“Instead of talking, ‘We’re going to do this, we’re going to do that,’ it’s, ‘No, this is what we’ve done, this is our experience, and this is where we’re going,’” Alex Rodriguez, founder of Xpece Drones, told me over Zoom. He was explaining why he believed Xpece stood apart among companies accepted into an eMerge Americas accelerator program culminating at the organization’s annual Miami conference. Out of 100 companies accepted into the startup accelerator that year, only five were invited to present on the closing stage. Xpece was one of them.

“Out of everything that I walked away with, the VMT was the most impactful,” he said of the Venture Mentoring Team, a nonprofit organization that offers senior-level mentoring for startups, founders and business owners. (Full disclosure: I was previously a volunteer mentor within VMT, which required a mentor take no financial stake whatsoever in the companies mentored.)

“They guided me on the story,” Rodriguez continued. “Because what’s hard about telling a story is leaving out, cutting out older parts that you think are important.”

Accelerator success is usually quantified through capital raised, contracts signed and valuations achieved, all of which make for an attractive press release. But sharper positioning and disciplined customer validation generate less razzle dazzle, even when they produce better long-term returns. Melissa Medina, eMerge Americas’ co-founder and CEO, has watched enough companies pass through to know investor access alone won’t carry a founder very far.

“The ones that follow up are the ones with the most success,” she told me via Zoom, as did everyone interviewed in this article. “Because you never know what a conversation in a workshop or a 10-minute meeting at the conference could lead to. And if you don’t follow up, that’s kind of where it ends.”

eMerge America’s Startup Accelerator Took JennABytes From Idea To Evidence

“I’ve always been an operator, even though I was in C-suites,” Rabia Malik told me. “I was working under somebody’s idea and building on a team, but I’ve never built for myself.”

Malik came to eMerge Americas’ Small and Medium Business Growth Lab with 16+ years in product and user-experience design, including UX research and design for Affirm’s Amazon integration. She knew how to build products for corporate titans but building one around her own conviction required a different set of muscles.

That conviction became JennABytes, an early-stage girls’ health platform delivering age-appropriate health content to young girls navigating puberty and adolescence while giving parents accessible language for such conversations.

“Women’s health has always been reactive,” she said. “Only when we hurt and when we’re in pain do we go and get help, and then we’re always just like, ‘God, I wish I had known better.’ So why not start the future of women’s health with our girls now? Let’s teach them about themselves, their bodies, their hormones. And this isn’t just puberty education. This is teaching them about confidence, about what changes are about to come, how their moods are going to change, how their food will change, their intake, their activity, all of that.”

Malik entered eMerge’s SMB Growth Lab with only an idea. Over six weeks of coursework, followed by a seventh week preparing participants for the annual conference, the program covered turning an idea into something commercially viable, fundraising , equity and AI tools. During one session, Malik said she built in roughly 30 minutes the email intake system and database she later used at the conference.

“For me, the difference was they gave me the comfort. It’s exactly what I needed. I have the experience, I have the tools. I just couldn’t get past my sort of panic of, ‘Can I do this on my own?’” she said. “I needed them to guide me through every step of it, teach me about finance, teach me about how to structure the idea, teach me about how to go out and talk about it.”

At the eMerge conference, Malik removed the standard table from her booth space and turned the area into an interactive prompt. “I created an immersive experience,” she said. “So I had people walk up to the wall, I had little cards, and it was writing a note to their 12-year-old self, to the girl, because that’s what my company is.”

The activation won JennABytes the SMB cohort’s fan-favorite recognition and a $5,000 prize. The more consequential return, however, came from learning how strangers understood the problem she was trying to solve.

“What I’ve learned in these last few months, thanks to eMerge a lot, is the fact that I came up with an idea, and then I had to keep fixing that idea to make sure that I’m solving my problem,” she said. “I’m a mom who has a 12-year-old daughter. I need a bridge between me and my daughter. She needs to learn about her body, I need words to talk to her. So that’s the problem I’m solving. I’m solving it for myself, and as I keep talking to others—other moms and dads, and girls—I’m realizing the things that need to be put in, and the things that need to come out that are frivolous.”

eMerge America’s Startup Accelerator Helped Xpece Drones Tell The Right Story

“The raising-capital experience is not what the internet tells you,” Rodriguez said. “The companies that go out, raise capital in a week, it just doesn’t happen. The truth is, like, 90% of the companies take between six months to 10 months to close the round.”

After leaving a television and government-media career to build his drone business, Rodriguez launched Xpece’s first product, the Xpece ONE, in January 2025. The fully waterproof drone can land on water, see underwater from the surface and carry payloads of up to seven pounds. Its first serious customers were anglers, who use it to fly bait beyond the range of conventional casting and into water where larger fish are more likely to be waiting.

“We have no problem generating sales. Zero,” he said. “The constraint is we don’t have enough inventory. That’s the constraint. Every problem is a problem. There are bad problems, and there are good problems. Bad problems are your product, your people quit; good problems are you’re out of inventory. It’s a good problem, but it’s not a problem, right? We are selling faster than we can bring in inventory.”

He said his customer-acquisition cost sits at roughly 6% of average order value, a company-reported figure driven by user-generated fishing videos. While more marketing could increase sales, he said, inventory remains the bottleneck. Unfortunately, strong unit economics and product-market evidence don’t make capital raising automatic.

He entered eMerge’s accelerator expecting to run daily operations while pursuing investment but quickly learned fundraise preparation demands a founder’s total focus, or as close to undivided attention as an operator managing supply chains and payroll can spare.

