2026 Cohort
Techstars Chicago 2026 Company Lookbook
CloudReno
AI-enabled renovation roll-up
- Construction Tech
- AI/ML
Chicago, IL
Kitchen and bath remodeling is a $70B market across the US, almost all of it independent, owner-run companies. Around 5,000 are owned by boomers nearing retirement with no succession plan, each profitable but doing under $1M in EBITDA. Private equity owns less than 2% of the market because it's too fragmented to chase. So thousands of good businesses risk closing instead of changing hands.
CloudReno acquires, automates and scales kitchen and bath remodeling companies. We use AI to grow margins from 10% to 40% by automating procurement, bookkeeping, marketing and design. So far we've found 400 targets, met 80, and signed 5 LOIs, all in Chicago, on the way to three acquisitions in 18 months.
Brad Doering: A decade in renovation. Over 1,000 projects delivered. Built two 8-figure tech-forward renovation companies.
Myles Chase, CPA: Runs finance and operations. CPA out of KPMG with real estate roll-up experience.
Soheil H: Built and sold two software companies. Most recently at Shopify. Builds our AI automation.
ForgeBee
Automated honey bee production & pollination technology
- Agtech
- Robotics
- AI/ML
Champaign, IL
Global pollinator populations are declining at unprecedented rates due to disease, pesticides, climate stress, and the limitations of traditional beekeeping. In 2024 alone, an estimated 60% of managed colonies were lost, resulting in over $200M in annual losses for beekeepers and crop producers. Pollination shortfalls reduce yields, increase costs, and threaten the stability of global food production, with experts warning conditions may worsen significantly over the next 5–10 years.
ForgeBee is developing a patented, automated system for honey bee production, distribution, and pollination that removes bee rearing from the environmental stressors driving colony collapse. The system integrates three components: an AI-enabled Queen Monitoring Cage (QMC), an Automated Bee Factory (ABF) that rears healthy bees at scale in a lab environment, and a Disposable Pollination Unit (DPU) that delivers highly efficient, fire-and-forget pollination in the field.
Adam Hamilton, PhD (CEO) – 15 years researching bees; led development of ForgeBee's core technologies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Gene Robinson, PhD (Chairman) – Over 40 years researching honey bees; member of the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Medicine; recipient of the 2018 Wolf Prize in Agriculture.
Kaizen Design
Enterprise building standards governance platform for healthcare infrastructure
- Healthtech
- SaaS
- AEC Tech
- Enterprise SaaS
Kearney, NE
For a health system running a $500M capital program, $75M is wasted every year on rework, change orders, and preventable failures — roughly 15% of every project — driven by fragmented, outdated design standards managed today in PDFs, spreadsheets, and tribal knowledge no one trusts. Across the U.S., that's $10B lost annually on a $70B construction spend.
Kaizen is the system of record for healthcare design standards. We replace static documents with a living, governed platform that lets health systems collect, maintain, and enforce standards across every capital project — improving cost predictability, accelerating delivery, and ensuring consistency at portfolio scale.
Becky Holden (CEO) – over 20 years of healthcare design and construction experience
Joe Conley (CTO) – enterprise-grade backbone with strategic AI and data expertise
Spence DiNicolantonio (Technical Lead)
Josh Myers (Full Stack/DevOps)
Bryan Lentjes (Product & Customer Success)
Pam Cobb (Marketing)
LineSight
The decision intelligence engine for metal service centers
- Manufacturing
- AI/ML
- SaaS
Chicago, IL
Metal Service Centers create production plans using pen and paper, guess-and-check, and unscoped tech like Excel. This leads to super inefficient operations — the average service center faces 5-10% material loss, long planning times, and low factory throughput, resulting in millions of $ lost.
LineSight's software platform enables the world's first fully autonomous metal service centers – starting by automating production scheduling. LineSight analyzes center data to create schedules that reduce material loss from an average of 5% to less than 2.5%, saving centers millions of $ annually.
