Small business takeaway:
- Accelerators and pitch competitions have proven to be powerful growth engines for startups, offering lessons for small businesses aiming to scale. Startups LAMIK Beauty, fitness firm Aviron, and Measured telehealth tapped them to secure funding, refine business strategies, and expand market reach. These programs highlight the value of mentorship, customer insights, and strategic capital access for scaling businesses.
Early-stage startups tend to face a similar set of challenges, regardless of their industry: limited access to capital, low brand visibility, unproven business models, and few connections to experienced mentors who can help them avoid costly early missteps. For many founders, building a strong network, refining a viable concept, and raising enough capital to launch can take years. That’s time many young companies don’t have.
For some entrepreneurs, however, participation in startup accelerators and pitch competitions has helped dramatically shorten that timeline. The programs provide founders with expert guidance and structured support to sharpen their pitches, validate product-market fit, and prepare their businesses for growth.
Founders of businesses ranging from beauty brands to weight-loss services to gamified fitness platforms report gaining early funding, credibility, investor exposure, and hands-on mentorship—all within months rather than years.
CO— spoke with the founders of LAMIK Beauty, fitness company Aviron, and telehealth startup Measured on how accelerator programs helped them overcome early barriers to entry and position their companies for long-term survival and scale.
Accelerators as a launchpad: How Kim Roxie built LAMIK Beauty
Houston native and LAMIK Beauty Founder Kim Roxie was inspired by her mother and her sister, both of whom passed away from breast cancer, to create a makeup line of eye shadows, mascara, lip gloss, and other products made with nontoxic ingredients.
At 21, Roxie launched LAMIK (which stands for Love And Makeup In Kindness) as a brick-and-mortar store in Houston. After running the shop for 14 years, she pivoted to e-commerce, launching on Facebook Live.
At around the same time, Roxie participated in and won the Black Girl Ventures Pitch Competition, a nationwide contest and community funding event designed to help Black and Brown women-identifying entrepreneurs access capital, connections, and support for their businesses. It blends traditional business pitch formats with crowdfunding and community voting, meaning the audience helps choose winners by contributing financially to pitches they believe in. The experience led to LAMIK Beauty launching on ulta.com.
Roxie received $5,000 in funding through BGV, which also helped her move shipping in-house rather than having to rely on a third-party logistics company. BGV mentors from companies like PayPal and TikTok have been invaluable resources, she said.
The competition was a springboard to other competitions and accelerators that have helped Roxie secure needed funding and launch with more national retailers. In the summer of 2023, she was among the first cohort of Black women entrepreneurs from across the country in the W.E. Build accelerator in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The accelerator for women founders focuses on early stage startups that have raised less than $1 million in venture or angel funding. “We got mentors, made connections,” she said.
The following year, Roxie used the $25,000 in funding she received from W.E. Build and lessons learned to open a brick-and-mortar LAMIK Beauty store in Tulsa. Over the years, she’s also participated in Sputnik ATX, DivInc Pre-Accelerator, and SKU CPG accelerator, amassing an additional $120,000.
The money has been critical, especially since female-founded companies receive less than 3% of VC funding, and Black women even less. But, “the biggest benefit of the accelerators really has been the community,” Roxie said, and helping to get other big brands to take notice of LAMIK Beauty.
In August 2025, a LAMIK Beauty team member secured a pitch meeting with Nordstrom and the brand launched on nordstrom.com shortly after. The brand holds trunk shows in-store. Roxie hopes to ultimately sell her products on Nordstrom shelves, too. Last year, 35 Hy-Vee stores across Kansas, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Minnesota began selling her products. The brand will launch in-store in JC Penney in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas this spring.
“We’re concentrating on growing and scaling right now, and we’re working on new products,” Roxie said. “And, we’ve got some innovation in the pipeline. Even with last year being a different kind of year for a lot of businesses, with many closing, we actually grew with our retail footprint.” Over the last two years, sales have doubled, she said. “And we’re still growing, and we’re thankful.”
