Backing the Bold

Tim Luchini, CEO of Intramotev, knows firsthand that starting a business from nothing is one of the hardest things anybody can do. 

Using advanced technologies, Intramotev transforms conventional freight cars into battery-powered, autonomous railcars. The St. Louis startup has an ambitious goal: to rebuild the country’s supply chains and industrial base on the backbone of existing rail infrastructure. 

In 2021, Intramotev received a $50,000 grant from St. Louis-based nonprofit Arch Grants, along with wraparound support including connections to investors, business mentorship, and pro bono professional services. That support has helped Intramotev grow from a small team with an idea into a fully-fledged company that employs 50 people, operates a 67,000-square-foot manufacturing space in North County, and has raised roughly $20 million in funding. 

As the company has scaled, Luchini and his co-founders have leaned on the supportive ecosystem of other founders they’ve met through Arch Grants.

“There is a lot of innovation taking place in St. Louis,” Luchini says. “There are a lot of people who are willing to take chances on big ideas to try and break the mold, and I think there does need to be a group like Arch Grants behind it, coordinating and corralling all this activity so that it can be moving in a direction together.” 

“There’s everything from aerospace companies, geospatial companies, pet food companies, to people re-envisioning how rail works. And you might think that doesn’t have a lot to do with each other, but in reality, it’s all a bunch of very smart, intelligent people who have identified a problem, come up with a novel solution, and are working every day to go try and turn that into a tangible business. And that’s one of the most exciting things about being part of that ecosystem — getting like-minded people in a room focused on those types of challenges.”

Seeding the Future

Intramotev is just one of nearly 300 startups that have received life-changing funding and support from Arch Grants since the organization officially launched in 2012. Arch Grants was founded in 2011 by Zachary Boyers, Bob Guller, Joe Schlafly, and Jerry Schlichter to support early-stage business development in St. Louis. According to Executive Director Gabe Angieri, the group saw an opportunity for economic development efforts in St. Louis to not just attract and retain big employers but also boost innovation and attract entrepreneurs to the city.

In Arch Grants’ first year, the founders pooled their own resources and leveraged their networks to raise about $750,000 and launch the International Startup Business Plan Competition, featuring judges such as Jim McKelvey of Square and Sam Altman of OpenAI. The competition awarded 15 companies $50,000 of non-dilutive capital in exchange for headquartering their business in St. Louis for at least one year. 

“The hope was that they would sink roots here and grow their businesses in St. Louis for the long term,” Angieri says. “We’re taking a long-term view on regional vibrancy and economic development. We are trying to bring and support and keep great entrepreneurial business leaders in St. Louis, and we want them to be engaged and support other nonprofits, other civic organizations, because there’s an abundance of things to do here. We believe that by being the conduit, we can make the biggest impact in connecting these entrepreneurial minds to the broader St. Louis community.”

Arch Grants was founded as a 501c3 nonprofit, and its model of non-dilutive, equity-free funding was relatively unheard of at the time. While many startup accelerator programs exist across the country, the majority require an equity stake in the company, typically ranging from 5 to 10%, in exchange for seed funding, mentorship, and resources to help the company get off the ground. Arch Grants’ model, on the other hand, allows founders to maintain full ownership as they leverage investor dollars to scale their business without giving up equity during critical early stages.

“Our founders wanted to keep this relationship that we were building with the startups supportive and not adversarial,” Angieri says. “Whenever you have an investment position in the company, there’s an inherent adversarial nature: You want maximum returns on the investment. You may push or pull the company in different directions, based on how you see your profits, the return on your investment, going. Because we’re a nonprofit, because we were raising philanthropic dollars, we were able to form a new kind of relationship with these companies and keep it extremely supportive. Based on our research and knowledge, it was the first program in the country offering $50,000 in non-dilutive awards to startups with no expectation of equity and very little strings attached.”

“Arch Grants is entirely grant-based,” adds Frank Hopper, the organization’s director of portfolio and programs. “By not taking equity in the companies, it gives us a little bit more of a collaborative relationship. I view it still as an investment, but instead of financial returns, we’re looking at economic development returns for St. Louis.”

Arch Grants’ non-dilutive funding was transformational for Ben Mizes and Luke Babich, who co-founded Clever Real Estate in 2017. A member of the 2018 Arch Grants cohort, Clever is a vertically integrated real estate platform that matches homebuyers and sellers with top-rated local real estate agents to save on commission fees. Babich says Arch Grants lent Clever credibility in its early days and helped him build community — he met his mentor, countless friends, and even his wife, Lisa Hu, founder of Arch Grants recipient Lux & Nyx, through the organization. 

Thanks to that early support from Arch Grants, the business has continued to grow each year, driving over $3 billion in annual real estate transactions. And since the $50,000 Clever received from Arch Grants was equity-free, Babich and Mizes have been able to scale their business on their own terms. 

“In the early stages of the company, you need capital to be able to take bets, make mistakes, and learn what’s going to work,” Babich says. “You pay in equity for little amounts of capital to just be able to get that first employee, take that first experiment, or build that first piece of technology. Then you spend another eight years of your life growing the value of the business, but you have given up that ownership — it’s locked in. The more you can protect the dilution and get a little bit further on proving your concept before you have to give up dilution, it really changes your outcome as a founder and for your team, in terms of the ownership you have in the business that you’re going to then spend years working really, really hard for.”

