The Fall 2023 cohort of the Sway for Future Accelerator program has officially begun. Over the next twelve weeks, seven technology startups will work through our holistic, mentor-driven curriculum — developing not just better products, but better businesses and better founders.
The Sway Accelerator supports early-stage founders with one-on-one expert mentorship, access to business resources, collaborative workspace, and a structured program designed to build strategies for sustainable personal and company growth. The program is structured across two tracks — Sway Start, for companies still finding their footing, and Sway Scale, for companies with proven traction ready to grow into their next stage — so that every founder is challenged at the right level.
This cohort reflects the breadth of innovation we see in the market right now — founders attacking communications infrastructure, climate behavior change, sustainability certification, cybersecurity risk, operational software, and sports data, all at the same time. That diversity is not accidental. It reflects our conviction that the next generation of high-impact companies will not emerge from a single sector but from the full spectrum of economic and social systems that need rebuilding.
Meet the Fall 2023 Cohort
Alpine Media Technology
Alpine Media Technology is a software development company that builds digital communication platforms for businesses and organizations to share information in real time. Founded by Jeff Connors, Freddie Paeyerl, and Gerrit VandeKemp, Alpine Media's technology sits at the intersection of internal communications and operational intelligence — enabling the kind of rapid, accurate information flow that large organizations require but rarely achieve. Their platform is already deployed across a range of business and institutional clients, and the Scale track is designed to help them accelerate that growth. www.alpinemediatech.com
Eduslate
Founded by Ron Hardman, EduSlate is a class and camp registration platform built with the nuance that the market actually demands: dynamic filtering, full-text search, and role-based access for both course participants and administrative staff. The core insight is that existing registration tools were designed for events, not for the ongoing, multi-layered complexity of education and training programs. EduSlate fills that gap with precision-built software that saves administrators time and gives participants a genuinely better experience.
Forevergreen Tech
Founded by Ethan Thompson, Forevergreen Tech is a climate technology startup working to make individual climate action as easy, engaging, and financially rewarding as possible. Their app, GreenCoins for iOS, gamifies sustainable behavior — turning everyday choices into measurable carbon impact, tracked and rewarded at the individual level. The thesis is straightforward and compelling: the biggest lever in consumer climate behavior is not guilt or information, but feedback loops and incentives that make the right choice feel good. Forevergreen is building that mechanism.
KKrisch Energy
KKrisch Energy has built an automated SaaS platform for sustainability performance diagnosis, certification, and green branding — designed specifically for businesses that want to understand and communicate their environmental performance credibly. The problem they are solving is both widespread and underserved: most businesses know they need to improve their sustainability profile but lack the tools to diagnose where they stand, set credible targets, or verify their progress in a way that investors and customers will trust. KKrisch turns that complexity into a structured, automated workflow.
Risk Gauge
Founded by Dustin Bolander and Mike Riggs, Risk Gauge automates significant portions of the cyber insurance underwriting process — giving insurers dramatically better data on the true cyber risk of a prospective insured. As cyber incidents have grown in frequency and severity, the insurance industry has struggled to price risk accurately, often relying on self-reported questionnaires that sophisticated threat actors know how to game. Risk Gauge replaces subjective assessment with objective, real-time data — making underwriters more confident and the market more efficient for everyone.
SnapSOP
Founded by Batina Aloisi, SnapSOP is a desktop and mobile SaaS platform that helps manufacturers create, manage, and share video-based Standard Operating Procedures. The problem is deceptively large: most manufacturing operations still rely on static, text-heavy SOPs that are poorly adopted, infrequently updated, and impossible to scale to a distributed workforce. SnapSOP replaces those documents with video-first procedures that accommodate multiple presenters, allow for rich content variety, and dramatically improve adoption through intuitive recording tools. For manufacturers focused on quality, consistency, and workforce development, SnapSOP is the format shift the industry needed.
Swimcloud
Founded by Greg Earhart and Ivan Manolov, Swimcloud is the data and analytics backbone for competitive swimming — helping organizations save time, eliminate administrative errors, and engage their athletes and fans by integrating data across recruiting, video analysis, race analysis, and meet management systems. What Swimcloud has built is not an app; it is the connective infrastructure layer for an entire sport's organizational needs. The Scale track will help them deepen platform adoption, expand their market footprint, and move toward the integrations that will make Swimcloud the indispensable operating system of competitive aquatics.
Two Tracks, One Standard
The Sway Start and Sway Scale tracks exist because good founders at different stages need fundamentally different things. A company finding its first hundred customers needs help with positioning, customer discovery, and hypothesis testing. A company with proven product-market fit and growing revenue needs help with operational discipline, team building, capital raising strategy, and the structural challenges that come with scaling fast.
What both tracks share is an uncompromising standard: we expect every founder in the program to work at the highest level they are capable of, to challenge their own assumptions, and to emerge from twelve weeks meaningfully stronger — as a founder, as a leader, and as a builder of something that matters.
"The diversity of this cohort is a feature, not a side effect. Climate tech, cybersecurity, sports data, manufacturing software — the best founders learn as much from each other as they do from their mentors. That cross-sector perspective is something you cannot replicate in a single-vertical accelerator." — Marcus Okonkwo, Director of Portfolio Development, Sway for Future
What Makes a Sway Accelerator Company
We receive hundreds of applications for each cohort. The companies that earn a spot share certain characteristics that experience has taught us to look for above all others.
The first is a founder who knows their problem with uncommon depth. Not someone who researched the market last year, but someone who has lived inside the problem — often for years — and developed insight that is genuinely hard to replicate. Every company in this cohort has that. The Forevergreen founder's understanding of the behavioral psychology of climate action, the Swimcloud founders' decade of operational experience inside competitive swimming organizations, the KKrisch team's understanding of the gap between sustainability intent and sustainability execution — these are not surface-level insights. They are the kind of domain knowledge that compounds over time into competitive advantage.
The second is coachability. A founder who comes in believing they already know everything has already peaked. The founders we select are strong-willed and confident — they have to be, to build something from nothing — but they are also genuinely open to the hard conversations that lead to clarity. That combination is rarer than it sounds, and it is the most reliable predictor of how much someone gets out of the program.
The third is a genuine commitment to building something that lasts — not a startup that optimizes for a quick flip, but a company with the potential for durable commercial success and meaningful positive impact. Every founder in the Fall 2023 cohort has articulated that commitment. Our job over the next twelve weeks is to help them build it.
Looking Ahead
We will be sharing updates on the cohort's progress throughout the program, and we look forward to introducing these founders to the broader Sway community — investors, mentors, customers, and alumni — as the weeks unfold. The work is just beginning, and we are proud to be part of it.
If you are interested in future cohorts — as a founder, a mentor, or a partner — we would love to hear from you at invest@swayforfuture.com.