps finance teams at consumer packaged goods brands find and recover short payments from retailers. DealTree, backed early by Alabama private equity firm Tenet Partners, uses AI to help smaller PE firms find and evaluate deals with resources usually reserved for bigger shops. The studio's companion Venture Studio Fund is supplying early capital, and the goal is at least 10 venture-backable companies over three years. Alabama corporations with an industry problem worth building a company around can reach Trevor Newberry at trevor@harmonyventurelabs.com about becoming a partner.
Arkansas
The Venture Center wrapped the fourth cohort of the Arkansas Lithium Technology Accelerator (ALTA) with Demo Day at The Record in Bentonville on September 23. The event capped three weeks that took the companies from El Dorado and Magnolia to Little Rock and Northwest Arkansas. This class covered the battery supply chain end to end. Dallas-based ACT-ion Battery Technologies is building a continuous manufacturing process for cathode active materials. Princeton University spinout Princeton Critical Minerals is developing more efficient ways to pull lithium and other critical minerals from brine. MIT-founded Arcam is working to make lithium iron phosphate battery recycling economically viable. ALTA is backed by Standard Lithium, the University of Arkansas, AEDC, and the Walton Family Foundation, with sponsors including ExxonMobil and Tetra Technologies.
Florida
Miami had quite a week. Citadel founder Ken Griffin is committing $2 billion, part of a record $3 billion gift, to bring Carnegie Mellon University Miami to a 35-acre campus in Wynwood. Groundbreaking is planned for 2027, the first students arrive in 2028, and enrollment will eventually top 3,500. The campus will be organized around challenges like health, national security, and energy instead of traditional departments, with research labs and venture studios built in. That is about as direct a pipeline into the startup scene as a university gets. The same day, cross-border fintech Jeeves announced a $110 million equity round led by CoinFund, with Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase Ventures, and Y Combinator among the participants. Jeeves has quadrupled revenue over 14 months, and its stablecoin volume went from almost nothing to a $1.5 billion annualized run rate in eight months. The new money expands its stablecoin card from 25 to 35 countries and opens a Madrid office. Over in Tampa, Scholar Education raised a $2 million seed round led by Gainesville's OneSixOne Ventures for its platform that pairs AI with licensed psychologists to speed up special education evaluations.
Georgia
The 2026 Atlanta Startup Awards finalists are in, and Startup Atlanta will celebrate them on Monday, October 12 (5-8:30 p.m.) at the Biltmore Ballrooms. Categories include Mentor of the Year, Pivot of the Year, VC of the Year, Angel of the Year, and Best New Deal, and tickets cover a seated dinner, drinks, networking, and the ceremony. Corporate venture platform Engage also named the eight startups in its 17th cohort. The class leans heavily into AI and security and includes Atlanta's own 4Earth, which builds smart water reuse and AI-powered factory intelligence for industry. And Atlanta's newest angel group, Women on the Cap Table, wrote its first check this week, backing Cincinnati-based AI product intelligence platform Narratize.
Mississippi
Innovate Mississippi introduced its 2026 CoBuilders cohort, nine companies built around problems their founders know firsthand. CodifyAI (JR Cunningham) is an AI medical coding copilot that flags errors and likely denials before claims go out, an idea that came from helping a rural clinic in Aberdeen get its billing running. Precision Heat Technologies (Michael Brown), founded by University of Mississippi Medical Center researchers, is developing a compact patient-warming device that works through the palms and soles. Vicksburg's Clarus Labs (Max Wamsley) delivers on-site food oxidation testing in under 15 minutes. Numadx (Paul Thomas) makes adjustable pneumatic shoe inserts using technology originally developed for NFL helmets. ProSentra (Troy Vennon) has built an operating system for running cybersecurity programs, and CardFlow Financial (Chelsea Rogers) lets consumers make one payment across every credit card. Rounding out the class are Beibeaux Sol (Jennifer Jackson Penick), with funding-readiness infrastructure for nonprofits, Tax Assembly (Jae Cho), with real-world accounting cases for the classroom, and Sixer (Shahmir Siddiqui), North America's first end-to-end cricket platform. That's cricket the sport, not the insect, as Innovate Mississippi helpfully clarified. The cohort pitches at CoBuilders Pitch Day during the Accelerate Conference, November 10-11 in Flowood. One CoBuilders alum is already moving up. Illuminations Literacy Solutions, maker of the AI oral-reading platform VTO Reading, was selected as a showcase company for Venture Atlanta (October 14-15), fresh off closing nearly $500,000 in seed funding.
North Carolina
Durham's Front Porch Venture Partners released the first-ever Southeast Startup Founder Pulse Survey, polling 72 founders across nine states. The results will sound familiar to anyone who reads this newsletter. Founders rated confidence in their own businesses 86.5 out of 100. They gave the broader ecosystem 61.8, access to capital 50.7, and the speed and transparency of fundraising just 36.4. In other words, the companies are ready and the capital is still catching up. On the calendar, the North Carolina Technology Association has named finalists for the 2026 NC TECH Awards, with the gala set for November 16 in RTP. NC IDEA's Ecosystem Summit returns to Lumina on Wrightsville Beach November 12-13, and the group hotel rate closes October 12.
South Carolina
Charleston has a new source of early checks. Longleaf Angels launched as a member-led investing community of investors, operators, and ecosystem builders, writing checks from friends-and-family rounds through Series A for companies in South Carolina and across the South. Up the road, Tech Week Greenville packed 11 events into September 20-26 across Greenville and Simpsonville, including a theater-style pitch competition at the Camelot Theater where founders competed for the Tech Innovation Grant. Charleston equestrian tech startup HorseSpot will also represent the Palmetto State at Venture Atlanta later this month as one of the 99 companies selected for the conference.
Tennessee
Basalt Health raised a $20 million Series A led by NEA, with Frist Cressey Ventures and 25m Health participating, bringing its total funding to $24.5 million. Its AI reads post-acute care referrals, whether they arrive by fax, portal, or EMR, and checks them against clinical and payer criteria. At Lifepoint Health, median processing time dropped from 8.5 minutes to 1.2. Tennessee founders with a recent federal award should also mark their calendars. LaunchTN's SBIR/STTR Matching Fund opens October 5-16 and matches up to 50% of a federal award: up to $100,000 for Phase I and $300,000 for Phase