By Gretchen Webster

WESTPORT–It’s only been a few weeks since Kyle Mayers and Wally Namane, the founders of WheelPrice, won $20,000 in Startup Westport’s very first Pitch Competition, and they’re already planning the next step for their company.

Startup Westport, begun in 2023 as an incubator for entrepreneurs, offered a Pitch competition this year to give young startups the opportunity to be mentored by more experienced founders, and to get the word out about their new business ventures. Seventy-seven startup companies took Start Up Westport up on the offer.  Of those entering the competition, 12 new ventures were selected to participate, and five startups won prize money: $20,000 for first place, $5,000 for second, and three startup companies winning $1,000 each for third place.

The best part of the competition and especially the mentorship program, was not to earn compliments from the mentors, who were selected randomly from a pool, but to learn what the competition participants needed to work on with their new ventures, Namane said. “The best strength of [the mentorship] is telling us what we don’t want to hear, but need to hear,” he said. Their mentor, Marc Frankel, “helped light a fire under us, trying to figure out some of the challenges.” Frankel is a co-founder of Mainifest, a software security company.

Namane and Mayers met as students at UConn although they attended UConn on different campuses. They had a lot in common, Mayers said. “We were both first generation Americans and first in our families to go to college.” 

But it was their love of cars – they both had red classic BMW E30s, that really brought them together, resulting in the startup of their automotive-based business, WheelPrice. “We met through cars,” Namane said.

After college they both worked in the corporate world, Mayers at Sikorsky, and Namane at GE. “We were learning a ton – but there was something missing. We were just interested in this entrepreneurial spirit,” Mayers said.

As they become even more involved in the automotive community, at car shows and other car-related events, they saw it was “frustrating how hard the process was to get car parts … It’s a very niche marketplace. Now, we’re building a community around it,” he said.

They decided to organize their business around providing a marketplace for car owners to buy and sell wheels for cars, which many drivers may not realize can cost thousands of dollars, according to the WheelPrice website. So the partners started frequenting automotive related events around the country, as well as partnering with the Piston Foundation, a nonprofit organization “that gives scholarship money to kids who are interested in the automotive business,” Mayers said.

In the future, they plan on opening their marketplace up to customers buying and selling other car parts in addition to wheels, Namane said. The company will become even more of “a channel for sellers to sell their parts. We take a commission at time of sale,” he said.  WheelPrice already has more than 250,000 followers online, including a large international fan base, he added.

With the money they earned “with no strings attached,” from the Startup Westport competition, “we’re going to use a portion of the fund to build out some service operations using AI-based agents to prevent off-platform transactions from taking place … “We’re also simplifying shopping and logistics for our sellers – using pre-packaged boxes that we’ll drop to them,” Mayers said.

 “We’re definitely going to keep growing, we have some pretty high aspirations for this company.”

The other winners at the Nov. 20 Pitch competition were second-place winner

Mirabelle Medical, a healthcare technology company offering a wellness device for women to more effectively conduct self-exams for breast cancer in between mammograms.

And three third-place winners: 

Chroma Shield, a healthcare technology company whose flagship product is a smart, wearable patch designed to detect and monitor radiation therapy-induced dermatitis and offer early warning signs of any inflammation or other complications, thus improving collaboration between clinical care and at-home monitoring to provide better treatment and patient outcomes.

Neuro Puffs, a food innovation company creating a crunch, adaptogen-powered snack from superfood mushrooms grown on upcycled food waste, thereby creating an environmentally friendly and inexpensive option for improving one’s energy and focus.

Nexa Tax, a financial services technology company which seeks to fulfill the unmet need of assisting college athletes with managing their taxes when they profit from their name, image, or likeness.

Gretchen Webster

^{_{Gretchen Webster, a Fairfield County journalist for many years, has reported for the daily Greenwich Time and Norwalk Hour, the weekly Westport News, Fairfield Citizen and Weston Forum. She was editor of the Fairfield Minuteman for ten years. She has won numerous journalism awards over the years, and taught journalism at New York University and Southern Connecticut State University.}}