Maine-based Croft secured a $25,000 prize sponsored by Skowhegan Savings Bank at the Dirigo Labs accelerator’s second pitch competition in Waterville.
Based in Rockland, Croft creates high-performance buildings that actively sequester carbon from the environment. Founder Evan Ryan’s pitch featured plans outlining the company’s commitment to creating housing and sourcing materials from local farms, fields, and forests in Maine.
“At Croft, we make carbon-negative buildings made of all-natural materials for residential and commercial sectors. Built with our proprietary panel system, our buildings are fully customizable, super-insulated, vapor open, and designed to last for generations. Our mission is to reinvent the construction industry by demonstrating it’s possible to make buildings that improve the environment, structures that capture more carbon and greenhouse gasses than they produce,” said Evan Ryan, co-founder and principal of Croft, according to a news release from Dirigo Labs. “Training the next generation of tradespeople in this state is arguably as important to us as building better buildings. We plan to put 100% of this funding towards launching our new Croft Apprentice Program.”
Hosted at the Maine Film Center, 11 companies competed for the cash prize. The judging criteria included the company’s pitch delivery, capital strategy, innovation, team, and potential for driving economic growth and job creation across Maine. The 12-week program guided startups through a targeted curriculum to execute their project plans, and each cohort company worked with a curated board of local and national mentors from various industries. Seminar topics included utilizing public-private sector grants and economic incentives, customer acquisition strategies, capital planning, and intellectual property evaluation.
“What an asset the Dirigo Labs Accelerator Program is to local business start-ups and entrepreneurs, in offering viable information and coaching to help them grow,” said Dan Tilton, executive vice president of sales and customer relations for Skowhegan Savings. “These companies are not only full of great ideas but most of them go on to be successful and create jobs right here in the state of Maine and as a Maine-based bank, this is what we like to see and align ourselves in supporting. ”
Receiving the pitch competition prize, Croft was provided with a two-year dedicated desk membership to Bricks Coworking & Innovation Space in Waterville. In addition to Croft’s dedicated desk, each company participating in the cohort received a two-year floating desk membership to Bricks. The audience choice award was presented to Waterville-based SledTRX, a web-based snowmobile trail mapping application.
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