Nicole Morris of Virginia Beach came out of more than ten years designing pitch decks, branding, and websites. The company has just launched a platform for startups to DIY their pitch deck, define their branding, and streamline their marketing efforts.
Graham Henshaw helps patients and caregivers better understand and act on what happens during medical appointments. It captures care conversations and turns them into plain-language visit summaries, clear next steps, and grounded follow-up questions.
Tia Hatcher operates as Compass & Code Hospitality, a performance-driven RV asset management company that turns underutilized RVs into income-producing short-term rental assets. The business generates revenue through occupied nights and high-margin add-on systems, using trained operators and standardized processes to maximize profitability. It then reinvests that cash flow into long-term real estate assets.
Katie Hudson of Virginia Beach is building a reliable, trustworthy AI agent to guide people through the complex health insurance industry, with a bootstrap go-to-market model focused on low-cost, self-funded pilots.
Karen Watts captures the chaotic, fragmented moment of moving and turns it into a portable, trusted record of a home that can be used across insurers, lenders, and service providers.
Hannah LaCon is developing wireless power technology designed to remove dependence on traditional wiring and enable more flexible, scalable energy delivery systems, backed by NASA commercialization efforts.
Brian Kelly of Virginia Beach is removing friction from warehouse docks with fixed cameras at receiving and shipping docks to read pallet and unit-load labels as material freight crosses the dock doors. Each read gets a decoded label, a timestamped photo, and is checked against the manifest, so mismatches surface while the trailer is at the door during unload, not three weeks later.” The system creates an evidence-based ledger and integrates with existing warehouse and ERP tools.
Brian Ongati gives small service businesses a free professional page so customers can find them and book in a few taps, with calendar sync and review collection built in.
Richard Chaing of Suffolk built the SandClaw, a designed and patented tool that allows you to pull posts straight up off the sand with ease. It includes a friction-engaged step so users can reach hardware on beach volleyball posts without a ladder. The same approach (PostClaw) works for fence posts, signposts, and more.
Vernon McDaniel of Gloucester built something deceptively simple. “We invented a patent-pending oyster knife unlike anything currently on the market — one that uses a secondary blade and an integrated finger guard to give the user more leverage and control at the hinge and protect both the hand holding the oyster as well as the hand holding the knife, thus reducing the chance of injuries commonly seen in oyster shucking.” The secondary blade still allows traditional technique. It just makes the job safer.
Letitia Griffin of Virginia Beach is a Hampton Roads-based mobile drug testing company offering DOT-compliant C/TPA services for employers and a women’s wellness panel called The Her Panel — designed to give women direct access to comprehensive lab testing without a doctor’s referral. The mobile model removes barriers of cost, access, and inconvenience.
Marc Weinberg of Virginia Beach is attacking a problem that scales with the internet itself. “We are an AI sentiment analysis application for comments and similar data. Our launch focus is on YouTube, providing automated discovery, acquisition, processing, and reporting of large-volume comment data. Our roadmap includes additional social networks, as well as variations on our core theme, to serve different verticals.”
Start Peninsula has been running this process for more than a decade. Founders pitch, get feedback, and either advance or leave with a clearer sense of what still needs work. The cash is real, but the larger point is the repetition.
“Start Peninsula was founded more than a decade ago to give entrepreneurs in Hampton Roads a place to pitch their ideas and see if they had any real traction,” said Tim Ryan of Start Peninsula. “Today, our winners receive $5,000 each, and every finalist walks away with $500. That’s $21,000 going directly back into the hands of founders every year.”
Past participants have raised millions. OccasionGenius, the program’s first successful exit, happened in 2025.
This year’s judges were Carlton Campbell (President and CEO, C7AI Solutions), Brittany Perfegoff (Co-founder, Where2Wheel), Chris Salandra (Operations Manager, 757 Collab), and John Paris (Williams Mullen attorney and co-founder of 757 Angels).
“We have high expectations for this year’s group, not just the winners, but every finalist and every founder who participated,” Ryan said. “History has shown us that big things happen when entrepreneurs step outside their comfort zones and tell the world what they’re going to build. The 757 is up to big things, and so are these companies!”