“I thought that raising capital, I could run the company and at the same time raise capital,” he confessed. “It’s very challenging to do that. Raising capital is a full-time 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. job, and that’s all you’re doing. I can’t do that. I’m running the company.”

Fundraising requires a financial model, a clear market thesis, a credible account of risk, a defensible use of capital, and enough investor conversations to test every assumption. A founder can build a working product, secure paying customers, and target a massive market, then still discover none of it’s been arranged in the order an investor needs to hear.

“Building a pitch deck takes weeks,” he said. “When somebody told me that, I was like, ‘come on, that’s impossible.’ But then as I build my pitch deck, it took me two months. Because building a pitch deck is not only telling the story, and why now, and why us, it’s also searching in your soul. It’s a soul-searching activity.”

eMerge provided Rodriguez repeated 1-on-1 access to mentors through the Venture Mentoring Team to refine his presentation. “They put you in front of people that see pitch decks every week,” he said. “These guys are giving me an hour of their time, two, three times a week. And I took advantage of that.”

The mentorship also expanded his understanding of the business infrastructure available around him. “There are resources in South Florida that I didn’t know existed, and now I’m in their ecosystem,” he said. Rodriguez credits eMerge with increasing Xpece’s visibility and teaching him how to operate in the professional environment surrounding capital, including how to present a deal.

“If I can put it in a sentence, what eMerge did, it’s just—they put us on the map,” Rodriguez said. “A lot of people know about Xpece because of eMerge.”

eMerge Americas Startup Accelerator Gave WholesalePayroll A Route To Market

“Accountants can’t make money at it now,” Al Wagner, founder of WholesalePayroll, told me. “They can with us. That’s the value proposition.”

The “it” is payroll, a service many accounting firms offer clients but outsource to companies such as ADP or Paychex rather than administer themselves. Wagner argues that outsourcing hands the client relationship to the provider, along with the work.

“In payroll, every other provider is essentially removing the professional from the equation,” he said of customers who rely on QuickBooks or a payroll company. “ADP takes over the customer. You literally hand over your customer. No longer your client.”

Wagner’s position is partly about control. When something goes wrong with outsourced payroll, the accountant may still be the person the client calls despite not causing the underlying problem. WholesalePayroll re-establishes the accountant-client relationship while reducing the time required to solve routine problems.

“Our product is a service-layer integration, like an API in a program, that allows accountants to fundamentally replace ADP—not to compete with them, but to replace them as a service provider.”

It’s a deeply specific proposition, yet specificity can have its own communications problem. Wagner came to eMerge after years in accounting and payroll with a product built from intimate knowledge of the operational problem. Explaining it clearly to investors and people who didn’t spend their days thinking about payroll mechanics was another matter.

“I’m in a very boring industry with really well-established competitors,” he said. “There’s nothing sexy about it. I have a very complicated problem that I have to try to boil down into a very simple statement.”

While eMerge’s formal coursework proved largely introductory for a seasoned entrepreneur who’s already built companies across industries, the value for Wagner came elsewhere: VMT mentorship, repeated pitch practice and the pressure to explain a complicated product quickly. Listening to other founders helped him arrive at a stripped-down value pitch.

“WholesalePayroll is a white-labeled, high-margin service layer for accountants and bookkeepers to get rid of ADP and Paychex and QuickBooks,” he said. “That’s what we are. We’re a service layer.”

The accountants Wagner targets understand unit economics, but they also know the administrative misery of migrating an entire client book off a legacy platform. To eliminate that barrier, WholesalePayroll built an automated migration tool that lets firms move client records at their own speed. One of his VMT mentors has since introduced Wagner to a CPA firm interested in converting its clients to WholesalePayroll once a requested feature becomes available.

“It was 100% open arms, what can we do for you? It was all about service,” Wagner said of his eMerge experience. “For me, they set some pretty high standards for how conferences should really run.”

What C-Suite Leaders Should Look For In A Startup Accelerator

“Potential benefits go way beyond just funding,” Medina said. “It’s like relationships with corporate partners, meeting talent, right? So, potential future hires. The connections between the founders themselves.” The companies that produce the clearest results , she said, tend to be those that choose to use the help offered. “They have to want it.”

For the C-suite leader deciding if an accelerator deserves the time it will consume, here are three takeaways:

  • Seek dedicated mentors who can ruthlessly edit your story. Both Malik and Wagner found their breakthrough in one-on-one sessions with VMT lead mentor Benito Varela. “In 30 minutes, he sort of helped me figure out how to use the right words and how to talk about my story in a smarter way,” Malik said of her session. That same mentorship with Varela helped Wagner distill WholesalePayroll’s complex tax mechanics into easily digestible language.
  • Active commitment separates top performers from passive attendees. Medina has tracked four years of accelerator alumni to identify why certain founders scale while others stall. “The ones that we track that use it, in the last four years, top 25,” she said of founders who consistently lean on mentors. “There’s just this clear thread, and I think that goes back to commitment. If you’re going to commit to this, they’re really all-in.”
  • Look beyond investor checks to measure ecosystem return. Capital raising is only one facet of early-stage success. Those who maximize accelerator access can find corporate partners, recruit talent and build peer networks that remain useful long after the trade-show floor lights go dark.

eMerge Americas succeeds because it operates as more than an annual trade show. For Wagner, that’s ultimately what the eMerge Americas startup accelerator got right. “It’s the culmination, to me, of what an organization that’s wanting to leave a legacy behind should be doing and how they’re doing it. They’re taking money from the right places and opening up opportunities in the right places for the right people.”