New Horizon Precision secures top prize at the 865 Fest Startup Pitch Competition

New Horizon Precision secures top prize at the 865 Fest Startup Pitch Competition

The agricultural drone company, founded by recent University of Tennessee graduates, edged five other startups for the Judges' Choice Award. Youth STEM program Data Rook won the Crowd Favorite vote.

The New Horizon Precision team, led by co-founders Spencer Dore and Matthew Jones, walked off the stage with a big smile at Knoxville’s 865 Fest on Tuesday. The founders swayed the judges and pocketed $10,000 in non-dilutive funding to put toward their fast-growing agricultural drone business.

New Horizon Precision was one of six startups to take the stage for the annual Startup Pitch Competition, which is viewed in the East Tennessee entrepreneurial community as the pinnacle event highlighting the most prominent new enterprises in the area. This year, Comcast sponsored the Judges’ Choice Award ($10,000), and Carrasco-Trump sponsored the Crowd Favorite Award ($5,000).

It’s also a notoriously challenging competition to judge, given that all six founding teams represent drastically different industries. For example, this year, judges decided between physical deep tech product solutions and service-based businesses.

The judges for the competition included Rachel Mehta, Partner & VP of Sourcing for She’s Independent Investments, Michael Dirla, Principal at Greater Sum Ventures, and Mike Thibodeaux, VP of Business Services at Comcast.

The presentation followed a standard pitch competition format: a five-minute business pitch, followed by three minutes of questions from judges.

Agriculture in East Tennessee is often a battle against geography. Between steep slopes and unpredictable weather, traditional tractor-based chemical applications can be as dangerous as they are difficult. While technology may not be your first thought when you think about agriculture, New Horizon Precision, founded by Spencer Dore and Matthew Jones, is changing the narrative.

Both founders are recent University of Tennessee, Knoxville graduates.

“The day after my graduation, I started full-time deploying autonomous agricultural spray drones on farms across our state,” Dore explained. “I’m talking about a drone so capable it does things that only a tractor could do, but in ways a tractor could never.”

There are three main issues that New Horizon Precision drones solve:

In its first year, the company has served hundreds of farmers in 32 counties, delivering 115,000+ pounds of farm input to fields, and generating over $200,000 in revenue.

Watch our interview with the New Horizon Precision team leading up to 865 Fest!

For the last couple of years, Gustavo Alvarez-Suchini has been scaling up his STEM and sports program for youth athletes across the region. His company, Data Rook, runs footyLab, which reaches students of all ages and backgrounds across the Knoxville region, teaching them to code, build apps and analyze data drawn from their own soccer games.

footyLab can be administered at any school, camp, after-school program, or home-school co-op.

During a Data Rook session, students wear GPS trackers and cameras while they play soccer. The devices log every movement, speed and position on the field. Then the players head to the classroom to break down their own numbers and compare stats to their teammates.

Alvarez also already has a book full of repeat customers.

“People pay us, they come back, and they bring us the next customer. Our partners are our marketing,” he said.

Data Rook, in Alvarez’s words, “Make powerful learning feel like play.”

Watch our interview with the Data Rook team leading up to 865 Fest!

More than 9,700 water utilities across the United States are currently out of compliance with impending federal limits on PFAS or “forever chemicals.” By 2031, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will begin enforcing those limits, and utilities that fail to act could face fines of up to $70,000 per day. That leaves many water districts looking for a solution.

Aquafer Technologies says it’s ready to provide a solution in the form of a new resin that can filter these chemicals. The company already has a lab space at the Spark Innovation Center, a fellowship with the Innovation Crossroads program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and five paid pilots – including a phase two PFAS trial with the Orange County Water District in California.

“Our five-year goal is to supply a million liters of our resin as well as deploy 1,000 turnkey systems. That would represent a quarter billion dollars in revenue,” said Marton Krivan, Aquafer’s Engineering Lead on the stage. “And, we’re scaling… In the last five months, I’ve scaled up our production from a single liter per day to over 40 liters per day.”

While Krivan presented at 865 Fest, the company’s founder is Fuhar Dixit.

Watch our interview with the Aquafer Technologies team leading up to 865 Fest!

Applied 2D Materials’ founder, Alec Readel, is betting on hexagonal boron nitride as the new tool for material toughness. Readel’s goal is to use coatings to provide higher efficiency and uptime to industrial systems that experience fouling, corrosion, and high friction in their manufacturing.

When applied as a coating, hexagonal boron nitride (HBN) can withstand temperatures up to 1000˚C, withstand thermal cycling, and remain compatible with harsh chemicals and salts. Readel said these features would especially come in handy with applications like heat exchangers, aerospace, energy, and ultra-thin flexible metals.

Readel is also a fellow in the Innovation Crossroads program at ORNL.

“To date, we’ve raised about $600,000 in non-dilutive funding, thanks to Innovation Crossroads, Launch Tennessee, and an SBIR through the Office of Naval Research,” Readel said, sharing that he hopes to open up for a fundraising round sometime in 2027.

Watch our interview with the Applied 2D Materials team leading up to 865 Fest!

What if you could reprogram a material at the atomic level by moving individual atoms around? It sounds like something far off in the future, but the founder of AtomQ, Kevin Roccapriore, said the capability is within reach. This method can hypothetically create another route for engineering qubits, which are the building blocks of quantum.

“We are manufacturing at the atomic scale,” he said.

For his pitch, Roccapriore brought a prop, which allowed folks to see the size and (small) scale that AtomQ can operate at. He has been working on this technology for years, originally dating back to his time at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Watch our interview with the AtomQ team leading up to 865 Fest!

Sustainability has become a popular talking point in the fashion industry, and thrifting and secondhand sourcing have surged as more shoppers opt out of fast fashion. But the movement runs into a basic problem: Once a label is gone, so is the ability to trust, trace or responsibly manage a garment’s materials at the end of its life.

Brian Iezzi, founder of Fibarcode, is building a permanent textile label, “the thread that is read,” to fix that.

“We’re the first company in Tennessee to ever receive an NSF Fast Track Award for $1.6 million, and that’s really helped accelerate our growth,” Iezzi shared.

Additionally, he spoke of a partnership and pilot Fibarcode is currently working on with GS1 (the company behind US barcodes). The company is looking at moving away from 1D barcodes to the future of information transfer, which Iezzi said Fibarcode can help with.

That pilot will conclude with a whitepaper in about two months, showing the results.

Watch our interview with the Fibarcode team leading up to 865 Fest!

➡️ Check out the winners for the 2026 865 Fest Emerging Entrepreneurs Competition here.

➡️ Read the full-day 865 Fest recap from Teknovation’s Lindsay Turner!

➡️ Connect with Teknovation on LinkedIn.