Safire wins the 2024 PYA Ballard Innovation Award

Statheros secured second place and Whisper Aero secured third place.

Five entrepreneurs took the stage on Wednesday afternoon for the 4th annual  PYA Ballard Innovation Award. It is a prestigious pitch competition resulting in the largest gift of cash and in-kind services available to start-ups in East Tennessee.

The award honors Tom Ballard, PYA’s Chief Alliance Officer, and a well-respected East Tennessee entrepreneurial community member. An East Tennessee native, Tom spent more than four decades building relationships for the University of Tennessee System and Oak Ridge National Laboratory throughout the region, state, and nation before joining PYA in 2012. He is the Editor and Publisher of teknovation.biz.

Safire pitched the company’s patented Li-ion advanced battery safety technology, which prevents explosion/fire through an instantaneous liquid-to-solid transformation. Andrew Hanna, the company’s Head of Product, explained how the additive is drop-in to manufacturing and is currently being implemented in prototypes for specific use cases.

Safire is based out of Knoxville and has a lot of potential to scale with the influx of lithium-ion battery use. They are looking to hire local workers in the region and have partnerships with Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Most notably, in 2023, Safire was selected by AFWERX for an additional $1.25 million SBIR Phase II award. 

Statheros was selected as the second-place winner, securing $10,000 in in-kind support from PYA, and Whisper Aero took third place, securing $5,000 in in-kind support.

The judges for the competition were Drew Everett, Bush Brothers & Company, Dr. Maha Krishnamurthy, University of Tennessee Research Foundation (UTRF), Jorge Sanabria, Expoquip, Anca Timofte, Holocene, and David Youngblood, Strategic Acquisitions Group (SAG), LLC.