Erie’s Startup Ecosystem Continues to Accelerate with 8 Companies Selected for the Spring 2026 TechCelerator
Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Central and Northern Pennsylvania, in partnership with the Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority, today announced the 8 companies selected for the Spring 2026 TechCelerator – Sponsored by ECGRA. The TechCelerator is an intensive, cohort-based accelerator designed to help early-stage startups and small businesses refine their business and technical models, validate markets and prepare for growth and investment.
The announcement will be formally celebrated at an upcoming press event at Radius CoWork 1.5 at their new home at 900 State in Downtown Erie. The event will highlight the continued collaboration between regional organizations working to build a seamless entrepreneurial ecosystem in Erie County, PA and introduce the 8 Spring 2026 TechCelerator cohort companies; 4 of which are building their businesses at Radius:
- Mudget | Josh Burgess: A personal finance application that combines the clarity of modern financial dashboards with the motivation and learning mechanics of a game. It pairs automated financial data visualization, similar to tools like Rocket Money, with gamified progression, challenges, and bite-sized financial lessons inspired by Duolingo (A Member of the Radius Community).
- Lake Erie Trophy Fishing | Destin Demarion: A comprehensive resource (app) for those with the narrow focus of fishing while also offering functions to enhance the users ability to quickly vet conditions, find key points of interest, and shift them to the things they and their families will be most interested in, all within one platform.
- CiS | Kevin Marz: A cloud-based demand orchestration platform designed to improve alignment between enterprise training demand and available supply across learning partners. The platform functions as an intelligent routing layer that provides visibility into training needs and available capacity, helping organizations identify options, coordinate schedules, and streamline booking workflows (A Member of the Radius Community).
- KnightCode | Dylan Knight: OrderFlow is a fully integrated, multi-sided ordering platform built exclusively for independent cafes and restaurants. It replaces the fragmented stack of POS software, third-party delivery marketplaces, kitchen display hardware, and courier logistics with a single system at a fraction of the total cost (A Member of the Radius Community).
- RetroRad | Sean Friedrich: Turns a cancer program’s own clinical history into outcomes intelligence. It allows a clinic to shine a light on its own data, analyze it, compare it to the literature and clinical trials, gain new insights through AI, and continuously grow from where the program has been, to where it wants to be. It allows oncology departments to move from anecdotally driven treatment decisions to clinically rooted treatment decisions, based on their own locally held data and to improve patient outcomes.
- DiveTrack | James Lundin: A web and mobile app (iOS and Android) that combines dive logging, trip planning, certification management, gear tracking, and AI-powered automation into one platform. It replaces the 5-7 disconnected tools that divers currently juggle.
- Stayx | Yash Kasini: A vertical SaaS company that builds deep, industry-specific software for underserved SMB markets. Rather than one product, StayX operates a repeatable playbook — identify a specialized industry running on broken or generic software, build an opinionated product for that exact workflow, get customers reliant on it, then expand (A Member of the Radius Community).
- Hard6 Solutions | Ivan Watts: Produces Company Health Assessments, independent reports that test whether a company’s public claims are structurally verifiable. The same methodology points in three directions depending on what the client needs.
Pictured: Robert Mulokwa (Ben Franklin), Josh Burgess (Mudget), Sherry Davidson (Ben Franklin), Ryan Nelson and Ivan Watts (Hard6 Solutions), Dylan Knight (KnightCode), Brian Slawin (Ben Franklin), Yash Kasini, (Stayx), Sean Fedorko (Radius Cowork), Kevin Marz (CiS), Perry Wood (ECGRA). Not Pictured: Sean Friedrich (RetroRad), James Lundin (Dive Track), and Destin Demarion (Lake Erie Trophy Fishing)…