[Read more: How 3 (Very Different) Startups Landed on Walmart’s Shelves]
Aviron Founder Andy Hoang on turning zero into millions: ‘The doors all opened up’
For Andy Hoang, Founder and CEO of gamified fitness company Aviron, participating in Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator meant going from zero funding to raising millions. “Once we got into Y Combinator, the doors all opened up,” he said.
Hoang, a video game aficionado as a child, committed to starting a company that would transform exercise into an experience people love after noticing how hard it was for so many people to motivate themselves to work out. His idea for a business that would mesh rowing with a gamified experience required significant capital to invest in hardware. As he built his business, he called over 100 venture capitalists, with little luck.
From 2018 to 2021, Hoang forged ahead with the business. He built and sold the first gamified rower on the market and grew Aviron to over $1 million in revenue. With that milestone achieved, he was accepted into Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 program.
Shortly after his acceptance was announced, a VC who had previously declined to fund him, but said to keep in touch, called him wanting to invest in the company.
During Hoang’s three-month Y Combinator experience, he learned how to craft the best story for his business and build a winning pitch deck. At the end of the program, participants deliver a one-minute pitch in front of hundreds of potential investors. Y Combinator takes a percentage of a founder’s company in exchange for the experience.
“The experience prepares you to raise capital, and I got to build my network,” Hoang said. “It was also quite easy to get meetings with investors when you’re coming out.”
Hoang links around 120 additional investor meetings he set up directly to his accelerator experience. He raised around $4.5 million out of the program, then over $18.5 million through a Series A funding, followed by $7.5 million more in venture debt.
The company has used funding to hire more staff (the brand went from eight to 90 employees in a handful of years), design new products, and do trade shows. “With funding, you can be very experiential and hire a ton of people and invest in a lot of different things,” he said. “The company that succeeds isn’t the one that picks the best idea, it’s the one that tests all of the ideas. You’re really trying to find those wildly successful ideas, and having the capital allows you to test your ideas.”
Now, Aviron sells bikes and treadmills in addition to rowers. It’s continuing to grow in the double digits, it has over 50,000 members using its products, and its retention metric is over 98% a month for paid subscriptions.
“What did Y Combinator make possible? Everything,” Hoang said. “It was the best decision I ever made. It literally changed the trajectory of my life.”
[Read more: How Startups Are Taking Bold Bets in Underserved Markets — From End-of-Life Services to Discount Travel]
Accelerators and pitch competitions have proven to be powerful growth engines for startups, offering lessons for small businesses aiming to scale.
Measured’s Monji Dolon on fueling growth via customer feedback
Monji Dolon applied to Y Combinator for three years before getting into the program to work on his startup, Measured, a telehealth company focused on metabolic health and longevity.
The company helps people manage chronic metabolic conditions like obesity while supporting long-term health through personalized treatment plans that combine prescription medication, nutrition guidance, and ongoing clinical care. The company now works with thousands of patients across 35 states.
Dolon worked for years at a handful of tech startups, including Spire Education, UniversityNow, and UserTesting. He always wanted to start his own company and had a few ideas, but nothing took. Then, he and a friend launched a side project, an early-days version of Measured, to help pay their bills.
“Pretty quickly, it became evident that a lot of people wanted this,” Dolon said. Measured started to make revenue and gained traction over a six-month period.
During the accelerator, Dolon learned how to better understand customers and their pain points to deliver what they want. He and his business partner, Frankie Brannon, began to tie every business decision to customers. YC also helped them establish clear metrics to strive for. Measured subsequently raised around $3.4 million during its seed round. The money made it possible to hire more team members, expand into telehealth, and invest more heavily in paid media as the brand scaled nationwide. It generates millions a year in revenue and grew by 30% over the past year.
“The biggest thing YC tells you is to talk to your users, they drill that into you time and time again. It’s something that a new entrepreneur tends not to think about a lot,” he said. “YC is a true accelerator—it will pour fuel onto that fire and help you rocket-ship away. It definitely transformed the business.”
Dolon still leans on the rich network of founder peers and investors he developed during his accelerator experience, and he helps founders applying to YC fine-tune their applications. “You apply for an accelerator if you truly think it’s going to help your business,” he said. “Accelerators can, and do, help. But even if you don’t get in, you should be hell bent on succeeding with your business.”
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