Growing Together

In 2022, Arch Grants increased the non-dilutive grants awarded to early-stage businesses in its Startup Competition from $50,000 to $75,000 and also increased the additional funding for companies that relocate their business from another state to St. Louis from $10,000 to $25,000. But Arch Grants provides much more than just money to its founders. The organization emphasizes wraparound support, including mentorship, fundraising, pro bono services, networking, and targeted programs to help founders grow their business or solve problems.

Arch Grants’ Expert-in-Residence program, for instance, provides mentorship and coaching assistance to current and past Arch Grants founders by connecting them with subject matter experts in a range of fields. Founders can meet with an accountant to ask questions about filing their taxes, a sales expert to define and test their sales process, a marketing expert to explore digital branding, or a former venture capitalist to prepare for fundraising.

“I think a lot of people may still think of Arch Grants as an organization that gives that money, but the depth of what we do to support (founders) over the first year when they’re in the cohort goes much further,” says Director of Impact & Partnerships Jo Flannery. “One of the things that the founders often say is that the initial grant is obviously welcome — no one would turn down $75,000 — but what they get the most value from is the connections that are made through Arch Grants’ community and ecosystem. It helps them meet people and gain investors, board members, or staff.”

Arch Grants has had a profound impact not just on its individual founders, but on St. Louis as a whole. Since 2012, Arch Grants has provided $20 million in non-dilutive grants to 291 startups, which have created over 4,000 local jobs and generated over $1.3 billion in revenue. 

Those companies are driving positive change in St. Louis and across the country throughout a range of industries, from Seed Matriz’s cutting-edge seed encapsulation technology to Posie Pots’s self-watering planters to Native Pet’s all-natural nutritional supplements for dogs. And the portfolio is diverse not just in terms of industry, as nearly 70% of those companies are led or co-led by a woman, person of color, immigrant, or veteran.

As its founders have worked to deliver solutions in everything from ag-tech to advanced manufacturing to digital health to geospatial, St. Louis remains a throughline of Arch Grants’ mission. Angieri says Arch Grants specifically looks to support companies that are aligned with St. Louis’ industry clusters and will both benefit from and contribute to a stronger startup and corporate community in the region. Of the nearly 200 active companies Arch Grants has supported, 131 have relocated to St. Louis, and 84% still operate in the region today. 

“The unique thing about St. Louis is that doors open fairly easily,” Hopper says. “People are generally always open to taking the meeting. It’s easy to get conversations started here, and that’s really meaningful for these early-stage companies in terms of discovery and support. I believe that entrepreneurship is a fantastic tool for a city like St. Louis to grow. Even if you remove what the founders are doing for themselves, for their businesses, for their employees, for their customers, they’re also incredible success stories that breed confidence in the city and show problem-solving in a different way. The more successful entrepreneurs we have in the city, the more that spreads.”

Cultivating Tomorrow

As Arch Grants continues to shape St. Louis’ startup ecosystem and innovation economy, the organization is also exploring new ways to support its entrepreneurs in a holistic way and offer strategic pathways to investors and revenue. 

In 2021, Arch Grants launched its Growth Grants program, which provides $100,000 in non-dilutive, follow-on funding to high-performing founders who have completed its initial year-long program. The grants, which require a 2:1 match from outside investors, aim to accelerate the growth of startups while maintaining their headquarters in St. Louis for at least an additional two years. 

Founders also continue to receive support after the initial year through programs such as the Fellows Program, a peer advisory and business growth collective for mature founders who have successfully scaled, and a new lending program in partnership with the James S. McDonnell Foundation and St. Louis Community Credit Union that expands access to loans for Arch Grants founders from historically marginalized backgrounds or those expanding operations in underserved areas in the City of St. Louis and North St. Louis County. 

In late 2025, the organization opened its expanded headquarters in Midtown, which serves as a community gathering place for the hundreds of entrepreneurs it has supported over the years. Looking to the future, Arch Grants is focused on increasing its capacity to support more founders and strengthen local partnerships so that it can help address some of the challenges facing the St. Louis region. 

Zundra Bryant, Arch Grants board president and senior vice president of global people experiences and services at Cushman & Wakefield, believes that Arch Grants, with its deep network of founders, is uniquely positioned to bring solutions that may not have been previously considered. 

“If business leaders and civic leaders are grappling with any particular societal issue, I want them to see Arch Grants as a resource to tap into,” Bryant says. “Our inclusive, welcoming environment generates innovation and curiosity and brings unique solutions to critical problems. Where we may be struggling with an issue because we are trying to continue to leverage legacy solutions that are no longer working for us or serving us, our ecosystem of founders is coming up with innovative solutions to address systemic societal welfare and educational challenges in the region. I think we’re uniquely designed because of the visibility of our experience and the entrepreneur ecosystem, the energy from an inclusion and innovation standpoint, and the desire to continue to be in St. Louis and be a positive force of economic growth.”