Twenty-six startups were selected to present this week at the Florida Venture Forum’s 2026 Early Stage Venture Conference, and eight of them are from South Florida. Florida Venture Forum is the largest statewide support organization for investors and entrepreneurs, and the conference takes place June 2-3 at the UCF Rosen School of Hospitality in Orlando.
Here are the presenting companies from South Florida:
- Advanced Performance Materials of Miami manufactures and supplies fully customized and engineered OEM parts and solutions. Target customers include bus, train and rail car manufacturers, cruise builders and general construction sectors.
- BalancedTrust of Plantation is an AI-powered risk and compliance infrastructure designed to bridge the gap between traditional banking rigor and fintech innovation. The platform automates regulatory scanning, risk scoring, and compliance mapping, transforming manual oversight into a proactive competitive advantage. Built by seasoned operators in risk and payments, BalancedTrust supports Banks, Fintechs, ISOs, and Merchants. By providing an API-first trust layer, it enables companies to scale safely, reduce compliance costs, and confidently adopt modern payment rails like stablecoins and programmable payments.
- bundleIQ of West Palm Beach is the industry knowledge graph for conferences, associations, and B2B events — a $1.6 trillion market where billions are spent on gathering people but the content, connections, and conversations evaporate the moment the event ends. Their platform connects three layers that have always lived in silos: the content produced at events, the companies that participate, and the communities that form around them, turning what used to be a one-time experience into a living, queryable network that compounds in value every time it’s used. Attendees, sponsors, and organizers interact with the graph through Alani, their AI agent. bundleIQ is already deployed with HumanX, Concordia, Clarion, the Center for BrainHealth at UT Dallas, and enterprise customers including NextEra and Cox.
- Maestro AI of Parkland is a full-stack agentic operating system for mortgage origination built by the founders of Wemlo, a fintech mortgage company acquired by RE/MAX.
- NanoSieve of Miami is creating a new category in gas safety and emissions control: autonomous real-time gas remediation. Unlike conventional gas sensors that only detect and alarm, NanoSieve’s proprietary technology both detects and actively removes flammable, toxic, or greenhouse gases in real time—maintaining safe concentrations or reducing emissions. NanoSieve is the first-in-market to combine gas detection with autonomous real-time gas remediation with embedded IoT & AI in a single device for gas safety or emissions control, helping customers protect critical infrastructure & assets, provide superior health & safety technology, reduce risk, reduce gas emissions, and meet tightening gas safety standards or global decarbonization standards.
- PlainHand of Lauderhill is a full-stack robotics platform enabling robot hands to learn dexterous grasping from sparse human demonstrations. Their sensorized glove captures synchronized EMG muscle activation, hand orientation, fingertip pressure, object weight, and joint torque. A five-finger robot hand with magnetic tactile sensors and sub-100ms closed-loop slip correction executes learned strategies. A fine-tuned foundation model maps human motor intent to robot actuators independent of hand morphology, enabling the same training data to deploy across five-finger hands, three-finger grippers, prosthetics, and pneumatic systems. This cross-embodiment transfer approach dramatically reduces the data and time required to teach robots new skills, making dexterous manipulation accessible for manufacturing, prosthetics, logistics, and assistive technology.
- Sealor of Miami is developing a patented coastal resilience technology that creates impermeable biogenic limestone barriers underground. The technology addresses one of South Florida’s most urgent infrastructure problems: flooding and saltwater intrusion driven by porous limestone geology, tidal groundwater, king tides, storms, and sea-level rise. Instead of raising every road, replacing every seawall, or rebuilding homes higher, Sealor targets the root cause underground. Its treatment converts loose sand, crushed limestone, and subsurface voids into a solid, durable, impermeable limestone mass that can reduce groundwater flow, strengthen seawalls and foundations, and help protect freshwater resources.
- SmartCare360.Health of Fort Lauderdale is a disease-specific comprehensive digital health technology and virtual care delivery platform covered by Medicaid, Medicare and most commercial insurances for anyone with 1+ chronic issues. They help support healthcare organization complex chronically ill patients by providing proactive preventative health and wellness programs in between their office visits. The platform integrates with all EHR’s and over 250+ FDA-approved remote patient monitoring devices to track vitals and medication adherence, and is in-network with 25+ major insurances and licensed in 17 states to practice medicine.
Also part of the conference is a collegiate competition. Competing from South Florida will be Q-Beam Technologies, representing Florida Atlantic University.
The Forum holds an early-stage conference annually along with its main venture capital conference that was held in February, packing the house in Coral Gables.
“We are extremely excited to showcase such a diverse group of presenters at this year’s conference,” “A huge thanks to our selection committee, to our members and partners who referred such outstanding applicants, and to our sponsors and host-partners at Space Florida for their leadership and support of Florida’s innovation ecosystem,” said Kevin Burgoyne, President and CEO of Florida Venture Forum. For more information and to register, go here.
READ MORE HERE:
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- Maria Derchi Russo: Why ‘know any good VCs?’ is the wrong question
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I am a writer and editor with extensive media experience and a passion for journalism and serving the community. Most of my career has been spent with the Miami Herald in business news, and my expertise is writing about tech and entrepreneurs. I love hosting this blog for Refresh Miami and we aim to be the go-to site for South Florida startup and tech news, features and views. Have news? Contact me at [email protected]. Thanks for reading!
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