Ryan Bove just wants a beer. Unfortunately, he is on a gluten-free diet for health reasons, so the choice isn’t exactly thirst quenching. Why, he wonders, aren’t there more gluten-free brews?
He calls his childhood friend, Doug Foster, who has been gluten-free for most of his life. They are soon brewing in an apartment near campus, the incarnation of Aurochs Brewing. Bove soon tests their cold ones with beer drinkers: “We have it in a local microbrewery, and the brewers have said that they wouldn’t know it was gluten-free if we hadn’t told them.”
The company is moving to a Pittsburgh storefront, in part through the support of CMU’s Open Field Entrepreneurs Fund, which awards $300,000 to six startup companies founded by recent alumni. Of the 2013 recipients, Bove (TPR’12) has the lone food and beverage company. The other recipients are:
- Kelly Collier (E’11), ActivAided Orthotics, includes a line of postural training apparel to eliminate back pain
- Doug Bernstein (E’11), PECA Labs, producing the first valved conduit specifically designed for pediatric heart conduit reconstruction
- Tom Matta (E’07, TPR’07) and Mike Ressler (CS’02), StatEasy, offering a program for high school and college sports teams that simplifies the task of managing statistics and videos. More than 120 teams use their service
- Alexander Soto (E’11) and Matthew Bauch (E’12), Tunessence, a virtual guitar teacher that combines audio processing software with instructional video in order to replicate the experience of an in-person lesson
- Scott Sykora (A’12), Pixite, a software development company focused on photography apps that will simplify sharing and organizing albums across computers, tablets, and smartphones
The fund was established by Flip Video Camera creator Jonathan Kaplan (TPR’90) and his wife, Marci Glazer.
Related Links:
Tepper School of Business
Greenlighting
Greenlighting 10 Startups
Our Companies-Open Field Entrepreneurs
