“The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the center of each and every town or city.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes
Today’s issue:
December 8, 2020
CHAT WITH AN INNOVATOR
BroadLoop helps contractors simplify dispatching and tracking 
Nick McRae and Max Kommor at the Vogt Awards
High tech and hot asphalt might seem like an odd combination, but it makes perfect sense to Nick McRae and Max Kommor. Coming out of the University of Louisville’s entrepreneurship MBA program, they created BroadLoop, a virtual fleet logistics and dispatch intelligence platform that brings material producers, contractors, and fleet operators together to drive down costs and increase job profitability. Louisville Future recently talked with McRae to learn more.
How did you come up with this concept?
McRae: Max worked in heavy highway construction, doing bridge rehabilitation work, sales, and project estimating. I had worked at a GPS startup company that was tracking K-12 school buses. When he was noticing dump trucks stacked up on a job site, he brought it to my attention, and I started to think about the obvious solution being fleet management.
When we dug into it, we realized contractors don’t own those trucks. Available GPS options are really not suitable because you typically wouldn’t buy a GPS unit and put it on somebody else’s truck. So we built a sort of upside-down GPS model so that you have a mobile app where the trucks will allow you to see their location, but only temporarily.
Why is it important to keep track of dump trucks?
McRae: The worst thing for road contractors is that they don’t have enough material available to put into the back of the paver. If they know the ETA of the next truck, they can actually slow down the crew and give that truck a little bit of extra time.
You’re also trying to prevent “over-trucking.” What’s that?
McRae: A job site that shuts down costs about $1,000 an hour in equipment and labor costs. A truck costs about $100 an hour. So they do what’s called over-trucking, where they’ll order two or three extra trucks. They’d rather pay $200 or $300 more to avoid losing $1,000 if that job shuts down.
BroadLoop also supports e-ticketing. Talk about that capability.
McRae: Our system actually integrates with the load-out software at the plant. As soon as the truck goes over the scale and the ticket is created, we capture the digital details. Then we can show the location of the truck on the map, as well as the load information, such as type of material and quantity and temperature. Pumping this rich information into the field for the contractor helps them increase their quality and overall efficiency. The DOT is increasingly incorporating e-tickets into their specifications, and we’re one of just a few companies that can even comply with that specification.
"One of our investors even made a note that he appreciated the way we leveraged the startup community to put us in the best position possible to de-risk the investment for him and other investors."
— Nick McRae
So are you focused solely on construction vehicles?
McRae: No. We recently rebranded from Blacktop to BroadLoop. It’s the same construction materials delivery solution, but it also has lots of other angles, so it can work for a fleet operator who wants to handle dispatching and scheduling, and it can work for a company that just wants to track equipment and assets.
How has it been to launch a startup here?
McRae: Louisville’s been great. We’ve gone through Venture Connectors, which is a great networking organization, and Future Louisville. We won a few business plan competitions and were able to pull together $25,000 or $30,000 in nondilutive grants and funding.
Shortly after that, we went through the Vogt Awards and got another $25,000 as well in nondilutive funding. Since then, we have raised $450,000 in angel funding. One of our investors even made a note that he appreciated the way we leveraged the startup community to put us in the best position possible to de-risk the investment for him and other investors. Share this story!
INNOVATORS PODCAST
Serve the superuser, change the world 
Jose Gaztambide thought he would be a baseball insider but instead is leading the charge on a new kind of mapping that is literally changing how people navigate the world. Hear the details on Jose's journey, his company GoodMaps and the concepts, ideas and data they are harnessing to change the way we think about movement.
You can also listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, or wherever else you get your podcasts.
Share this podcast!
HOT COFFEE! 
Louisville is the place for industrial real estate Louisville has had 21 straight quarters of positive net absorption for industrial real estate. According to CBRE Econometric Advisors research, Louisville is second only to Los Angeles County for five-year projected rent growth, which is anticipated to be 34.6 percent. Code Louisville places over 500 students Code Louisville, run by the region’s workforce development board KentuckianaWorks, has now placed more than 500 of its graduates into new careers in the technology sector. Code Louisville’s mission is to make quality tech training available to everyone by removing barriers and offering high-quality software development training free of charge. Bellarmine recruiting for STEM program Speaking of preparing students for the future, Bellarmine University is in the process of recruiting its first round of students for its NSF scholarship program. The school received a $1 million dollar grant from NSF in September to help low-income, high-achieving students transition into the STEM disciplines of computer engineering, computer science, mathematics and data science. Delivering meds by fruit UofL researchers have found a less toxic way to deliver medicines by using fruit. The intellectual property portfolio invented by Huang-Ge Zhang, of UofL’s James Graham Brown Cancer Center and Department of Microbiology and Immunology, has been licensed to Boston-based Senda BioSciences, a Flagship Pioneering company. Share these stories!
Do you have something innovative to share? Is your company leveraging cutting edge technologies? Did your startup raise enough capital to scale up? Are you at the forefront of life saving research? Maybe your organization has a big announcement. Well, we want to hear about it! And, so does our community of innovators and entrepreneurs.
ON OUR RADAR
We're tracking 68 Louisville startups! How many are you? 
Learn more about the startups and the people behind them that are shaping the future of our city with Louisville Future's innovation radar.
We're tracking 68 startups in our ecosystem. If you don't see one that we should be tracking, you can always add it on our radar! Explore the innovation radar to find out how. Share the Innovation Radar!
SCRAPBOOK
The birth of a racetrack 
Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA)
Churchill Downs is, of course, home to The Kentucky Derby, America's longest running sports event that is widely known as the "most exciting two minutes in sports." In this week’s scrapbook, we take a look at the track’s beginnings.
The track was begun by Meriwether Lewis Clark, Jr.. (His pop was the son of explorer William Clark and he was named after Clark’s fellow explorer, Meriwether Lewis.)
After his mother’s death, Clark was raised by his two uncles John and Henry Churchill, who passed along to him a passion for thoroughbred racing. His uncles gave Clark some land to build a track, which opened to the public on May 17, 1875.
By all accounts, Clark had a bit of a bad attitude, which made him few friends. One prominent horse breeder shot Clark in the chest during a heated argument. And Clark once pulled a gun on a bartender in Chicago. He was disinherited by another uncle, John Churchill, and by 1894 Clark sold the track to a syndicate led by William E. Applegate.
The new owners made many changes such as having the twin spires designed by architect Joseph Dominic Bladez in 1895 and shortening the length of the signature race to its modern 1 1⁄4 miles.
AROUND THE REGION With 
We hope you enjoy these headlines from the latest issue of Flyover Future, chronicling innovation throughout the Midwest. If you'd like to subscribe to Flyover Future, click here.
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