Birmingham is landing on the tech startup map in a way that looks pretty different from what we usually see out there.
While the traditional model has founders chasing investors with an idea under their arm, a Venture Studio backed by the state of Alabama decided to flip the whole script — and the first results are already in.
Two startups were born inside the Innovate Alabama Venture Studio, a program developed in partnership with Innovate Alabama and Harmony Venture Labs, and both graduated from the program with confirmed investors from day one. The pitch is straightforward: build companies around real industry problems, with corporate partners involved from the very beginning.
The names are PackPay and DealTree, and each one tackles a concrete market pain point — one in the financial space for consumer brands, the other using artificial intelligence to supercharge private equity investment decisions.
But what makes this story interesting isn’t just the companies themselves — it’s the model that created them and what it could mean for Alabama’s innovation ecosystem in the years ahead. 👇
What is a Venture Studio and why it changes everything
A Venture Studio isn’t an accelerator, it’s not an incubator, and it’s not your typical investment fund either. The difference comes down to how companies are actually born inside it. In the traditional startup world, a founder has an idea, builds a company, and goes out hunting for accelerators and venture capital funds to help scale. The studio flips that logic on its head.
Instead of waiting for entrepreneurs to show up with ready-made ideas, the studio works side by side with corporate partners to identify high-potential ideas and accelerate them until they become companies capable of attracting investment. The studio itself validates the hypotheses, assembles the team, and builds the startup from scratch — with resources, mentorship, and capital already secured from the start. This eliminates a huge chunk of the risk that normally scares talent away from entrepreneurship, especially in regions still building out their tech ecosystems.
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The Innovate Alabama Venture Studio was announced in the summer of 2025. At the time of its launch, Shegun Otulana from Harmony Venture Labs noted that the studio model was the best fit for attracting capital and attention to a larger number of Alabama companies. And the logic makes total sense: with direct state support, innovation here doesn’t rely solely on private capital.
This combination of government backing and operational expertise from Harmony Venture Labs creates an environment where startups can focus on solving real problems without the immediate pressure of surviving financially in their first few months. It’s a model that has worked in other parts of the world but is still relatively rare in the United States outside of major hubs like San Francisco or New York.
For Birmingham specifically, this represents a real turning point. The city has been growing as a tech hub in recent years, with a solid foundation and operational costs way more accessible than Silicon Valley. The Venture Studio leverages exactly those advantages to build companies more efficiently and with a different risk profile — which attracts the kind of talent that might never have considered going the traditional entrepreneurship route. And the first two products of this process have very concrete names.
PackPay: simplifying finances for consumer brands
PackPay is an early-stage startup built to solve a very specific — and very real — pain point for consumer packaged goods brands, commonly known as the CPG segment. These brands, spanning everything from food to personal care and beauty products, deal with an extremely complex financial chain when it comes to getting paid correctly by retailers.
PackPay focuses specifically on helping these brands identify and resolve so-called short payments from retailers — situations where the brand receives less than what it’s owed — and recover revenue that often just falls through the cracks. Any company that has operated in this space knows the problem isn’t just selling, but making sure every single penny that was sold actually hits the bank account. And that’s exactly where the platform steps in.
Under the leadership of Jeremy Carter, PackPay has already brought in Regions Bank as one of its first investors. Having a financial institution of that caliber betting on the thesis says a lot about the project’s strength. When a startup is born with secured capital and a well-mapped market pain point, the path to its first customers tends to be a lot more direct.
The CPG segment, which moves trillions of dollars globally, has plenty of room for a solution that finally treats revenue recovery with the seriousness it deserves. With an integrated tool, brands save time, reduce losses, and can make much faster decisions — which in competitive markets can be the difference between growing or losing ground to a more agile competitor. Birmingham may have just given the market one of the most relevant financial tools for this sector in the coming years. 🚀
DealTree: AI in service of private equity
While PackPay focuses on consumer brands, DealTree was built for a completely different audience — but one that’s equally demanding. The startup uses artificial intelligence to help private equity funds find and evaluate potential investments far more efficiently.
Private equity funds deal with massive volumes of information: company reports, market data, transaction histories, sector analyses, and an endless list of variables that need to be considered before any investment decision. For decades, most of this work was done by human analysts, through long, expensive processes prone to biases that sometimes go unnoticed until they influence a decision worth millions of dollars.
DealTree enters this process precisely to speed up and sharpen the analysis of opportunities. The platform can process large volumes of data, identify relevant patterns, and generate insights that help investment teams make better-informed decisions in less time. This doesn’t mean AI replaces human judgment — it means AI does the heavy lifting of mining data so analysts can focus on what truly matters: strategic evaluation and negotiation.
The company also graduated from the studio with market backing. Tenet Partners, based in Alabama, came on as one of the first investors, and Ben Pollock recently joined the project as Entrepreneur in Residence at DealTree, according to information on LinkedIn.
In the current landscape, where private equity funds increasingly compete on speed when it comes to identifying and closing good deals, a tool like this has a very clear appeal. The time it takes a fund to analyze a deal can be decisive — and any advantage in that process translates directly into financial results. For Birmingham‘s innovation ecosystem, having a startup focused on AI for sophisticated financial markets is a clear sign of technological maturity. 🤖
A process built with patience and purpose
One thing that really stands out about this model is that nothing was thrown together on the fly. According to the Harmony Venture Labs team, readiness for launch comes down to three key factors: confidence in the customer need, confidence in the business and market opportunity, and confidence in the team that will carry the company forward.
The innovation cycle for PackPay and DealTree kicked off back in 2025, and each company developed at its own pace from there. In other words, there was no artificial rush to push the startups to market before they were ready. That kind of care is usually what separates projects that survive from the ones that disappear at the first stumble.
All of this work is guided by Catalyst, the strategic framework from Alabama’s Department of Commerce. This framework focuses on sectors with high local potential, such as financial technology, healthcare, logistics, industrial systems, and other innovation-driven markets. This isn’t a shot in the dark — it’s a calculated choice about where the state has the best chance of building competitive companies.
What this move means for Birmingham and Alabama
Seeing two startups graduate from a program with confirmed investors from the start isn’t something that happens by accident. It’s the result of a well-structured model, strategic partnerships, and a clear vision of what Alabama’s innovation ecosystem needs to grow sustainably.
As Mary Beth Grant, program director of the Innovate Alabama Capital Access Initiative, put it, the studio was created to transform the expertise and strengths of Alabama’s industry into new companies. The launch of these first two companies shows that the state can do exactly that. And more importantly, it demonstrates that a repeatable engine for company creation is being built — one capable of continuing to generate new businesses, attract investment, and sustain long-term economic growth.
For Birmingham, the impact goes well beyond these two startups. Every company that’s born inside this model and manages to grow sets an important precedent: it shows other local talent that it’s possible to build something meaningful without packing up and moving to the West Coast. It attracts more capital to the region, creates skilled jobs, and fuels a virtuous cycle that, over time, transforms the city into a real destination for anyone looking to build in tech. That kind of compounding effect is what separates ecosystems that stay on the map from those that fade after a hype cycle.
The Venture Studio model also sends an interesting message to other American states that still rely too heavily on traditional accelerators or venture capital concentrated in a handful of urban centers. When the government steps in as a strategic partner — not as a bureaucrat, but as a facilitator — the results can be surprising. Birmingham is proving in practice that quality innovation doesn’t need a San Francisco address to happen. And with PackPay and DealTree taking their first steps, this chapter is just getting started. 💡