Bilal Yousuf (CEO) – CS @ UIUC, 2x founder, previous SWE experience at Geico
Ferzam Berki (COO) – 5+ YOE managing metal service centers, CS + Econ @ Purdue
CTO has PhD in combinatorial optimization (18 research papers), previously founded & exited Greycon (largest European competitor)
Offline
IRL advertising platform
- Adtech / Marketing Tech
Chicago, IL
Consumer trust has shifted offline as social media has lost its social value and AI-generated content has reduced trust in digital media. While advertisers increasingly want to engage consumers through real-world, in-person experiences, they still require digital-style attribution, measurement, and scale. Today, IRL communities lack the infrastructure to monetize attendance or attribute impact in the way online creators can for digital viewership.
Offline enables brands to sponsor IRL community events, at scale. Offline has standardized and streamlined the sponsorship process for 5,000+ active IRL community groups producing 10,000+ weekly events. Offline's platform matches communities to brands, streamlines the execution workflow in platform, and integrates event check-ins for offline attribution and post-event reporting, giving brands the ability to measure and scale their spend through a new offline marketing channel.
Andrew Roth (CEO) – Serial founder; founder of dcdx; Forbes 30 Under 30; Ad Age Gen Z'er to Watch; featured in WSJ, NYT, BBC, Vogue. Brands include: Google, Spotify, TikTok, Hinge, Snapchat, Chipotle & many more.
Chris Banks (COO) – Previously built and bootstrapped Ronin House, serving Logitech, Disney, Nike, Riot Games and more. Also served as a collaborator to Drake and his recently founded Playing For Legacy label.
Plexus
The observability and data stack for hardware teams
- Space Tech
- SaaS
- Robotics
Omaha, NE
Modern machines think. They're autonomous, software-defined, and mission-critical. But understanding and observability is hard. Plexus exists to make understanding physical systems faster, safer, and smarter for companies pushing the limits.
We are building inference and observability software for hardware systems. We are building high performance UIs with AI at the core — root cause analysis, telemetry streaming, anomaly detection and more.
Ann Schulte (CEO) – First hire at an aerospace company, where she built and shipped mission-critical systems from the ground up. Now building Plexus with deep firsthand insight into shortcomings of existing inference and observability tools.
Seated with Love
White-label wedding planning platform for venues
- SaaS
Ann Arbor, MI
After booking a venue, couples are forced to Google every step, juggle 5–10 disconnected tools, and manage planning through chaos (email threads, spreadsheets, scattered files). Meanwhile venues have no way to support a modern digital planning experience, get priced out of vendor software, and miss out on new revenue streams.
A Modern White-Label Wedding Planning Platform for Venues. Our Collaborative Platform makes every venue feel effortless to plan with & drives revenue with a 30% affiliate share.
Shawn Trznadel (CEO) – Founding Engineer at two venture-backed startups; Fortune 500 cybersecurity background supporting $185B+ in assets.
Chris Hart (CBO) – Scaled V1Sports.com to 2M users / 4,000 coaches; partnerships with Golf Digest, Sony, Samsung, GoPro; 20+ years scaling platforms.
Ares Blessios (Outbound Sales Specialist) – Relationship-driven sales + hospitality background; focused on outbound and client acquisition.
WattShift
Making devices energy-smart
- Cleantech
- Energy
- Grid
- IoT
Chicago, IL
There are more than 200,000 regulatory combinations governing behind-the-meter (BTM) electricity prices in the U.S. alone. Companies cannot accurately calculate the economics of installing or operating EV chargers, heat pumps, batteries, solar, or other distributed energy resources (DERs). Existing solutions address only fragments of this pricing complexity, forcing customers to integrate multiple data sources themselves.
WattShift provides a unified behind-the-meter electricity price signal via API, allowing customers to optimize device behavior to reduce energy costs, minimize waste, and generate grid services revenue. The company is building a proprietary utility tariff and rate database powered by LLM-enabled data extraction from complex regulatory filings.
Will Blanchard (Founder) – Former smart thermostat PM; 10 years in behind-the-meter energy.
Techstars Chicago · 2026 Cohort · 8 Portfolio Companies